I now have a vivid mental image of Michael Palin ducking the pike his opponent swings, and splooshing Cleese into Teddington Lock with a delicate parry from his sardine.

Hahaha

Although, since Carey called Ted a donkey first, it's all a bit "well, you are, but what am I?"

Carey: "Can he not understand that to crunch all Shakespeare's plays together in his preposterous pick'n'mix myth-pack is an act of grotesque, donkey-eared vandalism?"

All in response to Carey's review of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I now need to look up the review and the double spread riposte and counter riposte. I've never been tempted to read SatGoCB, and also don't much like Carey's feel for poems but I like Carey's account of the fracas

Still working on my translation of the newly rediscovered Lorca

The hours on the watch's face its underworkings
Find all the same: 7 o'clock is just 12 o'clock.
So that's how I'm not here,
my flesh that tick-tocks, when I swing away
and know I have cogs in place re-turning

Radio piece on IBS and I heard myself shout TOO MUCH INFLAMMATION.

Wilfrid Wood.

His unapologetic and expressive portraits.

Here's my very loose version

Hours on the clock's face the underworkings
find no different: 7 o'clock is like 12 o'clock.
So I'm not here
in tocks of my flesh marked a lurch away
Know I'm the cog in place re-turning.

Lost Federico García Lorca verse discovered 93 years after it was written Eight-line poem found on the back of a manuscript sheds light on Spanish poet’s preoccupation with time

The Spanish isn't quoted, just a dull unsigned crib

El reloj cuenta maquinalmente las horas
Da lo mismo las siete que las doce
Yo no estoy aquí
Es la señal de carne que dejé al irme
Para saber mi sitio al regresar.

www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...

I was so polite as a child that I actually did ask to be born.

“if your problem with open access is that commercial publishers are hoovering up all the money, design open access interventions that specifically prevent commercial publishers from receiving your money”

Really well written piece from @samuelmoore.org

Oh I was so much older then...I think that was a time when I didn't have a telly, and would anyway have been put off by the hosts. I've always thought of this as the acme of his Naughty Hugo side. I think any poetry person of the time would have heard of it.

Peter Magyar has offered a template which can be used, without too much alteration, in defeating populists worldwide

open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

I do think, though, that this poem was a cause celebre in literary circles, and to many people who followed poems in the various national periodicals. But to the nation: Who?

@tomsnarsky.bsky.social - - Remembering on his birthday the great poet and translator Anselm Hollo.
allenginsberg.org/2012/04/anse... - allenginsberg.org/2025/01/w-j-...

Imagining a parallel universe where Jools Holland played the trombone and every band on Later has to do a song with Jools playing alongside them on his trombone.

Jane Austen never mentions the Napoleonic Wars in any of her books.

Mind you, neither does Irvine Welsh in any of his, and people don't go on about that.

Double negatives are a no-no

"You're an author? Would I know anything you've written?"

"Have you heard of the book Eat Pray Love?"

"Oh wow. I have, actually!"

"Well, one of my books was printed in a typeface not totally dissimilar to the one in that."

The time it takes to write a joke, from conception to birth, is the jestation period.

Liverpool Anglican Cathedral.

A light gray square building Lego baseplate features a raised, molded landscape section with craters and ridges resembling a lunar surface.

The only souvenir I would bring back from the moon. 🥰

I liked his sci-fi novel but yes, I've found his very confidently expressed pronouncements of late irritatingly unhelpful

Why I went to Moscow

1/ This Yanis Varoufakis screed made me so angry the only way I can salvage my day is to go through it line by line as catharsis.

You are welcome to come on the journey toward my aneurism with me.

An angry h/t to @sianushka.bsky.social for bringing this into my life.

unherd.com/2026/04/why-...