• The Day That Went Missing is a heart-rending story as intensely personal as any tragedy and as universal as loss. It is about how we make sense of what is gone. Most of all, it is an unforgettable act of recovery for a brother.

    Jun 16,
  • The Day That Went Missing is a heart-rending story as intensely personal as any tragedy and as universal as loss. It is about how we make sense of what is gone. Most of all, it is an unforgettable act of recovery for a brother.

    Feb 22,
  • From I'm No More of an Idiot Than Anyone Else. Mozart is perfection! I don't want anything to do with either him or his.  Me, I like a bit of imperfection.  Down with Leonardo!  Down with Flaubert and all that gang!  Down with the eighteenth century - Voltaire, d'Alembert, Diderot and all those people! Me, I like the monstrosities of Rabelais, Rimbaud, or Cendrars. A Hemingway doesn't speak to me.  Even Bach bores me sometimes.  In general I like those people who are a little bit (or a lot) mad. The imbecile, no!  The idiot, yes!  There's a big distinction between the two.  To be mad is to be a poet.  But it's the imbeciles who rule the world. More

    Oct 31,
  • from I'm no more of an idiot  than anyone else I've decided to write a little book in French.  I was encouraged to do this by Miss Sylvie Crossman, who is currently writing a thesis about me and my work.  She left here a few hours ago.  We agreed that I should keep all my grammatical faults, my errors, my bad punctation and my spelling mistakes.  At least, that's what I'll do if any publisher finds this project to their taste, n'est-ce pas? (You will see, dear reader, that throughout this book I'm going to repeat 'n'est-ce pas' as often I say in English 'don't you know?'  I've no idea where this bad habit comes from.  I hate it, but

    Oct 24,
  • I know I keep promising to post up the first pages of J'suis pas plus con, or rather, I promised once and I always keep my promises. I have, however, been distracted by two issues. Computer malfunctions, which are boring. And stash. As an ambitious rugby player, I used to have the same hunger for stash as everyone else.  'Stash' was the stuff that came with selection to a team.  Stash is the extras, the perks, the over-and-aboves, and in those days, before the ease of printing onto synthetic materials, stash was expensive and therefore reserved most often for representative teams.  It was worth having. Typical items would be tracksuits, training tops, match shorts, maybe even a team-branded bag.

    Oct 17,
  • There was once a time when instructions coming out of the TV were worth trying to follow.  This was in the days before - 'Who will leave the house?  You decide.'  I remember an episode of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, in which Michael Gambon was red and flaking in a hospital bed with Potter's unfictional psoriasis.  To cheer Gambon up, even though he was only acting, another character asks him for his favourite word in the English language. Fortunately, there was a pause.  But not a very long one. "Elbow,' I thought. 'Willow,' Potter/Gambon said. I liked this.  We were in the same area.  Both words had the same lament of an ending, and the middle curve of the l.  Potter's

    Oct 03,
  • When I set up this blog (see left sidebar) I made half a promise to translate a little known book by Henry Miller called J'suis pas plus con qu'un autre. And I would probably have started before now, if I hadn't attempted to disprove Miller's title: some people are more idiot than others.  I lost my copy of the book.  It is a small book.  In the Domaine Etranger edition there are 79 pages, and it had somehow slotted in with my other slim volumes, on the poetry shelf.  This explains why it took me many months to find it.  And when I did spot it among the poetry, I immediately reclaimed it because it was prose. The curiosity of I'm

    Oct 01,