Theriomorphous
In a sticky frenzy of creative, productive, juice I have managed to cook together a trailer of sorts for forthcoming content. It’s a hodge podge in the good old tradition of mashups between the gritty and the ethereal. It also somehow manages to celebrate recent comings and goings and comings again in my turbulent emotional […]
Ruminations about aging in a population that is more and more ideologically and culturally divided along generational lines, dating disasters and ongoing relationship struggles, plus many health issues are dogging my days and sapping my creative power most days in the past few years. I’ve wanted to return to blogging the whole time but have […]
When a public figure—tasked with the democratic, modern liberal job of holding government to account on behalf of the people—instead openly and publicly expresses the eugenic question of whom the government should let die for the sake of the economy, then it has become clear just how far the public sphere has shifted from being […]
To paraphrase one of many recently TV-interviewed doctors, ‘Coronavirus does not want to kill the host; it just wants to replicate itself and it can only do that in the body’.
Here we are, politicising a health crisis. And here we are repeating the obvious: a crisis, of any kind, is already a lens in which politics invariably appears, usually clarified, sometimes magnified, and always polarising. The global pandemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoV-2 (popularly Covid-19 or Coronavirus) is exactly such a lens.
With the ‘urban renaissance’ of the eighteenth century came new forms of sociality which included unprecedented levels of social mixing.1 One of the spaces in which these forms occurred is the pleasure garden, and this literature review collates varying perspectives on Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in the mid eighteenth century. While Vauxhall has been studied far […]
In the 14th Century a man named Francesco Petrarca, surprised at the sophistication and subtlety of the classical works he was beginning to read, came to feel that he was living in a dark age. Petrarch could not have known that six centuries later a similar feeling would wash across the academic world; a feeling […]
Cruelty and vulgarity are being normalised as acceptable forms of entertainment. I accept that entertainment has by its very nature a dark side — which I will admit to enjoying up to a certain point. We have invented collocations and terms like ‘biting wit’ and ‘mordant perspicuity’ to cover this ancient tradition of enjoying a […]
Two thousand and nineteen. The end of a decade, and for me, much else. 2019 was the year I endured anastomotic dehiscence, a post-operative complication in which a re-sectioned part of the colon comes apart and the contents of the large intestine empty into the abdominal compartment. I survived the subsequent sepsis and peritonitis, both […]
Mark Twain probably never said this. It’s another case of the Mass Memory Discrepancy Effect, or if you prefer, the Mandela Effect, or still again, cultural mnemohistory (this is my preferred term). It’s strangely ‘meta’ then that the saying describes its own social genesis as a saying. Knowledge spreads, with many loud and knowledgeable people […]
Theriomorphous