I remember once becoming absurdly excited in Princes St. Gardens in Edinburgh - that was just where I chanced to be, not the cause of the excitement - when I realised that an interesting thing happens if you number the dimensions in the reverse of the conventional order. My brother had once explained the concept … Continue reading Vanishing Point and the Golden Rule (by way of Immanuel Kant)
Month: February 2013
A true likeness?
If you are not familiar with art history, a painting titled ‘nude descending a staircase’ probably conjures an image of a naked person halfway down a stair, poised in the act of moving from one step to another; but what Marcel Duchamp gives us is this: Here, by way of contrast, are two decently-clad Irishmen, … Continue reading A true likeness?
Rage, semiotics and structuralism.
I occasionally allow myself to become exercised about things out of all proportion to their importance. Take, for instance, the signs that have for several months now been on the stretch of the A904 between the Forth Road Bridge and the works for the new additional bridge, which for some reason is called the Forth … Continue reading Rage, semiotics and structuralism.
The Shadow and the Stone: reflections on the mechanism of metaphor
I mentioned elsewhere that there is a puzzle in our use of metaphor to expand our range of thought: if we think of the unknown in terms of the known concrete, as Vita Sackville-West has it, how does that get us anywhere new? I think I have the answer: it is by a process not … Continue reading The Shadow and the Stone: reflections on the mechanism of metaphor
‘With shabby equipment, always deteriorating…’
We live in an age of infrastructure: we take for granted an underpinning layer of nigh-magical technology, much of it electronic, on which our day-to-day lives rely; occasionally we are visited by anxiety lest it should fail - as the result of a solar storm, perhaps, such as a repeat of the Carrington Event of … Continue reading ‘With shabby equipment, always deteriorating…’
An Each Uisge (The Water Horse)
written as a "Fearie Tale" for Pitlochry Festival Theatre's Winter Words Festival 2013 (where it was admirably read by Dougal Lee on 2 February (an auspicious date -James Joyce's birthday)) - Looks as if it was fished out of a canal, I say. He doesn’t like that, the man behind the counter, a big fellow … Continue reading An Each Uisge (The Water Horse)
COMPLEAT TROWZER 