Tag: literature

I decided never to rely on my very first impressions of what is likable or not. Why I persevered then with Rupert Everett’s short stories in ‘The American No’. This blog is mainly on his Oscar for A Last Season.

April 14, 2025

I decided never to rely on my very first impressions of what is likable or not. Why I persevered then with Rupert Everett’s (2025) short stories in The American No London, Abacus Books. This blog is mainly on his Oscar for A Last Season The American No is a new set of short stories by … More I decided never to rely on my very first impressions of what is likable or not. Why I persevered then with Rupert Everett’s short stories in ‘The American No’. This blog is mainly on his Oscar for A Last Season.

‘The School Play’: Growing up Queer amid so many manly performances. The poet James Merrill on the perils of a “small part”, “but an important one”, when: ‘What was not important to the self / At nine or ten’.

April 6, 2025

As I sort my library, I come across writers I have long meant to read. Such a one is the poet James Merrill, who I came across in relation to reading novels of his period some years ago. I know nothing really of Merrill.  I read through the selection I have in the Everyman Library … More ‘The School Play’: Growing up Queer amid so many manly performances. The poet James Merrill on the perils of a “small part”, “but an important one”, when: ‘What was not important to the self / At nine or ten’.

Thomas Haller’s resurrection is his ‘lilac renaissance, his violet hour’.

April 3, 2025

Fritz Schein lives entirely in, and on as his means of living, ‘the art world’ of ‘spectacularity’ – a world of apparently random images and appearances that eschews the privacy of inner reflection by being in love with the still surface of mirrors. When the ‘great recluse’ Thomas Haller turns up at a show Schein knows … More Thomas Haller’s resurrection is his ‘lilac renaissance, his violet hour’.

Let’s be Dante!

March 29, 2025

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!

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”.

March 16, 2025

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”.

‘The poetic phrase is constantly thinking, is forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language’. Rethinking new poetry, including Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s ‘Strange Beach’ again, and now  Yomi Sode’s ‘Manorism’ [2025].

March 14, 2025

In an earlier blog post (see it at this link if you wish) about Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach, I ended it with a promise, or is it a threat, that: ‘I want to return to them. Maybe I will, for I have more to say of the brilliant things in Andrew McMillan’s book blurb on … More ‘The poetic phrase is constantly thinking, is forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language’. Rethinking new poetry, including Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s ‘Strange Beach’ again, and now  Yomi Sode’s ‘Manorism’ [2025].

Choose to be around people who make you wonder. ‘How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world / That has such people in’t’ When one’s untutored eyes are opened the world is full of potential. Is that only because ‘’Tis new to’ us?

February 13, 2025

Choose to be around people who make you wonder. ‘How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world /  That has such people in’t’ When one’s untutored eyes are opened the world is full of potential. Is that only because ‘’Tis new to’ us? The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is aiming to bring young people into ‘First Encounters’ with Shakespeare’s drama and spoken poetry. How did they fare with … More Choose to be around people who make you wonder. ‘How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world / That has such people in’t’ When one’s untutored eyes are opened the world is full of potential. Is that only because ‘’Tis new to’ us?

Of a ‘chert the size of an olive pit’, that travels with the narrator through the spaces and times of the novel ‘Juice’ [2024] by Tim Winton, the narrator says that ‘… a stone is an expression of the earth, a signal of time. … but its journey isn’t over, and neither is its destiny fixed’. In the dystopia imagined by Tim Winton whether destiny is fixed or not at any point in the globe’s political and environmental history is the central ethical problem of the novel.

January 16, 2025

Of a ‘chert the size of an olive pit’, that travels with the narrator through the spaces and times of the novel Juice [2024] by Tim Winton, the narrator says that ‘… a stone is an expression of the earth, a signal of time. But it’s also a relic of experience. A thing propelled into the world. … More Of a ‘chert the size of an olive pit’, that travels with the narrator through the spaces and times of the novel ‘Juice’ [2024] by Tim Winton, the narrator says that ‘… a stone is an expression of the earth, a signal of time. … but its journey isn’t over, and neither is its destiny fixed’. In the dystopia imagined by Tim Winton whether destiny is fixed or not at any point in the globe’s political and environmental history is the central ethical problem of the novel.

“If there were no time there would still be some / Sometimes, …. / :Cocooned in comfort where there’s no splendour”.

December 27, 2024

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”.

A ‘wild surmise’ whilst ‘Silent, upon a peak in Darien’.

December 11, 2024

Let’s wait for a moment on a peak in Darién Province in Panama in South America. Why are we waiting? We got to Darién Province, not through its history of colonisation, though it is a fairly interesting story, having seen off the ill-fated Scottish mercantile project of subsuminf it to Scottish rule in the eighteenth   … More A ‘wild surmise’ whilst ‘Silent, upon a peak in Darien’.

‘born to set it right!’. Genetics, Destiny and Duty for all time in ‘Hamlet’

December 6, 2024

Act 1 Scene 5 is pivotal in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet for the eponymous character and the progress of the play’s plot itself, partly because it makes clear that the character of Hamlet is the substance of the plot of Hamlet as a play. If plot distributes the actions that take place in a play, those … More ‘born to set it right!’. Genetics, Destiny and Duty for all time in ‘Hamlet’