Having recently determined to read & re-read Jefferies’ work from beginning to end in order of writing, I’ve become conscious of the way he seems to thrive on contrast & juxtaposition, both small chunk and large chunk. It seems to me that his cognitive processes frequently go like this to good effect. As an example […]
It is suggested that one result of Lockdown is that people are reading books. Wow! They haven’t been doing that? In the last three months I’ve had my habitual average read for the last 60 years – 15 quite demanding books. I have been described as a ‘chain reader’. Having completed my third or fourth […]
Master teaser, my father exasperated my young self one year in the early 1950’s by saying, “This year our holiday’s in Stopaton…” It took me a long time to figure out what he meant. I think he too would have been perfectly content with ‘stopping at home’ during Plaguetime. He always had less contact with […]
“We’re talking too much,” [Demian] said with unusual seriousness. “There’s no point in clever talk, none at all. It only leads you away from yourself. Going away from yourself is a sin. What we need to do is crawl entirely into the self, like a turtle.” Hermann Hesse: Demian There is no reality except the […]
At the end of Rain Upon Godshill (1939) JBPriestley tells us that he had been thinking about ‘the chapters of a story, based on an idea I had had for years…’ In nineteen days after returning from a rough excursion in Arizona to the ranch where they were staying he had written The Doomsday Men […]
Rain Upon Godshill Nothing is truly real in this world but living creatures… (JBPriestley 1939) All the talk about ‘not going back’ to the toxic normality that existed before [the Plague] will be tested by the ruling class’s insistence on reasserting a world where their profits and their power prevails. (Socialist Workers’ Party 5th July […]
I write a fairly regular ‘essay’ in a series called RANSACKING THE PAST for display on The British Haiku Society Website. Sometimes I dredge books of my own early haiku for ones I could have done better (most of them) and write a critique, sometimes I look at old articles in Blithe Spirit (the BHS […]
Pursuing my private intention to discover what it is in Hilaire Belloc that I love so much, I’ve read some of his minor novels and returned to the essays. Apart from some supremely outstanding poems, his verse is negligible but the man is a poet through and through – a ‘maker’ of profoundly affecting prose […]
I re-read Mark Epstein’s Thoughts without a Thinker. I made noteswhich gradually formed themselves into a poem. I laced it togetherwith haiku from a forthcoming book of my own; I suppose the result could be said to be a sort of haibun. ❁ in the prison of the mind we’re too busy survivingto confront the […]
Apart from my library, I have three comparatively small bookshelves which I visit every so often when my chain reading habit has ground to a halt for some reason. The books on these shelves are not in alphabetical order nor are they classified by subject matter, so that, starting from the top left hand corner, […]
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