Jonathan Gibbs

Dreamed I was the new drummer in My Bloody Valentine. Played a whole concert in the dream (I was listening to Isn't Anything the other day), then went back to a shared flat and hung out and chatted. Walked round town. Went shopping. Lovely people. No new music for a while, I don't think, I'm afraid.

Screenshot of a tweet by Leon (@leyawn) from Twitter before it turned into a Nazi bar: SOCRATES: I am wiser than this man; he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing. DARRYL, SOCRATES’ FRIEND: fuck him up, Socrates

Every single time

My novel The Proof of My Innocence comes out in paperback on October 2nd. I got bored signing 1,000 copies, so I made one of them slightly different to the others. Let me know if you spot it anywhere!

'Humitas' sounds like a place you go in Switzerland to have your soul painlessly extracted.

Whereas 'Thrival' could happily be a largely forgotten festival of the pagan calendar still celebrated in some remote parts of the country.

Very nice. Enright's pieces that I've read in the LRB (and some in the Irish Times?) have been superb.

Latest reading mini🧵 as part of my ongoing 2025 Reading thread.

My third French-language book of the year!

Creative Digest #2: Mary Gaitskill’s dinner details; semi-colon vs comma splice; Percival Everett’s artifice The second edition of our departmental Substack looks at craft issues around observation and authenticity, and uncovers a useful grammatical trick

Ha. No, that's real. And the other bit: perhaps you're right, but usual syntax would suggest a full stop after "no hurry to confront him", I think.

I also wrote this, more clearly setting out (for students) how I consider the relationship between comma splice (as stylistic choice) and semi-colon:

She's absolutely clear about the kind of book that she doesn't want to write, and about the unhealthy desires (of all kinds) that might lead a reader to pick her book up. I can't imagine reading a more incisive, illuminating or compelling account of something I'd rather not have read about at all.

Sinno repeatedly moves away from the singularity of the abuse to different aspects of the world, where her boundaries meet ours, which means, essentially, that she shows how completely invasive the act was of her life.

Reading it in French (it's recently been translated, by Natasha Lehrer, for Seven Stories Press) was helpful, in that I read it slowly, and perhaps paid more attention to the language and word choices than I would have otherwise. The language is mostly simple, but the syntax can be thorny.

There are moments of incredible lucidity, where we are brought – carefully, considerately – into the heart of the experience: not of the abuse itself, but of its effects and after-effects. And there are declarations of such shocking power and even horror that I could never have foreseen.

I won't say anything more about the facts of the case, as what Sinno chooses to narrate, and how, is integral to the book's success. She takes different tacks: memoiristic, sociological, literary-critical. There is a consideration of Lolita, and Ernaux, Gaitskill, Carrère &c are also referenced.

The basics: Sinno was repeatedly and regularly raped by her stepfather from the ages of about 7 to 14. She told her mother aged I think 20 and he was charged, convicted and imprisoned. Her alpine upbringing was rural and precarious, with her mother and stepfather both outdoorsy, hippie types.

A plain white French paperback cover with author name and title and a dark blue removable band wrapper showing the words (in a much larger font) Prix Goncourt Des Lycéens 2023 and Prix Femina 2023.

2025 Reading 47: Triste Tigre by Neige Sinno. I was hand-sold this by a bookseller in Orléans as something in the hybrid memoir-essayistic mode. Then she told me: it's about how the author was raped as a child by her stepfather. We looked at each other, then she said, but it's really good. It is.

In defence of the comma splice: Katie Kitamura’s A Separation I’d been planning to write about the comma splice for a while. Reading Katie Kitamura’s novel A Separation (Clerkenwell Press), I made a note that it would be a useful book to quote from, as it use…

I wrote a defence of the comma splice as used in Kitamura's first novel A Separation, here. Perhaps it makes more sense there in terms of narrative voice than in the new novel, which I haven't read. (And I warn my students about it too!)

tinycamels.wordpress.com/2017/03/12/i...

