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 […]
Though she said she was talking too much (!), Pat Mason wrote a long well-considered response to my Plaguetime Glob Number 13 which has stimulated me to write Number 14. She began:- Amongst other things, Silence, both internal and external, can be used in any number of ways, to exert power, and pressure or to […]
In Grateful Memory of David McAndrew The title page of the very old essay that started me off with this Glob, done with a hand-propelled typewriter, ribbon clearly on its way out, which I have scanned and laboriously corrected with the aid of the Optical Character Recognition facility that snuffles away in the maw […]
In his monumental book Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi remarks on the importance of keeping a notebook: he writes …having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. It forces us from the tyranny of the present and makes it possible for consciousness to revisit former times… In The Literature […]
when I suddenly forgot to flap my arms sufficiently vigorously and finished up at the bottom of a flight of stairs with what turned out to be two broken ribs. They were somewhat painful. In hospital in the middle of the night, after oral morphine had settled me down a good deal, I was suddenly […]
escaping into the night garden I thought – Cassiopeia! hello stars! I said as on so many occasions in other night gardens far away in time & space and then it burst upon me: God stops right here – inside this bag of skin & ancient bone at the surface of my eyes at my […]
My dear old friend James swam into my more-than-conscious mind yet again on the 19/20th January 2017 in London when I was privileged to be present at a monumental performance by Ian Pace of Michael Finnissy’s five hour masterpiece The History of Photography in Sound. James is one of the poets recorded/celebrated/memorialised in Chapter Six […]
The Railway Bridge after a painting by Brooke Farrar There he stands, the well-known figure Of the total stranger with his back Towards me, leaning on the parapet Of the secure suburban bridge. He stares along the permanent, white Summer rails, the expanding iron thoughts That curve into perspective, signalling The distance and himself, and […]
Discovering Haiku I arrived at haiku sometime in the 1960’s while I was reading Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. I was very drawn to his argument that went something like this: in Western philosophy (and, as a result, pervasive throughout western thinking processes) there’s a habitual cognitive dichotomy between thinker and thing-thought, between mind […]
One-dimensional Thinking In One-dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse argues that technological change undermines the true substance of art: the easy availability of its products and their subsequent manipulation, universality of access, the general dumbing down of processes, the seeming ordinariness of ‘how to do it’, crowd mentality, psychological analysis… And the concrete manifestations of technological effect […]
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