Carrying on, in times like these I turn to poetry. CK Williams is working best right now, The Collected Poems (up to 2003).I’ve also just bought Writers, Writing, Dying (2013). I like his poems that are often slowly unfolding stories, long sentences, with spaces to pause and breath, both personal and political, moral and cosmopolitan. Is this [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
‘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 [...]
“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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Living well right to the very end: Natural, healthy and health promoting, what are the essentials of an end-of-life caring network? The basics are a kitchen table (or similar), teapot, mugs, and cake or biscuits. In other words the caring networks we are talking about are ‘grassroots up’ by and with local people, and – [...]