what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Alasdair Gray RIP

Alasdair Gray – writer and artist extraordinaire – embodying and celebrating both the city of Glasgow and the very soul of originality – has died, suddenly, just one day after celebrating his 85th birthday.
I had been delighted to find earlier this year a copy of his A Life in Pictures in which he weaves his autobiographical text together with his sketches, portraits, landscapes and book designs. He was indeed sometimes compared to William Blake – since so few manage to combine both visual and verbal genius.

That soon had me thinking about the different types of intelligence we have – I hadn’t realized that Howard Gardiner had suggested we actually have nine! Perhaps that’ why I woke today with a dream about how conferences reward only those who like to perform - and leave the shy and taciturn frustrated

Alasdair Gray’s approach to books and their design showed his creativity at full stretch. He designed every stage of the process, it seems, except for actually printing the book itself
Paris Review is a prestigious journal devoted to writing and, rightly, had separate features on him – first as a writer and then as a visual artist

A Gray Resource
http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/6450/1/6450_3750.PDF a thesis on the literature of Alasdair Gray

Lanark – a life in four books; A Gray (1981) His most famous novel – set alternately in contemporary Glasgow then in a dystopian one

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