Tim Robinson ponders the mysterious and alluring prospect of making a 360 degree navigational error as one stravaigs around the Burren.
Cairngorm-regarder. Bairn-herder.
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Tim Robinson ponders the mysterious and alluring prospect of making a 360 degree navigational error as one stravaigs around the Burren.
If I had a superpower I would quite like to be the ability to sigh with an exact replica of the descending ninth motif in the opening movement of Mahler 9.
Tim Robinson strikes a lyrical note in a letter from Malaysia, while on national service.
Slugging happy-hour Love One Another or Die cocktails at the Auden karaoke bar on 52nd street.
(For ‘hat’ read ‘what’).
Random lurid theories as to hat killed Wordsworth’s creativity. The effort of suppressed incestuous passion, forsooth!
Towards autumn.
I will confess to a juvenile snigger at this passage in Hazlitt.
The nobility should keep authors the way they previously kept fools, says Hazlitt, the decline of which practice is a sure sign of ‘social degeneracy!’
Up, up and away with Jessica the cat (15), who disdains the stairs.
In the Winter Gardens.
I sense so. He died in 1968, possibly of exposure to Muriel Spark?
‘Hi, just firing over some quick queries’, wrote no editor ever who valued their life, to Muriel Spark.
Aberdeen from above.
Few pleasures compare to a pristine, possibly never-read Penguin, its hour come round at last.
Irish poet Niall Montgomery pegged to play Roger Sterling in Mad Men reboot.
Archie Markham discovers the limits of Irish-Caribbean solidarity on a trip to Dublin.
Sad to hear Terence Stamp has died.
Interesting to learn that in Rastafari dread-talk, 'me', 'you' and 'we' are replaced with 'I' as a way of asserting the oneness of all being. www.reonline.org.uk/knowledge/ra...
Something I think about a lot is the Szymborska prose poem about Job and how that figure goes along with God’s plans for him and is patently tired of the whole spectacle even when everything is being restored to him, but is too polite to say so because ‘he did not want to interrupt a masterpiece’.
Birth by devil-assisted tennis ball in Smollett’s Roderick Random.
I was at a child’s birthday party today where the magician stood on a child’s toe, Ouch, said the child. In time you’ll come to forget it, replied the magician.
Neeps and tatties (Niepce and Tatis).
What Scottish meal is this?
Lang-legged loon. Seven miles on a bicycle.
At the very least get a facebook page and shout out ceaselessly how exciting it’s all been to waste and pine and die and rot. 3/3
The fact you can’t is all your fault for being dead. Win a prize, headline a festival why don’t you, not just lie there dumb instead. 2/3
READINGESQUE Peter Reading thou shouldst be living at this hour, to feast grim-greedy on the gallimaufry of our follies now in flower. 1/3
It’s the feast of the Assumption, title of Beckett’s first published story and likely best-before date of the narrator in Malone Dies.
Is this the greatest poetic ‘ah’.
Many thanks John, greatly appreciated.
Help! Can someone please direct me to the angry response Basil Bunting sent to someone who asked for him a statement about poetry and politics, or poetry and the Vietnam war, or whatever it was. No thanks!, was the gist of it. But can't find anywhere. Thx
This topic reminds me of the experience of a colleague who wrote to a well-known (not strangely neglected) poet-editor proposing a new edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. No, came the answer, because 'posterity has spoken'.
Geoffrey Hill on the 'demeaning charity' of rehabilitating 'strangely neglected' authors. I wonder if many people, or even anyone thinks like this anymore.
James Schuyler, who gave his first poetry reading at the age of sixty-five.
Some vers de circonstance by Peter Reading.
History does not record.
Has anyone (ever) read Robert Southey's prequel to Paul Muldoon's Madoc? Any good? It's 350 pages long.
When I was a lad my piano teacher, and a fortiori I too, pronounced the word acciaccatura 'ackyackachoora'.
At the height of his pantisocratic mania in the 1790s, Coleridge walked, in Southey’s company, ‘on a desperate hot summerday, from Bath to Bristol, with a goose, 2 vols of Baxter On the Immortality of the Soul, and the giblets, in my hand.’
Paul Muldoon discovers a sure-fire way to kill a conversation with WB Yeats stone dead.
Two out of Tom Pickard’s splendid new chapbook, A Walk in Winter (Foolscap Poetry, 2025). Impeccably presented, sound-tensile pieces (see, say: “pecked in limestone / swathed in lichen”). Includes, too, a selection out of an expanded version of Fiends Fell, forthcoming from Flood Editions.
Excellent. Just to note btw that the sonnet is from Collected Poems.
Fine Shakespearean sonnet by Edwin Muir.
Has Scottish poetry ever forgiven Edwin Muir for writing this book?
Boy in a field.
