John Constable
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Observation at a high window in the University of Laputa

Created: 08 January 2013
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Clouds of white gold drift beyond a ridge of tiles edged with

seagulls.

You cannot see the ground, only the court walls, the tower and

the sky.

A throaty, sawing noise of engines competes with that of students

making notes.

  • There are two voices...
  • What a farce!
  • Possessions
  • Resignation and Futility
  • Innumerate Triolet
  • My Place in The Sun
  • Health, Climate and the Covert Hand
  • Sex as Social Glue
  • Rhythmic Utterance and Mate Choice
  • Who is to blame for the Industrial Revolution?
  • Survivals
  • Learning to Listen
  • Inward and Outward Looking
  • Sweet Time
  • Out of the Blue
  • Moral Fibre
  • Very Knowing
  • Satisfaction
  • The Serpent's Tooth
  • A. P. Rossiter (1903–1957): A Biographical Note and a Checklist of Works
  • Letter to Commander H.
  • Do as I say, not...
  • Nothing beside...
  • Stowaway
  • Eyes left, Form a Tortoise!
  • Crime Scene
  • Likeness
  • At the bottom of the garden...
  • Si vis...
  • Head On...
  • Something to Say
  • Revised Account of the Oxford English Texts to 1939
  • For Sure... or Against?
  • Green Gollums
  • Suggested Reading
  • A Backward Glance...
  • The Origin and Destination of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
  • Plate Tectonics
  • Forming a View
  • Economy
  • Redemption
  • First Sight
  • First Contact
  • Transparency
  • Reconfiguration
  • Under the Skin
  • Immusical Opinions
  • Truly, truly great
  • Negátive Capability
  • As it Is!
  • Trouvé
  • The Mirror of Nature
  • In Medias Res
  • Fish In and Out of Water
  • Mr Punch Contemplates his End
  • ..., perhaps
  • Clean
  • False Promise
  • Repurposing
  • Dragon and Dragonfly
  • Gradus
  • Anti Social
  • Beyond, and back again
  • Sunlight and Civilisation
  • Rough, tumble, and consequence
  • Set in Stone
  • Lazy Bones
  • Multum in Parvo
  • Pretty Plans
  • Transgender Castrati
  • Jackanory
  • Call of the Wild
  • Strip the Altars!
  • Why are the rich so gullible...
  • Sentiment and Significance
  • Names and Clues
  • Textually Obsolete
  • When Editions Go Wrong
  • The Oxford English Texts 1940 to the present day
  • Lovelock's Latest
  • A Note on the Oxford English Texts Series up to 1939
  • Science, Scholarship and Institutional Systems
  • Truth will Not Out
  • A Respectful Silence
  • Two Types of Poetry
  • Prayer
  • Love Actually
  • Wyndham Lewis & his Readers
  • Up & Down, and All Around
  • Unlucky Stars
  • Energy and Substance
  • Wit and Insight
  • Timor Mortis Conturbat...?
  • Larkin's Enormous Appeal
  • Words and Deeds
  • Processed Literature
  • Do as I do...
  • Silence!
  • Shakespeare & Bacon
  • Bernard Mandeville the Devil Man
  • Copy Text
  • Self and Family
  • Division of Labour
  • Five Observations
  • Bullying
  • Intelligent Design
  • Beyond Civilisation
  • On Your Own
  • Of the Propriety of Intoxicants
  • Taking Aim
  • Playing Fair
  • Characteristics
  • Pointer
  • Saving Grace
  • Art with a capital A
  • Giving
  • The pursuit of happiness and other thoughts
  • Models of Man
  • Wyndham Lewis: Strategy and Tactics
  • Types of Readers and Writers
  • Thoughts on Eagleton
  • By popular demand...
  • Does public discourse matter?
  • Upstairs, Downstairs
  • Early one morning...
  • One liners
  • Self-indulgence and the Pledge
  • A Note on De la Mare
  • Simple recipe
  • Leaders and Readers
  • Launched
  • Guilt
  • The Bright Side
  • Action Stations!
  • Savings
  • Sleep well
  • Old and Foolish
  • Who's Who
  • Lingo
  • Commandments and Resolutions
  • Blood, again
  • Evening
  • Hygiene
  • Beyond!
  • "Words no good!"
  • To Effluvia: On her laughing at the handkerchief verses
  • 01.02.87
  • Muscle
  • Sheep and Goats
  • Innoculation
  • Growth, Status, Contract
  • The Engine of History
  • The One...
  • The Dignity of State
  • All his Cry...
  • Making the Most of It
  • Definition
  • Interpreting the Signs
  • Three Ways
  • Vital Statistics
  • Population Thinking and Intellectual History
  • The hand that we have been dealt
  • When there's a War On
