There is a power…

“There is power, which can resurrect high cities from the ashes, but no power in the world is capable of lifting the light eyelashes over the eyes of a dead child” Vasily Grossman 

The father I knew, and the man I never will 

Dog whistles to the worried well 

Dust jacket 

“See me missus. If I had brains I’d be dangerous.” The people you passed in the streets, some walking with purpose, some wandering one way, then turning and walking back the other. Others just standing.’ These Days - Lucy Caldwell                                                         

He is good at making shadows. Even in broad daylight, his presence sits behind an unseen absence. . 

Cliff chalk, Margate, Kent

the result….

The result of the stroke was that she could not look back and no longer look down. She had to feel for everything.

Pronounced dead, her house smelled of sour milk and dried mushroom.

They crumpled like empty crisp packets and within 10 seconds were gone. 

I am interested in how many flavours a feeling can have.

Parting shot

Photographs are souvenirs of an unfinished world 

Unheimlich - unhomely, unsettling, disturbing or everything that ought to remain hidden and secret becoming visible. 

He was skilled in the art of doing nothing, driven by a burning ambition to avoid success. Looking back, his life was totally fulfilled by its emptiness. 

Sixty seven lessons of life. 

Womb to tomb

Sperm to worm 

A person’s back tells me more than their front’ Saul Leiter

Oscar Wilde’s prison cell door

I like things that are moving....

“I like things that are moving. And now, where I live, I see the mighty Atlantic passing by” Laurie Anderson interviewed in New York

Warren Buffett, the veteran US investor, once said that it’s only when the tide goes out that you see who’s been swimming naked.

Design is a way to understand the world and how you can change it.

In Glasgow the rain keeps the grass green and the people pale and bronchial 

A Flaneur is a botanist of the pavement - Baudelaire 

Like a house full of children playing with matches.

“I hope to see more of you.” “There isn’t any more.”  Diane Arbus 

He was like a water beetle gliding across the waters face. If he asked how he did it, he would sink. He never asked and never sank.

Even his reds were cold as ice Francis Bacon 

“It seems like the soul... loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon.” Essais’, 1580. 

Zeppelin airship repair

Elephants on the move…

Elephants on the move.

Great singers have great ears 

Not for dancing 

‘What does your surname taste like?’

‘My father tastes like processed peas

The Plimsoll line gauges the weight load of a ship. Where is your load line? I cannot see it, though I can sense it.

In the west, we are in a golden age of ignorance fuelled by distraction and political tribalism, inevitably leading to distrust, doubt and theories of conspiracy. We need to slow down, calm down and imagine that we are wrong  

A smile so wide it was audible 

She wears her veins…

She wears her veins close to the skin, a map of oxygenated intent. 

“Like a theme park of soft decision-making and avoidance.” Comment on the functioning of Downing Street 

Dilly dally

“Take the receipt. It’s holistic” Courtney Love

“These are narrow judgements about the worth of education based on short term earnings. In a more agile and dynamic economy, we need the creative skills that enable people not to be replaced by robots.” Lesley Giles, Director of research group Work Advance

It more than likely isn’t there 

This evening there is a smell of baking bread coming through the wall. It is yeasty and buttery and strange. What is odd is that for many years it has been the odour of stale tobacco smoke and goat head curry. 

In Italian peroxide blond is bionda ossigenata which translates as oxygenated blond 

Carbuncles translate as…..

Carbuncles translate as ‘little glowing embers’

Everyone’s body has 3m sweat glands. We typically breathe 25,000 times a day

To reduce is to thicken a sauce, cut down in size, and to relocate a fractured bone.  

The transport select committee chair, Huw Merriman, put it most brutally in the Commons, saying: “This is the danger in selling perpetual sunlight and then leaving it for others to explain the arrival of moonlight.”

Klein aber fein (German) small but wonderful 

Stuzzicare (Italian) to tap repeatedly or prod with something pointed  

Tang ping (Chinese) a new social movement in China denouncing being cogs in a machine. It translates as ‘lying flat’

Off true

In reserve 

She is useless at hellos, he is even worse at goodbyes. Between them they stay together without having to say either. 

