As I was sorting out my books again, I came across a book I bought at the Laing (pronounced ‘Laine’) Gallery in Newcastle when I visited the wonderful permanent exhibition there. It’s a huge book – the size newspapers used to be and made of a similar kind of paper. But how do you look … More Do Roads answer questions? In honour of a great photographer, Chris Killip
How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic? GAVI is a public-private partnership created to enable the vaccination of more of the vulnerable populations of the globe. And yet, even so, its research implicates the need for change in the approach of both sectors to their belief in growth as … More Has anyone truly adapted? Pandemics and the global extinction of livable environments are the wilful product of a world obsessed with growth and competitive domination.
I still have not got myself ready to write on James Cahill’s wonderful novel The Violet Hour, though I have started, but today one part of it sticks out as usable in answer to this question. One particularly character in the novel, Fritz Schein represents what the ‘art world’ is increasingly meant to mean for … More When knowledge is reduced to appearance and those appearances animate ‘legends’ so that the experience is ‘epic’, there is no room for a book to ‘read over and over again’.
I am still sorting my books. I have reached George Mackay Brown (GMB), and I read as I go. He wrote a version of the Orpheus myth as it had been translated into Shetland Islands myth in medieval times with the poet Orpheus with his lyre now translated as in other medieval takes on the … More Urge them to Fall in love with ambiguity
I could be Dante because, as yet, I have read only extracts of what is considered by some the greatest poem of the modern world. Moreover, I have been preparing to read it for so long that the task of cataloguing these volumes is raising my cultural guilt to new and higher levels than ever. … More Let’s be Dante!
My current reading Being retired and in one’s seventh decade of age leaves the issue of time open and yet I seem forever to find certain nagging questions pressing on my mind as if they mattered top anyone – even myself. Here is a case in point. i have resolved to do a blog a … More When I do strange things, fortunately I laugh at myself. A case in point …
I need to answer this obliquely in order to avoid any validation of the notion of unique personalities. They do not and cannot exist. The argument might be worth taking up another day but my aim today is to assume that we should and must avoid the tendency in single-issue thinking to invoke moral panic. … More In truth no-one is ‘unique’. The best thing we can do is to avoid turning to the single issues that fuel ‘moral panic’.
Dressed as the sun, the lady sings to thoseBoy sailors, resting shoulder to shoulderOf stormy weather ahead on the seasThat stand for their life voyage with each other.And should one fail the other truly knowsThat somewhere there’s a crew to make bolderAssay upon , for open seas will teaseThat way, for past lovers lost’s my … More Since I first heard Elizabeth Welch sing it in Derek Jarman’s ‘The Tempest’, it has to be the Etta James blues lyric ‘Stormy Weather’
When I were five, I wore a plastic swordTo make my fantasy of Shakie’s ‘DickThe Turd’, heroic tho’ a villain, boredOf bowing to lesser kings, cringing sick-With-fancies sycophants to restrainingRealities. To change the sad bad worldEven then was my aim: rid of feigningWe would, I’d ensure it, red flag unfurledMake level those peaks of false … More ‘When I were five, I wore a plastic sword’: my child hero then, not Hugh MacDiarmid’s hero in his ‘Hymn to Lenin’ [but confused with Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ in my childish brain].
When Adam in Book VIII of Milton’s Paradise Lost gets the chance to quiz the Archangel Raphael (man to man, as it were) he has one thing on his mind. He wants to know how to sort out the confusion he has about the satisfaction he feels as a result of loving Eve, created for … More Do we understand that ideals that are constructed, often out of resistant and crude raw materials, are more significant than our hope in there being something transcendent in which to believe. This is a blog on the making of angels in art.
Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher in Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’ , in the depiction made by Harry Furniss as frontispiece to the novel. A man who uses his fingers to point – did Furniss intend to capture the early etymology of the word ‘teach’. ‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but … More The influential teachers point out the multiplicity of ways forward not point their finger at you to absorb, from them as your authority, the ONLY answer they know.
What is it to be confident? Usually mythologies are based around what ‘confidence’ should mean. The Viking sea captains and jarls of the Orkneyninga Saga are a strong subject for a literature in which boys dream of the men they might become but adolescence was a fraught and painful thing for George Mackay Brown (GMB), … More The queer confidence of a shy man: George Mackay Brown (GMB) and his late novel ‘Vinland’, where “boys love to range freely in the country of their imagination, and there they are captains and jarls”.
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