Online tonight from one of the great small(ish) poetry publishers, getting stronger and stronger after 18 years.

The rooms are divided into a Pottery Room/Mould Making and Wet Slip Casting Room, a (skinny) Laboratory, an Old Tool Room, a Mill Room, a Wet Press Room, a Turning Room, a Glazing Room, a Drying Room, a Fuel Storage Area and a Cleaning Room.

Workplace

Monikers in the comments section below this Lunch showing the public sphere to be well and alive:

Stefan Zweig, sleepy gambler, the council estate, Hagrid 67, one armed bandit, The Invisible Hand, pol roger, American Person, Emergency Nurse, covertaction, Bob the Builder, Quiet-Resilience, Ennui …

Communing with beauty just outside of Dunkeld.

#Scotland

Yes indeed. He often translated from German for me when I edited Edinburgh review in the 1980s. There’s a fine obituary piece by Robert Lumley in the Guardian.

Great translator.
Great guy.
Sad loss.

He was on holiday in Tunisia when his publisher gave him the catastrophic news: "In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize". He went into hiding in the desert.

So much fun talking to @ivygrimes.bsky.social about food, voices, and spiders. Thank you for having me 🫶🌠 And definitely read Ivy's "The Cellar Below the Cellar", which is twisting and prodding my mind around family, community lore, and faith, like nothing else 🖤

Today’s wander in town. Abandoned chair with pigeon, Goodge Place, central London.

#abandonedchair #pigeon #london #goodgeplace #londonpigeons #centrallondon #urbanwanders

We were just given a tour of the Klementinum Library in Prague. I can’t think of a more stunning example of the romance of knowledge. Also saw some of Tycho Brahe’s astronomical books with his scribbles and corrections in the margin. The birth of modern science :-) Prof Brian Cox

Listening to Asha Bhosle and Cornershop’s beautiful tribute ‘Brimful of Asha’ today - the Cornershop song is such a great celebration of multi culturalism. We don’t hear it enough these days but cultural diversity is brilliant, beautiful, hopeful, wonderful, generative & inspiring actually.

If it's ever published I'll send you a copy. I envy you the way you write just what you want to and like it when it's finished. I can never seem to get anything just right. Nevertheless, I think the idea of a man being dead all the time is pretty new. When you are writing about the world of the dead – and the damned – where none of the rules and laws (not even the Law of Gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks.

Laughter in the dark: Flann O’Brien, died on the 1st of April 1966. (Letter to William Saroyan about The Third Policeman)

Submissions for the 2026 Barbellion Prize are open!

The Barbellion Prize celebrates & promotes writing that represents the experience of chronic illness & disability.

Subs open 2nd April-1st September, 2026.

Judges: Penny Pepper, Dr David Bolt & Letty McHugh.

Full details: barbellionprize.org

And Virginia Woolf could be pretty brutal too - this from the first page proofs of To The Lighthouse:

Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog, like her poetry, deserves more attention. She began it at 81, inspired by José Saramago, who wrote his at 85 & 86. She wrote this in response to a questionnaire sent on the 60th anniversary of the graduation of her Radcliffe/Harvard class of 1951:

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

bell hooks

www.theguardian.com/books/2021/d...

This is the beating heart of a community of more than 200 artists who, each in turn, help transform into pictures, shapes and words, all the pleasure and distress of living and working in one of the world‘s great cities.

I never thought I would have the same work gripes as an astronaut but here we are!

Hammonasset Beach, Connecticut. Some very direct signage beyond the driftwood.

#food #connecticut #driftwood #seaside

I’ve just typed Bluesky into my notes and it has autocorrected to blessedly.

Gentlemen of the West. Cover is a line drawing of two men before a townscape, by Alasdair Gray

Like Birds in the Wilderness. Cover is blue with the centre showing a cartoon-like painting by Richard Adams of a man clinging to a cliff while gulls attack him, with a woman on the clifftop and sea spray against the rocks in the ocean

A Working Mother. Cover is a painting by Alasdair Gray of a woman and man sitting beside one another, each with a drink, and looking pretty fed up. He has a cigarette in his hand and the smoke rises in a line, separating him from the woman

Bad Attitudes. Terrible cover showing a blurry photograph (Credited to Stone) of a black wall and a set of grey steps rising to the side of it, with green colours on the walls suggesting mould or mildew

And the original hardbacks. (I can't find my copy of Willie, so here's Owens's final novel, Bad Attitudes, instead. It's reissued in Sep.)

Gentlemen of the West (Polygon, 1984)
Like Birds in the Wilderness (Fourth Estate, 1987)
A Working Mother (Bloomsbury, 1994)
Bad Attitudes (Bloomsbury, 2003)

Alas, Agnes Owens never had a Paris Review interview. However, this one comes pretty close.

journals.openedition.org/etudesecossa...

RIP Glen Baxter

This from Comics Journal: ‘man wearing a trench coat leans against a tall building. New York cop walked by, tapping his billy club “Hey waddya think you’re doing, holding the building up? Scram!”
The figure immediately obeys and the building falls down. My hero was Harpo”

A photograph of a page from an 1824 diary. A small boy, still on frocks stands on a north-east beach. His left hand is in front of him, the right trails a stick or piece of string. A ship sails behind him.

Been using a couple of days leave to do some research for the museum I volunteer in. The diarist I was reading this morning was besotted with their children and drew this gorgeous picture of their son.

RIP Alexander Kluge
writer, filmmaker, collager

“I’m a patriot of books because books are very patient”

Talking here with Ben Lerner @parisreview.bsky.social

tinyurl.com/3h6vf52v

An image from the World Book Day book, LOKI: TALES OF A BAD GOD showing Loki asking his fake dad Heimdall (who is very beardy), "Please may I have some money to buy food?" Beside heimdall sits another dark haired but clean shaven adult who bears a certain resemblance to a certain demon, sitting next to another, blond, adult who may or may not run a second hand book shop while battling the apocalypse. The demonic adult has a coffee cup. Are there six shots of espresso in there? No one can say. The blond adult has his hand nearly touching the dark haired demon adult. Oh and the demon adult cannot sit. His legs are all over the place. Bad sitting, terrible.

His boyfriend might also look familiar

Was sent an old print interview I did with Frederick Wiseman, and this opener (which coulda gone either way), yielded some nice lil zings…

It’s not every day that you get the mythic birds Simurgh of Persia and Anzû of Sumeria in song lyrics on a hat…

And this too from the very same source

substack.com/@hanaleegold...

UK promises procurement shift after Palantir deals : Government looks for sovereign tech as NHS deal nears break clause

There is a real chance to choose something better for the NHS and drop Palantir. @foxglovelegal.bsky.social have campaigned tirelessly on this since 2020 - follow them for the latest. We can win this one. www.theregister.com/2026/03/20/u...