John Baker’s Blog

1. Why do you blog?
I think that I blog to test things out in a real environment. I can re-read new ideas myself, or I can share them with those familiar with my work and myself, but it is fascinating and valuable to see how writing is publicly perceived by “strangers” in a small sample [...]

1.Why do you blog?
I maintain a weblog in order to:
. . . sustain & develop further a unique form of communication that enables me to write in reflective solitude in the traditional way, but also enables me to locate & interact with a critical readership almost immediately.
. . . be able to read across a [...]

The miraculous yield of 1922.
The year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Rilke’s Dueno Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus(written in three days). Of Brecht’s first play, Baal, Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Virginia Wolfe’s Jacob’s Room, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christy, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned Galsworthy’s The [...]

SURREALISTS & SYMBOLISTS
The Surrealists stood against everything which mutilates man’s inner life, or stifles his imagination for the sake of peace and quiet, law and order and the smooth running of the social machine.
Surrealism constantly poses the question: Whether in the eyes of the society in which we live, the ‘compleat person’ is a ‘crime [...]