Giving Birth to Birds [urban fantasy]
Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind: The New Adventures of Vashti Bunyan, Holiday Rep [time travel]
Last and First Zoom Meetings [cheap Olaf Stapledon knock-off]
Non-fiction
Goodbye Blackberry Way, or: How To Remember What Happened Before You Were Born [1960s music & counterculture, nostalgia as psychological category]
Ropes, Planks, Sensible Shoes: Disaster and Resilience in 'Signs' and the World at Large [the M. Night Shyamalan movie and crop circle culture]
Two Cheers for the E.U. (Oh Ian McEwan) [political piece from 2019 on why I dislike Remainers, even though I am one]
David Foster Wallace: Where I Was When I Heard [an 'in memoriam' for the American novelist, following his death in 2008]
Isaac Deutscher's Brief Lives [thoughts arising from Deutscher's landmark three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky, which Tony Blair also appreciates - no, google it]
And Soon It Will Be Morning: Appreciating ‘Cats’ as Theodor Adorno Might’ve [some remarks on the recent film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which memorably features both Taylor Swift and Judi Dench amongst, as they say, a star-studded cast]
Other Content
Most of the rest is bits and pieces, including 27 word reviews about books read and movies watched. Clickbait-timewaster stuff, in other words.
Follow these links to read about: atheism/ Bradford/ boring postcards/ Callagham, James (British Prime Minister, 1976-9)/ Camus, Albert (philosopher)/ Christmas/ cyborgs/ existentialism/ fully automated luxury communism/ Hackney/ Hull/ Rod (comedian & puppeteer)/ Jesus/ Kerensky, Alexander Fyodorovich (lawyer and liberal revolutionary) incl. his link with Hattie Jacques, star of Carry On Nurse/ kitchen sink drama/ Knott's four-figure mathematical tables/ Leeds/ Middlemarch/ the miners' strike/ Moana/ Musk, Elon (entrepreneur)/ Newman, Nanette (singer)/ Putin/ rats/ Sartre, Jean-Paul (philosopher) dream involving/ Sex Pistols, the (punk band)/ Slits, the (punk band)/ socialists as idiots (present company excepted)/ toilets/ vampires/ widths/ X-rays and zombies.
Or you could just read the most recent content.
External Links
See also right-hand sidebar (scroll to foot of page, click on 'web version' if on mobile device) for external links to (para-)politics, (counter-)culture and, not least, the song 'Captain of Your Ship' by the Reparata and the Delrons.
Email Updates
You can also sign up for email updates - notifications of new site content sent to you automatically, apparently, including notifications of any times when I feel daft enough to read fiction or poetry out in public (which I haven't for a while but 'never say never').
Click here for info about the original 'Index of Possibilities' (1974).
