Walking Commentary

Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

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Machine Driven

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I was rereading Geoff Dyer’s fascinating essay collection See/Saw when its subtitle stimulated a question. Which of these images would a computer like if it was ‘Looking at Photographs’? My computer is already involved in photo management, development and chapbook layout so why not have it make the selections for once? And so I ‘invited’ my desktop computer to collaborate for this edition.

The outer covers for Machine Driven
Available now from Bracket Books Ireland at outlets like FabHappy or WalkingCommentary.
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Perspective Loss

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Your experience of this chapbook starts with looking. Perhaps you’ll find more geographic detail than can be comprehended, perhaps less image resolution than you’d like.

The outer covers for Perspective Loss
Available now from Bracket Books Ireland at outlets like FabHappy or WalkingCommentary.
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‘Breakout’ On The Way

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MOMENTS

Reading Caspar Henderson’s 21st Century Bestiary, reminded me that the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub defined the ‘dimension of the present moment’ as a little less than three seconds.

The outer covers for Breakout
Available now from Bracket Books Ireland at outlets like FabHappy or WalkingCommentary.
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Random Erasure and Discovery

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Random

‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ is the string of words that I got from a spreadsheet I made this morning. I took ten sentences from a book and typed them into a spreadsheet. I devised a formula to randomly select one word from each sentence. With the resulting ten words, I used a random number generator to select the number of sequential words that I should grab from the arbitrary, nonsensical list. Four was the magic number, four contiguous words from ten. I purposely biased the experiment by choosing the sequential four that made some sense to me. ‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ was my reward for creating the word list in the first place.

Mountain walk erasure.
Post discovery.
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Ogham, Cartouche or Glyph

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‘Follow the cartouche!’ is not what you’d expect native American trackers to say but it’s one trick that The Shadow Wolves can use to find people who have crossed into Arizona from Mexico. It seems that our shoe brands in soft soils or sands are as useful as a wall for immigration control.

Black Powder Pier Ogham?
Nion over luis, ash over rowan?
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