Art

After The Wasteland, then Prufrock, I decided on T.S. Eliot’s Preludes for Conceptual Art. Lines at the end of the poem set the scene: “The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.” This is a photograph of a disused area in Manchester with industry behind. I used to drive around looking […]

Word of the day: hodology – the study of paths, roads, tracks and networks (from the Greek hodos; path). In neuroscience, the study of the interconnections of brain cells and neural pathways. – Robert Macfarlane   For several years I went to the Keswick and Borrowdale area of the Lake District. I liked it so […]

As the morning steals upon the night –  The Tempest   Night, day, flowers, birds and nature are important elements of Shakespeare’s world. I read the line above from The Tempest and felt what Nabokov called a shiver down the spine: Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the […]

  The best things, he always used to say, are put together of a night and vanish with the morning. What people call the floating world ― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World I am fey again – Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain   W.B. Yeats poems are well known, so it feels […]

The photograph is above the Aletsch Glacier in the Swiss Alps. Around 4,000 metres, so peaks below are still formidably high. I walked around then suddenly felt uncomfortable. It could have been a cornice, not a snow field, and there was no way of knowing. You take a train to Aletsch intended as a tourist […]

Reality is neither tidy nor efficient, nor does it comfortably tolerate fences and fields. The real world is composed of astonishing patterns of complexity which shade and grade into one another in endless and random configurations – Joseph Meeker, Fields of Danger and the Wilderness of Wisdom The wolf behowls the moon – A Midsummer […]

  King Lear Fennel   There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts. . . . There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’Sundays. You must wear your rue with a difference. […]

  Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting. ― Haruki Murakami   My first and favourite Murakami was Norwegian Wood where a bath tub features. It’s too late, he can’t go home, she laughs and says that’s where you can sleep. My second read was Kafka on the Shore with […]

Word of the day: chatak – the unheard sound a flower makes at the moment it opens or petals   – Robert Macfarlane   At Twitter/X Rob Macfarlane is probably most known for his Word of the Day. Tens of thousands of people must have seen it. A word for a bird, a feeling, a […]