Mood: unsure.

Happy publication day to @nicholasroyle.bsky.social – Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books is available from all good bookstores now! 🥳🎉🥂

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

~Elaine Scarry

[A Breezy Day by Charles Courtney Curran (1887)]

Tuesday .

“Today erōs is often mistaken for or reduced to the sexual. Many Jungian scholars understand erōs to be the desire for connection. Erōs represents creative energy, which combines the spiritual, emotional & physical aspects of sexual energy.”~Alexandra Fidyk

Goodnight.

I’m feeling similarly. Would happily do in person. I spend all day in work staring at screens, but would do online if that means people can do it.

I’m home. Work tomorrow. Staring at the fallen cherry blossom.

Horse ninjas.

OK i need everyone on the radio to stop saying splashdown

Off to the Lake District with my daughter, wife and mother-in-law. Three generations. It’s my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday. The weather looks grim. We have a night in an AirBnB. I think the plan is we watch Race Across the World together. It’s on me to bring the glamour.

You make me chuckle. I appreciate you.

Cover of the July 1962 issue of ‘Fantastic’ magazine, which references the J,G, Ballard story ‘The Singing Statues’ - image shows a close-up of a woman with her eyes closed, her face framed by her long blonde hair. Behind her is one of the singing statues of the title, a large metallic column, curiously ornamented, and with curved struts forming a shape like two metallic wings at the top.

Back to J.G. Ballard’s Vermillions Sands series today & the 1962 story ‘The Singing Statues’. A darkly surreal love story involving the mesmeric effects of ‘sonic sculptures’, offset with moments of playful humour.
A rather wonderful cover here from the tale’s original publication in ‘Fantastic’.

Alison Goldfrapp in my ears.

I’m a sucker for #LastFourWatched #LetterboxdFriday 📽️ Sometimes I Think About Dying was excellent. Daisy Ridley can do anything.

Had a dream where I was being chased, caught, and injected with a hive mind drug, by men with smudged faces. Woke up shouting. Deeply unpleasant feeling.

A cartoon picture of a smoking cat Text: PLEASE DON'T EVER TRADE YOUR AUTHENTICITY FOR APPROVAL. LET PEOPLE DISLIKE YOU

Gentle reminder…

Massaging the shoulders of my distracted self. Loosen up, buddy. None of this matters a jot.

On my own in a screening of Fuze. I’m on holiday. It’s going to be stupid, but I’m hoping it will also be fun. Selfie? Why not. And pizza.

Mostly with others. Need to fashion some alone time.

It was the calm before the—as it turned out—further calm, each calm preceding the next, day after day of relentless, stultifying calm, until we could no longer remember anything but the calm, nor hope that anything would ever exist beyond the calm, the endless, ongoing calm, the final calm.

If you're curious, I say yes. I’m enjoying having more than usual.

Sweet sun and eager insects.

A Swedish poster featuring Lili Damita for Red Heels (1925). Artwork by Eric Rohman.

Whitby. A world I love unto itself.

David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan by Alana O'Herlihy (2024)

A photo of a copy of the 2010 Lund Humphries edition of Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art by Susan L. Aberth.

Night of the 8th. A painting from the book.

The Giantess. A painting from the book.

Syssigy. A painting from the book.

Impossible dream: a fantasy imprint consisting solely of novels inspired by Leonora Carrington's paintings.

I’m reading old notebooks. Time is slippery. Holding on for dear life to a cup of hot tea.

27.06.20. “I‘m always hopping between genres and getting frustrated. When I lose myself in the work, time passes quickly, and time is something I don’t feel I have enough of.”