Year: 2018
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Reflections on 2018… fragments
This year has had no coherent themes for me, and perhaps that is why I have struggled to write posts with a clearly signposted judgment on 2018. Only now it occurred to me that it has been a year of fragments and broken off story lines. So, the form of the fragment may be my […]
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Poem: Twitter sonnet #1
I essayed a small literary experiment today, composing a sonnet that would fit the old character limit of a tweet – 140 characters. I forgot or did not realise till I tweeted the experiment just now that twitter has expanded its character limit to 280 characters. It gave me spare space for a few punctuation […]
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A revelation from Rumi
Sitting in a shopping centre cafe, I am reading A Year with Rumi. I am waiting for a back massage, sipping a coffee and listening to Sam Harris and Johann Hari speaking about addiction, depression and the loss of connection and control in our society. I woke this morning with the thought that I wanted […]
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Reflections on 2018… on (not) belonging
This year has seen the mass formation of stories of belonging in defiance to an imagined social order of cultural dominance: #metoo, people of color, it’s OK to be white, neurodiversity, gender diversity, identity politics, alt-right, intellectual dark web. majority-minority. These new claims of belonging, of strength through identity, oppose the powers that be, and […]
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Reflections on 2018… a year of history
Looking over my posts for the year I am struck by the recurrence of history in my material. I have read more history than literature this year – although of course I would believe that history is one branch of literature. A quick recap of my year’s reading, before some reflections on what all this […]
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Reflections on 2018… ambiguous loss
I am listening to the On Being podcast that features this week a conversation with Pauline Boss on the meaning of ambiguous loss and how there is a myth of closure in our cultures of impatient striving and ceaseless ambition. There does not need to be an end to grief or to loss. We have […]
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What I am reading… Gerard Manley Hopkins
Here, listen to the uncanny insight… 75 The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world undone: They waste, they wither worse; they as they run Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress. And I not help. Nor word now of success: All is from wreck, here, […]
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Reflections on 2018 – 1. self-portrait at 55
The year is drawing to a close, so time to begin reflecting on what the year’s stream of images, texts and events meant to me. Where has this year left me, and what has it left for me to say? I am ending the year in a bit of a slump, one of those periodic […]
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What I am reading… Solzhenitsyn on his limited experience
From a review of recent books on Solzhenitsyn come this brief account of the conservative Russian author’s encounter with condescending and blinkered American liberalism: “leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limitedSoviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment […]
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What I am reading… on governing and imagination
amzn.asia/0CNwQ94 from John Dunn, Breaking Democracy’s Spell
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What I am reading… Karl Gützlaff, missionary, drug dealer
From Platt, Imperial Twilight, comes the story of Karl Gützlaff who was a German Lutheran missionary who yet could pass himself off as a native Fujian Chinese trader. He made the trip that broke the shackles on European trade to China, and convinced Britain’s mercenary merchants, Jardine and Matheson, that China was a market of […]
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Poem: History
History No thing these days is as it seems, And ideas… well, don’t trust them. I pore over the all too human follies Of dynasties and revolutions, And create like Casaubon a sterile wisdom. Into grey garners, I pour the husks of time. The vital seed has long since passed away. Lost in trash, I […]
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