On What I Do
Always after some profound shock—deep disappointment, bereavement or, indeed, joblessness—life’s little transactions take on added significance. Two days after I heard that I’d been made redundant, I got my hair cut. The hairdresser was making the usual small talk about Christmas, recent vacations, etc… when she asked me what I did. Normally I would have [...]
On Treacherous Ground
Last week, I found my myself in a predicament I never imagined I’d be in: explaining to my sons, aged 11 and 8, that I had lost my job.
I’ve worked as a print journalist for almost 17 years, the past nine-and-a-half for the same employer. Like a lot of my colleagues, I had watched the [...]
Words Are Deeds
In addition to several sequences of prose poems, British poet Peter Robinson’s collection Untitled Deeds (Salt Publishing, 2004) contains a collection of aphorisms to which the Ludwig Wittgenstein saying quoted above—Words are deeds—applies. Robinson is greatly concerned with the act of writing, its motivations and proper execution. Some of his aphorisms can be read as [...]
On New Enthusiasms
New year, new enthusiasms, the first being the quarterly journal of wit and wisdom The Enthusiast, which takes as its motto an aphorism by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
The Enthusiast is a great read, enlightening, entertaining and infused with the humor and perspicacity of its founder, the British author Ian Sansom. [...]
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