Wordstall

  • Blue to be Sure – but not the Blue Danube

    Blue to be Sure – but not the Blue Danube

    Playing in’Waltz Time’ – Ummpapa, Ummpapa – but the rhythm section is adding triplets and other faster tempos and we hear far more than four beats to the bar. “The musical component comes first”, we are always saying – remember balance, rhythm and measure. It is simply that here there is an absence of melody…

  • Haunted by barely recognised pressures

    They crowd up against me, catching my attention, but disappearing before I turn my head. Or at least there is nothing to see, but the it may not be the visual sense I need to use, but rather some other process that I have never learned to use, dazzled as I am by the visual,…

  • Irony was mentioned

    In our discussion on Monday irony was rather inadequately explored and the inadequacy left its traces, scars, whatever in my mind. Then in my continued rereading of Claudio Magris’s Danube I came across the following: ‘Here the Danube is young [in the vicinity of Ulm] and Austria is still far off, but clearly the river…

  • Speaking my mind

    Speaking my mind, living my mind; mind being vast empty tracts, more extensive than the universe of potential that waits without waiting for me to speak, indeed to live. The angel descended and stood quietly, not exactly ignoring me, but on the other hand not making further advance towards me. What do you want of…

  • On Being Peripheral

    On Being Peripheral

    Loitering in the Calcutta metropolis – Kalighat is a forever new city, the Bengal foundation myth is powerful and self-confident, but it breathes a particular kind of newness that is instantly tarnished and decayed each morning sunrise, and centrality of position is simultaneously surrendered . It is another instance of the story of modernity. However,…

  • The strange work of writing

    As usual this morning I managed to get myself out of bed about 07.30 and return to its warmth with a cup of tea to start the day with some reading. There were just a couple of Kindle pages left of Sloterdijk’s The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as Practice, and he finishes with a quotation…

  • Mahash Masan (The Great Crematorium)

    Mahash Masan (The Great Crematorium)

    We are told that Varanasi and is a city of feeling, rather than looking. First here are the facts from the riverside ghats:- c. 300 corpses are burnt every day, some 360kg of wood are required to consume each body, and the average cost of cremation is about £ 3,300 (30,000 rupees). There are also…

  • Hacking a Shelter Out of the Chaos

    How real I am; such an intensity of existing. It surprises me that Descartes based his existence on thinking rather than simply the avalanche, the torrent of pre-thought feeling. Somehow or other he used doubt to undermine his exuberance for life and decided that his thought must take precedence. If Socrates had his absences, when…

  • I Could be Anywhere

    Midpoint in Ayurvedic immersion in Kerala. Hardships? I can’t say my ample tummy has reduced so far as to be pressing against my spine. Ascetic is rather a word that conjours up excess for me, and a practice for the few. Whereas hardships come to us all sooner or later in life regardless of our…

  • Torn Memories

    I like the line: ‘An unusually hot summer stripped the memories from our bodies’ that you quote from Michael Kruger. I like ‘unusually’ and ‘stripped’ and ‘our’; it’s those words from which we can glimpse their story. There was something different about that summer, something uncanny that took us into a new situation. Memories are…

  • Late Kick Off

    About five minutes before the football classifieds results and all we could see on the tv screen was the teleprinter golf ball ticking away. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. The seconds ticked away slowly as we lay horizontal on the sofa a rug drawn up over us to keep us warm. Central heating was an irregular business…

  • Does death have a future?

    Well that brought you to a stop didn’t it! There’s nothing like a slash across the belly To bring you to your knees! ‘A few years before the October Revolution, one of the most distinguished authors of bio political Utopianism in the early Soviet Union, the poet Alexander Svyatogor (1899-after 1937), had founded a group…

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.