Writings
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
blog
Spelled [blawg, blog] noun, verb, blogged, blog·ging.
Noun. Weblog. Example: The blogger blogged about his books.
Let us remember the days when our opinions were wasted on our peers and our poetry was destined never to see the light of day; a pencil scrawl in a diary. The days when we transported music on a cassette that held only fourteen tracks and waited for hours outside Woolies for a friend to turn up, because we had no means of sending a message asking ‘WHR R U? IM COLD N ALONE. LOL.’ Now look at us, typing our every incidental thought and contemplation onto a web log, for the world to peruse. (more…)
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Tags: author blog awards, blog, blog diary, british bloggers, completelynovel, karina evans
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Friday, May 11th, 2012
During those rather tenebrous days of the 70s, you could go to a cocktail party and discuss Genesis, Pink Floyd, and Yes, and there would be no smirk, the conversation would not linger on the superfluity of notes, the brazen ostentatious lyrics, instead the conversation would be serious, almost academic, maybe too academic, the conversation would be littered with Greek and Roman allusions, the lyrics would be compared to Byron and Keats, the musicianship would be fawned over. During wine and cheese you could bring up any subject, the intelligentsia would deconstruct and construct with the vigor of Irish road workers. I spent very little time outside, so the dark, wind, and rain hardly bothered me, the early 70s was lived not between cocktail parties, it was one long endless cocktail party, and this is how my trouble started. (more…)
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Tags: Byron, Genesis, Harry Mathews, Keats, paul kavanagh, Pink Floyd, The Professionals, The Sweeney, Yes
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Friday, April 27th, 2012
When I was ten, I got two things I dearly wanted – a BB gun and a pet hamster. I kept the hamster in a cage at the foot of my bed. After a while, I bought a girlfriend for him. But they started to copulate and so we decided to move the cage down into the basement. That’s where I had my BB gun range.
At the range I shot baseball cards, toy soldiers and newspaper pictures of famous people I didn’t like. I remember shooting Francis Gary Powers completely to shit. He was the guy in the spy plane who told everything. How the hell were we supposed to beat the Russians with finks like that? As I fired away at the few remaining shreds of his gray forehead, I thought vindictively of Benedict Arnold, righteously of Nathan Hale.
I also enjoyed shooting that traitor de Gaulle and photos of all bald people in general. The shiny domes made keen targets. (more…)
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Tags: hamster short story, hamster story, loss of a pet, Nothing Doing, pet hamster, pet short story, pets, Willie Smith
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Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
It seems like a silly question – what is poetry? But in many ways I think it is crucial, so, for World Poetry Day, let’s spend a bit of time glaring at the roots.
What is a poet? A poet is someone who practices the art of writing poetry. Is someone adept at writing poetry.
The South Korean film, Poetry, tackles the poet/poetry issue in a very interesting manner. The protagonist, an elderly lady, decides to join a poetry class. She then struggles throughout the entire film to write a poem because she can’t get her head around how to be poetic, although her life, experience and troubles are perfect poetic fodder. She makes notes of what she sees and eventually these notes turn into a poem. (more…)
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Tags: becoming a poet, Bogdan Tiganov, bt, Poetry, what is poetry, world poetry day, writing poetry
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Thursday, March 15th, 2012
The current events in Syria, where the regime of President Bashar al-Assad (based on reports from the UN) have been conducting a systematic and vicious assault against Syrian civilians and those factions trying to protest against the government, has yet again raised the specter of genocide and human rights violations. We’ve seen this movie before in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya. For myself it forces me to put myself in the shoes of the citizens of Syria and, also, in the shoes of those who are being ordered by the government to carry out attacks on their own citizens. This is a lose-lose situation for both sides until the rest of the world exerts pressure on Syria to force this to a peaceful end. But with so many already dead it is far too late for many Syrians. (more…)
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Tags: arab spring, jeanpaul ferro, President Bashar al-Assad, Syria
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
Recently it was announced that J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame would be releasing a new novel soon, not for the Young Adult crowd like her previous works, but for adults through her new publisher, Little, Brown and Company. At first glance this raises a whole host of questions for J.K. Rowling. Does she have to get an entirely new audience since her new endeavour will entail finding an entirely new demographic that is not within the tween arena of fiction? And can she make the switch from a young adult/fantasy style to a more sophisticated, commercial adult fiction style? The answer to both of these questions is an unequivocal, yes, with a caution at the end. (more…)
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Tags: Cormac McCarthy, Dan Brown, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, Jhumpa Lahiri, John Grisham, Little Brown and Company, Phillip Roth
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Friday, February 24th, 2012
I do not know why I am writing this because I have no answers. For the life of me I do not know why I am obsessed with Stefan Themerson. I do but it is mundane and I would have to stop writing after the word love.
When I first read Stefan Themerson I threw Stefan Themerson, not out of the window, not against the wall, not into the fire, we had no fire, when I was a kid we had a coal fire and my older brother thought it marvelous that objects, mainly my objects, toys and the like, melted on the hot coals and turned the flames from orange to blue, down and proclaimed loudly, shocking my wife, who at the time was my girlfriend, that for the life of me I have no idea what the hell that book was about. I had just finished Stefan Themerson’s The Mystery of the Sardine. The energy I had spent on Stefan Themerson’s The Mystery of the Sardine I could have used to climb a mountain. I have never climbed a mountain. I suffer acrophobia and also vertigo. (I stole this) “Vertigo is often used (incorrectly) to describe a fear of heights, but it is more accurately a spinning sensation that occurs when one is not actually spinning. It can be triggered by looking down from a high place, or by looking straight up at a high place or tall object, but this alone does not describe vertigo.” When I first went to Chicago I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl down Michigan Ave. I felt very silly and very sick. I had just consumed three slices of Chicago (pie) style pizza and my belly was sagging and dragging along the pavement. (more…)
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Tags: anything can and should happen in a book, on writing, paul kavanagh, pk, stefan themerson, stefan themerson the mystery of the sardine, the mystery of the sardine, themerson, writing shouldn't be easy
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Thursday, February 9th, 2012
If you’ve already bought a copy, you’ll know Honest’s latest book, Paul Kavanagh’s joyful Iceberg, isn’t only full of searing, brilliant writing, but that it also includes illustrations – an Honest first. These linocut gems (and the wonderful cover) are all by London-based artist Alex Chilvers. (more…)
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Tags: aldous eveleigh, alex chilvers, design, iceberg, paul kavanagh, the art of iceberg
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