Well, that is an absolutely appropriate Nobel. Very pleased. (Still think nothing has surpassed Autobiography of Red, but gosh that book meant a lot to me.)

Yesterday I bought three bottles of Crystal. Today I watched Hellraiser for the first time in decades, and Chatterer was easily my favourite. This all checks out.

'Love is of the body; not the body, but of the body' - Forster, but probably also Barker. Now imagining a tv show in the style of The Trip called Morgan and Clive where they take a road trip together.

This is an excellent piece that captures what many (most?) of us think.

'The world of [...] Deans receded illimitably. Water, sky, evergreens, a wind - these things not even the seasons can touch, and surely they lie beyond the intrusion of man?'

Trying to recalibrate my belief in art by reading A Room with a View (for teaching) before watching Hellraiser (not for teaching, but I wish).

I admire my library catalogue's commitment to the bit.

It’s a good sign when on Monday at 5:45am, despite a chill weekend, your first thought is ‘gosh it’s been a long week’, right?

In 1998 I read a Guardian review of Saint Etienne’s Good Humor and it sounded so much like my kind of thing I walked straight to the record shop. Tonight I saw their final Scottish gig and it was an absolute joy. Feeling nostalgic, but also like I’m 19 and the world’s beginning.

Wait, is the Maggie Nelson who is Annie Dillard's literary executor, you know, actual Maggie Nelson?! Because what now?!

rip annie dillard

(Not as a plug, but this week is the fourth anniversary of the book I wrote about my mother and reading, and next week would've been her birthday, and I talk about Dillard there, and today is just so sad.)

I love (almost) all of her work, of course - there's no better piece of prose than her essay on the eclipse. But Holy the Firm is the book through which I see the world.

Christmas 1977 my uncle gave my mother a copy of Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. It is the book in which I keep my mother's memorial prayer cards, the item I would first save in a house fire, because those pages, turned by my mother and I, are one of the closest connections I have to her.

Why, ask managers up and down the land, would we want to preserve or critique our history and culture?

Has any canonical poet had as big a glow-up as Frost between A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914)?

Got new glasses for the first time in seven years and now I know how dirty my floors are. Huge mistake.

I'm slowly working my way through The Collected Poems of Alexander Scott, and really like 'The lipperan-lapperan lick o the sea' as an opening line. (Scott is not high on my radar, and there's some really great stuff here.)