Thursday, October 1, 2015

3BT

overcome by fatigue, i pull the truck off the motorway at cobham and park next to the newly landscaped west pond, home to a thousand bullrushes, and lay me down to sleep on the greensward, waking after thirty minutes to watch a dragonfly flying backwards and glistening

at a bus stop on putney hill, a plane tree has put up hundreds of new vertical shoots and foliage fifty feet above the traffic

and whilst i marvel, and while the bus fails to come up, a stream of confident and rarther posh looking girls emerge from the high school at random intervals, moving briskly to the bus stop and gathering around me ...  smart clothes, nice hair, new hips and thighs ... and they bring with them an invigorating and timely breath of fresh   joie de vivre

Monday, September 14, 2015

sweet thames, run softly 'til i end my song


insomniacs' reading material ...



















i've been chortling a lot in the wee small hours

i share my father's crude tastes in literature and the visual arts, hard-wired in to my DNA

he recommended schweik when i was very young

but he can't have had the pleasure of reading cecil parrot's definitive 1973 translation

of course, before you read hasek's satire/comical digression, you'll need to set aside all of your sober attitudes, based on having read robert graves and/or siegfried sassoon, edward thomas and/or wilfred owen

maybe hasek's closest connections in british literary culture might be laurence sterne and/or spike milligan

what do you think ?


2013 gyama valley mine disaster ... i've been looking at satellite images of the area made for google earth since the disaster two years ago ... there's a toolbar app that enables you to compare earlier images ... they've put in a new dam and a filter bed .... further downstream, there's a brand new village and the old one has been abandoned

1. the landslip went from left to right ...















2. the mine company have recently dammed the valley at the toe end of the landslip and it looks as if they're using a new filter bed and a tailing pond to either/and/or collect salvageable mineral assets, and/or protect the river from further pollution, which was already dreadful















3. at the bottom of the valley, the small village at the confluence seems to have been deserted, and a new settlement has appeared ... but i don't know if it's for the local people or the chinese miners















a hostile account of the disaster's causes has been published which includes interesting but unsurprising theories about the tax status of the company's chinese investors

http://www.tibetnature.net/en/assessment-report-of-the-recent-landslide-event-in-the-gyama-valley/

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/polluted-08052015161804.html