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Now They Are Coming For Your Books!
The second of my questions on Twitter attracted fewer responses but they were more interesting as they named specific books. Of course I’m going to have to read all those on this list that I haven’t...
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Edward Hopper Sketches!
Passing The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was irresistible, the architecture drew me in. Though I found the permanent collection uninspiring, the Hopper Drawing exhibition was inspired...
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The Quality of Solitude
Brouhaha, not the word I was seeking, but a magnificent word nevertheless, defined as a state of social agitation which, afterwards, can seem pointless or irrational. But it isn’t the word I want....
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Writing About Anxiety
Before reading this post, may I please ask that you read Helen’s superb post on Anxiety and writing, to which this is my long-winded response, which I didn’t want to clutter up Helen’s comments...
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New Bibliological Definitions Added
Bibliocarnality: the mania for continuing to acquire books despite have insufficient time left to read those you possess but haven’t yet read. Bibliophilic neuralgia: involuntary facial twitches that...
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A Musical Initiation
Only one band ever visited the small, remote East Asian country I called home for the first fourteen years of my life. Why Boney M chose to play in Brunei I’ve never been able to discover. That summer...
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Discovering the Dark Mountain Project.
Last night’s launch event for the sixth issue of Dark Mountain corroborated my initial impression of the community that surround this network of writers, musicians and artists. I’ve been immersed...
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The Profound Pleasure of Reading
One hundred and twenty-three readers visited Time’s Flow Stemmed so far today, inconsequential compared to some popular book blogs, but a normal day’s statistics for this blog. It never fails to both...
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“A literary sanctuary unlike any other”… Time’s Flow Stemmed approaches its...
“To me, it is a literary sanctuary unlike any other” an anonymous reader told me in a comment this year. How long to bask in the light of one little phrase? When in January 2009, I issued my first...
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Complete List of Books Read in 2015
For those not inclined to delve into the guts of this blog here’s a list of the 78 books I read in 2015. Pascal Quignard, Abysses. trans. Chris Turner Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows. trans. Chris...
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The Journey of Modernist Literature
What binds together the literature I read, and write about here, is that the writers engage to varying degrees with the continuing spiritual vacuum of the last hundred or so years. A crisis...
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Books That Make My Ears Burn
There’s quite a lot I want to say about Max Frisch but I’m writing something for the Spring issue of The Scofield and don’t want to foreshadow that piece too much here. There is this curious quality...
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Married Hell
Finding the need for some respite from the brilliant intensity of Anna Kavan’s fiction I turned to last year’s reissue of Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic. If Kaufmann, in his all too brief...
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The Quality of Solitude
Brouhaha, not the word I was seeking, but a magnificent word nevertheless, defined as a state of social agitation which, afterwards, can seem pointless or irrational. But it isn’t the word I want....
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“Trapped in a dialogic relationship with the world”
This excerpt is from the opening paragraph of Som Raj Gupta’s The Word Speaks to the Faustian Man. I’ve been contemplating this book for years, since reading A Review of Roberto Calasso and Som Raj...
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An Element of Impossibility
Yesterday I came across an admirable plan to read each book of the Biblioteca Adelphi. That is 653 books published to date. It is no less absurd that the notion I’m contemplating to read the Seagull...
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Marie Antoinette’s/Blair’s Fool
The headline I catch sight of momentarily across the train is “Blair was like Louis XVI”. The paragraph I read next in Jay Griffiths’s Tristimania: “The nineteenth-century scholar Paul Lacroix visited...
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America has voted in Donald Trump. – Reading in the afternoon.
Kafka’s diary entry for Sunday August 2nd 1914 was “German has declared war on Russia.– Swimming in the afternoon.” It is echoed in the reaction of Joseph K. to his arrest in The Trial, “Of course I’m...
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A Parisian Memory
In the last days of enjoying long childhood-afternoons, in that transitory place between child and adult, I went to live in Paris. While at boarding school, I was profoundly affected by Rilke’s The...
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My Old Chestnuts
Books and handmade gifts are a family tradition. My daughter, 15 years old, surprised me this morning with this drawing, with an apology for spending so much time shut up in her room whilst making this...
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