Oil Spills and Alien Abductions

If I were a pelican, say, caught in the gulf oil spill, I’d probably go through a nightmare of poisons, and, if I’m lucky, be pulled out of the ocean by a volunteer, after a ghastly near death experience . I’d then be sprayed, cleaned, scrubbed, treated well, examined, tagged, turned upside down, contained, [...]

Cashback

The movie may not appeal to all of you, since it has some commercial comedy strewn around, but it delivers some surprisingly firm nudges about seeing and being seen, and what it all adds up to.
The plot is simple - an recently-dumped insomniac artist, filling in as a night shift worker at a supermarket, [...]

Anniversaries: What if….?

Today marks the 70th anniversary of General Charles De Gaulle’s broadcast to France, from London, in which he urged the French people to continue resisting the Nazi invaders, even though their country had been over-run.
The French Battle fleet, hearing this, dithered. This forced the British fleet to sink the whole lot, fearing that those [...]

New Video from Beyond 50 radio

This is the slide show developed by Beyond 50 Radio from an interview with Daniel Davies. Didn’t they do a good job?

Memoir, plot, writing….

Re-reading Dickens, with his magnificently improbably plots of coincidence and far more characters than one can keep track of, reminded me of Memoir.
In Memoir we tend to think that we are at the center of things, and that our view matters. This is true - to an extent. What makes great [...]

Smiling Statues (Ancient Greece)

Those smiling statues I blogged about a couple of days ago…. What could they be smiling about?
Here’s an idea. I think that the date of their creation, about 550 BC might be important. The smiling Buddha is one of the few other smiling statuary figures that exists, and it is from around this [...]

Bridgewater State Writing Institute (Aug 1 - 7)

The Institute will be blasting off this year, looking at Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction and so much more.  Jerald Walker is the guiding light, ably assisted by Bob Atwan, with a cameo by me.
Here’s the link:
http://www.bridgew.edu/externalAffairs/NEWI%20Home.cfm
Check it out, writers!

Smiling; and Joy.

Leafing through my copy of Janson’s ‘History of Art’ I noticed, again, that in about 530 BC statues appeared in Greece, all of which were smiling enigmatically.  These statues are called kouros and kore, and are thought of as being ‘archaic’ forms.  This means that they aren’t that good by ‘our’ standards.
Later statues rarely have [...]

Writing Short - the new way forward?

I’ve noticed that many books are now rather, um, brief. I just read a delightful book of 150 pages, of which about 40 pages were pictures, or one sentence quotations taking up one page, and other such things.
The book itself was excellent - but short.  In this case it made its points well, but the [...]

For some time now….

For a number of years I’ve been wondering about creating a learning center - one in which the emphasis is on growing human beings as thoughtful, creative, expressive individuals, while at the same time nurturing critical thinking skills.
Often ‘critical thinking’ is a buzz word that implies heartless analysis and the rejection of all that is [...]