T.S. Eliot's legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.
In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.
I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.
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According to the always interesting Maria Popova, artist and writer Austin Kleon was invited to give a talk to students, the backbone for which was a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator:
So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist. While all 10 tips illustrated above make sense, nos. 2, 3, 4, 6 and 10 resonate with me in particular.
As we pass the 70th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death - or rather his work - has remained dear to me, one way of another, for nearly 40 years, from his poems, through the biographies I consumed at Edinburgh and subsequently, a profile on Great Lives and an excellent BBC commentary on Under Milk Wood.
During a guided "green meditation" in the summer of 2023, while focusing my attention on the beauty of a nearby plant, I was reminded of Thomas' The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
My favourite films (text credits below to Far Out magazine), include the following:
All That Jazz (to follow)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear
I was relatively late getting into Dylan properly...into my early 20s - although before that I'd appreciated individual songs, such as Lay Lady Lay, Like A Rolling Stone and others.
However, when his force finally it hit me, it hit me hard. Chimes of Freedom, To Ramona and Ballad in Plain D all affected me on a deep emotional level in different ways, while the likes of One More Cup of Coffee had a beguiling exoticism.
See also:
In 1883, Antoni Gaudí began working on the Sagrada Família in Barcelona and before his death managed to complete the crypt, apse and part of the Nativity facade. Work slowed during the 1930s and 40s, then picked up again in the 1950s and a series of architects carried on Gaudí’s work, completing new towers and facades.
Nearly two centuries after his death, the final resting place of William Blake (1757-1827) was finally marked with a gravestone. The remains of the poet-painter lie in a common grave under an anonymous patch of grass in Bunhill Fields cemetery, just outside the City of London.
Patti Smith would celebrate Blake as “the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation” — a guiding sun in the human cosmos of creativity.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment topped Open Culture's crowdsourced list of Books Intelligent People Should Read. I certainly enjoyed its narrow intensity, a stark contrast to the broad sweep of the same author's equally magisterial The Brothers Karamazov.