In the poem 'Spring Voices' which is (I suppose) about suburban timidity: The small householder now comes out warily
Afraid of the barrage of sun that shouts cheerily
Spring is massing forces, birds wink in air
Battlemented chestnuts volley green fire.
But really, however much I feel that I am sitting here gazing into the contemporary equivalent of ( Read more... )

Sara Maitland: 'Savour solitude - it is not the same as loneliness'

Admittedly, this is somebody who was a favourite novelist of mine (I probably would still enjoy her novels) and then I read A Book of Silence (2008), and see I concurred with Ursula Le Guin that there was an awful lot of privilege involved in her search for elected silence to sing ( Read more... )

Apparently solo dining is becoming A Thing? (scroll down, it's the last thing) In New York, there’s a rising trend for eating alone and some restaurants have amended their menus and tables to cater for this. The restaurant booking site OpenTable has also reported a rise in solo dining.
That thing that that is that I have been doing, lo, these many ( Read more... )

Somebody writing on a topic who doesn't claim to have discovered a hitherto neglected subject: In pursuing the Ladies in Llangollen, I was not discovering them, though no one I mentioned them to had heard of them. I was picking up a trail first laid down by their intrigued contemporaries two centuries earlier.
I don't think the Ladies were ever ( Read more... )

The book that made me a feminist.
I mean, did they not realise that they were feminists before then?
I remember coming across the term in, it was either Girls' Crystal or Schoolfriend - which were not the girls' comics we had bought for us, but had passed along by, I think, my mother's friend along the street who had a daughter a few years older ( Read more... )

I have probably seen the odd movie or two with Bill Nighy in that I enjoyed, but there's something about any role in which he is massive amounts of *EPIC MANPAIN* that makes me wish you could hurl movies at the wall as well as books (he was not the only thing wrong with the movie of I Capture the Castle, but his being entirely wrong as Mortmain was ( Read more... )

Some matters of interest spotted today and at other times:
Women: not all the same, rly:
Possibly a slight exaggeration? Susie Orbach: ‘Not all women used to have eating issues. Now everybody does’: and while I'm inclined to be all over anything that points out that the feminist wheel keeps being invented and How Soon They Forget or at least ( Read more... )

Two women artists, contemporaries, different countries, very different lives:
Barbara Hepworth. Not just 'idealism and political engagement", but a life in which the 'pram in the hall' was a reality she had to deal with: In an interview with the Observer in 1964, Hepworth was asked whether domestic demands had ever frustrated her, or got in the way ( Read more... )

Yet another article about the solitary anomie of These Here Modern Days.
With the following statistic: A survey carried out by Opinium for The Big Lunch has found that 83% of 18- to 34-year-olds have experienced the dull, quiet ache of being lonely.
(I have no position on how SRS a survey this might be).
What strikes me is that there is a minority ( Read more... )

Yesterday I found myself completely out of people-cope and in severe introvert plz 2 show me 2 nearest hermitage mode.
I have had a lovely time managing to arrange f2f meetings with DW/LJ/Wiscon etc peeps, but this was combined with a certain amount of non-voluntary socialisation in connection with my academic activities.
And while some of the ( Read more... )