In Nordic mythology the Tree of Life, Ygdrasil, connects past, present and future of a culture or bloodline but is also a symbol of eternity and divine intelligence. Above is Heine’s emblem that had sinister uses for the Nazis. Words have a right to change their meaning and their method of doing so is to … More Tradition: Can you choose it?
G.K. Chesterton wrote What’s Wrong with the World’ in 1910 and I have, I have to admit, never read it but I did search out a context for the quotation that is a little wider and here it is: “Nobody says, “This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now if there is … More The art of cooking might after all be another defensive response to ‘raw’ truth.
They say retirement’s a time for leisureBut not necessarily for pleasure. The little iambic couplet I composed, with obligatory soft and feminine rhymes (don’t blame me though for the sexist nomenclature of the discourse of poetic technique where double rhymes are named both feminine and weak), for this sad blog is meant to look at … More “They say retirement’s a time for leisure / But not necessarily for pleasure”.
In the 1964 comedy,Rattle of a Simple Man, a Northerner (in 1964 a synonym for a simpleton to the London elite) goes to visit a prostitute because of a bet he has with his mates (down in London to watch a football match) who think he he is impotent with fear. He spends the night … More Leslie, the Rent Boy, offers five things to his new punter, Herbert.
The idea of winning the lottery – or winning the pools as was the norm when when I was a child and before the advent of a state lottery in the UK – may have appealed once as an means of evoking impossible resolutions to real problems – real or relative poverty, economic insecurity and … More Why offer me a dream of doing what might be better never done.
W. Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive biologist (and, of course, an animal) from the University of Vienna, giving his keynote speech at the 2017 International Convention of Psychological Science in Vienna: ‘we really need to … recognize a very simple biological fact: It’s a truism, but people are animals, too.” Available at: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/humans-are-animals-too-a-whirlwind-tour-of-cognitive-biology Forget precedence and … More Making and communicating decisions about our ‘favourite things’ are not exclusive to humans, who forget the truism, as stated by the University of Vienna cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch says: we really need to … recognize a very simple biological fact: It’s a truism, but people are animals, too.”
Believe it or not, there is a Wikipedia entry for ‘snack’. I link to it here. What is more this entry tries to enhance the significance of the term by looking at cultural variants of foodstuffs considered ‘snacks’ across a number of locations and cultures, as well as tieing it to theoriesof the propensities involved … More The meaning of a Pot Noodle (or other ‘snack’) and when you might ingest from it, possibly in secret, the mass of calories it supplies?
The choice of vocabulary to describe the world we are always trying to shape around us and our needs – either in societies, groups or as individuals – is sometimes the most urgent issue in those worlds. This may be because our chief business as meaning-makers and users of meaning is to get things done … More ‘Fictile worlds’: a business in the interests of pretensive human well-being aimed at consumers we know to be the ‘most fingent plastic of creatures’.
Young people are portrayed in literature, as inordinately fond of things they can’t quite digest or understand. In another blog I mentioned the summary given by Mr Venus, the aged taxidermist in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, seeing off a young man who checks the change too carefully (for old men’s teeth substituted for the … More What are youthful attachments worth? In my ‘salad days’ I knew no ‘meat’. And now I am a pescatarian.
Is thinking differently, doing something differently? Or is thought a means of doing nothing? Can thinking become its own object rather an an eternally self-reflecting subject seeing itself repeated infinitely in a Hall of Mirrors. A Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror Room. ‘We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an … More Is thinking differently, doing something differently? Or is thought a means of doing nothing? ‘We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves’ says George Eliot magisterially with perhaps this issue in mind. If we are born thus, the emergence of independent moral understanding is painful as a result, for in that emergence we begin to know the otherness of others beneath the barriers set by our thick skins. (Cue George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ from the end of Book 1, Chapter XXI).
If there were no time there would still be someSometimes, wherein we would find time containedIn some special relationship with us:Cocooned in comfort where there’s no splendour. It does not surprise me that when I think of time I type some plangent iambic pentameters like those I typed above with echoes of the moment in … More “If there were no time there would still be some / Sometimes, …. / :Cocooned in comfort where there’s no splendour”.
The ‘gift’ is a complicated notion. It is considered as a possession by natural right, whose possession carries with it no obligation to the giver and yet is seen as something that could not be ours without someone have gifted it in the first place. A ‘gifted’ person may possess some quality or talent that … More “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us! / “:
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