'Disturbing Things' is taken from a radio programme featuring the author Edna O'Brien introducing some of her favourite literature.  It stopped me in my tracks.

 

The Duende is alluring but the harder you try to conjure it, the faster it will retreat from you.  Federico Garcia Lorca understood it profoundly, and gave this astonishing lecture in 1928.  Entitled Theory and Play of The Duende, it contains some of the most brilliant ascertions about the transcendent potential of art that I have ever read.

 

ISCAEE Kenya is my report on the International Society for Ceramic Art Education and Exchange symposium at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya in August 2008.  An abridged version was published in Ceramic Review number 236.

 

The Death of Dil (my title) is a piece taken from the novel HMS Surprise, which forms part of the extraordinary Aubrey Maturin series of twenty novels by the author Partick O'Brian.  The series as a whole is a work of astonishing narrrative and intellectual scope but this small passage is the one that has stayed with me.

 

This excerpt is taken from chapter 42 of Melville's Moby Dick, entitled

'The Whiteness of the Whale'.  White has for me always been a hue of mystery and somehow of danger.  Melville puts his finger on this deeper, more challenging quality with such precision.  Porcelain has this potential: sadly, rarely explored.

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