Princess May, Sentinel Island, Alaska, Aug 5th 1910

She has beautiful, perfectly formed ears.......

She has beautiful, perfectly formed ears, though looking straight on her right one lies flatter against her head than the left. She often tells me that when she was born the ear was so fine her grandfather thought it looked drawn on, and her mother used to stroke it fondly and pass baby tresses behind it. I think that unborn and undisturbed, perhaps she lay against the uterine wall listening out. All I know for sure is that in our twenty years together, at night in bed she always sleeps on her right side, head pressed hard against the pillow. 

His first big word was mutability. His last was smaller, fixed and final….

Reculer pour mieux sauter - retreat in order to advanced further later 

Soviet criminals and prisoners would sometimes get large chest and back tattoos of Stalin and Lenin, not out of respect, but to avoid having internal organs damaged during beatings by guards who would not dare touch them.

I saw the air fly......

I saw the air fly 

In 1994 an ex-wallstreeter started up his company, Cadabra. After a lawyer misheard this as ‘cadaver’, Jeff Bezos renamed the company Amazon.com

Ballard caught its essential flavour when, at the end of the Blair years, he wrote about a politics of “fleeting impressions, [and] an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions”.

guts for garters 

everything seems okay until suddenly it ain’t

Blue de travail clothes dye 

“In America, blackness was about the erasure of your identity in Africa, and the creation of your identity in opposition to whiteness. So blackness has had to be about a constant reinvention of ourselves, even in relation to ourselves” Alvaro Barrington - painter of mixed Haitian and Grenadian heritage. Educated in Hunter College in USA and Slade School of Art, UK

Japanese wives sometimes refer to their retired husbands as sodai-gomi (wet fallen leaf)

We were simply not ourselves

Adam and Eve, Orvieto cathedral, Umbria, Italy

Wanda Jackson was a sweet girl....

‘Wanda Jackson was the sweet girl with a nasty voice’. 

Hej skat in Danish translates as ‘darling’, ‘treasure’, but also ‘tax’. 

Wartime measures that became permanent: passports during the First World War to monitor movement and prevent spies; income tax to help fund the Napoleonic war

There is no word in Latin for ‘interesting’ or for ‘shrug’ in French 

“Nobody knows anything” William Goldman

Iron foot Jack 

‘……My neighbour liquored up now, starts his big car, races the engine, and heads out again filled with confidence. The radio wails, beats something out. When he has gone there are only the little ponds of silver water that shiver and can’t understand their being there.’ Marriage Raymond Carver

Whittling wise words from a cleft stick, he always made things seem better; his carpentry fitted and could bear weight.

Let me hang up........

Let me hang up in a while. 

“She was just here for us and with us,” he said. “I watched her body fly.”

He said let’s do something even if it is something wrong  

The ‘beautiful family’ with two young daughters in 802; the young married couple in 804; the single father in 801 who coached his son’s baseball team. In an instant, their apartments were gone. ‘I know where my mom is,’ Rachel Spiegel said as she stood in a cloud of smoke and dust

A good poem has no full stops

Lying notch back to the head-high sun, two fathoms out 

A place of broken clouds and flat fish  

In Italy the matches are joined together. You would like this. And they have a special name for them but I can’t say it. You would like this as well. 

Her personality is assessed on the quality of her garden: simple but optimistic

‘When you invent the ship you also invent the shipwreck’ Paul Virilio

The many dog-eared pages wait patiently for his return

Artwork. Jannis Kounellis, Fondazione Prada, Venice Biennale 2019

I met a girl……..

I met a girl who sang the blues, And I asked her for some happy news, But she just smiled and turned away. American Pie

Spencer Silver, the Inventor of Post-it Notes, is dead at 80

“I remember someone saying, ‘Joe, now you caught the car.’ I said, ‘No, I think I got the bus.’ I’m the dog that caught the bus.” Joe Biden 

“Our brains can’t see, or hear, or taste. They sit in the dark, making up a world informed by electrical stimuli from our sense organs. The act of perception is an act of prediction, of estimation. What we consciously perceive is our brain’s ‘best guess’ at what the outside world is like.” Laurence Scott, Picnic Comma Lightning

Photographers of interest: Brooke di Donato - uncanny domestic  Ben Zack - colour, style Thomas Wrede - scale, simulation 

‘A good toolbox is not the same as a toolbox full of good tools: two dozen top-quality hammers will not do the job. Instead, what you need is variety: a hammer, pliers, saw, a choice of screwdriver and more’ Tim Harford FT

Soundcloud.....

