Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
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.
‘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.
‘I want a poem
I can grow old in.’ ¹
Poet and Professor Eavan Boland died a year ago yesterday.
We went to see The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover in The Landmark Theatre in Greenway Plaza in Houston. That was in 1989 and the Greenway Plaza was then the home of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. The cinema was more arthouse than mainstream which explains how we saw a Greenaway movie in a Greenway cinema in a place then better known for basketball. Romantic crime drama with cannibalism – just the thing for a brief respite from parenting when we parked our kids with the 5Es for a few hours (a great family with five kids whose names started with E).
People say that Wordsworth wrote in praise of the early morning in London, saying that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. That was in 1802, half a century before before the The Great Stink changed the way London used the River Thames for waste management.
The Road Not Taken I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. ROBERT FROST[Read more…] about Uncertainties, Alright Jack?