The Circumflex

We will try to do better….

A friend of mine, the musician Ken Slaven, took the fatalistic view, whenever prospects seemed more than usually dire, that, in the end, we’re all just a thin black line in a cliff.  I have always respected Ken’s wisdom.  It has an appropriately secular and grounded sense of eternity.   It seems, according on a [...]

Having watched three “well-intentioned” Hollywood products in the last three months -Syriana, Babel and now Blood Diamond I am struck by the queer distortion in these ‘liberal’ efforts to expose or at least explore the evil of the global condition (did I just say ‘evil’? iniquities would be a better term ).   And by exploring [...]

Whilst visiting London with my eleven year-old son to attend the Royal Society of Literature AGM and award ceremony, I took the opportunity between the zoo and the National Army Museum to visit Damien Hirst’s Beyond Belief exhibition in Mason’s Yard.  I have found in the past that my children “get” Damien Hirst and conceptual art [...]

This title, stolen I admit from the poem in by David Weevil which I first encountered in A. Alvarez’s book The New Poetry when I was in my late teens, keeps circling and recycling in my creative consciousness.  Sharks have always been a liet motif in my work and now some bright young spur has [...]

Shuttlebus – Fairmont St. Andrews hotel to St. Andrews Cathedral (ruin).  On the in-car muzak – The Corries ‘sing’ Rise and Follow Charlie with the energy and pep of two geriatric convicts filing through a giant redwood with a blunt two-man saw.  For the toorists I suspect.  Eventually the boys (now long gone from the [...]

Spent last weekend, somewhat peripatetically, around the 10th St. Andrews Poetry festival – StAnZa – billed as Scotland’s poetry festival.  Having managed to avoid St. Andrews for the first 49 years of my life I find myself visiting the town twice in a month [In the discourse no-one can hear you scream]. St. Andrew’s, particularly [...]

Noted with interest the flurry of enthusiasm for things Baudrillardian as Jean grabs the cultural headlines one last time by shuffling off his mortal coil.  Excellent summary of diverse Anglophone and Francophone responses to the same ‘objective’ events – Baudrillard’s death and Baudrillard’s work – in Click opera.  Ignoring the side altar to Baudelaire – [...]

N is for Nabokov. I started out on Invitation to a Beheading.  I found the first 2 pages interesting.  The nowhere/notime setting was a bit alarming but the immediate seizure of the reader – our protagonist already tried and sentenced – beginning at the end.  I was disposed to take an interest (at least for [...]

In a frenzy of enthusiasm I added a string of posts to this blog over the last 24 hours [ In the Discourse- No-one can hear you scream] presenting various takes on the speakers and behaviours at last weekend’s Crime Fiction Masterclass at St. Andrews University.  Now…I am still struggling with all this meta-tagging, blogbot, [...]