On the Force

I love Star Wars. I love the story, the mythology, the premise, the characters, the cities and the aliens and enduring battle between good and evil played again and again on distant battlefields. And not just the movies, either – the entire body of work that constitutes the Star Wars storyline, from the novels to [...]

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Come Potter Finale

The Harry Potter series is nearing its grand finale, following the release of the penultimate book in the series, the Half-Blood Prince.
What tidings will Book Seven bring? What ill news, what seeds of new hope? What comic affectations and tragic setups? What absurdities, what profoundities, and what tangents will branch off from the great colossus [...]

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Winter Wish

In Winter
I yearn
For summer solitude
and autumnal ash
Of leather leaves
That saunter down for spring.
That make a laurel crown
For gentle grass and green.
In Summer
I wish
for winter withering
and blinding white
of silent snow
and lakeside jewel-laid.
And midst the quietude,
A snowy enfilade.

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On Books

Like music books are often connected to a memory, or a sensation, or an emotion one feels upon finishing; terrible regret, yearning, warmth, sadness. The best of books induce emotion, yet so do the worst. When do such emotions indicate a good book? When that emotion was identifiably the author’s intent, or of a purpose [...]

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Mr Brown

I just heard the Mr Brown podcast called “Resident Smilers”.
It’s revolting, disgusting, perverse, cynical, demeaning filth. It may have been meant as humour or irony, but the manner of its execution is needlessly vitriolic, relentlessly pessimistic, savagely ironic, and grotesque in the extreme, from the poster of the gruesome, surgically-altered grimace to the very content [...]

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Contrasts

The sun is shining and the sky is blue and the light shafts down in a dusty sky, and it’s beauty, beautiful, splendid. Here we are in Common Tests Drudge still.
Trapped in time, trapped in school life. Unlike space, there is no avoiding time, that which is inevitable. It’s like being strapped to the front [...]

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