Book Review: The Isle of Dogs by Daniel Davies

The Isle of Dogs is a strange slippery novel that plunges deep into the sexual underbelly of #Britain. The Isle of Dogs explores sexual encounters between anonymous people in the shadows and margins of a surveillance-heavy society. #Sex #Sexuality #Novel #Book #BookReview #Review #DanielDavies #IsleofDogs

Book Review: Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland

A weird and funny feel-good story of an unlikely adventure by an unlikely middle-aged adventurer who discovers love and connection in the most unfathomable places. #BookReview #Fiction #Love #Connection #Relationships

Travel: The loneliest buildings in the world

I love secluded and lonely places where there’s nobody around for miles. That’s why the Highlands and Islands hold such appeal to me and so here’s a couple of lonely places may make you feel in turns melancholy or yearning for a place where nobody can disturb you.

Book Review: The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing is a mixture of reportage, biography and creative non-fiction. Weaving together strands of history, philosophy and art, Laing explores one of the last taboos of humanity which is loneliness. This is an alarming and at times uncomfortable book to read if you have been or are now lonely. Yet loneliness is common to all of us at some point in our lives. It’s what we seek at all costs to avoid and hide under the rug.

Comforting Thought: Loneliness is a doorway to belonging

Loneliness is a place from which we pay real attention to the voices other than our own. Being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other. The shortest line of an email can heal, embolden, welcome home and enliven the most isolated identity. Lonely human beings are lonely because they are madeContinue reading “Comforting Thought: Loneliness is a doorway to belonging”

People make things to express their need (or fear) of connection

“It seems funny to think that healing or coming to terms with loneliness and loss, or with the damage accrued in scenes of closeness, the inevitable wounds that occur whenever people become entangled with one another, might take place by means of objects. It seems funny, and yet the more I thought about it theContinue reading “People make things to express their need (or fear) of connection”

Art shows us that not all scars are ugly

Art has a strange negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It create intimacys; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.

Infinite attention, infinite regard and the minor deities of the internet

“That’s the dream of replication: infinite attention, infinite regard. The machinery of the internet has made it a democratic possibility, as television never could, since the audience in their living rooms necessarily far outnumbered the people who could be squeezed into the box. Not so with the internet, where anyone with access to a computerContinue reading “Infinite attention, infinite regard and the minor deities of the internet”

Marshall Berman: All that is solid melts into air

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything that we know, everything that we are. Marshall Berman, “All that is solid melts into air’.