Helen Andrews on the corporatisation of morality
A while back I featured Helen Andrews’ superb “Shame Storm” which drew on her own experience of online mobbing to look at the wider phenomenon. She has a new piece…
Category: commonplace book
The late Michel Serres on angels and messengers
At the start of this month, the French thinker Michel Serres died aged 88. He had an eclectic range of interests, as evinced by his Wikipedia page: Over the next…
“loneliness, the toxic by-product of freedom which generates ad-hoc, fragile communities among people who have escaped conventional backgrounds and who, after dreaming of cosmopolis, wake up atomized.”
A few weeks back I came across a brief review in the New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl of the current Whitney Biennial, which turned out to be a condensed version…
“The decline of industries left woodland open to destruction” – Oliver Rackham on how industry saves woodland
That the natural world is rarely entirely “natural” is a bit of a truism, one I’ve reflecting on since reading “Curlew Moon” by Mary Colwell. It is tempting to idolise “wild…
“Crossing the Jordan”, Matt Alberswerth
From the journal Prometheus Dreaming , I liked this poem by Matt Alberswerth which has strong echoes of Ted Hughes: Crossing the Jordan Did the fish hear me when…
“My Life by Water” – a found poem by M. Stone
I greatly enjoyed M Stone’s found poem “My Life By Water”, constructed using… well, you can follow the link to find out – and does it matter? It stands on…
“Machinery” by Robert Wrigley
On what would have been my father’s 87th Birthday this poem by Robert Wrigley seems fitting. It captures something of the tension between the worlds of literary endeavour and the…
“We have to remind ourselves constantly we are not saviours”: Jean Vanier RIP
Another appreciation of Jean Vanier, which ends with this quote from Vanier himself: We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign,…
Séamus Sweeney 