The Life-Illusion

  It's been just over a month since I started my PhD and I've spent pretty much all that time enjoying my newfound, unlimited institutional access to books and articles. However, I haven't had much to write about beyond notes and thoughts on my readings. I wanted to, as a bare minimum, write at least one blog post a month to detail the research and reading I have been doing. Before applying, much of my reading around modernism had been confined to work that directly related to Powys, Read and/or the Apocalyptics. I wanted to compile a bibliography (and potentially a literature review) of materials pertaining to the historical contextualisation I will undertake in my first chapter, 'Landscapes of Interwar Modernism'. I started the month by looking through recent issues of Modernism / Modernity to get a sense of the scope of the discourse. This journal has a “recent books of interest” section which greatly helped identifying more recent work. I looked for handbooks a...

I will officially be beginning my PhD at the end of the month! Now this is a certainty, I will be dedicating a lot more time to this blog. I have been writing and working on a number of posts recently, but most of them I haven't posted because they ended reading more like diary entries than expositions or analyses. I have also been working on some “Introduction” posts for various authors I'll be looking at for my PhD (aside from JCP and HR) including: Henry Treece, Nicholas Moore, E. Graham Howe, Alex Comfort, D. S. Savage, Kathleen Raine, Paul Nash as well as groups and ideas like the New Apocalypse, the Villa Seurat, some various strains of anarchist thought and Neo-romanticism. Many of these I have started writing, but I want them to be quite comprehensive accounts which other people might refer to in future – for which I personally have a lot more research and reading to do. For now, here is my research proposal. I have an alternative version of this proposal which is a lot...

  I have been working on a small collection of poems, tentatively titled Ampersands , which I am hoping to release in the new year. This will be my first self-published collection (not including the poems in Goblin Realism , which, incidentally, I will also be publishing the second edition of which around a similar time). I have compiled around twelve short poems, potentially stretching that number to fifteen depending on the amount of poetic creativity I can conjure before its publication. I have also been experimenting with collage to accompany the words, but these are still at the level of very-basic experimentation. I do like the idea of having art alongside the poems, though, something along the same manner as William Blake's illuminated works (precursor to zines that these are?). I use a lot of ampersands in my poetry, hence the title, which is something I have borrowed from John Clare, especially his long poem The Shepherd's Calendar . As a poet of nature and place, I...

(approaching Race Hill) Another lockdown has descended and, again, I find myself longing to be outside rather than inside. Perhaps this is a strange, contrarian impulse in me, however, it seems that I'm not alone in feeling this way. With people being restricted to their immediate locale, unable to go out and work, socialise, or do any of their usual civic activities, walking has presented a welcome escape from the drudgery and stuffiness of being stuck indoors for weeks and weeks on end. I can see this as only being a good thing – roads are less busy and more pedestrian-friendly, people are immersing themselves more regularly in nature, for some it has been a source of creativity. People are re-discovering the places they live and for many this has been a meaningful experience. I have always found this to be the case when exploring my local area. For me, walking provides the closest thing to a religion – it is a time for solace and reflection, communion with nature, discovery a...

- 'The Golden Bough' (1834) by J. M. W. Turner    That we shall never map the totality of things should be cause for consolation rather than abjection. Even in the minutiae of the earth, the provincial backwater that is human civilisation, the map tends towards infinity – something is always left out. In such a seemingly finite space, such a container should eventually become full, right? And yet, with each passing second, each passing glance, things appear differently – mutating, merging, crumbling, absorbing, becoming, always, something else. How could the maps ever keep up to date? And, each perceiver of such topographical features and suchlike things that make up the map, what of the transformative power of their perceptions? What of the weight and influence of their fluctuating emotions, their prejudices, their language, what they had for breakfast that morning? Such features are mapped by the mind in a continual process of self-re-creation, filtering the chaos of the wo...

  Black Landscape (1939-40) by Graham Sutherland I've had lots of ideas for blog posts for the future. I see the topic I've chosen for my PhD as a bridge towards discussing a lot of other stuff. My intention for this blog has been, thus far, to use it primarily as an instrument in my research – when collating a large amount of information and ideas it really helps to write things down as you go, forcing yourself to think through an argument logically and consistently, finding the precise words you wish to use. I'm very much guilty of not doing this and it really takes some effort to translate thought to page, but I think it is absolutely essential practice as a researcher and a writer. This has been the main purpose of this blog so far, and I will continue to use it in this way throughout my PhD. However, I would also like to start using it to explore other ideas including stuff that's tangential to my research topic as well as my own personal thoughts and reflections....