Authors Electric

In a way it seems like every introvert's dream life. Encouraged to stay at home for the common good, only venturing out occasionally for very specific reasons, and always able to use technological failures to explain away absence from meetings or even virtual coffee breaks. Yes, actually, I am fairly relaxed in many ways about life in lockdown. In my case it doesn't even have the nightmarish 'hell is other people' aspect that it does for some others, as I tend to see quite a lot more of the three family cats than I do of the two people I live with. Because there are three of us here (although six including the cats) the situation   reminds me of   the play 'In Camera', also known as 'No Exit', by Jean-Paul Sartre, which I remember viewing   on television years ago. Its three characters are trapped together in a room, apparently for eternity. Incidentally it was a memorable production, with Harold Pinter playing one of the parts. I must say I wou...

                                      POETRY FILM: APOPTOSIS, or CELL SUICIDE Sometimes we have to lose bits of us. It’s called Apoptosis: some of our cells have to self-destruct, instead of living on and multiplying by splitting in two. They do this for our benefit. My animated text poem in the video above undergoes apoptosis to tell that story. An example; the foetal hand is a paddle – many of the cells between the finger bones kill themselves, to free our fingers to gesture, point and grasp things. Things like books. 'I don't think I lost enough cells to grasp this book.'  Writing, in any genre, is as much about taking words out as putting words in. Poetry is about losing as many words as possible without losing any meaning, so that the remaining words also contain homeopathic amounts of the ones that went, concentrated and rich like a reduced sauce. Plays and novels, e...