A character in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s beautiful short novel Djinn who may or may not be sometimes the author or Simon Lecoeur or nobody at all come to that from time to time, has perhaps been enrolled, or enrolled himself, in some kind of Kafkaesque non-situation only half-explained because of the need for the utmost secrecy. […]
The World is Mired …in the growth of what can justifiably be called ‘fascism’, there are starving millions, anti-human activity perpetrated by people who imagine they are human, people being blown up or killed in plane crashes and nobody asks what it’s all about; the few who sit quietly doing nothing can lose themselves in […]
Everything that happens in life is accidental… Even the things we imagine to be deliberately planned out are the result of accidentally stimulated decision-making. I do not remember what it was prompted me to acquire (accidentally) Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen somewhere around 1963 when I was accidentally mired deeply in wage slavery – […]
One Sunday morning in early autumn, astray in the summerhouse where I go for silence & certainty, I took down from the spidery shelves of my ‘library in the garden’ (thanks to Edmund Gosse who quotes the case of some old writer who had one) a yellowing volume of essays, acquired from a dead friend […]
In July 2018 I was given the task of reviewing Cor van den Heuvel’s Selected Haiku. He is regarded as a significant figure in haiku circles. In his Afterword I learned that he was much influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work which propelled me into re-reading the novels with this in mind starting with Jealousy. This […]
IntroductionFor a whole week to the 9th April 2018, I suspended all other daily avocations to set about reading John Redwood Anderson’s three volume poem Triptych which I’ve had on my shelves for some years, unread, many pages uncut. Oh, the pleasure of slitting them as you read with a sharp kitchen knife. Can’t get […]
I’m used to quoting HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU THINK TILL YOU SEE WHAT YOU WRITE? Variously attributed to EMForster and WHAuden. It rings true for many people. It’s probably also worth asking HOW DO I KNOW WHAT I DO WITH MY LIFE TILL I SEE WHAT I WRITE ABOUT IT? It’s useful to […]
