Do you prefer masculine or feminine poetry?
‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night.’
‘Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land.’
Metres and Poetry Gender
Anchoritism
Book Borrowers
Do you ever wonder where your books end up after they leave your shelves?
At one point in my career, I would leave some of the novels I’d finished in airplanes or airports. I realised that English language books ended up in other language skips so I only left them in English speaking destinations.
Historicity and Othering
If a people has a culture, it also has a present and therefore a history. While the present does not guarantee a future, recording the present helps establish the historicity of a culture. The authority that is conveyed through authentic observation tends to help preserve cultures when those presents are continuously documented. Perhaps the idea of historicity is another concept to add to grievability when we think of human rights.
Managing Expectancy
We are taught early in life that heart muscle repairs itself very slowly. You probably worried that it will wear out one day. So you determine to look after your primary pump by eating carefully and taking suitable exercise. You do what you can to keep the pipes clean and flexible so that your heart can pump some 8000 litres of blood around your body each and every day for whatever term you consider to be your life expectancy. That life expectancy in Ireland was 79.6 years for men and 83.4 for women according to the CSO in 2017.
Resentments
I was educated amidst resentments. Equality was a threat to the more equal and in Ireland, the more equal folk had a code word for denigrating the less equal. The code word was and is ‘begrudgery’. I grew up scared that begrudgery would undo society while the more-equal missed the point entirely.
Begrudgery is all about identifying resentment. It is resentment but it is also a pejorative term for the alleged resentful. And I wonder if begrudgery could itself go pandemic to become the single biggest threat after Covid-19.
2016 Bouncy Castle 
2013 three day old clasp 
2016 Third Birthday Cake 
2003 Harefield Swans 
2010 Inukchuk Tableau 
2010 Inukchuk Wave
Controlling Robots
New gatekeepers have emerged to fill the vacuum created by a media increasingly needing ‘likes’ for a codependent life-support system based on advertising revenue support. Such codependency is maladapted and objectivity is a price the media seem prepared to pay. The Bellingcat group is good place to look for accurate reporting. But how did we get to needing citizen journalists for our truths?
Third and final view, it was clearer than yesterday but not quite Summer.