littleworkpage

You've reached a mid-life crisis - you've been dabbling with writing (perhaps with some success, maybe you've been published already) for years and want to go to the next level. Maybe your kids have grown and left, you've come into some money, you've a long-term illness, or you've unexpectedly become unemployed. What are the options? It's a question that prose writers more so than poets ask. Prose needs more of a full time commitment than poetry does, and some people who already earn money writing prose (journalists, technical writers, translators, etc) can earn money writing while pursuing their dream. Also I think women more so than men follow this delayed career path, their lives disrupted more by parenthood. You could take early retirement, buy a cottage in the South of France, Walden, or even move to Tahiti, but most of us have to compromise a little. A Masters Degree (MFA, MLit, MA) Creative Writing's a competitive hobby nowadays, verging on a prof...

Classic album. Find the New York Sessions bootleg for the better version though. Hurrah! Finally, part two of our look at prepositions. The first part débuted back in October, and since then we’ve accumulated quite a lot of thought on the subject over on our Facebook wall . Now, some of you might disdain the whole Facebook thing, and fair enough. But it's handy for us, because it allows us to quickly note down various little things and then discuss them together in a way that’s not really possible here. Think of our Facebook wall as a notepad, and the blog here as thick vellum, powder-blue, gilt-edged stationery. (Which is an amusing contrast when you look at the pooh-y beige clutter of the actual thing). Anyway, my hope – as ever – is that by giving you real examples pulled from (mostly) Pl>En translations, you will be able to cement your existing understanding of correct preposition usage. So without further ado about nothing, let’s get cracking:   for/to (1) Here’s a rea...

The Burmese government has released 651 prisoners, amongst whom are political prisoners detained since 1988. Although this release is to be welcomed, it has to be remembered that there are probably many more political prisoners that continue to languish in jail. Estimates based on disappearances of activists and official reports of past detentions place the number of possible detainees at between 1000 to 1500. The Association of Political Prisoners in Burma has estimated that more than 1500 prisoners have been detained for political reasons. This release of prisoners is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the Burmese government will continue down the road to democracy by releasing all of its political prisoners. Meanwhile, I read something that was said by the US President that I couldn't help but be amused about. He was referring to a telephone conversation that he had with Aung San Suu Kyi when he was in Indonesia 2 months ago: "In Indonesia, I spoke about the fl...

The rather uncomfortable fact surrounding the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking in Singapore is the fact that the presumption of trafficking operates on the basis of the possession of a specified quantity of a prohibited drug. Prosecution does not prove that you are a trafficker. Prosecution proves that you are in possession of a specified quantity of drugs. The law artificially designates you are a trafficker and you stand to be convicted if you cannot prove otherwise. Firstly, the reversal of the burden of proof (i.e. making the Defendant prove certain facts instead of the Prosecution) on its own raises questions of the right of a private citizen to a fair trial. There may be justifiable reasons for such reversals in limited situations. I am not opposed to reversals of the burden of proof on all occasions. But, the use of this evidential technique in drug trafficking cases, where the failure of the defendant to discharge his burden places him on death row, cannot be...

Hello again! By now you might all be back in the swing of things after the festive period. Personally, I took things a little easy in-between Christmas and Sylwester – recovering from the former lead into preparations for the latter, and the time in-between seemed ideal for catching up on some R&R. But of course it’s all over for now (he said, thinking of the three-day weekend that starts tomorrow here in Poland (R.I.P. Polish GDP)), and it’s time to set our sights on new goals and plans. I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, and long-term readers will know I’m great at promising exciting new articles and then totally failing to deliver them. So let’s just say that in 2012 I will be trying harder to stock the shelves here more often.   To get the ball rolling, let’s catch up on some of the action that’s occurred on our Facebook wall since late October’s post on prepositions . First of all, there was quite a lot of follow-up to that item, and I’m going to roll it all into one...

This is an old topic, one that's popular for essays. Coleridge introduced the distinction to help explain why he thought Milton was better than Cowley, and why Wordsworth was good. My interest in it has been revived by reading "The Further Reach", an article by Maitreyabandhu in Poetry Review, 101:3, Autumn 2011. He says that imagination " is a faculty that unites and transcends reason and emotion and points us toward a deeper understanding of life beyond the limitations of the rational ", p.59 " spontaneously selects sights, sounds, thoughts, images and so forth, and organises them into pleasurable formal relations that draw their deeper significance, expressing fundamental truths beyond the machinery of conceptual thought ", p.61 " unifies the contents of experience by discovering something within them, some underlying meaning or significance, inaccessible to ordinary consciousness ", p.64 " unifies the poet - better still imagination...