Janet Lewison

Lost in the forest…    Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twigand lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,a… Read More »Pablo Neruda: Lost in the Forest

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,in… Read More »Sonnet XVII: Pablo Neruda

Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.What might have been is an… Read More »T.S.Eliot's Burnt Norton and Winnie Verloc in Conrad's The Secret Agent: Correspondences?

Love Sonnet XI Pablo Neruda I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all dayI hunt… Read More »

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone,… Read More »Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher

Jane Austen has a truly relentless gaze. Think Cobra in a sitting room? Just been rereading the first few chapters and am dazzled by the easefulness of her scrutiny, moving… Read More »Emma's world

Phew…Good job I don’t suffer from high blood presssure as the novel is winding  me up SO MUCH!  Coitus interruptus stylistically and thematically. Everywhere I look what do I see… Read More »Atonement.

‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich…’ Who could resist this heroine? !!!

The Short Story.     Seminar Schedule.   1)    Introductory Session: Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain; Lydia Davis. 2)    Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher; The… Read More »

Prose Fiction 2.   Workshop.       Examine the passages from McEwan’s Atonement and Dickens’s Great Expectations. Pay particular attention to the ways in which a sense of ‘reality’… Read More »

Away from home.   It has been so long since she used a metaphor!   Metaphors are our means of bringing our disparate worlds together through words. Home in this… Read More »The Art of Lydia Davis

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary… Read More »Cecil Beaton's Thought for the day!

Started Atonement and it is exactingly well written: ‘tiny frets about the household’ and ‘the stews of her untidied room.’  Does deliver  the ‘tale’ in a crafted, thoughtful style…but it… Read More »Just Atoning for McEwan!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkKxGzm98AU   First time I heard this I thought it recklessly tuneful and decadently sexy! Lollopy guitar too….and he is the come back kid! Windows -down -song with strongly all… Read More »Edwyn Collins: Girl like you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d41TPgRdFPs There are advantages to hire cars; not least that the previous driver might have programmed the radio to a radically different set of stations. My fabulous few days in… Read More »Jamie Scott: When Will I see your face again?

All this talk of wolves makes me remember one of most extraordinary books of the Twentieth Century and one which had a massive emotional impact on me when I read… Read More »Dr Zhivago : Lara's Theme

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py_JN5lPCC0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y04kUI1mrVc

  Claire already read and thinks ‘genius’!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lvMQCmUVv8 How irresistible the rhythm and beat of this duo as they really show how to play the acoustic guitar! Puts the wow back into your body and soul! Resist… Read More »Rodrigo Y Gabriela 'diablo rojo' …' it's a rollercoaster'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9gBTIOxodA