The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: writing

  • The Way of Florida

    The Way of Florida

    Russell Persson’s The Way of Florida is a compact, driving, rhythmical work – a novel, but quite unlike most. The book revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition of the sixteenth century, which saw a group of some 600 Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese explorers arrive on the coast of Florida intent on establishing preliminary colonial settlements and…

  • Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Look into the eyes of the wolf. What does it see? On 29th August 2016, shortly after the announcement of Steve Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, The New Yorker ran a cartoon by Paul Noth. It shows a large billboard standing in a field of grazing sheep. Upon it is a wolf…

  • Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    The final wolves in Ireland were wiped out some time during the eighteenth century, outliving the wolf in England by almost three hundred years. The process of their extinction, exacerbated and even engineered by the English colonisation of Ireland, bears multiple parallels with the gradual diminishment of the Irish language, itself subjected to a sustained…

  • In Bocca al Lupo: Three Mountain Walks

    In Bocca al Lupo: Three Mountain Walks

        28th February 2013         1st March 2014 I slid across the leather seats as the car swung around the obstacles on the track; pulled forwards and pushed back as the steep slopes were tackled. The headlights carved tunnels of green from the forest, the keys rattled against themselves and the…

  • Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

    Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

      Corrie nam Fiadh, Deer Corrie the gentleness ………of browsing deer Allt a’ Mhadaidh, Wolf Burn will never ………dissolve the wolf   Some place-names refer to one-off events, like pegs stuck in the ground of memory. Others reckon the catastrophe of species loss over centuries. In his pioneering study of the influence humans have on…

  • Crossing Over

    Crossing Over

    Late November in Malaga is beautiful and easy: sun, cloudless skies and highs in the upper twenties. The olive trees bask in the late late heat, the Mickey-Mouse-head-shaped cactuses bloom with geranium-pink blossoms and the tourists still soak up rays outside cafés like solar batteries. But drive two hours inland to Granada and the temperature…

  • Were

    Were

    We have been taught to believe that werewolves only change into their cursed form on full-moon nights, but perhaps – and this is speculation – on nights without full moons, the animal shape, which is the cursed form, still awakens within the werewolf, yet it cannot be seen, only sensed. Maybe werewolves spend any night…

  • Asterisk

    Asterisk

    High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…

  • A Hole at the Core

    A Hole at the Core

    I re-encounter the incised apple indirectly, in the mirror-image. Glancing across rows of burnished half-pint beer glasses, their reflections bounced back and forth on opposing glass surfaces, it is on display: residue from an earlier foray into bar preparation, when my back was turned to Carlsberg drinkers and finickerty Guinness drinkers, who verily pour the…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    Anton Newcombe, leader of the psych-rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, is one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio is just a few blocks from my apartment, north-west of Nordbahnhof, where affluent Mitte begins to meld with the predominantly Turkish, working-class neighbourhood of Wedding. I sometimes cycle there for a late…

  • Notes on Being a Father, and a Son

    Notes on Being a Father, and a Son

    It was a curious experience to read for the first time, several years ago, a biography of my late father, a well-known Australian author. It was even more so when I heard the biographer talk on the radio “about getting into other people’s lives who are not there to tell the story themselves… about staying…