Barry Graham's Blog, page 5

Near Kelvinbridge, Glasgow

Tam's Granny:a dark story of Glasgow

The Spring 2019 issue of Northwords Now, which has just been published, contains my story "Tam's Granny," a dark tale set here in Maryhill, Glasgow, in the 1970s. The magazine, which is free, is distributed throughout Scotland, and you can get a PDF by clicking on the image above.

First step on the path of Zen

When I was very young, before I had any information about Zen or Buddhism, I annoyed my first girlfriend by saying life was only varying degrees of suffering. When I heard about the First Noble (or Ennobling) Truth, I think it was a relief.

I don't know what this language is

There is nothing that's not the environment

I just finished reading The Uninhabitable Earth , a book of frightening and infuriating urgency by David Wallace-Wells... And I'm remembering a debate I had in the early 1990s with a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party in Edinburgh who told me: "We're not environmentalists. There's no such thing as the environment."

The artistic endeavours of the young gentlemen of Maryhill, Glasgow

 Nice script, and I like how the Valley Young Team tag is in the middle.

Zen: Showing up for work

When Ikkyu was abbot of Daitokuji, a layman approached him and said: "Master, you are renowned both for your wisdom and the beauty of your calligraphy. It would be a great honour for me if you would write down some words of guidance which I could hang on my wall and reflect upon."

Ikkyu took up his writing brush and, with a flourish, wrote the single word Attention on a sheet of paper.

"Attention?" the layman said.  "Could you elaborate?"

Ikkyu wrote a second time, Attention.

"That’s not much," t...

Nature

Haiku

summer weather, winter day
thoughts of oblivion
taste of tea

No-platforming a fascist is not the same as censoring their poetry

I recently wrote an essay against ad personam attacks on authors, so I was interested to read this essay in The New York Review of Books about how W.H. Auden rescued Ezra Pound's poetry from being removed from an anthology.

The headline — "Auden on No-Platforming Pound" — seems like click-bait, because the essay contains no account of any such thing. I'm all for denying fascists a platform, but not for censoring the publication of poetry, no matter who wrote it. I read books, not authors. And...