Mid-run thought. You could probably quite successfully mix Urban Clearway by Saint Etienne into the Beastie Boys’ Intergalactic. The former’s bass riff at 2.25 maps neatly on the “Another dimension”/“I have an erection” breakdown.

J'ai conscience que ces comparaisons peuvent être choquantes et injustes. Je ne devrais pas les faire. J'ai tendance à enchaîner trop vite les causes et les conséquences, à faire des analogies. En ce sens, ma pensée n'est pas rigoureuse. Elle s'emballe, s'enivre et se met à faire délirer les éléments à sa portée. Quoi de plus naturel cependant? Surtout si on considère l'absence de matière philosophique sur le sujet. La pensée fait feu de tout bois. La pen-sée, comme dirait Deleuze, délire le monde.

Thanks, that makes sense in general. But I’m getting something a little more sardonic in the usage here (from Neige Sinno’s Triste Tigre), where it seems more a case of: it uses everything it can so much as lay its hands on to further its ends. What do you think?

A black fuzzy felt board with three ballerina figures in pink tutus and dancing poses the middle with a star stuck to her head

A blue fuzzy felt backing board with the felt pieces of clowns and animals from the fuzzy felt circus set stuck to it

Been buying vintage Fuzzy Felt for the art I’m making & it’s so deeply tender & touching finding some still carry ghost traces of the last owner’s play & since the sets are so old, I wonder if these little scenes were made by a child who’s my age now, with fond middle-aged memories of creating them

But it’s the all-pervasiveness of active language use – to do the boring things of life – that makes possible its more creative functions. The earliest examples of writing we have are agricultural accounts and property laws, not prayers or poems. Those are conditional on familiarity with the former.

The book I’m reading (in French) uses the wonderful idiom, that I’ve never heard before, of “faire feu de tout bois”: to make fire from all (available) wood. The closest equivalent I can think of is “when all you have is a hammer everything begins to look like a nail”, which isn’t as strong.

I agree with both points. The end of books will come not from the extinction of the writer but from the end of the idea of reading as a creative act. As your interviewees point out, this degradation is happening (in all art forms) because of tech companies’ financial imperatives.

Clara Bow was born 121 years ago today, so I'm celebrating with this photograph. It's described as 'Clara Bow in the Mojave desert with cigarette and gun' which sounds like the opening of a movie. It's preserved by UNLV Universities Libraries, Special Collections and Archives.

And someone working with words in their day job and then reading Sarah J Maas or George RR Martin on the tube or bus home is exactly that kind of ordinary/extraordinary interchange. We’ll all be poorer for the loss of that.

Well yes, in practical terms, insofar as literary fiction is sustained by the wider publishing landscape. But that degradation of literacy in the widest sense - of written language as something that can be used for ordinary and extraordinary purposes - is the real danger.

Nice piece John. My biggest worry about Gen-AI is that its eventual widespread general usage means that ordinary people in their everyday lives write less, and read more slop, and so their literacy levels gradually degrade such that they lose interest (and skill) in reading for pleasure.

Who wants two tickets for Hayden Pedigo/Bell Lungs in St Vincent's church in Edinburgh on 5th September for free?

A ★★★½ review of Airplane! (1980) A classic Friday evening compromise choice for all the family. At times I was in absolute paroxysms of laughter, though not all of us were. At other times there was total silence in the face of repeat...

Reading reviews of the new Naked Gun having watched Airplane! last night, it occurs me that Liam Neeson would do much better in a Lloyd Bridges role – taking serious too seriously – than a Leslie Nelson one, completely, ludicrously deadpan.

boxd.it/azlkP1

It’s always an exciting moment when a box of your finished books arrives on your doorstep from @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social
I am biased, but they look truly beautiful. 🙏

#greyhound #nonfiction #fitzcarraldoeditions #writinglife
#bookdesign #theblueandthewhite

Name another song that mentions the word ‘girl’

youtu.be/Kb1syfgJ-4w?...

Yes Sidewalks is fab. As is Blue Self Portrait. The Taiga Syndrome is… odd. I honestly found it incredibly confusing.