I’m still a wee bit of an American Stroke Bloke. In kind of the same way Martha Stewart is Scottish by sex.
And yes, it’s still weird when the cheese triangles in Subway are “cheddar” and not “American”. And I still say and think “toMAYto”. But on the other hand, I was doing a crossword the other day, and got the following clue….
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Continue reading Jacob’s Ladder
In autumn of 2012, they pulled the siphons from my skull, and the spigot from my spine. I slowly started making memories again, but I was rubbish at answering the questions doctors ask patients with brain injuries.
“Who’s the President?” they would ask.
Continue reading Through A Glass, Darkly
My recent trip to Brooklyn wasn’t all the insides of courtrooms and the outsides of container terminals, oh no.
One day, Mrs Friendoftheblogpaul — who knows a good walk when she sees one — suggested we take a wander through Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Continue reading The Case Of The Peculiar Details
The story of my stroke is the story of the characters in my life: nurses and doctors; friends and lovers; and everyone who has wandered through the past twenty months….
In the wake of Jeremy Paxman’s recent call for a poetic inquisition — a call for quantification and measurement and exclusion from a white, male member of the establishment — I was surprised by his premise that the citizens of the British Isles are increasingly rejecting poetry. Continue reading Stag’s Leap
As subscribers to the apoplectic.me Tiny Letter are aware, I left Scotland the day after the European Parliament elections for a trip to New York City.
Well, not exactly. Just as famous Americans like Justin Bieber, Pamela Anderson, Jim Carrey, Alanis Morissette, Neil Young, and Michael J. Fox aren’t American at all, a number of things dubbed as being from New York are from a different State altogether. The New York Giants, the New York Jets and the New York Red Bulls (née Metrostars) all play in New Jersey. Continue reading Secaucus
A couple of weeks ago, I attended one of the monthly workshops run by the Scottish Poetry Library. The previous month we had spoken about how effective the evocation of tastes and smells can be in poetry, so for this session our leader had brought along a thin metal case full of small sample vials of Penhaligon’s scents. We were each invited to take a vial, smell the scent, and let it guide our production.
![[Aside — it doesn't work]](http://www.apoplectic.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Scent-Library.jpg)
Before I begin, I generally have my first sentence more or less ready.
And I always know what the last sentence, or the last verse, should be.
Then I go on discovering the thing as I am working on it.
Continue reading A Meaty Oeuvre
Next week, we present a very special apoplectic.me. This would be a great time to sign up for alerts on the right-hand side of the page — or even better, more whimsical and personal extra content in the Tiny Letter distribution.
1. Caroline Alice Elgar
If you like poetry, or this post picqued your interest in poesy, the website of the Scottish Poetry Library is a great resource for readers and writers. Each week, their @ByLeavesWeLive twitter feed points me to their blog sharing poetry-related items coming up on TV and Radio. Continue reading Bigger Than The Beatles
I I had a thought recently, that one of the benefits of blogging this blog is working in a space that I encourage friends and family to visit and is open the blogosphere forces a certain honesty on the blogger.
Continue reading Return To Sender
All Asthmatics, being angry or sad,
do fall into Fits oftener than when
they are cheerful
Sir John Floyer, A Treatise of the Asthma — 1698
Proust cropped up in the blog a while ago. I’ve never read any of his stuff, I have to admit. But I have discovered that he suffered his first asthma attack at the age of nine, and thereafter was considered a sickly child. The pneumonia that finally killed him followed asthma brought on by the young Samuel Beckett’s cigar-smoking. I’ve seen him referred to as “the asthma poet”.
Continue reading Of Love And Asthma