Music is a pump for inflating the soul: hypertrophic souls turned into huge balloons rise to the ceiling of the concert hall and jostle each other in unbelievable congestion… (Milan Kundera: Immortality) ✺ In Plaguetime I greatly miss playing the recorders with CoMA Firewire in Colchester; I have composed some music in the mean time […]
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 […]
I found a battered old copy of Ivan Illich’s Celebration of Awareness lying around on my impossible-to-work-at desk top. Together with his Deschooling Society, it was a book I acquired in the late 1970’s more or less at the height of my desire to make something different happen in the world which I still thought […]
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 […]
Learning in Stages Conventional wisdom (that is, not really ‘wisdom’ at all) suggests that learning proceeds in four neat and tidy stages. The model is taught as though it’s the be-all and end-all but what it doesn’t do is to depict the subtleties involved in the shift from one assumed ‘stage’ to another. This essay […]
In an essay called ‘In Praise of Idleness’, Bertrand Russell says that he thinks ‘…there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous…’ He hopes that ‘the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do […]
There’s something about the preservation of old notebooks… I wonder what’s to be gained from keeping a notebook? My friend Paul Hickey prompted me to hunt through some old notebooks to find a picture I remember preserving there; it’s a page from a book I used to read my kids in the 1960’s ‒ a […]
As a theme for presenting a keynote address to a local poetry group this summer I chose to look back over sixty years of my own making of poems. The result was something like what follows and the presentation of a small book of Selected Poems which is available free to anybody who might choose […]
So often one hears, “I can’t draw…” “I can’t write…” “I can’t figure this out…” Many adherents of the Gurdjieff canon have a general belief that human beings are simply unable to DO anything because there’s a belief that we are asleep, not in control of our lives. Certainly any attempt to DO is futile […]
I wonder if anybody else in the world, except Michael Frayn and myself, remembers Gasbag’s [Mr Brady, Irish] English classes at Kingston Grammar School; he was one of the many great eccentrics there under whose spell I fell one way and another. One day, without telling us what the purpose was, he set us, for […]
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