Finished reading Marianna Torgovnick's 'Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives': an intriguing reading of the 'dominant' tradition of Western 'primitivism' in the twentieth century. The way in which our need for 'the primitive' as a place of projection of hidden desires and hopes has obscured both the diverse realities of actual indigenous ( Read more... )

Continuing through the trilogy of Kathleen Raine’s autobiography. If the first volume was paradise and its rupture, this is full descent into imagined and actual hells ( Read more... )

Fond liberals may hope that the march of the world is generally, with frequent particular setbacks, heading for a brighter, more tolerant future; however, I doubt whether this is so. There are periods when certain forces come together that make for balance and tolerance, that allow people, generally and for a time, to be their better selves, only ( Read more... )

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/brian-viner/well-read-literature-is-being-used-as-part-of-revolutionary-therapy-to-transform-peoples-lives- ( Read more... )

Hesperion XXI are a wonderful early music group, who have been exploring, especially since 2001, the music of the Orient and the Occident, allowing them to stand alongside each other, different traditions that yet stand in the stream of music, and music that speaks to a common humanity. Music that, at times, influenced each other, as in medieval ( Read more... )

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-footprint-internetRead more... )

This is not because I have rushed out and bought a 'Kindle' (though I am mountingly tempted) or a 'Sony reader' but because slowly I am repatriating books held at my mother's whilst I was in Russia ( Read more... )

It was at the Pallant House Gallery, to which I had never been, indeed had never heard, located in a Queen Anne house in the better part of Chichester. This Georgian development of an ancient Roman town is unlike Bath or Edinburgh for being unplanned, rustic, a slow accumulation of houses, each individual, woven to place. The house has been added ( Read more... )

I am reading the poet, Kathleen Raine's first volume of autobiography, 'Farewell Happy Fields'. I first read it when I was seventeen, a borrowed library copy, it spoke of a world that I recognised: a world always on the edge of transfiguration, and a paradise revealed not in spectacle but in the revealing of the more than ordinary nature of things ( Read more... )

Something I wrote a while back introducing a volume of Rumi's poems, sadly yet to see the light of day ( Read more... )