Disconnected...

This morning, while our brain cells were still in that pleasant, slow spell of pre-caffeine Sunday morning, (so we were spending time thinking rather than getting on with blogging!) the laptop, naturally, went to sleep. We 'woke it up' again to get to work. Here is food for thought - the way we personify the inanimates of our world: the computer that hibernates, sleeps, is woken. The way we apply the natural to what is unnatural: the 'mouse' we use for the laptop; the 'blackberry' phone; 'raspberry' pie; 'apple'; and now 'crumble'.

This week Kate Bush asked her audience not to record her live performance on phones - not to erect a wall of technology between artist and that audience - in other words, not to interrupt the aesthetic relationship of art; the connection between the Self and potential beauty. Did those people listen?

This is our world, then: we dress it up in the vocabulary of the natural, while all the time we gaze ever more inwards, towards the unnatural and inanimate. We prefer the isolated thrill of online gaming to the shared lift of the spirit in the natural environment. And we can no longer experience the moment free-falling in time - we have to capture it as history even as the experience drifts past, unnoticed.

We are, then, in the process of disconnecting ourselves from the natural world; ignoring its time long rhythms such as the pull of tide and seasonal change. When did you last gaze at the moon, or the blaze of stars in a dark sky? When did you last smell clean earth and dew-soaked grass? We can call those inanimates what we like, they are nothing compared with real experience, captured in memory alone.

So we're putting the laptop to sleep now - off now to smell that dew-soaked grass and feel that late summer sun on our shoulders (which means walking the dog!) Hope your Sunday is one where you can re-connect with the Earth!

Just round the corner... the Gothic writing season!

Good afternoon bloggers, tweeters and facebookers all; it's good to be back! Holidays are done, the new term beckons and figuratively speaking, we have been shining our shoes and packing our new satchels!

Thoughttree Writing Course news... we are currently taking bookings for our November residential courses and yes, there are courses available for teachers too! Our storyteller is waiting in the wings and what's more, the Gothic season for writers is just around the corner! We love autumn and its mellow mists and all that fruitfulness stuff, but really - bring on the darkness!

Teachers: find us in the Good CPD Guide. Writers: find us at www.thoughttree.co.uk Everyone else - just find us; we are out there...

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

Last year's Man Booker Prize winner, Eleanor Catton's #The Luminaries, is a massive read. Set in New Zealand gold mining territory in the 1800s, it has all the ingredients of a Victorian Sensationalist feast: it is all at once a whodunnit and the tale of a mysterious woman, with gloom, and rain, and a seance; with plotting, theft and murder, and with rain - oh and more rain. It's a book to spend time with. Or well, maybe...

For it's curiously opaque; characters go out in the rain, and come in from the rain. It makes a promising start with Walter Moody (who most definitely comes in from the rain)... but somehow as the novel progresses, it all becomes... well, a little damp. It's as if we're reading sitting in the damned New Zealand rain; the more we attempt to become engaged with the novel, the more the ink runs and it blurs.

Don't misunderstand; it's an intricate novel, very carefully constructed, and the language and detail feels beautifully authentic. And what goes around comes around in the most Victorian, Dickensian way. But one can't help feel that when all is done and (gold) dusted, it has rather escaped, somehow. Dickens fans (we love him!) may find Catton's characters curiously difficult to pin down. It is as if we view them all from behind the most carefully placed and delicately, cleverly woven, muslin hanging. Most authentically Victorian, of course; but damned hard to see through.

Defined by gender still... after all these years.

BBC news coverage defined #Eilidh Child (silver, 400m, Commonwealth Games) as 'Scotland's pin-up girl'. The Daily Mail reported on the new female members of the Cabinet in terms of the outfits they were wearing as they took on their new roles. And this morning's Daily Mail describes #Baroness Warsi's resignation in terms of 'flounces out'.

How sad it is, that after all these years, major discourses in our society still insist on defining women by their gender rather than by their skills, or achievements. And still use cheap tricks to attempt to undermine, such as a verb like 'flounces' to denigrate; and a reductive description such as  'pin-up girl', to shrink an outstanding achievement to the level of how 'pretty' a world-class athlete is.

We say this not to become embroiled in the petty political sniping that the pseudo-tabloid Mail indulges in (well ok a tiny weeny bit!) but to call on our major discourses to strive to weed out this kind of poor representation that persists. For what kind of example is this to set for our children? As teachers, surely we have a duty to demonstrate in our classrooms and in our Selves, a society where our children have freedom of choice; where those choices, and our children's achievements, are not defined or reduced by denigration of the female.

So yes, its a return to firefighters, not firemen. And humankind, not mankind. And not dinner ladies. And not postmen...

...and if you're not happy with that, you can flounce out.

A Hundred years in History.

One hundred years ago, the First World War began. People will say all sorts of things today, to commemorate what we now see as a momentous shift in our history and to try and express what it means to them. Here's our take on it:

At the end of it all, in November 1918, David Lloyd George said: 'At eleven o'clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.'

But wasn't it Bertrand Russell who said 'we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth.'?

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

LIBYA

UKRAINE

SYRIA

SOMALI

IRAQ

AFGHANISTAN

SOUTH SUDAN

and more.

Fools, all of us.