On the Road Again

 Posted by at 8:33 am  Echo Effects, Exodus, OUT in the WILDERNESS  Comments Off
Nov 152016
 
On the Road Again

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 [...]

Jul 252016
 
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 [...]

Jul 102016
 
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 [...]

Jul 082016
 
"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 [...]

Dismal Deaths and How to Avoid Them

 Posted by at 11:48 am  Exodus, Old Men Travelling  Comments Off
Apr 082016
 
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 Great Derangement

 Posted by at 10:13 am  Echo Effects, Exodus, IN Conversation  Comments Off
Mar 092016
 
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?

 Posted by at 5:37 pm  Anti-Gravity Surgery, Exodus  Comments Off
Feb 092016
 
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 [...]

Writing in Caring Networks

 Posted by at 12:25 pm  Exodus, IN Conversation, ON the STREET  Comments Off
Jan 072016
 
Writing in Caring Networks

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 – [...]