Blogs

ASSIMILATE

Assimilate To take into conformity and incorporate, as one's own, absorb. Unconscious Alliance: waiting for nothing in return. We only have forever sworn to secrecy. That's hiding in plain sight; without form or void. In an artificial, lifelike bird flying in sequence. Watch as they disappear, separate only by time. Now and not yet holding their absence in the twilight. All is but a dream, and everything is so clearly real. Yet, it still...

AS TIME CONTINUES

As Time Continues The form of its manifestation. There will be light step by step. As time continues. Waiting to believe reaches back to the beginning as the end unfolds. precisely toward one destination in between two points. That has merged into a decisive decision, change reaction Steady and slow to come, easy to go. It shows in your flow. Almost there, just out of reach. Like salmon fish out of water resting in a tree, built nests surrounded...

CHANGING SEASON

CHANGING SEASON The legacy one chooses to leave behind, in the memories of faded time. Beneath the same sun from day to night, glimpses of the way beyond Vanishing, as though absence from the conscious world, memories of time spent on earth. Those dreams that were once far-off beacons of the future at a cost. Life distant flickers, until small moments flow; waiting for the magic hour to glow. Starlight in your eyes, filled with hope. When...

Lucy Mangan (2023) Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading.

Reading is what I do. That’s the explanation I often give for my views. I sometimes add, I also write. But most readers aren’t interested in that. Lucy Mangan does both. She shares her home with her Bookworm husband and child and around 10 000 books. I love books too, but I’m not allowed to love them that much. ‘Books have not isolated me, they have connected me,’ Mangan tells us. Reading is an unnatural act. Think of it in analogous terms of...

Walden (2023) film written and directed by Mick Davis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_(2023_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden Walden is a good name for a film. A good name for an American character. Walden (Emile Hirsch) is a court stenographer in a small southern town. The film was shot in Atlanta. Everyone knows each other. Everyone knows Walden. But he’s really not worth knowing. Penny dreadful. I was going to explain the plot. But if you’ve watched as many Scooby Doo cartoons as I...

Nora Okja Keller (1999) Comfort Women

Comfort Women by Nora Okja Keller began as a short story. Keller turned it into an acclaimed debut novel. Comfort Women sounds kind of nice. A pseudonym for mass rape, torture and mass murder by Japanese soldiers who invaded Korea in the same way England invaded Ireland. Japanese Imperialism, claiming to be ‘for the good of Koreans’, failed when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The roots of genocide remain because some...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by onemorething: So much wonderful writing this week. It's ALWAYS hard to choose Picks of the Week! Our Poem of the Week is celticman's brilliant and moving Memento Mori. https://www.abctales.com/story/celticman/memento-mori Our Story of the Week is one we've all been following avidly - Ewan's Don't You Step on my Blue-tacked Screws. Excellent writing. https://www.abctales.com/story/ewan/13-dont-you-step-my-blutacked-screws This week's...

Wladyslaw Szpilman (1999) The Pianist.

I don’t usually read books twice. But I was browsing and picked Władysław Szpilman’s autobiography again. He was born in 1911. He had two sisters and a brother. They were taken with his mother and father, East, for resettlement. They were killed by the Nazis. Wladyslaw survived the Warsaw ghetto. The Warsaw uprising. He was almost killed by his Russian saviours. He was one of the few Jews to survive. He needed not just one miracle but many...

Henry Marsh (2022) And Finally. A Neurosurgeon’s Reflections on Life.

Henry Marsh was once part of an elite group of around 200 neurosurgeons in England. Not only that, he’s a Sunday Times Bestseller. His focus here is letting go. With the help of an editor, this is his diary written over a year from the Covid-19 epidemic. His fears and doubts as he moved from being part of the establishment to just another NHS patient. A fearful old man with cancer of the prostrate. ‘Although I was to come to terms fairly quickly...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Huge Thanks for all the amazing writing this week. The variety and quality is staggering, and I have enjoyed reading pieces again and again, while trying to make this very difficult decision! A late and most welcome arrival is another brilliant, thought provoking instalment of Jane Hyphen's Parcel For You, which I look forward to seeing in print and on screen in the future: https://www.abctales.com/story/jane-hyphen/parcel-youpart-27 Ewan has...

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