Wordstall

  • The Issue is Happiness (Part 204)

    The Issue is Happiness (Part 204)

    Like Scozia, Africa is also far away. But sometimes there is no alternative and we have to go there in order to meet somebody we have to face-to-face because, you are absolutely right, email, social media, text, mobile, or Skype won’t do. Think back to Scipio Africanus and the glories of Rome: first stop Carthage,…

  • At least I kept my return ticket

      The month in Florence is down to its last few days. Dr Bomboka who I was assured had been in Venice where I endeavoured to locate him and interview him for this review, has, it seems completely disappeared. Did or does he even exist? How close is Africa? The word on the street is…

  • My Story Flows in More Than One direction*

    My Story Flows in More Than One direction*

    I‘ve been lurking in shadows this week, Malcolm said, naming his growing  indifference and irritability – “blacker and denser it is” (after Carl Jung) the less we embody it. Boldness helps to spread encouragement, I thought, and free things up. And simultaneously lurking in the shadows the less I embody it, equally paralysed – frozen…

  • What is it we need courage for?

        To turn the world upside down. To free us from, to break away from, parents. To die to what is finished. To question authority. To follow the barely legible path through the wilderness. To love. To be ready to sacrifice that which we, until only a moment ago, believed to be sacrosanct. To…

  • The Standing Man

    The Standing Man

    The older man, tidily dressed in his best country clothes and farmer’s hat, walks across the Piazza del Duomo in the city centre. Stepping steadily along, he also appears to have no interest whatsoever in going into the Cathedral doors which are open behind him. Whatever his destination may be, with his shepherd’s walking stick…

  • Plenty of room upstairs

    I remember the conductor shouting and it comes to mind with news that the vanity scheme of the dishevelled blond mayor is finally delivering the smoothly rounded lines of a rereleased routemaster. Ma qui, è molto caldo . . . in so many ways . . . Out there in the piazza with the sun…

  • Lungo i Portici

    Lungo i Portici

    What are the older men looking for? Squeeze up, make some more room. No, we can’t! There isn’t any. The thing is that there are too many of us to fit one street bench, and there’s a limit especially for older men with our spreading waistlines. Even if it is a long one, and the…

  • Objects of desire and growing without growing

      Jenny Diski* is super focused on her memories of what she was looking for as a young woman – in this case ‘older men’. Her energy rebounds and bounces around the court and somehow I manage to have a whack at the ball and off it goes over the high fence, across the railway…

  • On closer inspection of the reflections in the water

      “She glances at her lovely echo, Joyce and Beckett walking on I’Ile aux Cygnes, Paris”. David Risk Kennard (DRK) 2013

  • She glanced at her lovely echo

    She glanced at her lovely echo

    You’ll remember me saying. Well, perhaps I don’t, the other replies. Two men in conversation: it is not difficult to find many explanations for the disconnect in what they are saying to each other – reinventing the tradition, as Walter Scott said reputedly, always comes easy: – Walter Benjamin walking with Baudelaire in Paris and…

  • Judge not the weak-kneed for they shall climb the mountain

    What if God were round and a plump and short sighted with two left feet? But dainty steps and a surly smile that at the same time possesses an unusual sweetness. In London the city of untold wealth and poverty, where blind financiers grope their way towards extravagant deals, leaving millions to sell their kidneys…

  • Into the maelstrom (part 2)

      I have little faith that I will manage to get beyond part 2 in this set; the thread will break and I will be off somewhere else. Somewhere else is likely to be Florence. And who knows I might see you there. Discoveries of books (and other things, I guess), books that I think…

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.