The dash for celebrity brings with it a mass of hangers-on whose main interest is their own and using the names to bring in investment. It gets to such a degree f vanity that they think celebrities expect it and don’t even trouble themselves about using another person without seeing or dealing with the person….
Month: October 2024
I had to Smile
Someone on linked In made the comment that capitalism would never go away. Given that it is a system and all systems made by human beings fail at some point, given that it relies upon relentless growth on a finite planet and given that book-and-bust cycles are inherent to the system, H suggested people would…
What Is Innocence?
In Blueskin the Cat, a children’s book, a reviewer said she stopped reading in the first few pages because it talked about a hanging. It was not a subject she would ever allow her children to know about. The hanging is seen by a cat who is a reincarnation of the hanged man, and the…
Psychology
I met a psychology student on set yesterday and we talked and while talking I said one of the challenges of research on the human brain is to find out why we make up stories about what it is to be human. She asked me what we had made up. I immediately replied god then…
The Most Difficult Task
I decided almost as soon as she died tow rite my mother’s life story. But for it to be a literary biography, while the day-to-day inquiry may be left to future historians of English poetry, I was helped by her own writings about her childhood and life, by hundreds of letters from husbands, friends and…
The Politics Of Jobs
We are all familiar with the odd fact that people who use their brains more than their bodies tend to get paid more (lawyers over factory workers for example) which instantly should give one to understand using ones brain is seen as more significant than using one’s body. Though the anomaly is that using ones…
Lying for a Purpose
I have often wondered why people lie. I am told it is because it works, it hides embarrassment, it comes with an agenda, all of which means we gain something and that something is positive for us. I have thought about this this past ear because clicking through the news outlets I am struck continually,…
Availability
We are all sued to making ourselves available for work and the stresses and strains of being equally available to close family. Time, it appears, while not actually existing in the wider sense is very much all we have in our own sense. And it is that time, our time, that seems to me to…
The Religious Mind
I was asked once who did I look to for authority as I was an atheist. It was an interesting questions because I had never looked further than my upbringing. I had read English poets and poets in translation, I had read most of the famous writers of Europe and dissected their knowledge of the…
Memorials
Abraham Lincoln said it better than anyone at Gettysburg when he pointed out that while one mourns the dead, the best way to respect them is to fight on for what they believed and see their greatest dreams realised. “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground….