In his introduction to the OUP After London (1980) John Fowles wrote ‘…Some of his more starry-eyed later worshippers have forgotten that he enjoyed hunting and killing for much of his life…’ I once had a neighbour who owned a cat and a dog both of whom he obtained from a rescue centre; they were […]
“What’s that you’re reading now?” said Euphemia.“It’s called Living by Zen by DT Suzuki.”“It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?” she said.I missed her point till it caught up with me a bit later. She meant that in my 84th year there wasn’t much time left to put whatever advice it might contain […]
On the other hand, you have different fingers – Steven Wright When I was a little lad (difficult to imagine now but only too easy for me to get back into who I was then now… seeing, hearing & feeling all the things I experienced those long years ago…) I used to spend some time […]
Early to rise… It’s 4 July 2003… Woke up this morning (4.15am) thinking, “Brackets!” Explosion of ideas got me up and at my desk in the hour before dawn which the Sufi says is an hour out of paradise.. Where did I get the notion of bracketing from? It’s long been part of my being. […]
Making a Heap into a System You can have a heap of ideas—most people, including myself, do—this one, that one & several others all higgledy-piggledy; it’s possible that they may be connected in some way—everything is sub specie aeternitatis—but when they are in a heap all the possible connections are difficult, if not impossible, to […]
Do you, as I do, have rows of old notebooks, going back years and years? I once used the yard of adolescent diaries to make a novel called The Unremembered Joke, thinking I’d be able at last to throw them all away; the joke is that, though writing the novel helped me to deal finally […]
The Best is Still to Come Between 1993 and 1999 I lost count of the times I taught a three day workshop described as Stephen Covey’s ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’; I taught it so often, several times with Ed Percival and sometimes with a learning partner, that I even began to become rather […]
The Brain and the Fear of Motorcycling The brain is more or less made up of parts that set in motion different human functions. Considering something as complex as the brain, words are only a very rough & ready way of describing how this happens but we might say that the part that deals with […]
Book-learning often has a bad press. Mere book-learning, they spit out between pursed lips… But it’s worth asking exactly what one does get from books… The short answer might be that it depends what you do with the words you ingest. The longer answer is, perhaps, that it all depends on what is happening to […]
…it sometimes seems as if in her work a cat came at us speaking English… (Blackmur) Reality leaves a lot to the imagination… (John Lennon) I Trained to be a Teacher Between 1964 and 1968 They were great years! The first essay we had to write was to be called, without a second thought about […]
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