Nigeness
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Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene. His book, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death, is available on Amazon or direct from the author.
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All posts (221)
An interesting piece in The Times yesterday, about literary couples, i.e. cohabiting couples composed of two writers, each pursuing their own projects or, sometimes, collaborating. American examples include Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. From this...
Having recently read Richard Holmes's excellent account of Tennyson's early years, The Boundless Deep, I was amused to come across this picture, in J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures (a great book for browsing in). It shows Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sculpting...
Consciousness. I know I have it, but have no idea what it is or where it comes from (nor does anyone else, whatever they may say). I am equally sure that I have a soul, but again have no idea what it is or where it comes from. Are consciousness and soul the same thing, or aspects of the same thing? Is soul perhaps a...
This morning I took delivery of a new Panama hat, the old one having become an offence to the eye, and summer being in the offing. The new hat, I was delighted to note, was made by the firm of Borges & Scott – a nice literary double-act. Sadly, Jorge Luis had no connection with the hat-making dynasty, which is based...
Here, for no particular reason, is a poem by Charles Stuart Calverley which perfectly demonstrates what Pope called the art of sinking in poetry – also the perils of ending a stanza with a two-syllable line. Changed I know not why my soul is rack'd: Why I ne'er smile as was my wont: I only know that, as a fact, I...
It's not only the poets who are getting older (spoiler alert: we all are). Last night, for some reason, I was looking up Michael Caine, and discovered that he is all of 93. I've always liked Caine, who seems to be that rare thing among actors, a proper mensch, a regular guy. I wondered if he'd made an appearance on...
The poets are getting older: Kay Ryan is 80, Dana Gioia is 75, Dick Davis is 81, Billy Collins is 85 – and today Ted Kooser turns 87. He's a poet who tends to get dismissed as a Midwesterner dispensing homely wisdom, but I think this is unfair (and reminiscent of the way some have dismissed Willa Cather as a...
I'm just back from yet another visit to Worthing (see Nigeness passim). This time my reading on the train was Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which I resolved to read after enjoying The Age of Innocence so much. I'm about halfway through, and finding it even more impressive than The Age of Innocence, and every...
In the course of writing my butterfly book, I spent some time seeking out butterfly-themed poems (the best of them are Emily Dickinson's butterfly poems, and Janet Lewis's 'The Insect', which you can find here, after the snails). A name that did not come my way was Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839), author of a...
Oddly – deplorably? somethingly? – my recently acquired anthology of 101 very short poems, Short and Sweet, doesn't include anything by Walter de la Mare. This is a pity, as some of his shortest poems are among his best. I posted a couple a while back: this extraordinary portrait of grandiose paranoia –...
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