Wordstall

  • Our Tribe is AEON

    Our Tribe is AEON

    Try Aeon – “Aeon is a digital Magazine. It is better than the London Review of Books.. and it is FREE”. I was talking over breakfast on Sunday with a woman called Penny. She is a literary agent living in upstate New York, working mostly with non-fiction writing. Aeon is the closest publishing thing I’ve…

  • The Crowd

    The Crowd

    “I prefer the teeming crowd of souls to the teeming soul itself”, walkingtalkingwriting, please join the conversation: THE CROWD I prefer the teeming crowd of souls to the teeming soul itself. This has nothing to do with my material condition. Every kind of virtue is found in a crowd: that humans in a crowd create…

  • “death … hospitals”

    “death … hospitals”

    ‘entitlement’ was the word I was remembering. I added it between these other two, “death … hospitals”, when we were meeting yesterday in the city-centre Cafe. We were in the spirit of walkingtalkingwriting, and one aspect of the entitlement word we were on about was (entitlement/un-entitlment) the dialectic, in which both of us were entitled…

  • I almost reached

    I almost reached Piazzale Michelangelo – aware of a beating heart – only a small slope remaining but I decided to cut through to the Giardino delle Rose, where I sit in the shade impressed by the vigorous shoots of the roses – no flowers yet, of course. Knocked off course by the recent nose…

  • Dismal Deaths and How to Avoid Them

    Dismal Deaths and How to Avoid Them

    “How unbearable the body of a living being who fights with death, and now seems to win, now to lose. I don’t know how long we remained like that”. The Days of Abandonment,  Pp 145. Elena Ferrante explores in this story what happens to us when our lives results in an unbearable absence of sense.…

  • The heart of the matter

    Somewhere there is the point at which life turns into death. Loss of blood, for example, takes one towards that point. And recently I was taken closer to that point on the occasion of a nose bleed. Because I am taking warfarin (to reduce the possibility of a a DVT following surgery last year) the…

  • Another door

    Is this a door I should open and walk through or is this a door to fleetingly admire and pass by? I must admit it doesn’t look like a door that is used very often. Long ago locked, jammed in its frame, remaining as a reference to the past. The past use of the building…

  • Arrangements missed, dissed, unmade

    I rather liked the Wikipedia entry for deranged:  ‘Deranged may refer to psychosis, a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a “loss of contact with reality”. Deranged may also refer to: In films: *Deranged (1974 film) a 1974 American horror film. *Deranged (2012 film) a 2012 South Korean science fiction,…

  • The Great Derangement

    The Great Derangement

    Words! It took only a little verbal cunning in India to acquire the copy of the River of Smoke (Amitav Ghosh’s 2nd volume of his ‘Ibis’ trilogy) from the beloved. She had already started the book, but her visual cortex was so filled with the colours and patterns of cloth and textiles which are to…

  • What makes a tragedy?

    In The Danish Girl the hero/heroine pushes against the boundaries of body and identity. His/her death as a result of the surgery that had the purpose of shifting identity from male to female appeared to be both tragedy and fulfilment. He went into the surgery and she came out and died “happily” in the hospital…

  • Each Day is a Tree That Falls

    This is the title of a book by Gabrielle Wittkop. No, I’d not heard of it either. Neither the title nor the writer. I find an excerpt in the latest copy of the very excellent Sonofabook magazine http://www.cbeditions.com/magazine.html The book was published postumously: “…a celebratiion of death and life , Eros and Thanatos, beauty and…

  • Let’s explore that a bit more

    Thanatos, Thanatos wherefore art thou Thanatos? And for that matter WHO are you? Are you the unregenerate savagery that is always waiting to burst forth?  Yesterday I went to the movies! I saw The Danish Girl: a further adventure into gender and sexual identity. A moving account of one man/woman’s story set in the 1920/30s…

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.