I was doing a printmaking course at the time and had got quite into his work. I was amazed they did this - it was like having a personal exhibition put on, at about a weeks notice, and the curator was chatty and enthusiastic.
Cambridge-based, work in ELT publishing / ed tech for a university press. Semi-competent rock climber. Half Man Half Biscuit & Cardiacs enjoyer. Occasional writing and translation.
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I was doing a printmaking course at the time and had got quite into his work. I was amazed they did this - it was like having a personal exhibition put on, at about a weeks notice, and the curator was chatty and enthusiastic.
I did this a few years ago and if I recall correctly, they put out about 10 individual prints and a portfolio with about a dozen more ('The Image in Search of Itself'). Online catalogue lists 94 Pasmore works, most of which are prints.
Top work here from the trillion dollar brain.
Top tip: email the Prints & Drawings Room at Tate Britain and request an appointment to see as many of the Victor Pasmore prints they have in the vaults in one go as you can
But did he switch sides to cold empiricism between the BA and the MA, or did they strip him of the MA when he started raving about "The Sacrifice"?
Authors of this 1974 pamphlet have no time whatsoever for any of your unempirical, new age, hippy bullshit
The 'Nine Maidens' standing stones, of which eleven are still present. Diminutive enough perhaps to have inspired that scene in 'This Is Spinal Tap'.
Mounts View Cottages, Madron.
St Ives Gothic
Black Slab, Bosigran, Cornwall. A Colin Kirkus route. Easy but spectacular.
All together now: "But I can put a tennis racket up against my face/And pretend that I am Kendo Nagasaki" Jasmine Paolini performs unexpected HMHB tribute at the US Open.
How do you think they're doing from a moral perspective?
Last 5 gigs: Josienne Clarke (doing Sandy Denny) Adwaith Half Man Half Biscuit (Bethesda) Oyafestival Oslo 2024 (PJ Harvey, Pulp, etc) Half Man Half Biscuit (Coventry) ... should go to more gigs, really
Little Fashy Crowds
Next week: 'How I rethought my views on compulsory chainsaw training' by Charles "Seven Fingers" Amos
Wow. If I found a chicken that could talk, I wouldn't care about the egg colour.
Vincent Yzerbyt too pleased with 'imself
People who warn of "tinderboxes" always reek of petrol.
Kayaking trip. Crow in Exmouth Harbour
Moderate Breakfast Traffic sounds like what you'd get in the Neutral Milk Hotel
Achtung Bono then.
Depends if Half Man Half Biscuit counts in the genre.
Ah, I was picturing... something else.
Um. Is there a typo in this?
Which reminds me of my dad, circa 1983, pointing out Tony Benn nearly getting rolled over by his own car in the car park of an M1 service station after he'd forgotten to put the handbrake on. "That's Wedgie!" he said, confusingly
Broad definition of 'celebrity', but I once chased after the hatchback of reclusive avant-garde poet JH Prynne in order to tell him that his exhaust pipe was hanging off
"I should have just got a job on the bins / The pay's better and I'd know some hard blokes"
Now look online to find out if Iain Sinclair really is Clive Sinclair's brother
Clive and Iain Sinclair, eccentric siblings solving mysteries in 1980s London. Clive cruises in his futuristic C5, crunching the data on 16K of RAM, while Iain tramps the streets, making lateral connections through his psycho-geographical instinct. Commission it now!
The Bayeux Tapestry is, by miles, the most breathtaking work of art I have ever seen (even if it was created as invasion propaganda). Pictures just don't prepare you for the three-dimensional reality of the thing. www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...
Tragic consequences for the guy who didn't spot the ambiguity of "make a turkey melt" when he asked AI to set the oven
Ah sorry I didn't realise it was o.o.p. It's a fantastic little book.
If you want an antidote to Bad Nature Writing, Richard Smyth's own 'An Indifference of Birds' is great, mainly because it's about birds and not about Richard Smyth having big feelings while looking at birds.
Vindicated in my wariness of nature-based memoirs with woodcuts on the cover. Wrong 'uns, the lot of them. Shady as their bosky paths
What is the charge? Walking a path? A succulent salt path?
Osip Mandelstam (my translation, in 'Unknown Soldier' Equipage 2019). #smallpoemsunday @tomsnarsky.bsky.social
The shadow of the zone of pleasure Floated on discarded things; Where we smelt, with some displeasure The mouldy mattress and the bins.
A heartwarming picture, but that was in the 1960s, when he was trying to make a comeback
1) asks AI to set oven hot enough to melt a turkey 2) sets fire to house
Savage Gardens? Supported Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1983
Wow, did they train Google AI on that confidently delivered horseshit?
Wasn't there a Professor of Modern Literature a few years ago, who similarly answered his phone on Bloomsday, was asked about the book, and gave a salty, know-it-all quote, which inadvertently revealed that he hadn't read it?
