Category: Writing
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Getting High – A Reader’s Guide
For those of you who have already begun the book, or are awaiting delivery, I thought it might be helpful to post a kind of field-guide to the text. That’s not to say — I hope — that it doesn’t stand alone, but for those who are interested in delving into some of the background…
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Don’t Tread Softly (Though You Tread on My Dreams)
It’s always a strange time in the run up to a book being published. Mostly, there’s a sense of excitement. But there’s also a degree of nervousness. Will people ‘get it’? Will people think it’s any good? I was thinking about this the other day, and was reminded of Yeats’ poem The Cloths of Heaven:…
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Life, Writing and Being Useless
(soundtrack to this post: ‘Wasting My Young Years‘ by London Grammar) Posts here have been a little thin on the ground, mostly due to the fact that I’ve been work very hard on the manuscript for a novel – more news of which I hope one day to be able to share, but I’ll shut…
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Stillness Is Coming | National Poetry Day
My dear friend Nic died a year ago on Monday. Missed so much. This, on National Poetry Day, for him. Stillness A year in has not stopped our yearning, this anno domini we know dominates; still, stillness is coming. Your stilling broke levees of such Orlean, Orwellian turbulence rising angry Leviathan against this awful…
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Revolutionaries or Decorators? | Art, Brutality and Transformation
Been meaning to post something on this for a few weeks: on holiday this summer I read (recommended by an Italian friend) Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island. He’s a very good but pretty bleak writer, with a very disturbing vision of humanity. The TLS describe the book as ‘a charging bull in…