from Gravity's Rainbow / Thomas Pynchon
GR is, of course, not a poem. It's a 900-page novel. Fifty years old this year. But I was so bruised, amused, amazed by it that I wanted...
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Alistair Appleton
Dec 1, 20232 min read
London London
So I was in London last night at the Barbican. My brother, niece and myself had booked tickets to Kyrill Gerstein play Rachmaninoff's...
328 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
Nov 30, 20231 min read
Music for Well-Being
I got this interesting link from Reasons to be Cheerful (David Byrne's excellent website). How do concert spaces make themselves more...
238 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 19, 20238 min read
Can we meditate while the world is burning?
A participant in the last retreat I led asked a very good question that often arises in retreats. “It’s all very well us pondering our...
476 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 10, 20236 min read
The Machines are Not To Blame
This is the second in my series of Victory Mind blogs exploring the ways in which we can gird our minds against the incursions of Big...
386 views18 comments
Alistair Appleton
Jun 2, 20228 min read
Two reasons why “This Is Us” might be the greatest piece of art of the 21st Century
Daniel and I sit down, rather solemnly. Me with a bowl of ice cream. He with a nice glass of wine. We want this to be a good and...
505 views23 comments
Alistair Appleton
May 8, 20223 min read
Letting the Holy Spirit in my Earphones
Alistair takes time to listen to James Macmillan's dazzling 5th Symphony, Le Grand Inconnu, and feels the Holy Spirit fluttering.
248 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 21, 20222 min read
Finding Adonis
A trip to A favourite London bookshop unearths one of the great poets I’d never heard of.
162 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 1, 20222 min read
Virginia Woolf: I finally get to the Lighthouse
I must have started and re-started To the Lighthouse three or four times in my life. I’ve always thought that I should love this book....
347 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20221 min read
River
Just watched mesmerising film by Jennifer Peedom, simply entitled River. in the tradition of Koyaanasqatsi and Baraka it is mostly images...
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 18, 20222 min read
Be Here Now - at night, alone, with earphones.
Sometimes when Daniel goes away, it's a chance for me to do nothing very much. When he's here we hang out or I have to carve time to do...
271 views12 comments
Alistair Appleton
Sep 10, 20214 min read
Our Love for the City
On the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, I was thinking about how we relate to those events – both at the time...
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Alistair Appleton
May 27, 20215 min read
On reading James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
This is another blog fished out of the annals. I probably wrote it about 10 years ago. I have subsequently read Joyce’s magnum opus for...
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Alistair Appleton
May 7, 20216 min read
“Being incarnate is a business”, Iris Murdoch.
Adrian’s boyfriend was telling me about epiphytic plants which are not directly parasitic on the tree they dwell on but rather hop on…
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Alistair Appleton
Apr 23, 20214 min read
The Supersumptuous
That voice is all wrong, really. It’s not formal, it’s not ‘correct’ but it gushes and it’s unstoppable. It IS supersumptous. And that’s wh
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 5, 20218 min read
Mother Nature doesn’t care about suffering. Buddha does.
I have been really deeply inspired by the experience of leading the Dharma Days for Mindsprings. After my initial introduction to the...
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Alistair Appleton
Jan 14, 20216 min read
Language #3: Thinking and Language as the Bridge of Love
NOTE: I think in this last blog I am in some sense arguing myself OUT of a position that I have thoughtlessly held for many years. That...
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Alistair Appleton
Jan 14, 20215 min read
Language #2: The Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic
In the first part of this blog on language and thinking, I argued that the human experience of thinking is fundamentally grounded in...
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Alistair Appleton
Jan 8, 20215 min read
Language #1: Cutting your thinking mind some slack
I’ve been grappling with the issue of language/thinking for many decades, but lately have had a few clarifying insights that I’d like to...
11 views1 comment
Alistair Appleton
Apr 14, 20192 min read
United Simplicities of America
2 weeks in LA and Mendocino County, 2 hours North of San Francisco. Have been unconsciously avoiding America ever since Bush came to...
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