This poem, a work in progress, is based on a recent event. While you need an imagination to write fiction, in my experience at least, real life makes for better poetry. With apologies to Billy Collins, whose poem ‘Consolation’ gave me the self-belief to think good poems can be written about everyday disappointments, just as they can about life-changing events.
“Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trusting intuition and making decisions based on it is the most important activity of the creative artist and entrepreneur. If you are facing (and fearing) a difficult life decision, ask yourself these three questions: 1) “What are the costs of inaction?” 2) “What kind of person do I want to be?” 3) “In the event of failure, could I generate an alternative positive outcome?”
(Author: Dan Andrews; image by Victor Trac, who kindly granted me permission to use his photo of a heavily stapled telephone pole as the cover to my e-book Iniquity)
The Vale of Health is a part of London’s Hampstead Heath, supposedly so named because it was spared by the Great Plague of 1665-1666. The Vale of Health is also my short story about a painting with a life of its own. It was inspired by the 1914 Henry Lamb portrait of the writer Lytton Strachey, a man who was ironically something of a stranger to good health; that is, considering he sat for Lamb in his Vale of Health studio at various times over a period of several years. Henry Lamb’s portrait of Lytton Strachey, one of the better-known members of the Bloomsbury Group, can be viewed online at the Tate Collection’s website. It’s an extraordinary painting, not least considering Strachey was supposedly in love with Lamb at the time. A brief excerpt of the story follows.
I’d decided not to re-publish an old post about Martin Amis, until I discovered a David Barrett article on Standpoint. I was defending Amis’s writing long before it became fashionable to deride him for being, as some would have it, “a really lousy writer”, “talentless” and, heaven forbid, “really annoying”. But if Barrett’s examples from Amis’s body-of-work are unconvincing, it’s incumbent on the haters to dazzle us: specimens from his superiors should be so incandescent that quotes by a talentless and lousy writer would shrivel and turn to ashes in our hands. I challenge anyone to do that by posting examples of inarguably better writing than the ones Barrett quotes. In the long silence inevitably to follow, here’s what I said about London Fields.
“The bullet point party’s electro-shock therapy hadn’t cured my ‘internet addiction’, which is what it claimed countless citizens were suffering from when its propaganda also said the net was killing print, the banks and big business, presaging bailouts and the more drastic measures we came to call the Almighty Crunch. I completed the treatment programme around the time they began prosecuting bloggers and citizen journalists for ‘media crimes’.” Ask the dissidents in Venezuela, the revolutionaries in Egypt, the rebels in Libya, or the protestors in Bahrain: the enemies of the internet are legion. Repressive governments, police states and fundamentalist regimes abhor a free internet. Iniquity is now available as an e-book on the Amazon.com (US$0.99) and Amazon UK Kindle Stores.
