A claim of being ‘passionate’ about something often comes with an apology these days. Passionate people don’t just talk to you. The ‘go off on one’ in the modern term. They seem forced to act or talk in ways that go beyond people’s expectations of them, or indeed anyone. Those people often include the person … More Passionate or not? Feeling forced to feel it or forced not to feel at all.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why? The last three books I read might as well be the list of books I offer here. For if they did not have an impact on me, in truth, I can’t have read them. That may not always be the fault of the book … More The last three books I read can be my list of books that had an impact on me. Books that have no impact and render you passive aren’t things you read, just commodities you consume.
The answer to this prompt question (‘What are the most important things needed to live a good life?) has to be one based on how and who we love and value outside the circle of what we call me. But you cannot achieve such things easily and they are often obscured and misrepresented. We have … More Dirg Aab-Richards, a Black gay elder from Brixton, would say the important things are an integration of ‘love’ and ‘communities of diversity’. Yet he felt he had to reinvent them, rewritten from the ‘works of a white man’ in order to find ‘What wasn’t there but was’. This is a blog on Jason Okundaye’s 2024 book, ‘Revolutionary Acts’.
In Act 4 Scene 2 of Cymbeline, a late play of Shakespeare’s, is one of his most famous songs, possibly made so by Virginia Woolf’s obsession with it. It is, though, rarely reprinted as the dramatic lyric or part song, distributed between two roles that it is (Cymbeline, Act , Scene 2, lines 331 – … More The wisdom of the late Shakespeare plays tells us that to ‘fear no more’ is to be dead.
What quality do you value most in a friend? Friendship coming like a surprise upon you in order to remind you of its capacity to be present may well feel to us as the contents of a witch’s cauldron feel, stirred by some witch’s huge and magic ladle. The poem I tried to bring together … More Hoary thoughts on whether friends last forever; with good news from Emily Dickinson.
Olivia Laing tells us as her book The Garden Against Time closes that she loves a line from the fourteenth-century Psalter by Richard Rolle: This boke is cald garden closed, wel enseled, paradyse full of appils’. In contrast she goes on to say that her ‘book is a garden opened and spilling over. The common … More Olivia Laing thinks the answer to this question is to ‘cultivate your garden’. But she shows us what a political act that is!
A ‘rolling description’ is where I post early on the day of an event and keep updating it as the experience I am trying to recount occurs. It is now 6.30 a.m on the 28th May and I am looking forward to friends Rob and Linda Goffee arriving(about 11 a.m. we think, to leave for … More It is joyful to visit mutual interests with friends. A rolling description of visiting The Laing Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to see ‘Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia’, on Tuesday, 28 May 2024.
Erich Fromm distinguishes a healthy culture of ‘being’ from the diseased cultures obsessed by ‘having it all’. However you define ‘all’ in that phrase, it is the acme of a diseased culture ruled by individual greed alone. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was an iconoclast of amd from many traditions in which he was nevertheless embedded, … More Erich Fromm distinguishes a healthy culture of ‘being’ from the diseased cultures created by capitalist ideology, obsessed by individuals dreaming of ‘having it all’. However you define ‘all’ in that phrase, it is the acme of a diseased culture ruled by individual greed alone.
Who would you like to talk to soon? I wrote and put online the blog below on he 24th May. John Burnside died on the 29th May, announced by his publisher on 31st May. Never to see the hero again and talk to him, even if at a book signing. I mourn for him, his … More Poetry is a dialogue with everything. The sooner we do that, the better. Communing with John Burnside’s latest volume, ‘Ruin Blossom’.
“Strictly speaking,” said Mr. Strict DyasDust, who spent his life correcting others, “this question is nonsense because it uses the word ‘practice’ as a verb whereas it is only a noun. Ask me, if I practise religion, or do not ask at all”. In the UK there probably are people who still care about the … More An Atlantic of a difference in ‘How I Practise as a person following a religion’ or ‘Practicing religion’. And then my answer!
How do you feel about cold weather? Snow, snow, snowis how the snow speaks,Is how the page reads. Snow, from Simon Armitage’s (2020) Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems London, Faber & Faber. It must be different reading Simon Armitage’s poem Snow outside on Pule Hill near Mardsen in Yorkshire, inscribed in stone, than in a book. And maybe even … More When I am cold / the world feels old/ My heart’s in hiding!/ The train buffered at a siding.
Of course, having been born in 1954 and schooled in the sixties, I remember that time. My first computer was an early Amstrad bought in the 1990s. Even in the 1970s, I was subnitting essays at UCL in my own handwriting and using real books in real libraries. We now call that using hard copies. That fact … More X’d. From communication to controlling others in one social media application, once called Twitter. It did not need to be thus.
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