Adam Roberts

Yes it's interesting. He's pretty readable, so perhaps still has readers, but he lost the zeitgeist lingerie since.

I'm intrigued as to what happened to Fowles. Does he have any contemporary reputation at all? Even "French Lieutenant's Woman"?

I was obsessed by the opening of this novel as a teen: when he sees the spitfire. Much of the rest is tedious midlife crisis writer-stand-in has affair with younger woman gubbins. But the opening is great.

Kitamura also does this.

I am charmingly unserious.

I feel you could take all the Jason Bourne titles (The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Protocol etc) and replace "Bourne" with "Erection Measuring", for pleasure and profit.

To my shame I've not read "Nightwood". I really must.

The Modernist who does the prolixity, splurge-don't-bother-revising thing is surely Wyndham Lewis.

That's not Kitamura's approach, I should add.

The New Prolixity I’ve been wondering whether the various examples of what I am going to call ‘the New Prolixity’ mark a school, or perhaps even a dominant…

I wrote about this, actually: medium.com/p/d39ee28fa6bb

There's definitely the Jon Fosse, Knausgaard school nowadays, the "write it all splurgingly down in a great gush and don't revise" approach. Not my cup o' tea, but popular. Fosse won the Nobel!

Great photo! Yours?

As Facebook used to say, "it's complicated".

Is there no path to you-atonement?

Didn't know that about Spanish! Maybe. Still, I tell my Creative Writing students not to do it.

I may have written something that cannot be forgiven.

Tricky to wrap.

Shop store dummy, as in the Kraftwerk song, but this is on france. Her hair is curved round over her ears and down the side of her head to a point near her chin.

Only the French could make female sideburns look so chic.

Photo taken in a French supermarket: a giant model of a bull advertises various bovine-pizzle sausages and testicle-cuts. A sign says "PROMO 3 POUR €12!"

I'm tempted by this offer: but where would I keep three gigantic model bulls?

Oh, could be ...

Excuse me: Bottle' Acid.

Just popping to the shops to buy some Bottle Acid.

I'll see what I can do.

I may be over sensitive to these things: teaching creative writing, quite a lot of what I do with my students' work is flagging up where the sentences don't work, or are slack. But there does seem to be a lot of published fiction (prize-winning fiction even) that don't seem to have been edited.

Katie Kitamura, 'Audition' (2025) Though routinely praised for her prose, Kitamura's writing is not good, actually

Problems with Katie Kitamura's Booker longlisted "Audition", I had a few. profadamroberts.substack.com/p/katie-kita...

Read the alt-text I wrote for the image.

Headline from UK paper: "'Britain's most tattooed man' claims he is unable to watch p*rn as 'new age check system mistakes his ink for a mask'". Ther is an image of the man's face: he looks a little like Sir Kier Starmer, if Starmer had had someone go over every inch of his face with a blue biro, tracing intricate elements from an Alan Parsons Project LP cover from the 70s.

Roses are red
Basking sharks bask

Eric Frank Russell's THREE TO CONQUER (1956). The novel adopts the idiom of 30s Noir hardboiled to tell a story of evil Venusian soul-replacing alien vampire invaders and the one Earthling hero, who happens to have been born a telepath, who can detect when what look like regular humans are actually evil Venys Space Zombies. Accordingly the cover art shows a grid with some clover growing through it. Because... why not?

Tonight's bedtime read.

Impressively, this image confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson.

The Gustav, the Bad and the Ugly

*sings to Goldfinger*
Bir-mingham [wa wahh wah]