Speaking the Unspeakable: Alphonse Daudet ‘In the Land of Pain’ In the Land of Pain’ was Barnes’ own chosen title for this book and is his translation of a phrase Daudet invents in the book to describe a sanatorium for the dying. Let’s face it: Julian Barnes’s edition of his own translation of La Doulou (La Douleur) – the … More Speaking the Unspeakable: Alphonse Daudet ‘In the Land of Pain’
If you like watching how bisexual threesomes might occur that goes no further than the operations of eyes and thoughts, Luca Guadagnino ‘s Challengers will seem to you to be a film worth giving up over 2 hours of your life to. A film without love and remarkably little insight into the sexuality of a threesome, … More A note on Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Challengers’ seen yesterday.
Thomas Hiram Holding, supposed to be the great populariser of the activity of camping, outside his camping tent. Whether it has sufficient academic credence (by which is meant referencing to authoritative evidence) or not, the Wikipedia entry on CAMPING fits with my thoughts, memories and, possibly, biases, in understanding what camping as a term means in … More Why is ‘camping’ just not classy? Or is it? Not for my class upbringing!
We do not need a list if we consider poets the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. This blog takes an encounter with the reading of a rather wonderful current poet, Kathleen Jamie at the Hexham literary Feastival, to try and explain what I mean, if (as is my wont) obscurely and, in another way, darkly. … More Why give a list? ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Arguing the case using Kathleen Jamie’s new work. ‘Cairn’ (2024).
This blog is in sheer joy in having heard Jackie Kay read from her new collection, May Day, at the Hexham Literary Festival in The Queens Hall, Hexham, on 26th April 2024 at 8.15 p.m. Infer the answer to the prompt from this blog! However, this blog started as a preparation to see Jackie Kay … More Infer the answer to the prompt from this blog: The blog is in sheer joy in having heard Jackie Kay read ‘May Day’, at the Hexham Literary Festival.
If we are to discuss anything at all in our networked world of codes and symbols, where meanings lie in layers and sometimes in the knotted interconnections of things, subjects, objects and commentary thereon, is there any topic that can be excluded from the picture. In modernity, we are used to thinking of the world … More Quid tum. What next? So what?
I thought with this one, I might not want to interrogate the prompt question asked but I find I cannot do so with the question: ‘Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?’ In general I hate the idea of life quotes and their command on social media – … More ‘HERE the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest lasting’:
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow. Neel Mukherjee’s opening story in his novel ‘Choice’ has helped me realise that, if to develop as people is to value the uncertain ethics of all decisions and choices, it must be our decision not to become a gay male couple … More Neel Mukherjee’s opening story in his novel ‘Choice’ has helped me realise that, if to develop as people is to value the uncertain ethics of all decisions and choices, it must be our decision not to become a gay male couple pioneering adoptive parenthood & that this helped us grow together.
Dedicated to Joanne When I worked as a social worker I believed in and promoted in my own practice, and in the learners I worked with at Teesside University later as Subject Leader in Social Work, a concept called ‘positive risk-taking‘. It was a concept first popularised by Steve Morgan in an important article and … More A ‘risk you took that you do not regret’ is called life. It has to be chosen by the person living that life, not be IMPOSED on them.
What makes you nervous? This a daily prompt blog that I am basing on visiting what would once have been classed as a vampiric B-movie, Abigail. What does it mean to be nervous? Wikipedia defines the most usual form as another name for anxiety. We use it far too widely – no doubt of it … More What makes you nervous? This a daily prompt blog that I am basing on visiting what would once have been classed as a vampiric B-movie, ‘Abigail’.
The only way be a Notman like Philip, the anti-hero of How To Make A Bomb, is to mistake inescapable memory of unconscious trauma for existential nausea and make it the basis for a political ‘notmanifesto’. Yet it may still be necessary to face the feeling that: ‘We’ve been raped while we were sleeping’.[1] Rupert … More The best straight writing is necessarily queer. This is a blog on Rupert Thomson (2024) ‘How to Make a Bomb’.
Describe something you learned in high school. Remember, of course, when you read this that I started ‘High School’ [not a phrase used in the UK then much] in 1966 and at a Northern semi-rural UK grammar school where conventions and ideological rigidity passed themselves off as the nature of things. But the idea of … More That men also make up their faces.
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