Approaching Midnight
And here I am in that moment,
leafing through the scattered others.
Author: William Altoft
Writer in and from (and consistently on) Bristol.
Their Deeply Familiar Shape: on lions and us
What does our relationship with lions need to become, if this ancient conflict is to come to dusk in such a way that an early morning air that’s charged with the roaring of the dawn chorus still greets the sunrise?
To Softly Settle In The Sweeping Wake
And so it begins again, the collection of dust.
The Last Jedi
Yes, it is flipping expectations in some way, but fundamentally not. Yes, it is a very creative way to re-hash, but it is still the same. The idea that The Last Jedi is making us question what Star Wars is, presenting us with something unfamiliar, simply isn’t true. The story, quite naturally, is fundamentally the very same.
Overload: a Star Wars story
I want – nay, need – nay, don’t need… just want – to complain about two things in particular: relentless encroachment on the original trilogy (OT) by recent additions to what is now official canon, and the superficially fashionable fandom of much of it all at this point in time.
Free Speech Upon the Rock Above the City: on John Milton’s Areopagitica, & my translation attempt
The title – Areopagitica – comes from Areopagus, a large rock outcropping just outside of Athens, Greece. Milton used this because, in ancient times, the outcropping had been used as the seat for councils and tribunals; had been used for open and free debate.
“But where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”: on faithful parents and the rights of a child
The child is but a lamb, and the parent but a child, obedient to God and faith and scripture.
On the African Lion & Environmental Research Trust
And there she still is; and so it hasn’t worked.
The Human Aspect: conservation and development
Conserving a bird species, then, by dedicating the vast majority of your time and effort to the human communities that share space with it.
African Sons: lions and us
It is a singular relationship, that which exists between humans and lions.
Absent The White Roses: on monuments in deeper history
Nothing beside remains. Something beside remains.
American Muslim: the lost & irretrievable third life of Malcolm X
“Let’s cool it, Brothers…”
Renouncing the Call of the Wild: the self-domestication of wolves
That the first tentative steps toward deep, eventual friendship, informed by a self-interest in easy food as those steps may have been, were taken, willingly, by wolves.
Coexistence
I have, for so long now, found so little wild, so few pockets without their shadow, and so few of the wilder, natural prey. They are not within my grasp.
Go Tell The Gods
Trying, some desperately, some half-heartedly, to weave themselves back into the web that they severed themselves, at once with vicious intent and complete indifference, from.
william altoft 