'I have never read poetry that irritated me more than yours', TS Eliot wrote to one Arthur Sale. That's a no then. www.spectator.co.uk/article/ive-...
He also features honourably in the roll-call of 'words that don't exist but should' with 'wrongous', which always strikes me as a good name for an Orcadian cousin of Fungus the Bogeyman's.
Edwin Muir is among the select band of modern poets more likely to consult an annalist than an analyst.
Morven is Coneface. Beckett looks on uncertainly.
I wonder if the notes to The Poems of Seamus Heaney will tactfully point out the common small mistake here (in ‘The Loose Box’): Michael Collins died at Béal na Blá, meaning ‘mouth of the pastureland’, not ‘mouth of the flowers’.
Comma butterfly in the back garden.
‘Reboantic’, meaning ‘reverberant’. From Allen Mandelbaum’s Dante.
Action shot of Jessica the cat jumping up to come in the bedroom window.
Portrait of a Scottish summer.
At one point Lynette Roberts' address was 'The Caravan, the graveyard, Laugharne'. She also opened an art gallery underground (not in the graveyard).
Listing up on Amazon now for Tom Paulin's Namanlagh.
Ye gods!
The Lord’s Prayer in ‘Formosan’ by George Psalmanazar, a celebrated eighteenth-century literary impostor and friend of Dr Johnson.
A personal favourite to play among Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues. Among the most aria-like of the preludes. And then that Neapolitan sixth on the first-inversion G major chord towards the end. Sublime.
A very Curb Your Enthusiasm-resembling plotline from The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Richard Lewis wants a favour from Larry and has written two versions of a speech he has to give at an award ceremony. ‘If you don’t do me that favour I’ll read the version calling you an asshole’. But Larry says…
I knitted some toy soldiers from a yarn of this material but they ended up worsted in battle.
Early-season mushroom hunting in Aquhythie.
Harold Bloom was much given to hyperbole but the critical comparison here, in Saramago's favour, may be an OTT moment even by his standards.
Threadbare butterfly.
Delivering the post to Wyndham Lewis (in the slot?).
As I was, Montserrat, 2003.
www.the-tls.com/lives/autobi... Daniel Karlin stops reading for a year, a morbid experiment.
Coating something means adding a coat, but skinning something means taking one off: why is that?
Picked up in Castle Fraser. McDiarmid was a precursor of mine at the university of Aberdeen and, I gather, was Edna Longley’s uncle.
George Jamesone’s characterful portrait of Red John Forbes of Craigievar.
Camille Ralphs prepares for her splendid reading today amid the Scottish baronial splendour of Craigievar Castle.
Hazlitt records his utter horror somewhere at witnessing Wordsworth use a buttery knife as a bookmark.
Inspecting our escort petrels on our ferry-deck patrols.
Poem from her recent Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke, the newly-appointed Ireland chair of poetry.
Is this the funniest Scottish novel?
How on earth did this get left out of The Whitsun Weddings. Among his finest things.
The sylvan theatre at Killruddery in Bray, as featured in Walter Scott’s St Ronan’s Well. The house’s curvilinear gables are also superb, Tudor revival at its best.
Not even a lingering folk memory of Dickensian 'file and wittles', tsk.
Needless to say I privately auto-autocorrected.
Opium poppy of all things on Great Sugarloaf.
Do Irishmen called FX still, as in my youth, pronounce their middle name in four syllables (‘ex-aviour’)?
Off up this yoke.
Found this leaf.
A film compendium of poets from Rachael Boast's Versus Versus. Donside Tarkovsky that I am, I contribute a short traipse through my local Paradise Wood. vimeo.com/1102502312?f...
Idea for a Wittgenstein-themed cafe in Redcross, Co. Wicklow, called Everything that is the cake.
Iconography of the Irish rural interior, near Shillelagh.
Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow.
Seaside shenanigans.
Might this novel be about Drinagh in the county Wexford, asks my mother.
Hugo, Hugo Ekitike, he’s a football palindrome, he goes one way then the other before coolly slotting home.
Does anyone still pronounce Thucydides Thyucky-die-deez.
Every morning until the early 20th century a cannon at Culzean Castle was fired at the sea. Cannonballs that washed up with the tide were retrieved and reused.
Glasgow.
‘Daddy, I made a walnut scone.’ ‘Mm, lovely! I notice it only has one walnut.’ ‘That’s because I don’t like walnuts.’
Superb historical novel, quite in the Leopard and Memoirs of Hadrian class.
Ted pie.
Only getting round to reading this now, to my embarrassment. Powerful insight into the difficult life my grandmother would have experienced as a ‘Lundy’ bride in 1940s Belfast.
I notice Satie dedicates this piece to himself.
In the Den Wood, near Haddo.
