A task: from Milosz to me
This morning I read this poem. “A task” by Czelaw Milosz, chosen randomly from his collected poems. It reminded me of the post I made on reading this poem initially…
Tag: writing
Cantos from a cage
Today I am reposting this reflection on the true heritage of Ezra Pound, Cantos from a cage, which I originally posted in April 2018. I have borrowed from the local…
Taking time with Szymborska
I have established several practices for the New Year to make it a more mindful, culturally enriched and satisfying year than the plague year of 2020, now buried in an…
Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin…
The kaleidoscope of 2020: year in review
A tradition that I have embraced on this blog over the last few years has been to write year in review posts in December. In 2019 I reflected on walking…
Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857
Today, I am reposting this response to William Dalrymple’s magnificent The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. I wonder if, over the next 5 to 10 years,…
Axel’s Castle, a mirror and an encyclopaedia
Today I am reposting this post from April 2, 2018 that reflected on some of the literary symbols that formed uncanny fascinators in my mind. *** When I was about…
A solution to political decay: the ordinary virtues of governing well
I am reposting this reflection on the response to political decay in the midst of the constitutional crisis under way in America, which reveals dramatically the rot in America’s institutions…
An interlude on Solzhenitsyn
Prophets are despised in their own country, and now and then I am tempted deeply by Cassandra’s fate. So in appreciation of true prophets and great writers, who formed my…
Heaney on Writing
https://wp.me/p1YJAa-2xN This interview with Seamus Heaney (vale Seamus) is wonderful. I particularly like the line that poetry is stratification of the need for transcendence.
11 years with WordPress – from the archive: Good Government Starts Today
Earlier this week I got a message from WordPress that I had passed my 11th anniversary as a blogger on the platform. I began with an anonymous blog, The Happy…
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…
