St Berrihert’s Kyle and Well
A little while ago I reblogged a post from Pilgrimage in Medieval Ireland on St Berrihert’s Kyle . Others have written about this site and generally describe it as in various ways magical. My…
Category: silence
From “Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed: An Introduction to Birdsong” Simon Barnes
Silence is rarely pure. You can hear real silence sometimes deep in a cave – when, if you stop talking, the sound of nothing comes as a physical shock. But…
From “The Poetry of Thought”, George Steiner
We do speak about music. The verbal analysis of a musical score can, to a certain extent, elucidate its formal structure, its technical components and instrumentation. But where it is…
Music For Another World. Ed. Mark Harding. SF Site review, 2011
This is a rather grumpy review. I found the writing in this anthology by and large ponderous and forced, too self-consciously “literary.” I think that is pretty clear from the…
A note on whales and silence from The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin
“But on the voyage itself none of Brendan’s crew guessed what was about to happen, not even Trondur, who had a great deal of experience of whales and whale-catching. Day after…
An unfinished piece: Reflections from six Parisian Churches
On a visit to Paris a few years back I ended up, well, visiting a series of (Catholic) churches. Each was very different in its way) I have often tried…
A Question of Silence: review of “Berberian Sound Studio” and “The Numbers Station”, Nthposition, early 2014
The original is here . Recently I watched Computer Chess which is similar to Berberian Sound Studio in many ways – an unusual setting and milieu usually ignored by filmmakers, and a main character’s…
Silence – A Fragment. Nthposition, March 2013
For some years now, I have been contemplating a philosophy of silence. Is that my most pretentious sentence yet? Possibly. Silence is fascinating. When we are most at ease with…
Séamus Sweeney 