Kester Brewin

In the last post I tried to argue, using Booker’s excellent book ‘The Neophiliacs – Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties‘ that we must avoid sensationalism. That we must avoid the projected image, the sensational, which in the age of screens and billboards is a difficult thing to do. Booker warns that [...]

‘In this our time, the minds of men are so diverse, that some think it a great matter of conscience to depart from a piece of their old customs; and again, on the other side, some be so new-fangled, that they would innovate all things, and so despise the old, that nothing can like them [...]

New Year, new blog series on… Newness. Actually, I’ve been meaning to write something for some time around the book ‘The Neophiliacs – Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties’ that Christopher Booker (the first editor of Private Eye) wrote back in the late 60’s. The Amazon synopsis for ‘The Neophiliacs’ is rather [...]

I’ve been musing while away. Wondering: what is technology? It struck me as we tanked along in a car about to seize up that it was nssothing more than raw creation re-worked by human hands. Forged to help us. Rock, sand and timber reined in wild like horses and bridled under our control. In other [...]

Strange how a disparate thoughts suddenly meld into something new. I was mulling over what was on TV. Not now, or then, but generally. It all seems to be houses and food. And also mulling on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which has popped up around the Bloge now and again. He identifies a pyramid of [...]

In a great post [ here ] Will Samson describes how the dominant psychological metaphor for our culture, as set out in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, needs pushing further. Maslow’s system is very much based around the needs of the individual, and Will has done some thinking about how, once the individual ‘self’ is actualized, [...]

Had a great few days away, and things seemed to go well at Blah… in Manchester last night. The Nexus space that is getting going there seems excellent. For anyone who is interested, the (very sketchy) notes I spoke from I’ve uploaded as a PDF here: I’d actually mentioned something about exoskeletons in the brief [...]

This morning I was sent an article to look over, which contained reference to Baumann’s work on ‘liquid modernity’, taken up by Pete Ward in his book ‘Liquid Church’. It set me thinking again, as I had done when discussing Pete’s thesis at a very early Blah…, about how much Baumann knew about the science [...]

The idea in the previous post of there being limits on where we ought to live on earth was given another spin on a piece about whether creativity has limits: Rollo May: “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose. The capacity to create ourselves, based [...]

More from ‘The Courage to Create‘ by Rollo May – an excellent book on the psychology of creativity. May was conducting some research into the roots of anxiety, and based his study on groups of teenage mothers in a shelter in New York. He was pretty sure his hypothesis – that their anxiety would be [...]