On This Deity

As you’ve probably guessed from my sparse posting this year, I’m busy. This bittersweet situation continues unabated, to the extent that even my “check this out” posts aren’t half as frequent as my noticing good shit out there.

Top of my current list of things that warrant me doing a Moses on the Red Sea of busyness bearing down on me, to bring my dear readers’ attention to it, is Dorian Cope’s new blog, On This Deity: Commemorating Culture Heroes & Excavating World Events.

Billing it as “an alternative ‘On This Day'”, for a good few weeks now Dorian’s been posting every few days on some birth, death, or other significant event that took place on that date. The focus is on visionaries and radicals from everywhere on that riotous spectrum: from the death of Maud Gonne (muse to W.B. Yeats and bold revolutionary in her own right) to the release of ‘God Save The Queen’; from Oscar Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol to the straw that broke the back of the camel in the way of me writing this, a remembrance of Helen Keller’s death, and a reminder of her radical political views.

Dorian and her indefatigable husband Julian have been staunch and forthright supporters of my writing and publishing since we met in 1996. What makes this much more than an obligatory reciprocation is the pleasure of seeing Dorian’s razor-sharp perceptions and infectious energy, which have inspired me endlessly in conversations over the years, transfer so well to writing. Her posts popping up several times a week in my feed aggregator have the habit of quickly creating a bubble of attentiveness, within which she paints a vivid picture of a moment in radical history. It’s a steady stream of historical nourishment—feast away!