The feed of updates to Invincible Summer
The British Psychoanalytic Association invited me to address its Poetic Mind seminar on Eliot, shame and environmentalism. The lecture was recorded : Passcode 578*pL!L Abstract Many writers have examined humankind’s remarkable failure to act to avert climate breakdown and social collapse, even as their likelihood becomes ever more evident. I want to approach the question not as a failure of…
A homily for the summer solstice The Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel asked me to deliver a short homily on the summer solstice for today’s Sunday Service. Today is the longest day. The sun has climbed as high as it will climb, and for a few unhurried hours it seems almost to rest there, at the very top of the year. The light is generous. The land is at its fullest – the leaves all out, the grass…
Notes on post-secular – 3: In the face of environmental and societal collapse, T.S. Eliot’s verse is a guide to facing a future we were never raised to expect. Manu “Know anything about Kanzeon – or Kannon, as she’s sometimes known?” Manu asked me. Manu Myōshin Bazzano is my Zen teacher. He also introduced me to bhuto dancing. The dance, I’m told, is an avant garde form devised in Japan by dancers…
Britain helped found the postwar legal order — and should be judged by the standards it helped create. International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1946 My late friend and neighbour Nicholas Wood wrote War Crime Or Just War? The Iraq War 2003–2005 , making a case against former prime minister Tony Blair for war crimes. This month is the 80th anniversary of the opening of the International Military…
To Ottolenghi in Islington last night to meet neighbour Inge Cordsen before seeing the revival of John Osborne ’s Look Back in Anger at the Almeida Theatre. Islington is an easy 20-minute ride away but the Overground would let us return home together. However, just before I reached Hampstead Heath station a problem was discovered with the track to the west. Train services were delayed, were…
DRAFT --> Find your ride You can travel on almost anything Dear Nigel It is Nigel, isn’t it? Nigel comes back, but I’m not entirely sure we were introduced. So kindly be Nigel. In Vendôme you admired our bicycles, and our journey from Saint Malo. We agreed how easily and quickly at our age one loses fitness, and how long the struggle to regain it is. When we saw each other again in Blois I…
The mission of the Global Compassion Connectors Refugees crossing from Syria into Turkey — HUFFPOST The mission of the Global Compassion Connectors is to create a caring and compassionate society. That might sound like a utopia in which everybody is nice to everybody else. In reality, this is an existential struggle. We are engaged for our and our descendants’ survival. This is a struggle for our…
Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid , Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art Dear Carissa Thanks for the Accidental Gods podcast links. I listened to the Josh Davila interview . He sees some interesting applications for blockchain, but he misunderstands the importance of location and embodiment – perhaps having been raised in a digital world. There’s a hint of this skew in the introduction,…
Once again, I recognise the face but the name’s not there. Begins with an M… hmmm… hmmm… hmmm… there it is. The delay between the first letter and the rest of the name suggests my memory for faces is organised around what programmers call a hash table . The face links to an M; another link gets me (eventually) to the whole name. Delay – or failure – matching a name to a face is an aspect of…
Education is essential. Going to university, not so much. My parents encouraged me to go to university. Maybe yours do too. Why is that? When I was a school leaver, only one in ten of us went on to university. A degree pretty much guaranteed pleasant, well-paid professional or managerial work, and opened a career path of steady advancement, to finish with a comfortable pension. Tertiary education…
Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Hero of the Soviet Union Later this month I’ll join Jem Bendell and Katie Carr ’s course Leading Through Collapse . Here are some pre-course reflections. A leader helps people collaborate: identify where they want to go; find a way; and avoid or overcome obstacles. Life’s journey The idea of a “life’s journey” is an entertaining delusion, for which Kurt Vonnegut is a useful…
— I’m at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The boys have already flown home, so I have an empty cabin returning to New York in September, all found, for which I can’t get my money back. Do you want it? I did give it some thought before declining. New York. Some people I could see before flying home, but nothing to do that would warrant the travel emissions. I don’t absolutely refuse to fly these…
Masset circa 1876 , © Gordon Miller , 1985, Canadian Museum of History From A Story as Sharp as a Knife Swanton’s hope, as he has told us, was to transcribe every story, or every mythic episode, told in Haida Gwaii. But you can no more record all the stories in a mythology than you can write down all the sentences in a language. A mythology is not a fixed body of stories; it is an open set. It is…
We are at war with Modernity and must look to our defence. Jem Bendell says that he was wrong In his seminal 2018 paper “Deep Adaptation: A map for navigating climate tragedy” Prof. Jem Bendell warned that climate change was certain, societal collapse probable, and near-term human extinction possible. Five years on, he and his research team conclude that in 2018 he was mistaken about societal…
and when you pack a duffel bag and plan on the gratuitous — Marilyn Hacker I’d been dreaming about it all winter, as my body healed from the surgery last summer. I got stronger, and it seemed to me I could hear the bicycle more and more clearly. For months it had been propped against the bedroom wall, each morning, the first thing my eyes opened to. The bicycle wanted to fulfil its promise, the…
