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 [...]

We few, we happy few … bloggers vs. The Guardian (which has a lesson to learn from computer geeks)

Dear Comrades, including those of you who once blogged with me on the books site of The Guardian – whether or not we’re still on speaking terms,
…The signs point to a victory over Goliath. . . Yes, we few, we happy band of bloggers … have won, by refusing to let that newspaper shut us [...]

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, [...]

As goes blogging, so goes literature … or, … Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

Mary Roach on Bill Streever’s Cold in last Sunday’s lead review in The New York Times:

Streever himself is a scientist, both by degree and paycheck, but writing for journals hasn’t muddied his style. Phalaropes, he writes, “swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to their feet.” […] He sculptures lucid [...]

The rafts of the unwelcoming print journos

When in July of 1816 a crude raft, constructed in haste, was found floating off the coast of Mauritania in West Africa, a terrible story began to emerge, piece by grisly piece. A French frigate, the Méduse, had run aground. Of the four hundred-odd people sailing on it, a hundred and forty-seven were squeezed [...]

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 [...]

== H A P P Y == E A S T E R ==

The title of the painting by PATTY BURRETS who is or was living in a place called Edina in the state of Minnesota is actually Balcony on the Sea — Greece. It works better than bunnies or yellow chick-chicks or pastel flowers for this celebration, though.
[ This isn't too late by the standards of the [...]

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 [...]

Editors begone!

Here is everyone’s chance to show me up as a shamefully inept Googler. Mulling over a recent post on the future of editors as oral culture makes a revolutionary comeback, I realised that I knew nothing definite about the history of editing as a profession. I was thinking of the very beginning, centuries before Yeats’ [...]