Wordstall

  • Feuilleton Fiction

    Feuilleton Fiction

    Last weekend’s Guardian Review (Sat June 1st) reads like a sign of the times short story or novella. The beginning section is about the imminent destruction of the buried classical city at Mes Aynak, which is to be found in eastern Afghanistan. This vast city was the crossing point between East and West for more…

  • Naming Older Men Desires

    Naming Older Men Desires

    Dear L, You desire older men, you write in your Diary*. Not long after this longing of yours began In 1963, when you were 15 and I was 13 and just about through puberty, I also began to long for you. “As luck would have it” like you say. But you, being two years older…

  • Into the maelstrom – as though we know what we are doing (part one)

      This business of writing can present puzzles and one thing that is readily on hand to bash our heads against are those two ancient categories of fact and fiction, and the apparent certainty of their definitions until as we begin the examination the distinction melts away and we are left with words, phrases, sentences,…

  • Post, Post-post, Post-post-post, Post

    Post, Post-post, Post-post-post, Post

    But you need to be patient with me. I’ll get there, in fact the novel has already started, we are all, so to speak, in the middle of it, you just haven’t noticed yet. A bird is singing out of your ear, and if you were to look up and to the left for a…

  • Ahhhhh Pedro

    Ahhhhh Pedro, what do I see here? Lists! Have you gone mad? Have you had your monthly check-up? Is it hormonal? Have you stopped taking the medication? You describe yourself as an older man; what does that mean? Get yourself booked in for a total blood transfusion in one of these new-fangled private clinics, they…

  • Showing an Interest in Loud Snoring

    Showing an Interest in Loud Snoring

    Judged by the tenor of the rumbling sounds coming from downstairs it appears His Lordship is fast asleep. I know it wont last, but while HE is in this state I have been getting up to a bit of mischief: I’ve begun to concoct a series of awesome lists (see below). Please feel free to…

  • Orpheus and Emblematic Modernism

    Orpheus and Emblematic Modernism

    Nescio – Amsterdam Stories (LRB review 23 May 2013) : Fritz Gronloh (1881 – 1961) is added to the Wordstall pantheon: … along with emblematic modernists such as Van Gogh, Pessoa, and especially… (given their similar office lives spent in 3-piece business suits with crisp white handkerchiefs in their breast pockets) Wallace Stevens. I am looking forward…

  • I greatly desired some olives

      But on the margins of the market Pedro Paramo skulked, half hidden by a fly-blown full length mirror propped against some cardboard boxes that bulged with an assortment of old clothes, hippy cast-offs from 1971, that time when we had begun to realise something: the writing was on the wall, the die cast, the…

  • Man Under Interrogation

    Man Under Interrogation

    There are the accepted norms for conducting these kind of things, and before we proceed to the thumb screws, we’ll begin by asking you kindly. Please tell us everything that you know. Make it easy on yourself because in the end you know that you’ll have to talk. It’s us asking the questions, and the…

  • Evolution (from ‘Taken Down God’)

    Evolution (from ‘Taken Down God’)

    I am slowly absorbing a poem which arrived in my inbox last Friday: ‘Evolution’ by Jorie Graham.   One’s nakedness is very slow. One calls to it, one wastes one’s sympathy. Comparison, too, is very slow. Where is the past? I sense that we should keep this coming. Something like joy rivulets along the sand.…

  • 18 Years in the Making

    18 Years in the Making

    I read that there have already been several reviews of the book  Middle C by William Gass (2013, 416 pp), including the ones by Cynthia Ozick in the New York Times, and Michael Gorra in the New York Review of Books. But I confess, I’ve only read the one by Seth Colter Walls in the latest LRB (9…

  • Nuts in May

      Here we go gathering nuts in May. And there are plenty of them out there. Take your pick. But there remains the same old problem – how to wrest the stories out of the rocks? The temperature drops, the gale tears at the fresh leaves of this late spring – or is it early…

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.