‘W dodatku ci okropni poeci, Platonie’ - ‘Not to mention, Plato, those appalling poets.’
😊 spending today’s brilliant quiet with the quietly brilliant Wisława Szymborska. Like bottomless puddles, her poems are simple, even mundane on the surface, but then surprise you with the whole sky…
💚 can’t be around for this month’s leafletting rounds, but instead I want to give ya’ll a chance to help @newhamgreens.bsky.social elect Rob and Shabd in Royal Victoria!
🗳️ @greenparty.org.uk are set to make BIG gains in May - let’s #getgreenseelcted
www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/rob-callen...
❗️’Yes, death can be designed. We can all play Snake, we can all play God.’
😁 Laurie Eaves has made a poetry collection as gleefully bonkers, as playful and as filled with moments of surprising profundity as any Hideo Kojima production. Get yourself this belter from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
😊 it is bittersweet to close the book on ‘Earthsea’, even as I could not think of a better way to end the saga than ‘The Other Wind’. These stories are a part of me now, and while I could gush about the beauty of the writing and the generosity of their vision - all that needs be said is ‘read’!
💧’Only catchment, maybe, is a sort / of *self*, a notional line / within which nothing is alien to a river’.
🌊 returning to this collection from Philip Gross I first picked up in my teens, it is still a challenge, but in the ‘Betweenland’ of the Severn Estuary the poet conjures real delights.
👋 gone to the Continent for a bit - see you in a week!
🚆
#holiday
😬 well….
There is much about Babel that is intriguing, even occasionally brilliant, and worth grappling with even as its politics get imprecise or nihilistic.
But ye gods, this novel is *terrified* of the reader ‘not getting it’, and its didacticism will exhaust you before the end.
🙌 GET IIIIIIIIIN!
✊Hannah Spencer and the Manchester Greens have done something *extraordinary* in Gorton and Denton, whose voters have decisively rejected hatred and division and embraced a path of hope and renewal.
💚 watch @greenparty.org.uk - you ain’t seen nothing yet!
join.greenparty.org.uk
🔥 arms are burning after tonight’s session at Mickey’s - here’s hoping they soon start to hit a little harder!
‘[W]as it brave to be standing there waiting for them, or was it cowardly? Or was it neither - merely sensible?’
👏 Julian Barnes’ short novel of the career of Shostakovich is a jet-black meditation on the relationship between art and Power, as well as the comforts (and limits) of irony.
🙏 today can be something momentous. I can feel it in my bones.
💚 come on Gorton and Denton - elect Hannah Spencer and show us just how different politics in this country could be!
#GetGreensElected
“Much like Geralt or Batman, Jesus Christ can shift into detective-vision and follow a blood-trail…”
@jacobgeller.com does it again - milk-out-my-nose jokes alongside analysis that expertly engages head and heart. It’s good stuff ya’ll.
youtu.be/8dkB-KTMB3o?...
📚 decided to spend Sunday with a selection from ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’.
😌 as with any anthology of ‘inspirational’ poetry, it’s a mixed bag. There are poems that leave me cold, or make me roll my eyes. But it only takes half a dozen or so truly excellent poems for it to fulfil its purpose.
⚖️ something else I was getting up to this week…
“Lot of good, clean fun down the Bailey…”
#BarLife
redlionchambers.co.uk/re-trial-end...
🥊 missed last week so I was a little nervous to step back into Mickey’s - but every step is getting a little quicker and ever punch a little sharper. Keeping going!
#boxing #resolutions
‘How does it start the sea has endless beginnings’
Alice Oswald has been, among other things, a priestess of water and its polyphonic, powerful emptiness for many years, so this ‘water-damaged’ version of various Homeric narratives might be her apotheosis. I can see myself returning many times…
🎲 I asked my wife if she was okay with spending Valentine’s Day playing #DnD with some close friends.
❤️ I think it’s accurate to say she insisted on it.
😊 love takes many forms…
#tabletoplife #readerimarriedher
‘Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life’
🥲
I wish that I had first come to the fantasy of Ursula K. Le Guin when I was a much younger man, but at any age these are masterpieces of fable-making: sweeping and also intimate, spare and also lush - all brilliance.
🙏 for anyone interested in human rights, peaceful protest and government overreach, this is enormous.
⚖️ this should be the moment for the government to change course; let this ban drop; and start considering how it can protect people’s rights rather than than criminalising them.
🎥 and now for the latest bucket of suds I’ve gotten myself into - an anthology from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
🙏 thanks to @aaronkent.bsky.social and @simonbarraclough.bsky.social for this opportunity!
📚 get your copy of ‘My Ear Is Full Of Milk’ now!
www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...
‘Heroism isn’t honest work… it offends normal people and frightens them…. It’s not the action of a friend to point out that your character is more heroic than mine.’
🎸 I do find the back half of this play slower going, though I understand why it’s there. Not my favourite Stoppard but still good fun
🥊 knocks taken (and a few dealt) at Mickey’s - must try and do more boxing during the day when working from home!
🙌 out of January and still keeping this #resolution going. Baby steps…
“I didn’t know a nose could be deformed to that extent.”
😳
Just what you want to read before you open the case folder you’ve been sent marked ‘INJURY PHOTOGRAPHS’…
#BarLife
💚 my heart genuinely soars seeing Hannah’s campaign take off in Gorton and Denton - Godspeed and good luck! Let’s #GetGreensElected
‘I had not only made him, but I had made him well enough that he created a work of so-called art. I felt like god considering Hitler…’
😆 I have enjoyed the movie adapted from this novel, but in my view its particular brand of malevolent humour has more room to breathe here.
💚 I am *properly* excited to see where this campaign goes - congratulations to Hannah Spencer as she prepares to take the fight to the far right and get @greenparty.org.uk their fifth Commons seat!
😁 yup - still got the full set of teeth even after a night at Mickey’s!
🥊 Hopefully for all the punches I took tonight I threw out a few good ones of my own! Baby steps, baby steps…
‘To invent one’s self was to resist the inventions of others: to forge was to author.’
I have been drawn through Isabella Hammad’s dense novel slowly, and found not so much a moment of dazzlement as a continuous unfolding of something rich and intriguing. Definitely worth your time.
🕯️ keep the candle lit for human dignity, in a time of where we remember the darknesses of before, those who survived and those who did not.
🙏 On #HolocaustMemorialDay my thoughts go out to all those who live with the legacy of that atrocity, and my resolve is quickened to see it is never repeated.
Raja Shehadeh’s memoir of his trailblazing father, the lawyer and political activist Aziz, is as matter-of-fact in tone, but also wrenching in its melancholy power.
Thinking now of Israel and Palestine, th imagined words of Aziz stay with me: ‘The only real victory is when we’ve both won.’
