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 [...]

Is blogging ultimately the friend of war or peace?

My most disappointing conclusion from running this eight month-old experiment in blogging? It’s that we human beings appear to find fighting more enjoyable than sparkling debate and friendly disagreement.
Never mind that in answering a question about what he or she would do as a live, fully clothed substitute for a statue in the One & [...]

J. P. Donleavy and Stephen Frears, two princes of poignance

A small boy tastes salt at the corners of his mouth. His legs feel shaky and his lungs heave. He’d counted on Tillie to see him through his first night in this dormitory but instead had to watch as all the stuffing was wrenched out of her by a pack of fellow-inmates — by way [...]

Blogger-hatred – Indie journalists über alles – A beauty in love with blood-and-gore

This collection of clips supports positions taken and points made in these recent entries on this blog: The rafts of the unwelcoming print journos; Stick to your Polish Joseph Conrad! –Whoa Cleopatra! ; and Ruth Padel and the presentation of intelligent pulchritude in everyday life .
LOATHING BLOGGERS
Referring to January’s baffling announcement by a respected Old [...]

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 [...]

Pixemones: friendship, love and gender in the blogosphere

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Mending Wall. Robert Frost.

Pheromones are faff-and-nonsense. That’s sex – rather than aggregation or alarm – pheromones that I’ve weighed and found wanting. The reason why it’s virtually impossible to think [...]

Do (real) writers lack a marketing gene?

O comrades, dear comrades, thank you for keeping this meeting-place alive in my absence – with special thanks to gentle @Suzan Abrams for her encouragement, and for the reappearance of two of you I’d given up for lost, @Captain Ned and @Hazlitt, with wonderfully thoughtful posts that set my head skipping.
I found those comments [...]

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, [...]

Flashing The Guardian — a books bloggers’ rebellion

[ This piece was originally published on Philip Hall’s/@ISA’s Xuitlacoche blog on the 3rd of February as an experiment in flash blogging. I’d recommend going there for the scintillating comment thread that followed. ]

Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation
When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – [...]