Not the worst, but Pet Shop Boys "My heart starts missing a beat / Oh oh every time" has always irked me. Either your heart misses a beat, or it starts missing beats.
the kind of songwriting up with which we will not put up with
"Run for Your Life" by the Beatles is horrifying on several levels
Have you ever heard Van Morrison's deliberately terrible contractual obligation songs for Bang Records? For example: "I can see by the look on your face That you've got ring worm I'm very sorry but I have to tell you that You've got ring worm"
Had to look up five different things to understand it, but "Came astride snorting destriers / North End ket wig lids in Montirex" has to be couplet of the decade #hmhb #allasimovandnofreshair
Allotments. Matalan. Lonely ventriloquists. Medieval war-horses. Legoland on acid. Rawlplugs. Mortality. Telepathic crime-fighting hens. All life is here. #hmhb
IT'S ARRIVED
Syd Barrett is probably the closest thing in Cambridge - mainly due to the mythology that grew up around the recluse in later life.
Terrible journalistic ethics too - to delete the explanatory clause, but let the lies stand
The Easter Island profile of Pen-y-Holt Stack
The speed with which a (problematic) judgement that "some groups are allowed to be trans-exclusive in some circumstances" has metastasised into an interpretation that "all groups must be trans-exclusive in all circumstances" is frankly horrifying.
It's a universal truth. My wife was at primary school in Leningrad in the early 1980s, and she also knew one kid with a very powerful magnet.
another trip to the horse dictatorship of Newmarket
Oh that's a great book. Second line of 'Dickie Davies Eyes' notwithstanding.
"Your optimism strikes me like junk mail addressed to the dead"
spent a couple of hours today in Newmarket, where everything is made of horse
don't want to alarm you Brendan, but someone has glued a bit of your hair to the upper floor of the building on the left
Climbing at Giltar Point, Pembrokeshire last Friday
Pen-y-Holt Bay in Range West, Pembrokeshire last Sunday.
Unforgivable.
Boundless / Unbound say on their website they are "a place where brave voices thrive", which is a funny way to spell starve
Ringing the doorbell would kill the burglary industry
No he's not. He's the drummer in Pink Floyd.
It's a little known fact that Tarkovsky filmed 'Stalker' not far from Rotherham.
This is a handy version which strips out the AI and ads: udm14.com
I first became aware of elections as a child in 1979 when I asked my dad about the party signs in people's gardens. For some time after, I thought you "voted" by sticking a sign up in your garden, and someone drove round and counted them all.
"In Latin, Peter." "ego... non ... lictus"
I'm hearing he's a catholic, Chris
The Cambridge Disinformation Summit took place in Oxford last week
He was just focus-grouping the new aggressive electoral strategy in a pub car park
@longbarrowpress.bsky.social but in case you missed it, they tried Hard Labour a few weeks ago
Come and Have a Go if You Think You're Hard Enough Labour
I fear they're going to learn all the wrong lessons and pivot even further right by rebranding as Forced Labour or something
Also, if you want to sustain or revive the economies of post-industrial cities, expanding universities is maybe the only way UK governments have actually managed to do that since the 1980s
Ray of sunlight in a world gone mad
was it for this the clay grew tall
Switch on Newsnight. Think Tank Guy questions whether "Keir Starmer can straddle two horses". Switch off Newsnight.
Are you familiar with udm=14? It's Google with all the AI and ads stripped out. It finds that book at the top of the search results. udm14.com
no
Top pitch of Sabre Cut, Dinas Cromlech.
Llanberis Pass.
Morgan McSweeney, Morgan McSweeney,... youtu.be/PNqcas3_-Dw?...
"I didn't see you at camouflage training this morning, Corporal" "Thank you, sir"
Public service announcement: remember when Google was a search engine which would find reliable information at the top of the page? Like this? udm14.com
When I was about 12, I thought (for possibly several months) that Sade was singing about a "School Operetta"
More HMHB & Glyderau action from the weekend.
... and Saturday morning ("amongst the boulders strewn between Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr...") #HMHB
Friday night (HMHB at Neuadd Ogwen, Bethesda)
Perhaps, but less so than "trade" publishing I think.
Look at academic, or educational, publishers for editorial roles?
Marine Le Penitentiary.
What's an ig? The most basic kind of igloo, lacking rudimentary bathroom facilities?
today’s wtaf moment www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...
(I mean it affectionately! Equipage has been dishing out brilliant poetry for 30 years)
One night near Catania in 1999, I saw a shadowy figure walk down a rocky headland with a metal case, chain it to a concrete jetty, and drop it into the sea. I assumed this was some shady Cosa Nostra smuggling activity at the time. I now realise it was a Cambridge small poetry press launching a book
