Being a think-and-write person: “…the hard things when you’re not thinking or writing and as far as you know you are dead or might as well be, with no word for yourself, just that suction-shush like a heart pump or straw in a milk shake…” [CK Williams, Writers Writing Dying, Pp59] It’s for keeping an [...]
And what does forward mean? No, don’t look at me like that, That exasperated expression on your face; I mean it seriously: Forward is now back. Is this Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence? 1970 is as far as got before the braying donkey of the right Rediscovered those populist slogans To feed the resentments toxically [...]
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 [...]
Brexit . . . Trump . . . is the darkness gathering? Is it Tolkein time? The gathering of the forces of tyranny? The denial of democracy as a system of enlightened governance? A realignment of world power? A Putin/Trump axis? Should I pack my belongings on the poor donkey’s back and head for the [...]
I woke early this morning – maybe 5 o’clock – to a sense of being worn out and remember the phrase care worn – worn out by caring – the slow work of love, of caring for others, that gradual erosion of the outer layers until only some sort of essence remains: a skeleton of [...]
So…here…to write…and being surrounded by books, overwhelmed by books, let’s be frank, by words, overwhelmed by words, tumbling madly, there is no way of processing, better keep the books locked in the cellar where they can do least harm. Is that true? Is it possible? Won’t they leak into the damp walls, crumbling bricks, stone, [...]
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 [...]