Category: Personal story
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Experiments with Morning Routines
So today I experimented with restoring my morning routine, but with a twist. So today the plan is….
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Discovering Zettelkasten and Rediscovering Luhmann
Discovering Zettelkasten and Ahrens’ guide to smart note-taking has been a blessing. But so too is re-discovering Luhmann…
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Colour Revolution on a Chaise-Longue
I took to reading Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (2016) this morning while reclining on a scarlet chaise-longue and bathing in autumnal sunshine. The cat was on my lap, but my attention kept slipping…. [Read More]
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A New Direction for the Burning Archive
I am going to approach the blog with the advice of “document, don’t create” that I saw on popular vlogger on youtube, Ali Abdaal. For periods of the last ten years the blog has been my primary creative outlet. But that is now changing. I have my books in preparation, my podcast, my poems and my essays. And driving all of that my restless curiosity about how to save culture and history from the flames. So I am going to use the blog as the platform for all of those aspects of my author life.
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Watch my poetry readings on YouTube
I have begun a YouTube channel, The Burning Archive, where I will feature short videos of my writing and interests in culture, history and literature. To begin the channel I am releasing a set of five poems that I have read from each of the fascicles of Gathering the Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, […]
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My collected poems published and on sale now
I am very pleased to announced that I am publishing my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, 1996-2020 in both a print and e-book edition. You can purchase through online retailers such as Amazon and Booktopia. You can buy the print edition from Amazon here and the e-book edition from Amazon here. […]
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Reflections on starting a podcast
Over the last month I have started a new venture, my podcast, The Burning Archive. I have posted links to my episodes here on the blog, and you can listen on all the main platforms – Apple, Spotify, Google etc. I have some brief reflections on the process, and the meaning of the podcast for […]
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Announcing my podcast, The Burning Archive
Dear readers – you may now become dear listeners. Yes, I have started a podcast – The Burning Archive podcast. You can listen at Spotify, and all the other podcast platforms, Apple, Google et etc. The show is about all things history and culture. It takes to heart William Faulkner’s statement from Requiem for a […]
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Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association and regathering of the fragments of my mind. I will write some more of these kinds of posts soon. Please enjoy. Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche (originally posted 23 April 2017) After a morning during which I searched my ravaged […]
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13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
In early 2017 I wrote a series of posts – or let us call them essays – on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. I wrote it still aiming to revive a career in the bureaucracy, but perhaps gripped by the fates to know, as I know with high resolution tonight, that poetry and […]
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On living not by lies
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of “soft totalitarianism” described in Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020). The last year has seen lockdowns, curfews and bans on the most fundamental human relationships (attendance at […]
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Dream. Life. Recovery.
For several years in my early thirties, I attended a dream group with the Jungian psychotherapist, Peter O’Connor. Peter, who is now retired, was a gifted therapist who for many years from the late 1970s held the torch in Melbourne for a humanistic and mythopoeic psychology against the rat-observers and statistical behaviouralists who were dominant […]
The Burning Archive 