Neurons making love and art

It’s rutting season where I am.
Perfect, as it happens, for the question preoccupying me lately — about what conclusions neuroscience will reach on the neurological basis for the romantic temperament, its joys and vexations. In place of the asthmatic buses and jackhammers punctuating thought on my last working visit to London, I have galumphing [...]

A serendipitous postscript to: Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

A good reporter thinking in what couldn’t be deemed his finest hour was complaining the other day that the net has killed serendipity. To that I say, stuff and nonsense. The fact is, it’s alive and well and has only done a bit of shape-shifting — just as Serendip, the inspiration for that gorgeous word, [...]

Stick to your Polish, Joseph Conrad! … Whoa, Cleopatra!

A few questions and some leftover thoughts from the last entry in this blog, Ruth Padel and the Presentation of Intelligent Pulchritude in Everyday Life … in ascending order of frivolity:

Why is Derek Walcott the focus of such vicious animosity in sections of the transatlantic literary community – more than the combinination of jealousy about [...]

Ruth Padel and the presentation of intelligent pulchritude in everyday life

Something missing in the hullabaloo about a great poet, Derek Walcott, apparently having trouble leashing his libido on university campuses, is that Ruth Padel — the good poet who won* the coveted post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford last Saturday — has had one of the most strikingly sexy personae in literature. I only [...]

On books as Bondmobiles . . . and a translation web site

When books become Bondmobiles, I expect that writers will be trans-textual getaway artists cobbling together scribbles, recorded music, spoken words, . . . moving and still pictures – some of all that newly minted, and the rest borrowed, licensed or filched.
Bondmobiles – who dat? You’ll know exactly what I mean if, like me, you hadn’t [...]

Poetry is the sister of music, not science or mathematics

Every attempt at certain arguments reminds some of us of watching a particularly grisly and unfortunate accident in progress. Just because they are mentioned in the same sentences by the great and wise does not mean that these three things go together: scholarship, science and poetry.
Don Quixote, said to be the world’s first novel, [...]

Hands off that haiku, that German painting, please

Annotations for a photograph of a painting in a newspaper article about art from the time of two Germanys have reminded me of the irritating inverse relationship between, on the one hand, the quantity of erudite commentary on art and literature — and on the other, the artistic worth of its subjects, or the degree [...]

Will Barack Obama bring back heroism?

‘There’s only one way off this planet and that’s through me.’
Will Smith as Agent J in Men in Black, 1997

President ‘has four years to save Earth’
Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. . .
The Guardian, January 18, 2009
Last week, the director Spike Lee — more or less forgotten by many of [...]

A mirage of minds in verse

There are penetrating, erudite discussions of poetry in other places on this net – but there will only ever be scruffy, dog-eared and raffish disquisitions on the subject here. That’s a guarantee.
Especially for anyone groping for aspirin in the early hours of 1 January 2009 with screaming eyeballs and a thunderous head, this site offers, [...]

A fanfare for the makers in this spot

One of the first and most generous bloggers to help start this still teetering and uneven site-in-progress – one month old today — is an artist who, I think, works in stained glass. He’s shy about mentioning his work, so I haven’t tried pinning him down on the question.
But he’s not the only ‘visual [...]