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Yearly Archives: 2018

The satisfaction of seriousness: The Peterson Phenomenon.

Michael Blackburn: ‘Peterson addresses a hunger in young people for honest discussion about the old philosophical question: what is the best way to live one’s life?’

A Diatribe.

Anthony Howell: ‘Aren’t you as dismayed about the growth of our arms trade
and how it’s all been done before
or has already been made?’

The Wise Child.

Laura Potts was a BBC New Voice for 2017. Her first BBC radio drama was ‘Sweet The Mourning Dew’ and aired at Christmas 2017, and she received a commendation from The Poetry Society in 2018.

About being nearly dead.

Michael Blackburn: ‘It was while I lay in my bed that I considered the lost concept of convalescence. There was a time when I was growing up and still a young man that if you had suffered from a serious illness, undergone major surgery or were a woman who had just given birth, you were allowed weeks in which to recover, even if, medically speaking, you were back to full health. In the last thirty years that rather humane idea has been eradicated. ‘

Translation, Expanded Translation, Version, Mess.

Peter Riley: ‘The argument about expanded translation depends, since all of it is fervently dedicated to modernisation, on what version of the modern world you are moving the poem into, and in what terms the modern world is claimed as an improvement on the classical world, and what is its language. There always is a more or less proud gaining of the present, even in the heaviest complaint about it.’

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 5.

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 5: ‘In ayahagaaq, a circle of sinew or seal line held between the palms is manipulated into semi-abstract versions of activity and transformation. The string moves in coordination with the narrative and when the string collapses, the space between the hands returns to emptiness.’

Fair.

Martin Thom: ‘The Arms Fair prospers yet, and Rudd
Has curtained off a mire of blood
Which the Few, the Good, the Great
In ermine gowns may contemplate.’

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 4.

After the snowbird, comes the whale 4: ‘Everything’s alive and in migration. The lagoons beyond the bluff that parallel the beach are filling with snow goose, scoters, harlequins and bufflehead. On the marshes that surround these, phalarope and godwits, knots and whimbrels. Summer migrations draw people inland. After the whale hunt, they co-habit with the smaller species.’

A charming sense of novelty.

Christopher Landrum: ‘Machiavelli writes that legitimate governance, by either a prince or a republic, tends to accomplish new things for their people. This is because illegitimate governance is so common that its opposite always feels quite remarkable. But these new things, in order to be effective for the people, must resemble the previous things––even if their resemblance is completely contrived. For it is only the tyrant who tries to make everything appear so new that nothing resembles the old.’

The dreams and nightmares of four civilisations.

Alan Macfarlane: ‘The image of the ideal man takes us to the core of a civilisation’s aspirations and particularly its system of power. For, in the four examples I have chosen, we are looking at the rulers, the elite who preside over a civilisation and are meant, to a certain extent, to be exemplars for the other 95 percent of the population.’

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 3.

After the snowbird, comes the whale 3: ‘Two Octobers back, I watched the village clean up team collect the barrels that had contained stove oil brought each September from San Francisco. On complex contracts and transcending vastly difficult logistics, fuel from cosmopolitan producers and via multiple cooperating agencies is shipped in a four month summer series of provisions north to Alaska and at Tikigaq is lightered to a central tank that’s fueled the village since the mid-1950s. Brimful with excreta, the barrels at freeze-up are carried to the north side and rolled into the water.’

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 2.

After the snowbird comes the whale 2: ‘Just as travellers moved from the ritual intensity of winter and spring to the more agnostic freedom of summer in the interior, so in July 1909, at the behest of a new missionary, they participated in the separation from Tikigaq of the cemetery where their ancestors had lain for generations as a part of the village.

Men with women.

Michael Buckingham Gray: ‘The phone rings. He lets out a sigh and does not move. Recalls his wife saying she did not want anything drawn out. Studies the rug on the floor. Notices the elephants.’

Yappy Apparatchiks and the Lobster Prof.

Michael Blackburn:

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 1.

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 1: ‘He knows I know his name is Tulugaq, but still I call this mighty individual Sharva, who visits me these late spring evenings. A specialist in kung-fu manoeuvres reproduced from Bruce Lee movies, small hours, visio­nary conversation, Sharva’s passage through the village keeps the girls awake and some in terror as he guns his machine to the edge of my storm-shed and opens the throttle in a final bellow. Then in the after-blast, he strides through the snow, my outer door groans and his glove smacks the lintel.’