Anthony Rudolf: ‘”His poems”, writes Owen Lowery, “are imbued with a sense of attachment and there is sometimes regret at the processes of modernisation and urbanisation. Bosley’s poetry frequently expresses further regret at missed opportunities, especially with regard to relationships and the complications of social class and family”.
Part 6, sec 1: Born in 1884 on the Kobuk River, Bob’s Inupiaq name was Qimiuraq. In the diseases and famines that claimed many in the lower Arctic, Qimiuraq lost his parents, his adoptive grandparents, and in 1893 the boy and his shaman aunt Avagruaq walked north to Tikigaq in search of food and shelter. Stumbling up the beach from Cape Thompson, the two migrants found shelter at Jabbertown, and within a few months they were living as a family with the whaling man from Swansea.
Tuesday, 18 September 2018
Augustus Young: ‘He requested copies [of his own books] and in less than an hour the library assistant brought three tracts black with dust. The pages were uncut. His joy fell to earth. He remembered their creation: burning the midnight oil, inspired by moments of genius, the rage for expression, the ardor of enthusiasm, oblivious to the outside world. Then the pride of publication, and afterwards the deadly silence, not a word from anyone. And now the one record of their external life confirmed the worst. Nobody had troubled to read them.’
Monday, 17 September 2018
Part 5, sec 3: ‘Oil has been described as black gold, and without displacing that metal as global currency, oil, in darker weeds (as Orsino might have phrased it in Twelfth Night) crept up to merge with her older sister. And while none of us can do without the oil towards which we feel an irreconcilable ambivalence, future centuries will presumably view oil as having acted as a temporary convenience, as obsolete as the micro-organisms from which it has evolved. And while, again, it has kept modern society functioning, it will presumably kill us.’
Sunday, 16 September 2018
Michael Blackburn: ‘It’s no wonder so many young people leave school semi-literate and semi-numerate. How can you teach literature, for example, when you have to present pupils with fragments of a book only, and are actively discouraged from getting them to read the whole book? (I have two examples of this told to me recently.) ‘
Saturday, 15 September 2018
James Gallant: ‘Spatial metaphors are unavoidable in talking about the “other side,” but it is not a place, and in it there are no distances to be crossed. The only experience of angels analogous to the human experience of space, Swedenborg said, was proximity to spirits with whom they were simpatico, and remoteness from others—either state achievable instantaneously simply by willing it. None of the inconveniences of travel.’
Tuesday, 4 September 2018
Michael Blackburn: ‘At the moment the situation is one of atomisation and fragmentation. But, disparate as all these idiocies are, if you put them together you have the left’s New Promethean society. I was going to say the New Man, a concept so beloved by both fascist and communists in the twentieth century, but these days “man” is unacceptable…’
Saturday, 1 September 2018
Part 5, section 2: ‘There is, nonetheless, a significant difference between resource utilisation by Natives and Euro-Americans. Native peoples have traditionally shared their territories with co-residential creatures. Native hunters never displaced a prey object. On the contrary, the pursuit of animals is in itself a reason for remaining in home territory. A subsistence dependent Native group will not make its capture and travel off elsewhere. They will remain in order to repeat the experience.’
Vanessa Waltz: ‘those lucky ones, the ones with special needs
crouched by the slats, lolling tongues already lusting for water
the ride would be over soonest for them…’
Michael Blackburn: ‘hat many students are uneasy with is literature that doesn’t fit into neat boxes: poems whose syntax is unusual or fiction that has no discernible genre or narrative, that sort of thing. Poetry remains something of an outlier so it is easier to get them into dealing with it. I make it plain that there is no money in it and no fame either, so some playful stretching of language and form is acceptable as long as you accept permanent obscurity as your fate. Luckily this often works and ups the conversion rate.’
Wednesday, 15 August 2018
Part 5, sec 1: ‘North America, as generally viewed by incomers, was a barely inhabited wilderness with freely available resources. It was true that the Norse, in the eleventh century, seemed to have limited their interest to timber and iron. And exceptionally, the Venetian explorer (his Anglicised name: John Cabot), made north east American landfalls merely for water. That said, the Grand Banks south of Newfoundland had by the early sixteenth century become important fishing grounds for Europeans. Basques, Portuguese, Bretons, Normans, English and Irish fishermen who rendered the Americas a prime source for what would end up as stockfish, thus competing with Norwegian cod as a European staple. ‘
Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing.
Michael Hampton: ‘Ultimately though the first half of TWSD is a vehicle that launches the second’s deep probe, a journey away from the failed industrial project that was Planet Earth, where “all is lost”, into boundless space and “towards” a Theory of Everything. This involves facing “the insoluble problem of turbulence in the dynamics of non-solid media” whilst recognising how human intelligence is co-evolutionary, embedded in the universe as a means of its progressive destiny through endless cycles of intentional destruction.’