  • Excluded Middle
  • Them and Us...
  • A Change of Heart
  • Easy come, Easy go?
  • Reference Points
  • Rising and Surviving
  • The way I read it is this...
  • Knowledge and Decision
  • Horrible Historians
  • The Study of Literature in a time of Science
  • Tossers
  • The Great Phoenix
  • Awesome
  • Good Heavens
  • Sick
  • Historical Visions
  • The world as some see it...
  • Ha, ha, ha
  • Energy and Wealth
  • Setbacks
  • The Meaning of Majorities
  • Residual
  • Metrical Structures
  • Difficult to imagine
  • Two (or Three) Voices
  • Slow Progress
  • Two Poets
  • Looking Back
  • Consequences
  • One word
  • Diagnosis
  • Rescue!
  • This is the way...
  • There are two cultures, one is of the deep...
  • Peter Singer's Ethics
  • The Gutter
  • Composite Materials
  • Quibbling
  • Saved!
  • Self Confidence
  • False pretences
  • Why go somewhere?
  • Green Shoots
  • Silent Recyclers
  • From the Streets
  • The Kingdom of Heaven
  • Easter Message
  • Duty
  • Chameleon Man
  • The Tragedy of Gravity
  • Best Friends
  • On reflection, let's keep it as it is
  • Listening In
  • Palpable Fiction
  • Ancestral voices
  • Looking Down
  • Feeding on the Will to Live
  • Stepping back
  • Autarky
  • Close...
  • Advert and Serve
  • The drift of our lives
  • Family Around You
  • Hiding and Driving
  • The opinion of betters
  • What we get from science
  • Shared endeavour?
  • Hell!
  • Inside Outside
  • Property, property, property..
  • Mental Arithmetic
  • Experiment
  • Getting There
  • Money as an Indestructible Fluid
  • Beyond anyone's grasp
  • Forked Tongue
  • Seed Crystals
  • A Dynamic History of Verse Form in English
  • The Administration of Justice
  • What are we up to?
  • Acid
  • Professor
  • Two Items from the Duck River Anthology
  • In two minds
  • Forgive them...
  • Degrees of Freedom
  • Buying Blind
  • Getting On
  • Essay in Criticism
  • Dog, Woman, Vacuum
  • Black Thoughts
  • Valleys are Fluctuations
  • Ego and its Owned
  • Apt to Burn
  • Direction of Travel
  • Election Reflections
  • Snapshot of a Gyroscope
  • From the ashes of disaster...
  • Waking Beauty
  • Independent Means
  • Bad People
  • Sphex
  • Power to the People (in Power)
  • Going round and round
  • Under which flag?
  • Whose Debt?
  • Everything is on fire
  • Thinking for You
  • Two Errors of Liberalism
  • Two Tribes
  • One of life's little problems
  • Putting Bread Upon the Table
  • The Long and the Short of It
  • Seminar Notes
  • What Theory Leaves Behind
  • Keeping it Together
  • Cui bono?
  • Anger Management
  • Under-exercised Judgement
  • Playing Together
  • Sorry...
  • Taking the temperature...
  • The Doom of Clio
  • The Sin Against Genius
  • Wyndham Lewis
  • More or less true
  • Foresight
  • Rum Punch
  • Book Learning
  • Presenting History
  • Revolution Principles
  • The goodness of our hearts
  • Doing the Business
  • There is no such 'thing' as the State...
  • The Romance of the Firm
  • A New Age?
  • The Great Fish...
  • What's Wrong with Ella Wheeler Wilcox?
  • Short Talk
  • Give and Take
  • The incredible shrinking god
  • The Family
  • Europe, Endless
  • All together now...
  • Wyndham Lewis' Doom of Youth
  • Between the Valley and the Mountains
  • Refusing to Decorate
  • Another Man's Childhood Memory
  • Mood Music of Ourselves
  • Don't bottle it all up...
  • A Rose by Any Other Integer...
  • Why Campus Novels Make 'Us' Laugh
  • A Solicitor Executes a Will
  • The Beauty of a Total Policy
  • Neko tsuri
  • The Voice of Command
  • Weeping, and gnashing of teeth
  • Cause and Effect
  • The Company of Clio
  • Among thieves
  • Any Morning's Philosophy
  • All the Olds that's Fit to Print
  • Certainty and Scalpel
  • ... on the Sea
  • Observation at a high window in the University of Laputa
  • Cultural Viscosity
  • The Raw, the Cooked, and the Freeze-dried
  • Nightpiece
  • The Doctrine & Institution of Religion
  • Paternoster
  • Reunion
  • The Ties that Bind
  • Simple Minds
  • Juvenilia
  • Drawing and Talking
  • Don't Play On!
  • Giving yourself Away
  • Marking the Past
  • Invidious Comparisons
  • Selected Books and Articles
  • John Constable
 
 
 
 
 
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