Is the idea that psychosocial or other roles are ‘parts’ played upon the stage a tired metaphor (from the too-often quoted lines of Shakespeare’s jester, Jacques, from As You Like It: ‘All the world’s a stage, …’). Why might modern novels then take up that idea again, other than to keep saying and showing the … More This is a blog on Katie Kitamura (2025) ‘Audition’.
The illustration – by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff – is from the Harvard Gazette article cited below, but to give up a book because it makes you uncomfortable may not be to ‘bin’ it but just re-shelve it in your mind (source: https://content.news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/when-to-quit-a-book/ ). After all the bin in the illustration has a l;ong shadow – … More Is giving up on a challenge a strategy that ever brings comfort? An example from my reading.
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’ve done worse things, things I am not proud of including standing here in the dark with David, I know there’s a little bit of hypocrisy there, there are shades of hypocrisy in everything. Our principles stretch like elastic bands’.[1] When certainties fail us, as they must in time, there may be no alternative to … More ‘I’ve done worse things, things I am not proud of including standing here in the dark with David, I know there’s a little bit of hypocrisy there, there are shades of hypocrisy in everything. Our principles stretch like elastic bands’. This is a blog on Nicola Dinan (2025) ‘Disappoint Me’.
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.
Father Walter J. Ong shook my world in 1982 with his book Orality and Literacy, wherein he tried to show us why we, seeped in literacy (even if we cannot or will not read because the characters to be read would still surround us and puzzle us, with either their potential to polysemous mystery or … More Why reading matters more than just hearing stories. With the help of Father Ong, Rita Carter and, more than the rest, Jobo (Joanne).
‘The fear of being powerless. The fear of being watched and judged. The fear of infection. They blur together. The mysterious American disease has grown larger and more ominous in your imagination as it begins to spread in Britain. … You read about it in the Mirror and you kept the paper afterwards, hiding it … More Ekow Eshun (2024) ‘The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them’. Black and Queer masculinity in the life-story of Justin Fashanu.
Alan Hollinghurst’s newest novel opens with the memoirist, who is the novel’s focus, Dave Win, thinking about his present life in his 80s. He is ‘two weeks into rehearsals for Bajazet at the Anvil’, where he is ‘playing old Acomat, the grand Vizier, a gift of a part, …’. This blog is a starter before … More A note about ‘Bajazet’ by Racine and translated by Alan Hollinghurst and featuring in ‘Our Evenings’
In the first story of Mark Haddon’s Dogs and Monsters (2024), named The Mother’s Story, a wily inventor and engineer, capable perhaps of only inventing dangerous fictions says of a story he is in the process of telling: “Much depends on it being a story that people will listen to greedily and be desperate to … More “Much depends on it being a story that people will listen to greedily and be desperate to pass on”. This is a blog on Mark Haddon’s ‘Dogs and Monsters’ (2024).
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