On Viewless Wings

Apart from the fact that she is getting a dig in at a political opponent, I am not sure what 'member of The Labour Party' signifies any more.

Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy I have made the leap from literary fiction to fantasy – for those who think it’s mere wish-fulfilment, here’s why we need that thing with the dragons

So much to be said on the subjects of genre, value & canon, so I'll stick with two.

1: that the discussion itself holds a mirror up to ourselves as much as stories of imagination do.

2: as Pratchett said: stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...

Listen to your children read. Read to your children.
Read alongside your children. Take them to libraries.
Talk about what reading means to you & what it can unlock in them.
Tell them it doesn’t matter if it’s comics, magazines or books as long as they’re engaged & enjoying what they’re reading.

Pratchett was the master of the footnote.

New Yellowstone spinoff just dropped...

New ones have come out over the past few years, with a main narrator which changes depending on the kind of discworld book it is, but across all of them you have Peter Serafinowic as Death and Bill Nighy as the footnotes.

Saint Francis of Assisi’s skeleton goes on public display for first time Hundreds of thousands of visitors expected for month-long display of 13th-century saint’s remains

So now people can go and assisi it...

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Text of poem - The reports kept coming and coming. I gave up the newspapers. Let all my batteries run down, my licenses expire. I shared my meals with a house-mouse watched it filling itself full on a few crumbs. What genie had got into the room at the rubbing of my cold hands? As I looked at it, it turned into a small child, into hundreds of grey children, watching me with eyes like blackberry seeds to discover what I would do next with all the pieces of small change going mildew in my pocket.

‘The reports kept coming…’ - #RSThomas
(Babel, September 2023)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

An anthropomorphised pastoral image of curling stones returning to their burrows to hibernate now the Winter Olympics is coming to a close.

Madeline Horwarth in The Guardian today. 🥌 🥌 🥌

It's a British English/American English thing.

Tweet from Minh Do @minhsmind Al filmmaking and storytelling is punk rock. It's hip hop. It's counterculture. It's a new type of creativity. It's a new medium. It's hated by the mainstream film and art establishment. It resists ideology. It ignores gate keeping. It's uncomfortable. It's scary. It's viral. It's accessible. It's refreshing. It's welcoming. It's here. 7:45 AM • 8/4/25 • 131K Views

The idea that anything most people find repellant is “punk rock” is so lazy and irritating, and yet keeps reappearing like the vampiric undead shell of what punks have ever stood for.

Grant Haffner (Californian Artist, born 1978)
"Into the Night", 2015.
Acrylic, Marker, Pencil, and Paint Pen on Wood Panels, 121.9 × 121.9 cm.
Private Collection.
#art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

Hi-de-Hi Windows

‘The need for support is everywhere’: working-class arts group expands to north of England The Working Arts Club is working to counter the stark class disparity within the UK creative sector

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Some people have clearly never seen King Ralph.

The royal family IS a performative gesture.

A little boy cries at being strapped into his pram. A man in yellow-framed glasses smokes a cigarette, his eyes on his phone. Headlights blink on and off on a parked car. A magnolia tree stands tall, buds ready.

Spontaneous overflow of powerful newsfeeds

It waxes and wanes. Don't force it.

I like this tiny poem by Bill Manhire @pacificraft.bsky.social from his forthcoming Carcanet collection Lyrical Ballads.

It is a shame about his politics.

"If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Still rings true today, especially in #trumpsamerica

Folk thynke that innovacioun yn academia will come from technologye. It will come ynstead from settinge asyde olde assumptions and hierarchies and givinge people more chances to trulye and radicallye thynke wyth each othir wyth no specific outcome yn mynde.

It is perfect, isn't it? Just as Detectorists was perfect.

I've just told my publishers to remove the Daily Mail quote they were going to put on the cover of the paperback of my latest novel. I don't care if the Daily Mail gave it a good review. The name of that shitrag is not going on the cover of my book.

No, you're not.

(By the way, it's maybe 30 years since I saw it, but specifically structurally speaking, I was thinking Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell)

Experience: I’m the last traditional clog maker in England I cut small trees around Offa’s Dyke, then shape the wood by hand

I'm beginning to think that it is only a few months until, when I say "I refuse to use AI in my teaching", most people are going to respond as if I have said something like this headline...

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Would love to see that final sentence as an author review quote on the next reprinting of Revolutionary Road...

Out the other end of this sickness bug, and 1,300 words written today, making 15,000 this year. Keeping on keeping on.

Poems for Lent (Day 3)

• Charlotte Brontë •