Read: Seascraper by Benjamin Wood ★★★★★ 📚
Little waves are shouldering the cart’s tyres, spitting upwards at his face. The sea is patterned by the rain like honeycomb. He’s trying to make the best of it, but he can tell the horse is getting more reluctant.
A wonderful novella. A few days in the life of a young horse & cart shrimper working on a misty flat coast. Beautiful slow description of the daily grind in the cold & wet. The story unfolds slowly into drama, dreams & music.
Read: Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively ★★★★ 📚
There is a vogue for ‘life writing’ at the moment, both for publication and as private endeavours. I am all for it, partly because I gobble up other people’s lives, as a reader, but also because it seems to me a productive personal exercise – to stand aside and have a look at your story and try, not to make sense of it, which may be too taxing, but to trace the narrative thread, to look at the roads not taken, to see where you began and where you have got to.
Lovely memoir and reflections on memory, books & old age. The author is continually curious across history, objects, people…
In reply to #tdc5061 #ds106 We have not got a Pi Sky.
John Johnston has a Raspberry Pi collecting skies for him. Not all of us have that luxury but we can all take a Pi Sky for inspiration. Take a photo of your sky today. Extra internet points for a gif, of course!
My Pi is no longer taking photo every 15 minutes, but I still love how the sky here changes. This photo combines two taken 6 minutes apart:
Read: No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes ★★★ 📚
What do you mean, you didn't see me there? Well, of course you didn't. It's not a trick, it's grammar. Greek uses the masculine and the feminine, but it prefers the masculine (I know). So no matter how many girls were in a room (just one, in this instance), if boys were there too, the word 'children' takes the masculine ending. And the girls disappear. But yes, in case it's unclear, Medea and Jason had three children, two sons and then a daughter. I was a baby when Jason left my mother; Medea fled Corinth holding me in her arms.
Retelling of the Medusa myth, lots of points of view, female, that are only hinted at. The first half is fragmented but it really picks up when Medusa takes over the narrative. Jason doesn't get much respect.
In reply to #tdc5054 #ds106 Dial A What?.
The Dial-A-Poem project by Giorno Poetry Systems (from the brain of artist/poet John Giorno) is old school connective tech. You dial the number (1-917-994-8949) and you get a poem read to you. Cool, right? (And it works! I just listened to a poem read to me via US phone service)
What else might work for the Dial-A-? concept?
Make your pitch.
Stole an idea from @dogtrax
Kilpatrick braes, yesterday, short loop. Low clouds, some drizzle and a few bright spells. Quite warm. Paths like burns after yesterday’s heavy rain. On the first field a buzzard hunting. A couple of ravens appeared & moved it off. After the deer fence, under the trees, I saw them again, or another trio. Again the ravens chased the buzzard off. I could hear them kronk and also making an almost electronic 2 note call I’ve not heard before.
#SilentSunday
Walk to greenside in the autumn rain yesterday. Low cloud & mostly very dull, made the few yellow leaves and other colours pop a bit.
Read: And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Burgh ★★★★ 📚
Working class boy is dazzled by Cambridge & his magician, occultist “friend”. Page turner, dark academia.
Some people say we’re our true selves when we think nobody is watching. But how do we know our own identities without others’ confirming gaze? If, like the tree falling in the proverbial wood, nobody is around to hear us, is our story a story at all? And when were different things to different people, what then?
Read Americana by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ★★★★ 📚
Love story that investigates class, race, sexism & history in Africa, USA & Britain
Obinze saw himself through Vincent’s eyes: a university staff child who grew up eating butter and now needed his help.
