Monthly Archives: December 2018

A Banner Year

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2018 has been a banner year for our activity. We have developed new courses, have taken up new projects, have helped many become fluent in choosing their English.

I have made some new green, blue and yellow words for perfect and imperfect strangers.

I am bound to eat more glass and stare into more abysses as I am planning to start a new business, a Creative Writing business, that will be dependent on growth-hacking strategies.

“Starting a business is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” – Elon Musk.

The hardest questions

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What is the hardest question you would ask your Business lecturer?

If you were a French entrepreneur in 1873, what business opportunity would you have pursued, following the Paris Panic?

Art – Peregrinations of a Comet – Illustration by J.J. Grandville from Un Autre Monde, published in 1844.

To be continued.

In winter

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“In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.”
– Henry David Thoreau

In summer, when days are squeezed of every inch of magic given by the clear moon in night,
we write:

I am delighted that five of my poems were included in the Sudden Denouement Anthology Volume I. The anthology is now available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

“The cultivation of Christmas trees” from Brainpickings.org

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“There are several attitudes towards Christmas, some of which we may disregard: The social, the torpid, the patently commercial…” – T.S. Eliot

In a rare gem of trailblazing vision from Brainpickings.org:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/12/24/t-s-eliots-the-cultivation-of-christmas-trees/

Wind by Robert Okaji

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The road to brilliance is paved with staggering simplicity:

Wind by Robert Okaji

That it shudders through
and presages an untimely end,

that it transforms the night’s
body and leaves us

breathless and wanting,
petals strewn about…

https://robertokaji.com/2018/09/25/wind-3/
“Wind” first appeared in Blue Hour Magazine and is included in his first chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.

A Winter Night by Sara Teasdale

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A Winter Night by Sara Teasdale

My window-pane is starred with frost,
The world is bitter cold to-night,
The moon is cruel, and the wind
Is like a two-edged sword to smite.

God pity all the homeless ones,
The beggars pacing to and fro.
God pity all the poor to-night
Who walk the lamp-lit streets of snow.

My room is like a bit of June,
Warm and close-curtained fold on fold,
But somewhere, like a homeless child,
My heart is crying in the cold.

Art by Frances Ridley Havergal, 1885.

May magic be

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“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

Art by Alphonse Mucha.