London garden bridge project collapses in acrimony after £37m spent.
And I can't help wanting to say to Boris J that in Ye Bygone Days when people built follies they did so on their own estates and with their own money (though on reflection this was probably ill-gottens from the Triangle Trade and dodgy dealings in India) and didn't ask the nation ( Read more... )

There just aren't that many early modern writers who were gay or transgender.
Larfed liek drayne.
Is there a law that this kind of pontificatery will always contain some egregious error based in ignorance?
Also, thinks canon just happened and is set in stone, immutable.
Was really not sure whether to put Barry icon or Don't Mock. This entry was ( Read more... )

Well, there was quite a bit of re-reading, because of travel stress etc.
What I read
Ebert's Bests (2012), which is a great essay about being a film critic - much of it generalisable to other media - plus his annual and ten-yearly lists of in his opinion the best films - about which I was a bit meh, though might be useful?
HG Wells, Star Begotten: ( Read more... )

This evening to a concert which included Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem (1936), which, besides various Biblical texts and quite a bit of Walt Whitman, includes John Bright's 1855 Angel of Death speech: The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born ( Read more... )

O the nostalgia of finding this passage in a spam email about bathroom remodelling: Favorite /e /ffe680 /hemisphere's /injured /hertz/ portal segno /reidy /costocolic /Number /Schweickart /whjwevpwd /coworker /hour /SN OPEN /iymwovnu /uptqvknu /japstwe /account /Estimates /termina /karvonen /en Har /confirmation /papp /obesity /takes /it's /ska / ( Read more... )

And it's a glorious Spring day outside here in the London.
And as Louis MacNeice's Spring Voices still can't be located online, let's have another poem that complicates the glories of spring:
Edward Thomas, The Glory:
The glory of the beauty of the morning,---
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
( Read more... )

I am sure we have seen what tends to get described as heated in-fighting in the poetic community before - last time they appointed an Oxford Professor of Poetry, and wasn't there some internal wrangle in the Poetry Society?
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka hit back at claims by broadcaster Melvyn Bragg that he was too old and “grand” for the role at ( Read more... )

Five perfect books for men who never read.

Wow Urgent

So Phallic

Such Manly

Very AAAAARRRGH

Books for men who do not read, we consider, should start off with something even simpler than Ernest H's stripped-down prose. Maybe Thomas the Tank Engine, coz of boyz luv traynz. Nursery slopes.

And we note the inclusion of Finnegan's Wake which is surely ( Read more... )

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Don't we all write about love? When men do it, it's a political comment. When women do it, it's just a love story'. I'd suggest that in fact it's when men do it, it is about the deep chords of the human heart, when women do it it's soppy wish-fulfillment, but her formulation works as well.

Photographer Nan Goldin burst on ( Read more... )

(No, really, the choices that appear on the whiteboard at the local Tube station are becoming a running theme and will probably go on running.)

This week we have had something by Siegfried Sassoon, A A Milne, 'Furry Bear', and W N Hodgson, 'Before Action' (a month or so too early?)

If that sequence is not WTF enough, today there is some horrible ( Read more... )