Wordstall

  • Ursonate: More Sniggers and Odd and Alien Sounds

    Ursonate: More Sniggers and Odd and Alien Sounds

    A “Long Time to Hope” or an account of odd and alien sounds on the Isle of Man: you or I raising our profile might equally end in a spell of internment there too. ‘Man’ – an odd name for an island isn’t it? – the island, not quite amusing enough for a snigger, but…

  • The Snigger and Other Noises

          Raising a profile might mean making a noise; startling others with irrelevant and irreverent intrusions into the conversation. Show us your profile! Which face should I show? And which side of a face should I show? But of course it might turn out that my efforts to control what is actually seen…

  • And How Dark is Darkest?

    And How Dark is Darkest?

    The darkest hour – when is that, I ask myself on my way to Ramsgate yesterday. It is hot driving the M2 motorway in the August sunshine. The roadside grasses are burnt a yellow dry and on either side flat fields spread out, empty, the harvest gone. It hardly feels like England I think, more…

  • You’ve left it a bit late mate

    “At first I was surprised by her designs, her hopes for me, as though a seamstress should dream her son would be a bank teller not a banker, a druggist, not a dancer. Her aim was too low to have been aimed at, and there seemed little connection between her life and the life she…

  • ‘Their father’s world is too strange’

    The title is a phrase from The Tunnel and it provokes the question: What happens when the link cannot be made? I went to visit my cousin last week – he is about the same age as me, a couple of months older to be exact – but he is now suffering from vascular dementia…

  • Mr Kirby Raises His Profile

    Mr Kirby Raises His Profile

    An Episode beginning at Tate Modern on the Southbank and leading to Carlisle Lane, SE1, during which Mr Kirby Raises his Profile Aug2013 email (click to view). Inert with a cup of coffee, the Barrowman opposite me begins raising his Profile, and I am reminded: ‘Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring.…

  • Stepping into the dream

    In the last few days I have made a (perhaps foolhardy) start on William H. Gass’s The Tunnel. I’m reminded of starting out on the Everest of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: this is going to dominate for a while, quite a while. Anyway, the point of this is some words I have just read…

  • It’s a Long Conversation

    It’s a Long Conversation

    It is the M25, anticlockwise, and you and I are on our way back from the zone. Time is on our hands: A. ‘Fog‘ is a new essay by Franco Moretti (NLR 81, May/June 2013, P 59-92). – drawn from The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, in parallel with his companion work Distant Reading(Verso 2013).…

  • When we get really excited we can call it TOP SECRET

      Breaking news . . . wow this is so exciting . . . I don’t know where to start but I have just this minute received the call from our sponsors: the new research project is to go ahead. What is it, you ask. An obvious question, nothing less than what I expected and…

  • Ahhh those mountains of flesh . . .

    Big men, big women, fleshy joyous creatures, always laughing, well maybe not always laughing, but full of their success and proud in a fleshy sort of way. The joy of the flesh. The pleasure of the flesh. Is there no end to it? Fleshed out – too much flesh for your own good. To flesh…

  • The Issue is Happiness (Part 407)

    The Issue is Happiness (Part 407)

    Something was missing that is for sure… when you said a photograph was supposed to be there: a dark room image enters and (joining Dr Bobomka? Who knows…) slides into a corner lurking in the shadows of the long conversation. One day the world may thank you and I for continuing to struggle with these…

  • Can you see the glint of an eye?

    There was supposed to be a photograph inserted here . . . but my relationship with technology being rather hit and miss it refused to upload so imagine if you can a narrow street with an arch high up and a window through which I thought I caught a glimpse of Dr Bomboka. Imagine the…

Categories (2024) are:

  • ATELIER Work – about-creative-work (in all mediums: text-drawing-sounds-image etc)
  • CLIMATE Action – indications-and-contra-indications
  • DAWDLING – walking-pausing-to-wonder-wandering
  • IN Conversation – companionship-and-connections
  • LA Communita –participatory-collaborative-artivism
  • OTHER than Human – animate-and-inanimate-terrestrial-kin
  • PARANOID Readings – violence-and-fundamental-perversions
  • POLITICAL Readings – mobilisations-affect-polarisations
  • REPARATIVE Readings – inspiring-healing-restorative
  • SHADOW Readings – speculative-and-not-yet-visible-thinking
  • STYLE Readings – scales-and-familiarities
  • TONITE at the Coliseum – live-experiences-performance
  • YOGI (‘Not This-Not That’) – meditation-bhakti-consciousness


Different WORDSTALL Categories in the past supported the mainly experimental personal writing in posts. The previous list of Category headings was: Anti-gravity Surgery / Atelier / Catastrophe Games / Echo Effects / Exodus / Fundamental Perversions / Hitting the Potholes / Holy Fool-Hero / In Conversation / Old Men Traveling / On the Street / Out in the Wilderness / Over and Beyond / Tonite at the Coliseum. Some of these still persist or recur as Tag key-words.

The even earlier Category headings for the walkingtalkingwriting blog (2006-2012) have been forgotten, but can be explored if desired via the long tail of monthly posts for those years here.