Much excitement at allumination this week, as my last big post – the Olson / Lovecraft one – has been picked up on by the international poetry world. Greetings, new readers from just about everywhere! I hope you’re enjoying the unholy poetry / weirdness blend that goes on here. Some personal poetic excitement as well,Continue reading “A hatchet for Jung”
Category Archives: Psychology
Swamp moralities
Well, it’s been a wonderful period of battery refreshing and book rewriting. The book’s in good shape now – 20,000 words shorter, more emotionally coherent and much, much more focussed. So that will be going out to various people over the next few weeks. Very exciting! And of course I’ve been doing much re-reading. InContinue reading “Swamp moralities”
A mirror and a window both
In ‘S/Z’, his wonderful, word by word dissection of a Balzac short story, Barthes notes that ‘in the text, only the reader speaks.’ There’s a fascinating point about the process of reading to be drawn out of that. When we read a book, he’s saying, we read it in our voice, hearing the words inContinue reading “A mirror and a window both”
What’s a person anyway?
So much narrative removes the possibility of change. Although faced by risk, the hero always win out, the quality and correctness of his or her original vision unchallenged. They’re superficially about progress, but in fact such narratives privilege stasis. The hero might develop new skills (whether practical or emotional) to allow them to achieve theirContinue reading “What’s a person anyway?”
Processing the world
Well, last weekend was very rock’n’roll – Djinn’s fractured Arab rave beats blending with Indokrautprog mayhem from Grok on Saturday, and word / sound crossover on Sunday as M. John Harrison and Erik Davis read with Grok. Here’s the Sunday line up, waiting to groove: Grok came out of Stoke Newington’s leading boy band, theContinue reading “Processing the world”
Stasis, dynamism
Well, I drafted an astonishingly perceptive and witty blog entry at home last night, which would have thrilled and amazed everyone as well as instantly doubling my on-site traffic, but I’ve left it on my hard drive at home, so instead of that I’m just going to blast slightly randomly about Cervantes and stasis. There’sContinue reading “Stasis, dynamism”
A mirror to shine in
Seeing a ghost is like experiencing a fragment of someone else’s memory; an insistent, present, repeated moment broken out of all context. Fiction takes such fragments and sets them in a reasoned and coherent narrative and emotional context. For example, there’s Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s novel ‘The Shining’. He’s trapped in the Overlook Hotel,Continue reading “A mirror to shine in”
Seeing the world
At Arvon last week I was ranting – as you do – about John Burdett’s ‘Bangkok 8’, the only psychedelic transvestite Thai reincarnation police procedural you’ll ever need to read (apart, of course, from its sequel ‘Bangkok Tattoo’). And, if that whets your appetite for Thai mythology, there’s much else out there – S.P. Somtow’sContinue reading “Seeing the world”
Dystopia IS utopia
Flicking through the Ballard entry on Wikipedia just now, and I was interested to see that they describe him as a dystopian writer. On the surface, a not unreasonable judgement, but for me there’s something a little more complex going on there. Ballard’s always explored – in a very engaged and fertile way – theContinue reading “Dystopia IS utopia”