Bruce Charlton's Notions

The book in which Garner decisively began to react-against Tolkien
I discuss Alan Garner's work in term of his Anxiety of Influence with respect to JRR Tolkien, over at my Notion Club Papers blog. 

One of the difficult lessons, particularly emphasized by Owen Barfield, is that in every way the spiritual is prior to, and encompasses, the material.
The spiritual world existed first - material and incarnation came later, and locally. Reality is spiritual - with some parts of it also material. The material is always spiritual, but the spiritual is not always material....

Ever since, as a young child, I saw a Scottish Curling game on TV (something like this), I have strongly disliked it - for one simple reason.
Because of the characters running along with brooms, sweeping with brushes in front of the stone.
If it was not for these sweeping guys, I would feel as cheerfully benign towards curling as I do towards lawn bowling. If the chaps that slid the stone across the ice did just that, and that was the game; if the stone was left to its own devices like...

Michael Green: self-deprecating comic fantasist - 1927-2018
People who are untruthful in a character-driven way, whose discourse (spoken or written, or perhaps visual) is not aimed-at correspondence with reality - seem to fall into two categories: fantasist and liar....