Plotinus surprised an artist who had offered to paint his portrait by suggesting this would be impossible, as unlike other people he existed exclusively in the spiritual realm and lacked anything as vulgar as a physical body.
‘Hen to pan’: ἓν τὸ πᾶν (‘The all is the one’), some dead’pan’ philosophical humour from Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Hen Woman’.
‘Could he have been that bad?’, asks my Dad of a review of Ackroyd’s Auden, which recommends a strong moral recoil from that poet on the grounds of, inter alia, egregious snot-eating.
A short essay of mine on Cavafy.
brandnewcarnation.substack.com/p/dont-hope-...
A painting produced in youth (c. age 10).
David Hockney has sadly died so here is one of Conor O’Callaghan’s numerous poems on swimming pools.
Delighted to learn that the title of volume ten of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time derives from a scene where the rackety littérateur Lindsay Bagshaw wants to check a quotation in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, pulls a bookshelf down on top of himself, and says 'Books do furnish a room'.
Ian Hamilton once ended a batch review by saying a slim volume ‘had a nice cover’, but 1890s poet John Gray suffered the even worse indignity of a critic praising ‘the beauty of the margins’.
Reading Scotus Eriugena’s Greek-language poetry, writes his editor, is like watching Agamemnon take communion from the Patriarch of Constantinople.
An ivory chariot drawn by leopards: on Michael Field.
brandnewcarnation.substack.com/p/an-ivory-c...