Gary Pearce

YouTube video by RNZ Te Pāti Māori MP Oriini Kaipara: 'I covered stories and now I choose to change them' | RNZ

Fabulous speech - upsetting the fragile sensibilities of the colonisers (see end). “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed firmly on our past”.

youtu.be/wS5cO6bSQI4?...

Opinion | George Saunders: Shame on the White House

Writer George Saunders on the sacking of the Librarian of Congress

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/o...

Via email, Trump fires head of world's largest library: The Library of Congress Hayden is a professional librarian nominated to the post by then-President Barack Obama in 2016.

Trump has just fired the Librarian of Congress.

Hayden is an Obama appointee who he met when she was working at the Chicago Public Library. She has been leading an initiative to bring more Black, indigenous, Hispanic Asian American works into the collection.

www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

We’re in town to watch Joan of Arc at the Stake!

Colm Tóibín introducing three books that deal with the drama of migration. My first thought was well Raymond Williams’s Border Country. My second thought was you won’t recommend that will you Colm because Williams is so underrated these days, especially his novels.

www.instagram.com/reel/DG6jsp9...

Cat Power sings Dylan set list from 1966 Albert Hall concert. Was rather special.

Guess which is my great great grandfather

Colm Tóibín‘s latest gets a shellacking in NYRB.

Really fine work about mothers and daughters. Memories rise around leaving her daughters for several years when they are young and then returning several years later. Leaving so as not to sacrifice her own needs to her love for them and returning as part of same.

Sailing

Just finished this - involved Christian fanatics, mental illness, Lech Walesa, pubs in country Qld, ‘bogans’ vs ‘elites’, complicated family relations. Quite the page turner.

Honda’s ‘Plastic Maggot’ CX500: The Best Bike that Aussies Loved to Hate Oh, how those ’70s Aussie journos hated the Honda CX500. If only it hadn’t gone and proven all its detractors so very, very wrong. So what exactly was the problem?

www.webbikeworld.com/honda-plasti...

Younger still. First motorcycle taken in country Queensland where my father ran a pub.

Unique styling but not the best handling - a high centre of gravity.

From when I was young and rode a motorcycle

Day of reading for me: finished the Leslie Jamison book Recovery, read a bit more Brothers K, and read a 100 pages of the new Lech Blaine book - now off to reading group to continue the Octavia Butler Lilith’s Brood trilogy.

Retrieved some old photos tonight. First car I owned.

A reading year

I received sailing lessons for Xmas.

The only list we need.

Officially on summer break.

Me after writing one (1) sentence in my writing hut

Humanities academic here. Here are the top 10 books you should feel bad about not having read in 2024

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

#Books
#BookSky
#BookChallenge

Day 20

Now Human Rights Watch is saying it

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

#Books
#BookSky
#BookChallenge

Day 19

Disputing Disaster In Disputing Disaster, Perry Anderson picks out from the highly charged historiography on the First World War one leading historian from each of the major powers that survived the conflagration: Fritz...

Perry Anderson, Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War - @versobooks.bsky.social November 2024
www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

#Books
#BookSky
#BookChallenge

Day 18

Oh dammit, do I need to subscribe to Paris Review now? I do, don’t I.

Everything Is Now Comparable to Paris in the 1920s, 1960s New York City was a cauldron of avantgarde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, ...

This looks good www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...