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said, And I make my bed with Capricorn and Cancer. — Dylan Thomas Over a month on the road. And what did I learn? But first the itinerary as it turned out. 28 April: Twickenham 29 April: Haslemere 3 May: ferry to Saint-Malo, France 4 May: Mortain-Bocage 5 May: Alençon 6 May: La Chapelle-du-Bois 12 May: Alençon 13 May: Vendôme 14 May: Beaugency 15 May: Gien 16…
The Invincible Summer from the ancient netbook webcam † Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais enfin q’il y avait en moi un été invincible. — Albert Camus Feels like it has been a long winter. The Invincible Summer †, propped against the bedroom wall, yearns silently for the open road. Miki will spend the next weeks in Japan. So I’m taking to the road with the drafts for my book, Post Atomic . I’ll be…
Your next lawyer might be an AI chatbot. Considering what Autocorrect already does to my communications , we have every reason to worry. Exercise your right to bare arms Baring arms, Hollywood style. And those cold, dead hands. You’re right to arm bears Can we expect armed bears to “shoot back at crime”? Your right to free peach Wee the people In economics, the so called “trickle-down effect” is…
What is a life? Two billion heartbeats. Perhaps four thousand books. And how many keystrokes? Q is an array-programming language optimised for timeseries. It is implemented as a domain-specific PL embedded in k4, a descendant of APL and Lisp. Q is fast, functional, and brutally terse. You will love it. Salient features: Implicit iteration Most q primitives have Map built into them and just iterate…
Ben Jennings in The Guardian Marina Hyde in the The Guardian yesterday: She was widely held to have embodied virtues whose absence in public life is increasingly evident. For some time, there has been a growing sense that the wheels are coming off all sorts of different machines – a feeling that we may not be watching the end of a season but the end of the whole series. And Martin Rowson today:…
Rory Stewart says he won’t return to parliamentary politics unless he can tell the truth about our future. Is this the story he wants told? In his popular podcast The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell , former MP and Conservative Party leadership candidate, Rory Stewart declared he would not return to parliamentary politics unless he were able to talk with “clarity and rigour” about the…
A reading list for the end of our world The times they are a-changing. It is hard to get a grip on where things are going. Here is a reading list for the end of our world, designed to free your head from the old normal. (Now pronounced “the past”.) I’ll expand and update the list. Send your suggestions to sjt at 5jt dot com. Categories: History, politics, economics Environment Inner work Fiction…
Isobel Dick Macdonald, née Patrick (1930-05-24 to 2022-07-21) Friday 22 July My mother, Bel Macdonald , died peacefully yesterday morning at her home in Chandlers Ford, Hampshire. She passed away exactly as she had hoped to do: in her own bed, quickly, her hand held by people who cared for her. She is survived by her daughters Joanne Taylor and Caroline Douglas , and by me, her son Stephen, who…
Waking wounded BY HAND 22 July 2022 Dr S. Pal Department of Cardiac Surgery St Bartholomew’s Hospital London EC1A 7BE Dear Dr Pal At our last meeting you gave me a form on which to appraise my experience of your service, and I promised to complete it. But I was dismayed. I needed time to examine my reaction before complying. Quality assurance is always important. Capturing feedback from patients…
Tasting the invincible summer Last summer leaving Britain seemed difficult and imprudent. We weren’t minded to compete for accommodation in Britain’s newly popular seaside resorts. Instead we took to the road for three weeks, looping through East Anglia, getting as far as Kings Lynn before turning for home. This year we were keen to continue north, though time commitments hemmed us in. Su26Jun:…
The librarian’s song This article, and the accompanying code, is on GitHub . I wonder sometimes about my partner’s father. The first time we met he launched into a lively discussion of audio recording media: magnetic tape, vinyl and Bakelite discs. I did my best to keep up. But we manage to get along. I sent him a wax cylinder for an Edison phonograph I’d found in a store in a small Texas town.…
Whose sandals are these? They are not lost. I know whose sandals they have been. What I don’t know is whose they are now. It is time I solved this problem. More than time. Maybe you can help me. First, a story my Zen sensei liked to tell. Ven. Myokyo-ni Do Not Think Good, Do Not Think Not-Good When he became emancipated the sixth patriarch received from the fifth patriarch the bowl and robe given…
I was there when it happened. Near as, anyway. In the next state. Grass: not always what it seems It was 1985 and I was living and working in Sydney. Colleagues visited from our Melbourne office and reported they could not get a cappuccino there. Milk would not froth. Strange as. Something to do with the grass. This was a lot to believe and we had to sit down. Already in 1985 Melbourne was a huge…
It must have been the fox. I had put the cycling gloves down on a garden wall, then been distracted by a telephone call that insisted on my opinion. When I returned after dusk only the right glove remained. “visibly distraught” The wall is an established path for the fox that roams our gardens – I believe he has an easement or something of that kind. He must have supposed I left the gloves there…
<)) listen Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m pleased to be here tonight. I seldom read to such a varied audience. My poetry is what it is. Graves, yes, said love, death and the changing of the seasons are the unique, the primordial subjects. I’d like to talk about that. One subjects oneself to art, not necessarily pleased to be a colander for myths. It seasons one to certain subjects. Not all.…
Poland is a country that from time to time has emerged from the mists of history, but always in a different place. — Len Deighton, Blitzkrieg Lviv (Lwów when it was in Poland) is a city in western Ukraine. Volunteers serve meals to evacuees in front of the railway station in Lviv From: ‘We have to do something’ : Lviv gears up to help those fleeing war (openDemocracy) Natalia, candy store manager…