Day: October 26, 2022

Bar-tailed godwit sets world record with 13,560km continuous flight from Alaska to southern Australia

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/bar-tailed-godwit-sets-world-record-with-13560km-continuous-flight-from-alaska-to-southern-australia?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Unspeakable Conversations – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html

Harriet mcbryde Johnson I was born with muscular dystrophy but she lived much longer than was expected. This is about a conversation with the philosopher Peter Singer he believes that parents should have the right to euthanize a baby born with such conditions

I strongly recommend you to read this article which is beautifully written and very enlightening about what it is like to be disabled. And that a disabled person is just as likely to be happy as someone without disabilities. You have to admire someone who will take on Peter Singer although he is a very good person but he has his own particular reasons for believing that parents of disabled babies should be able to end the life of their child. In a society which allows abortion till quite a late date if it’s hard to know where to draw the line but birth is one place where you could draw it

Writers’ rooms: Frances Spalding

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/27/writers-rooms-frances-spalding?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

But what I gained with this house was an enormous desk. It is an artist’s working bench, with slots on one side where canvases can be stored. In Vellacott’s day it was thick with oil paint and the grime of charcoal. Without my asking, the builders, while renovating the house, one day sanded the surface of the desk, to great effect. As a biographer and art historian, I often work with images and text. Recently, while coping with the last stages of my new book – John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art – the entire desk was covered with page proofs, making it possible to check illustrations against lists, sources and textual references.

With light coming in on all sides, the room absorbs the mood outside. Grey days here remind me of Stevie Smith and her “loamish landscapes”. Despite having written her life, only now do I understand why an empty park, in the winter rain, had, for her, a “staunch and inviolate melancholy that is refreshing”. Then, too, on sunny days, this room fills with light that quivers and slowly slides round the walls, sometimes forming diamond shapes.

Eating in the rain

You sat outside despite the chilly rain

why do I often criticise your actions?

The clocks have changed we can’t do that again

I can if I put on my duvet coat

I took my plate inside, but you remained

Maybe you didn’t want me to be with you

Now the. memory brings me love and pain

That seems rather pointless now

My salty tears will not leave any stain.

I wouldn’t be too sure about that

Yet they make a valley in my brain

I don’t think your family will fish inside your head

What a stupid and mysterious claim

I want to buy a candle with a flame.

Is life important.No it is a game.

Very often I feel deep,deep shame

Look at yourself: you are just a garden gnome

I think I’ll get baptised again in Rome.

Forgot to say why don’t you just get home?

I will stay out if you will stop your moans

An interview with Wendy Cope

Photo0316.jpghttps://www.poetryarchive.org/interview/wendy-cope-interview

 

“What do you see as the role of humour in poetry?

I don’t set out to write humorous poems it’s just sometimes my sense of humour gets into them – well quite often. As a reader I suppose I laugh when I recognise something – I think laughter often is when you recognise something is true but you’d never actually allowed yourself to think that or you’d never heard it put quite so well. I think it’s possible for a poem to be funny and serious at the same time and I get very annoyed with the assumption that if a poem is funny then it can’t be saying anything important and deeply felt. Some of my poems are just playful and could accurately be described as ‘light verse’ but I think in a lot of my poems, although there’s humour in them, they are saying something that matters and something that’s deeply felt and I don’t think…I think those things can co-exist in the same poem.”

Cancel culture?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/generation-cancel-culture.html

A few weeks ago Anne Applebaum published a piece in The Atlantic titled “The New Puritans,” about people who have “lost everything” after breaking, or being accused of breaking “social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago.” Around the same time, The Economist published a cover package about the illiberal left, warning that as graduates of elite American universities have moved into the workplace, they have “brought along tactics

5 Ways to Manage Politically Induced Stress

https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/lifestyle/5-ways-to-manage-politically-induced-stress

Be open to learning about other points of view.

Imagine you’re at a gathering with relatives and someone brings up politics. What may initially cause dread can be reframed as an educational opportunity.

There are reasons why people feel the way they do about certain issues, or people, and someone may not ever know why unless they ask and are ready to listen. That interaction may also bring up a topic or person the other wants to learn more about.