Barry Graham's Blog, page 15

The headline of this Guardian piece, "The owners putting pets on vegan diets..." is telling. The animals are owned, i.e. enslaved. Is there any behaviour more anthropocentric/anthropomorphic than forcing animals to live by our ethic du jour? This denies the very existence of the animal.

But despite her enthusiasm for vegan dog food, Greek won’t advise owners to feed their cats a vegan diet. Dogs, like humans, are omnivores, meaning they can more easily adapt to a carefully planned plant-based...

I'm always baffled when I read a description of someone as "a poet and writer." There's even a U.S. magazine called Poets and Writers.

By "writers," they seem to mean writers of prose. So I wonder how they think poets produce their work. I write poems using the same tools and method I use to write prose. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Is any author, artist, book or other work of art ever described as "flinching?"

At a community meeting this evening, I talked with a person in their sixties who, despite being declared medically unfit for work by their doctor, has been deemed fit by DWP, and so has to sign on. This person lives in Wyndford, Maryhill, but the nearest job centre is in Springburn, which means two bus trips to get there, at a cost of nearly £5. For many people on benefits, that's the difference between eating or going hungry for a couple days. So, people on benefits have to spend a significa...

There's no filter on this. It's the colour of the day.

winter morning —
daylight arrives
without a story

So many novels, especially "literary" ones (i.e. stories about bourgeois people getting their feelings hurt) are about people trying to control each other, get each other to change, or at least change their behaviour. If the other person changes, the person demanding the change thinks they'll (both?) be happy, or at least happier. (This seems to be God's problem in the Old Testament.) 

What about a narrative of acceptance? Not acceptance as a climax, the protagonist having "learned something,"...

This happened near my flat.

I was fortunate to spend the last couple days of the old year, and the first of the new, quietly, with people I love, in Garelochhead (where we have a zendo in progress, and will soon hold retreats).