I’ve just finished reading JBPriestley’s book of small essays published in 1951 called Delight. It is truly full of delight. In her biography of JBP, Dulcie Gray wrote: ‘…Priestley was lucky to be writing at a time when essays were popular – he was one of the last great essayists…’ I was lucky enough to […]
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 […]
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 […]
ON ‘THE ESSAY’ Why do I call these posts ‘globs’? Because I wish to dissociate myself from the word ‘blogs’ – they are essays – but that’s a word distinctly out of fashion… From September1968, at the beginning of my time of being what’s called a ‘teacher’, I taught briefly (though it seemed like forever) […]
I’ve just read JBPriestley’s They Walk in the City (1936) Edward Greenfield refuses to go along with the kind of life that his smug brother Herbert has designed for himself. The latter had made his great gesture when he had determined to be an analytical chemist and, in face of many obstacles, lack of money […]
META-I : TIME-LINES & WRITING HUTS This afternoon (28th May 2020) one of my ‘I’s suddenly had the idea that perhaps Meta-I could step outside of tick-tock time. It had been reading JBPriestley’s account in Midnight on the Desert (1937) of the moment in America when he chanced to find in a secondhand bookshop a […]
All True Haiku are the Anchors of Experience During this Plaguetime, I continue to ransack old notebooks; the problem is that one thing keeps on leading to another, one photo to other photos, an endless stream of things all written down in various kinds of exercise books, stapled to start with but from 1957 onwards […]
“This isolation – it’s driving me up the wall…” So some seem to complain during this strange time of what’s called ‘Lockdown’ while others relish the opportunity to be free of the world and its crass stupidity. What makes the difference? Would I find myself halfway up a wall, I wonder, if I were stuck […]
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