My name is Christopher Laws. I am twenty-eight years old. Born in Durham, I have lived in York, Umeå, briefly Istanbul, York again, Amsterdam for a year; and I am currently studying towards a PhD in literature at the University of York, with my area of research the works of James Joyce.
The first piece of writing I published on this website featured a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, entitled ‘Silentium!’. I wanted, in this first piece, to suggest some ambivalent feeling regarding writing, and blogging or publishing on the internet in the particular. The first line of Tyutchev’s poem, in which he declaims that each of us as individual people should ‘Speak not, lie hidden and conceal’, is not conducive to publishing in any manner whatsoever; but its emphasis on holding one’s feelings close, on living ‘in your inner self alone’, seems to speak especially against the immediate and repeated self expression which the internet allows in various forms. Of course, in the act of publishing his poetry Tyutchev suggested his own ambivalence regarding the private bearing and nourishing of his feelings and sentiments, and the expression of them in public.
My hope is that this website, far from dimming the fountainhead, will instead serve to encourage ideas and connections between things; and that I will improve with the practise of writing on a regular basis. More, where so much on the internet and in the wider world is discrete and predominated by specialists, I want this to be a broad area in which to discuss all of my interests in some depth.
culturedallroundman 