Who are your favorite artists? Cooking is an art in which I do not excel. This picture irrelevant to the blog, although this was once my favourite artwork. The joke was devised by my room-mates in the 1970s at university. Art is a big part of my life and it is not as a maker … More If I love art, why do I find this an impossible question to answer?
The Fugitives (1962) by John Broderick tells stories of people who flit around at the margins of a world they resist and would like to change: ‘A world in which death slipped easily, like one of those midland corner-boys edging through a pub door, dead of foot, buried of hand, mortified of mind; a familiar … More ‘The Fugitives’ (1962) by John Broderick tells stories of people who flit around at the margins of a world they resist and would like to change: ‘A world in which death slipped easily, like one of those midland corner-boys edging through a pub door, dead of foot, buried of hand, mortified of mind; a familiar sight. / It was a waiting world. … Something indefinable, far back in their blood, derived from the flat passive fields that bred them, told them to wait’.
What is your favorite hobby or pastime? In a neglected novel called The Fugitives by John Broderick, he writes: But just as people will live on in houses demolished by a bomb, going through the ritual movements of everyday life; so Lily adapted herself to the uncertainty of her existence’. This is probably a strong … More Passing time is no trivial thing: how to respond to the ‘uncertainty of one’s existence’.
What would you do if you lost all your possessions? All I possess is mine to give and I give it to you. All I possess is mine to give and I give it. All I possess is mine to give and I give. All I possess is mine to give. All I possess is … More Losing the words as a reflection on possession and loss.
‘It was this detachment, even more than his facelessness and the white coiling hand, that made Mrs Whitaker linger … / Suddenly Mrs Whitaker caught her breath. The white hand, so strangely contrasted with such coarse clothes, stopped twisting the button and reached out towards her. But the man was not beckoning. He was holding … More ‘It was this detachment, even more than his facelessness and the white coiling hand, that made Mrs Whitaker linger …’. Can it be that a novel and an artist can get forgotten even though they write at least one novel that is, in the words of David Norris, ‘in particular a masterpiece’.
What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind? The idea of changeless certainty about topics or issues is not an attractive one to me. Of course there need to be values that guide and limit the range of change in feelings, attitudes or thoughts about topics and give your own thinking some … More Things change!: that’s the blog.
Tell us about a time when you felt out of place. The rich man in his castle,The poor man at his gate,God made them, high or lowly,And ordered their estate. The third verse of the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful is rarely sung now unsurprisingly and perhaps we did not sing it thus during … More Make the whole of space and time that is available into your place: it’s okay to feel anxious as you replace yourself, of course.
As I get older, 69 on the 24th of this month of October 2023, I wondered what my life would be like if it weren’t called on ‘to go on pilgrimage’, somewhat as Chaucer’s pilgrims were, by the plastic and other arts (a range of them), and wide learning interests that sometimes feel so boundless … More Habitué of the Snug. Call that a social life!?
Your life without a computer: what does it look like? The prompt today contains, of course, its own bias. First, it speaks to people who are first asked to imagine life without a computer as if that absence could occur to one individual, regardless of the rest of the globe. Second, it sort of presumes … More Life before the spread of personal computer technology was once a fact but can it even be imagined now.
What skill would you like to learn? If you search the internet for the term ‘passive skills’, the likelihood is that the majority of returned sites will be on the use of the concept in computer gaming (they were on Bing anyway). These skills have a dark side: in their purest form we compare them, … More If all skills were active skills, learning would stop. Indeed, perhaps the fact is some active skills need unlearning. Relearning passive skills.
What details of your life could you pay more attention to? I think the idea of paying attention to your life down to each detail is problematic. Were it possible to attend consciously to each detail of my life, I would still not be in control of these details since so often they are details … More Attend not to the intention but to the accident of your presence having an effect.
‘We raised him and we saved him and when he was old enough he accused us of keeping him from becoming his … true self’.[1] This blog is a preparation to see Lemn Sissay’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an adaptation, retelling (and more) in a new dramatisation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis with the company Frantic Assembly with more … More ‘We raised him and we saved him and when he was old enough he accused us of keeping him from becoming his … true self’. This blog is a preparation to see Lemn Sissay’s ‘Kafka’s Metamorphosis’, an adaptation of Kafka with more than a glance at Sissay’s memoir ‘My Name Is Why’, for that book underlies the drama too. I shall be seeing it at York Theatre Royal on Thursday October 12th at 2.00 p.m.
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