Poems from the Soundcloud

Pressure creates diamonds.........

Pressure creates diamonds but also cracks ice and bursts blood vessels.

Susan Sontag ‘where the stress falls.’

The bridge of hesitation 

If you are not at the table you are on the menu

The empathic position is not, ‘I know how you feel’, but rather, ‘I don’t know how you feel.’

Words need to be weighed carefully, like currency. Often ‘small change’ is the most valuable and helpful, when given at the right moment. 

Poetry is words touching each other 

Asking whether the monarchy should be abolished is akin to whether of not we should dispense with pandas. Hilary Mantel said: “some people find them endearing; some pity then for their precarious situation; everyone stares at them, and however airy the enclosure, it’s still a cage.”  

She was a bone setter; he made mirrors 

Before the celebrations

An inch wide…….

An inch wide and a mile deep

Hemingway’s celebrated explanation of how people go bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

The Magic Circle’s motto Indocilis Privata Loqui means being ‘not apt to disclose secrets’.

The primary aim of magic as a performing art: the creation of a juxtaposition between the conviction that something cannot happen and the observation that it just has.

Love spells cast in Surrey in the last century; a witch in a bottle from Sussex found in 1926; and a lemon made in 1891 to bring about the death of a certain Mr William Smith, a greengrocer in Naples. All are displayed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, alongside Chinese wax figures stuck with pins, shamanic crowns and Sarawak spirit wands.

Ancient Greek has no word for blue

‘Sic transit gloria mundi’ is a Latin phrase that means ‘Thus passes worldly glory’

‘Over The Rainbow’ was the most popular piece of music in 1939, and has become shorthand for that bittersweet sense of being in tough times and walking towards better ones. Yip Harburg’s heartfelt lyrics speak of hope, but so does Harold Arlen’s music – and when the tune jumps a whole octave within the elongated “some-where” it flies over the metaphorical rainbow of seven notes to land on the eighth. And it’s that leap that really feels like the essence of hope: half rooted in reality, half up in the sky. Half present, half future. Part Kansas, part Oz.    Matt Haig Guardian  

Old head lonnie

Old Head Lonnie

Misinformation thrives online because users tend to aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation and polarisation.

To counter a belief in a hoax or conspiracy, it’s helpful to ask a hesitant individual, “what information would help you accept, for example, a Covid vaccine or that a moon landing actually took place?”

Chronos, a time that is quantitive, is something that we worry about and fear, that there is not enough of it or we have squandered it. Kairos is about the opportune moment, a living time, a wander, a daydream. We are not losing time but making it. This is the important one. 

The British Invisible Mending Service in Marylebone, London - textile repairs

John Keats epitaph: ‘Here lies one whose name was written in water’

Aqua Alta.......

Aqua Alta - high tide in Venice

lèche-vitrine / licking windows (window shopping in France)

In parts of medieval Europe the official New Year beginning on 25th of March,‘Lady Day’ which was believed to be the date when the angel announced to Mary that she was carrying the child Jesus. As early as 1520, Venice adopted the 1st January as the start of the New Year and other European countries followed at intervals, though England did not catch up until 1752.

His room was like a child’s pocket, full of marbles and treasures

A father, who was not a playful man, and a mother who had an extraordinary capacity for happiness

Winter journey

His nature was really like a sheet....

“His nature was really like a sheet of paper that have been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten out.” Sodom and Gomorrah Marcel Proust 

“How are you doing?”

“In a word, fine; in two words, not fine.”

In America people don’t drive their cars, they wear them 

‘History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes’ Mark Twain 

Hard to say...

Dark hairs glove my hands and finger backs, over growing the pooling liver spots and splinter scar. 

14 characteristics of fascism by Umberto Eco 

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”

2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”

6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”

8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”

10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”

12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”