Golgonooza

When Mary Webb died in 1927 at the untimely age of 46, she was a modestly admired writer noted for her observant nature descriptions tinged with a touch of mysticism. A year later, Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister, referred to her as a 'neglected genius' and sparked a craze.  Johnathan Cape reissued her works that sold in the thousands a trend that lasted through the 30s. Her, and similar, writing was satirized in Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (1932), and her writing was typecast as 'soil and gloom romance.' The height of this posthumous fame was probably in 1950 when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger turned one of her novels, 'Gone to Earth' into a film. After which her work fell into abeyance with Virago bringing three of her novels back into print in the 80s and modestly keeping them there ever since. This is undoubtedly a shame. It is true that her fondness for the local dialect and expression of her native Shropshire can create bar...

  Setting out to evade the political turbulence of Darjeeling, the American writer & photographer, Thomas K. Shor sets off with minimal baggage and walks. Following the example of his mentor and friend, Ed Spencer, the 'Harvard renunciate' whose story he has admirably told here:  Into the Hands of the Unknown  he steps out in no particular direction intent on the present moment and what will emerge and be gifted. Being Shor with a talent for stepping into stories, he comes across a local guru, simply called Gurudev, for whom he is the first real encounter with a Westerner. A relationship develops not of guru and disciple, Thomas is too true to his name for that, keeping always a vigorous level of doubt, but of admiring enquirer met by the mutual curiosity of Gurudev. What could have unfolded was a classic teaching text of observation, perplexity resolved, and illumination; and, in many ways, the book is this. Gurudev is a remarkable man - by Tibetan Buddhists seen as ...

  You meet an elderly man on a ferry bound for Greece. He is a fellow American in his 60s, you are a young man in his early 20s, fresh from a stay in a Greek monastery. He tells you part of his story and invites you to accompany him to India, the country that has been his home for decades and where he lives the life of renunciate enjoying an extended pilgrimage, with the only fixed destination: love!  He may be a saint, he may be mad, he might conceivably be both, but why not? Why not indeed if you are the writer and photographer, Thomas K. Shor who in a series of books and extended photographic essays has shown a remarkable ability to befriend people with striking stories to tell that touch on the transcendent, the holy, and not occasionally the eccentric and strange. (As here, for example,  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/04/searching-for-paradise-in-hidden.html  ). Ed Spencer, the renunciant, had taught medieval history at Harvard until the Second World War bro...