Author: bloggulentgreytripe

GILLIAN Clark’s letter to Carol Ann-Duffy says*: “The pre-[Sylvia] Plath generation of British students had studied old dead men and, marvellous as they were/are, they were a scold’s bridle on any idea that women too could be poets. In speaking when she did, Plath fired the wild hearts of the last silenced generation of poets…

IS Britain becoming socially and intellectually conservative? It’s a confusing picture. David Swartz suggests that in the 60s and 70s you could be on the religious right in America but be ‘anti-war, internationalist and pro-government intervention on poverty’. Such a careful and then commonly nuanced position has now been swept up into a more hard-line…

KARL Rossman lands shame-faced and exiled on the shores of the US, hotfoot from Europe and his sketchy past, to scratch a new existence in Kafka’s 1926 America. Being an intelligent mannered youth in unfamiliar territory means he feels the horror of his vulnerability but remains overawed by his streetlevel encounters. The scale of American…

“WHAT is actually morally reprehensible is, namely, the resting upon one’s possessions and the enjoyment of wealth.” In a nutshell Max Weber scribes the kernel of good capitalism. For Calvin wealth accumulation is fine, good, if not Godly, but sitting back to count it is an abomination. And our brand of capitalism was fine tuned…

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us… Eliot goes on to offer his barren images in The Waste Land, 1922. In…

IT is the library. Libraries were places of terror. Guarded by the austere and severe. The creaky floorboard was feared. Now metamorphosed into metroland ‘places to be’. Libraries have broken up their straight lines. There are little snugs, hang-outs, back-alleys, mazes, cul-de-sacs, booth-ala-record-shop. Surreal levels. Stairs and lifts to hidden floors. Is Floor 2 up…

“We can easily identify the several organs, including blood vessels… but their mutual relation inside the body can be grasped only by a sustained effort of the imagination,” offered Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was a polymath who moved between hard science and the mysteries of knowing. Some forms of knowledge are only revealed aesthetically, through sustained…

The time not to interrupt my father was late Sunday evening. He stood at his chest of drawers with his transistor, often holding it at an angle. Sometimes he brushed his thick wavy black hair with two brushes, in rather elegant sweeping motions. I suspected this was his most precious hour of the week. He didn’t…

“Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide” confessed Joseph Heller. “And, simply, acting like an arse,” adds Ian Sansom. I read Catch-22 at school. It was my first engagement with polemics and paradox; or at least the first I could understand. Shakespeare enabled me to sit on the…