I just listened to a podcast (Heretics Woven Energy) on the Chinese martial art of bagua quan (pa kua) and feel the people on that podcast had some misunderstandings about this art and, as a result, I feel compelled to put this information on the public record. One of the speakers commented that pa kua …
In this post, I share some reflections on my high school English teacher, Douglas Webster St Aubyn Berneville-Claye. This includes revisiting a creative response of mine to revelations about him which appeared many years after his death in 1975. I left high school in 1976 and for decades, like many of my school colleagues, I …
Nutrition is an important ingredient in any writer’s toolkit. When asked why people today appear unable to develop and act according to all they learn and seem to know, philosopher, Rudolph Steiner, replied: this is a problem of nutrition. We all need the proper proteins, fats, minerals, sugars plus all the rest for our brain …
Musings is a book that just sailed into my life one day and I’m so happy it did for it’s a remarkable work with a wealth of fresh observations of life, politics, culture, religion and a whole lot more that gets you thinking about how good life on this earth could be if we were …
It is with a great sense of satisfaction (and some relief) as I put down my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V for, with that action, I have joined that club of erudite readers who have read the complete works of Thomas Pynchon at least once. I was introduced to Pynchon over ten years …
As an aspiring writer, I took to the self-publishing path in 2008 to expand my readership circle to at least my family, friends and work colleagues. I’d compiled two dozen travel newsletters into a book Tales of The Bear, The Dragon and Other Wondrous Creatures, an account of my extended travels to mostly Russia, China …
A key theme of this work is the value of strength through softness, maybe contrarian to many in these days where might is often right. But the author has studied and practised taiji exercise for forty years, and he draws on that lived experience, as he puts his case as to why we should be …
In these few hundred words, I can only offer a fleeting impression of Beezelbub’s Tales to his Grandson by G I Gurdjieff. It’s such a complex and perplexing book. This work of a thousand plus pages carries the subtitle An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man. It is here on the very first …
Canaries in the Sunshine is a crowdfunding campaign on the Pozible.com platform. Pozible is a Melbourne-based company which has been operating for ten years and which has raised over ten million dollars for a range of campaigns over that time. Canaries in the Sunshine is a text unusually situated: it occupies a liminal space between …
This is part b) of my found poetry blog. I wrote in part a) that I was introduced to found poems during my creative writing degree years. I later remembered an album of songs from the late seventies I listened to many many times: My Life in The Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and …