From the river's throat a dock-less spine of earth juts up,moonlight stitching the reed-edges with a thin bright wire.Windows turn inward like closed mouths; a rowboat hangs idle,three small shirts looped over its oar — flags for nobody. Old men on the wharf barter the same two words: “Once.”The word folds into the nets and … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.5
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
An attentive manual that thinks like a maker and reads like a quiet manifesto Sheila McGraw’s Painting and Decorating Furniture presents itself at first glance as a pragmatic handbook: techniques, materials, step-by-step procedures. Beneath that useful surface, however, the book stages a subtler argument about how objects participate in our lives — about the ways … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.4
From the river's murk an island rises,a lantern on a stump that never burns.Three small shirts hang where no footprints go.Rumour skims the water like spilled oil. Men on the bank point with cigarette hands;dogs halt, ears pricked; shutters draw their teeth.Night settles with a bone-cold quiet.Only one reed argues with the dark. Footprints sink. … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.4
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
At once primer and manifesto, Good Bones, Great Pieces stakes a modest but ambitious claim: a home’s durability—its capacity to endure fashions, life changes and moves—depends less on trend-chasing than on a coherent set of flexible, well-chosen objects. Suzanne and Lauren McGrath, a mother–daughter design team steeped in editorial and television worlds, lay out that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.3
From the river’s throat a dock-less spine of earthjuts—an island stitched to rumour.Moonlight stitches the reed-edges with wire,and the black water stitches back, slow and smooth. Windows that never lit keep their dark,a rowboat hung with three small shirts like flags.At the wharf, old men trade the same two words:“Once,” and then the silence swallows … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
Marilyn McCully’s Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay performs the double service every good exhibition catalogue must: it documents a body of work that has long been underrated in mainstream Picasso scholarship, and it supplies interpretive apparatus sufficient to make that body of work matter anew. The volume — produced to accompany the Royal Academy … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.2
An island rises from the black river,its shoreline a gravel throat the current keeps.A single lantern, unused, rocks on a stump;mattress springs tangle with reeds like ribs. People along the bank point and look away,their voices small and sharpened by the cold.Rumour skims the water like oil — thin, iridescent —and children’s names come and … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
Tamara Maynes’ The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space is at once a manifesto for tactile domesticity and a practical handbook for anyone who wants their home to read like a lived, handcrafted archive. Maynes—who writes from the vantage of a practitioner—treats making not as a hobby but as a mode of seeing: an attentiveness to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversations Within Our Bodies Impact our Mood, Our Choices, and Our overall Health by Emeran Mayer
Emeran Mayer’s The Mind-Gut Connection reads like an extended, lucid argument built at the crossroads of medicine, neuroscience and narrative. Its central thesis—that the brain and the gut are in ongoing, bidirectional conversation and that this dialogue shapes mood, behaviour, and health—will be familiar to readers of contemporary popular science. What Mayer achieves, however, is … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversations Within Our Bodies Impact our Mood, Our Choices, and Our overall Health by Emeran Mayer
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
Paul Mathieu’s Sex Pots is a bracing, often surprising intervention in both ceramics scholarship and the wider study of erotic art. Its premise is simple and stubbornly persuasive: clay and the vessel-form have been unusually intimate companions to human sexuality across cultures and ages, and the history of ceramics is one of repeated, inventive erotic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
The New Renaissance Mindset 