In particular, the sense of utter dislocation from who you were, not knowing who you are now. As Huber writes, ‘I need to understand that she [my former, pain-free self] is buried in photographs with my face, … that I am now living another incarnation of myself’. And how hard that is to accept.
I’m reading Pain Woman Takes Your Keys by @sonyahuber.bsky.social (thanks to a ref in @pollyrowena.bsky.social’s Some of Us Just Fall) and just YES, THIS, EXACTLY. So grateful for both of these books as I flounder around trying to work out how to live with ongoing pain.
Box set of Star Trek: Voyager DVDs
Star Trek is no longer on Netflix and I’m still somewhere in the Delta Quadrant, so this was a necessity
Thanks, Bill! (That reminds me of a series of postcards exchanged by me and a friend at university, inspired by Viz’s Rude Kid. Ours featured inanimate objects such as lavender bushes with added speech bubbles and sweary remarks. Captioned ‘Rude Lavender’ etc. Works of genius…)
Thank you!
Thanks, Polly. Your books are really helping at a very tough time x
Deep breath… I’m newly living with chronic pain and finding it incredibly difficult. I’m very thankful for @pollyrowena.bsky.social’s memoir/essay Some of Us Just Fall and poetry collection Much with Body, which are helping me to feel less alone. (I also love the poems about tiny frogs…!)
Today is clearly a good day for excellent records having been released
My very favourite Bauhaus track. Learning lines in the rain…
Yes… and yes, not his finest!
I’ve really enjoyed Hemisphere, by @petegreensolo.com (published by @longbarrowpress.bsky.social ) - it’s a set of prose poems describing imaginary travels, but in the process ruminating on all kinds of things. Moving, in more than one sense!
‘Though you are changed from what I once beheld’ makes me think of Melville’s Redburn, trying to navigate Liverpool with his father’s old guidebook. Interesting this persistent sense of the city as constantly changing…
Next Pulp album, Morning Miss Marple, How’s the Leg…
I really hope someone brings this to Jarvis’s attention because he would surely LOVE it.
Support small publishers! Including the very excellent @longbarrowpress.bsky.social. Lovely to see our exploration of the Nova Scotian landscape travelling around.
The OK Gatsby
Man-Flu in Venice
The Wings of the Pigeon
Confessions of an English Toast-Eater
(I like this game!)
This was a great event in a lovely venue. Home-made cakes and bicycles repaired! (That’s one for any Jennings fans out there.) Thanks to Mary, and Brian, and everyone who came along.
Immediately made me think of Yvonne’s postcard in Under the Volcano: ‘Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me?’
Congrats to Steve and to Longbarrow! Great news.
The pamphlet and CD editions of 'To the End of the Land' by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey: the blue-grey coastal edge of Nova Scotia, with dilapidated wooden lobster traps in the foreground, sea and distant land beyond, and white clouds and blue sky above.
"Those places are so resonant, they speak of the past, but that inevitably makes you think of the future..."
@helentookey.bsky.social and @martinheslop.bsky.social on their new text/audio collaboration 'To the End of the Land'. Full interview here:
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/on-the-air
For those of you in Liverpool, this is in stock at the fantastic @deadinkbooks.bsky.social on Smithdown Rd, along with all kinds of intriguing books you won’t find in other bookshops… so get down there and check it out!
Published today! Text and sound work by me and Martin Heslop, derived from a residency at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Nova Scotia, beautifully produced by Longbarrow Press.
Here’s the text of one of the pieces from To the End of the Land, by Martin Heslop and me, out next week from Longbarrow Press longbarrowpress.com/featured-poem/
An edge of land in Nova Scotia: broken, splintered trees in the foreground; dark earth; a distant, curving line of trees; part-blue, part-clouded skies.
"It’s as though you’re able to stand outside the present and see yourself as a kind of ghost..."
@helentookey.bsky.social and @martinheslop.bsky.social on their new text/audio collaboration 'To the End of the Land'. Full interview here:
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/on-the-air
So pleased to have this work coming out with the fantastic @longbarrowpress.bsky.social!
Really looking forward to this event at @deadinkbooks.bsky.social Smithdown Rd on 24th - Jake will be reading from his fantastic new book and we’ll be chatting about it:
Script lichen! What a fantastic name/descriptor.
Oops, pressed post too soon. Thanks to the AHRC for supporting this project. It started from thinking about Lowry’s stories in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, which refer to the Isle of Man and have an overriding concern for the natural world.
Thanks to
Absolutely love the idea of error gardens.