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 […]
For a train journey the other day, I needed a book that would fit easily into my pocket. I decided to choose randomly from my library. Spinning around and pointing my finger, I arrived at a little book I had possessed for many years always intending to read it but never getting round to it […]
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 […]
For some years I’ve had on my ‘To Read’ shelves a book called ‘The New Age under Orage’ by Wallace Martin (Manchester University Press 1967). I bought it because of AR Orage’s connection with Gurdjieff and thought it might throw some light on another who, like Maurice Nicoll – mentioned briefly in the book – […]
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 – […]
It’s good to have an enthusiastic correspondent who sends me strange presents and parcels full of thoughts & ideas from time to time. For some reason, she does not believe in the hoarding of books and so I, being a constitutional hoarder, am so fortunate when she sends me her castoffs. One of these recent […]
A whole year ago now, I got the bright idea of re-reading all Iris Murdoch’s 26 novels in the order they were written so as to write about them. I published a Glob on The Italian Girl @ https://wp.me/p1QjJc-O7; that seems a long time ago. I aimed to finish the project by Christmas Day 2017. I […]
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 […]
All life is fiction but it fails to get recorded as fiction. Reading high literature is the cleanest, neatest form of learning about life that there is. Last Christmas I determined to re-read the whole of Iris Murdoch – all 26 novels. I’ve got to number 8… The Italian Girl In The Unofficial Rose, Mildred […]
Preamble We imagine that we consist of one ‘I’ only. All the time we imagine this we are not only kidding ourselves but we are losing the opportunity to re-arrange the way we think about our lives. We are many ‘I’s: Being-miserable-I one day and Being-happy-I the next; Feeling-competent-I one moment and Being-severely-challenged-I the next; […]
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