Based on his published letters,1940 was a busy year for T.S.Eliot. He was based in London and working at Faber and Faber as editor and director. I’ve picked out a few (mostly) bookish highlights here. In January he enjoyed an evening with Stephen Spender, and tut-tutted about his domestic tangles commenting: The irregularities of that group of young people are…
Hope I’m not jumping the gun here but the #1940Club starts next week and I’ve been gearing up and getting ready. The idea is simple. It’s a fun event with no pressure because you can choose anything from the year and read as much or as little as suits you. You can share on your blogs, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, in…
Soodle – it means means to walk in a slow or leisurely manner; to stroll, saunter. With so many alternatives to the word ‘walk’ it seems superfluous to promote more. But “soodle” just seems so right especially for this time of the year when it takes effort to move at all when the heat is high and the humidity stifling.…
In 1975 the poet Allen Ginsberg was in hospital. At a later poetry reading he explained the causes in an introduction to a poem that he had written from his hospital bed.: I got real angry and wound up sick in a hospital, for various karmic reasons, and woke up looking out the window, and started taking notes on what…
Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City. It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver on their way back from…
There’s the fog of war and there’s the poetry of fog. A recent heavy mist in my patch of the mid-Hudson valley brought fog and poetry to mind. Not the yellow fog of an old-time London peasouper particular but rather the mysterious wreathing whiteness of an English mist in a damp December countryside – the unsullied sister of smog. And…
“I was so rushed I had not time to go into the details,” – Cyril Ratcliffe. The political leaders of the independence movement in British India were unable to agree on a united post-colonial future. The result was a plan for a territorial division. The task was huge and fraught with difficulties. The consequences were traumatic. August 15th marks the…
Russian – American Romance In my land and yours they do hit the hay and sleep the whole night in a similar way. There’s the golden Moon with a double shine. It lightens your land and it lightens mine. At the same low price, that is for free, there’s the sunrise for you and the sunset for me. The wind…
We pay through the nose for subjecting of foes. Abroad we’re defeated, at home, we ‘re cheated. The ides of April are upon us and that means taxes. Just read this astoundingly relevant piece of tax outrage. It provides some consolation that “twas ever thus. A Ballad on the Taxes by Edward Ward 1. Good people: What? Will you of…
Epitaph on a Tyrant Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. by…
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; …
This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner and the girl next door. Just watch this clip from “Night Mail” – the documentary film from 1936 – and be transported to another time, another place. It’s the London, Midland, and…
What 60 schools can tell us about teaching 21st century skills. Here’s the TEDx Denver version of the talk Grant Lichtman gave at #naisac13 in Philadelphia. I take my title from an extraordinary compliment that Grant paid Poughkeepsie Day School on his blog where he wrote: “…Poughkeepsie Day School, a school that has preserved the fires of the Progressive Era, un-extinguished, for decades,…
On the last day of the year, time to show an affirming flame as another low dishonest decade ends. I’ll leave all the best and worst and top ten lists to others, but merely remark – that for all the base mendacity in the real world, life in school remains a place of joy and possibility. The words and phrases…