Easter Sunday, 2019. Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square. Extinction Rebellion and Brexit and Eucharist. Two hundred years on from Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” and Keats’ Odes. What if this is the site of Incarnation, here and now? parliament square easter sunday Carn, the root: meat, flesh. Incarnation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. […]
Read moreFighting the fight, right here.
“[We] never turn sentimental about something of real value — wilderness, wild animals, small towns, baseball, mountain music, our privacy — until the way we live and do business has pressed it to the edge of extinction. Then we administer affectionate last rites to everything we failed to love enough.” – Hal Crowther My boxing […]
Read morePowering up in Kings Cross.
At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]
Read more“What will survive of us is…”
Hunkered on a funeral urn, he howls into the void. Howls? Is that mouth open or closed? Is that even a mouth? In the dim gallery, walls dappled all around with trees, I circle him like John Keats at the Grecian urn. We’re in this forest together now. Dug out of the earth in Spong […]
Read moreBrexiting, teaching, and time-travelling.
“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.” – Susan Orlean, The Library Book — Is this the year we finally learn to distinguish story from myth, and lies from both of […]
Read moreLions in the arena.
Here at the hinge of old year and new, with books to promote and a new website underway, I’m wondering — again — about the relationship between writing and social media. It is what we need to communicate and self-present, to Get Ourselves Out There, no way to avoid it entirely. It does a lot […]
Read moreThe men at the wall.
Two men in tunics and hose, their backs to me, lean on the wall of a castle balcony and look down at something happening on the other side. A slim tree leafs out elegantly to the left. They’re relaxed, intent, faces totally hidden. What’s going on down there, in this picture’s entirely private world? Framed […]
Read moreThe arts, for real.
So. They want to cut the arts. Just something else for the talking heads to get worked up about. Just another aspect of someone else’s lifestyle luxuries you’re being expected to support. Except it’s not. You’re driving home at the end of the day, punching the seek button because you are tired of the commercials, […]
Read moreThe angels of Bread Loaf.
All around me in the half-light of thirty thousand feet, people abandon themselves to sleep: mouths slack as babies’, heads lolled back. A brown-skinned woman in a pale turban dozes under an airline blanket that in this light is startling persimmon-gold. A child curls across two seats, pink headphones clamped against her silky hair. My […]
Read more“Learn, little cousin:” Seeing with Signorelli.
Something about Christmas mixes emotion and memory like no other time. This is the hinge of the year, the liminal space where we could step one way or another way, where we can and can’t see what’s coming. Where we cannot avoid thinking about our relationship to time and how we perceive the world as […]
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