Let's blog again!

I kept a blog for a number of years - approximately between 2005 and 2008 – before ending it and deleting all of the content from public view. My rationale for ending things was that the blog was taking a lot of my writing time (I was blogging a few times a week) and I also that I was unsure about the focus of that blog – it was an impressionistic and often quite ranty view of the culture I encountered; it had no proper focus, to an extent. Nevertheless, it was a worthwhile experience and I made a number of contacts and even friends in the process, which was an unexpected boon (I may also have made enemies, but they didn't contact me so I am blissfully unaware of them…).

Since ending the blog – selections from which I am gradually putting up on my website here – I have missed keeping an online notebook. A better grasp of time management and an environment (I have recently moved home) far more conducive to writing has led me to desire to resume blogging. I want to just lay down the focus of the blog, so you can decide whether it is going to be something for you to come back to, and so I can be clear in my mind as to what it is.

Although I will often be writing about the performances and other cultural events & places I visit, this is not a reviewing blog. I am not a critic but a practitioner. When I engage my mind with something I've seen or heard or read, it is for matters of inspiration – either positively or negatively. William Blake wrote that "That to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem" and my attempts to know culture are inspirations within that process. I will be attempting here to write what I see, and to think through the issues which the works of other human beings throw up for me as an artist. I shall be sometimes referencing critical and cultural theory as I go along and could get dense at times. If that is not your bag, this blog might not always be for you. There might sometimes be a gap of weeks between entries, as other work takes precedence.

My major interest is drama (for both stage and screen) and most of what I write about here shall be plays and films - but this will not preclude encounters with art works, books, buildings and music. Every coincidence between the product of a human mind and the mind of another is a kind of close encounter with something alien and this is a journal examining those extraordinary events. Most of our lives are full of such events and as the Socratic proverb goes, the unexamined life is not worth living.

I will be keeping the comments box open for reader's insights and engagements and in doing so I welcome debate. I will moderate anything I find abusive or unnecessarily ignorant. But let's hope that it doesn't come to that. I will admit that, as I have evolved in my own internet usage, I have come to prefer engagements from myself and others which are not made under a cloak of anonymity.

I am currently engaged in writing a couple of plays and developing some screenplays, one of my short plays (Fellow Creature) is being performed at the Lost One Act Festival this coming Tuesday and I am researching an ongoing Ph.D. which involves the writing of and theorizing about a screenplay concerning George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham. Most of the things I choose to write about on the blog will have some connection with my life as a Imaginator of Dramas.