A 16 year old skateboarder - baseball cap, plaid shirt - takes repeated runs at jumping off an 18 inch concrete step on the concrete plaza. Every time, he falls off, hands fly out behind him as he crashes onto his arse. He gets up, grins, does it over again.
#WritingCommunity
Commendably long and thoughtful piece by Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic arguing that Substack’s @tedgoia ‘s declinism in essays about 21st Art And Culture is over pessimistic. Instinctively, I want it to agree with Ted Gioia, but Kornhaber’s main argument is that artists are being just as creative, but faster, because (essentially) The Internet. Trouble is, that The Internet demands reams of content creation, not thinking, so the actual content created is cosmetic and puerile. There might be new art, but it’s just not very good.
Try new ‘Woombitz’, the perfect BBQ crunchy snack for the menstrual woman. Artisanal and free-from most things, except hormones.
Two twenties women on main street are wandering up to blokes and asking them something… it’s all fun and not sketchy but who knows what it is. One of them takes a photo of the other talking to the bloke (or occasionally woman).
#WritingCommunity
My therapist once pointed out that ‘everyone is not your mother’ - ie don’t respond to everyone like they’re a malign narcissist. Dont let that dynamic dominate everything.
But that’s how the world seems to be reacting to Trump and his fascist minions. I heard a UK politician talk about the increasing price of eggs the other day. Egg prices haven’t increased much in the UK. They were picking up on US issues.
Trump and co consciously
A tiny woman slides past slowly on a huge Harley chopper her hands reaching way above her head to grip the handlebars. It’s way too big for her. Dudes sitting at a pub table on the pavement notice and hold their hands up, mimicking her odd position.
#WritingCommunity
Finished reading: The Survivors by Jane Harper 📚
As ever, quality small town murder mystery, intelligent and grown up.
Finished reading: the company by Robert LIttell 📚
Long, suspense-free fictionalised history of the CIA in novel form. I’m sure the CIA approved it.
I must look like I’m meditating. I’m not. I’m waiting to die.
I sit, foursquare on a bric a brac dining chair behind the empty boho cafe counter, palms on my thighs, waiting for impact.
I’m waiting for the sound of an old school shop doorbell, the kind designed to call staff running from their back room when a customer arrives.
I’m fighting an inchoate, terror-soaked impulse to flee, with the only thing I have: intense concentration. The most I can do is clench my eyes shut, so at least I have the extra few seconds of not knowing the end is a few seconds away. Here I sit, eyes closed. Experiencing my final moments as fully as I can.
I scuttled from the quay down the ship’s gangway, the overhead rigging clattering against the masts and booms in the early summer evening. No-one observed me. The local fisherman were out trawling for herring and cod, or settled into the fug of the village’s inn. I did not want to elicit questions about the antecedents of a clearly affluent man of the cloth skulking on board a schooner flying a unidentifiable flag. It was academic anyway. An hour later, the schooner was edging out to sea through the north Norfolk creeks, and nobody knew a thing. Or so I hoped.
The US media must be incredibly supine for this to be remarkable. That exact tactic is utterly normal in the UK
This cafe is full of older men. Retired. Or lone laptop typers, like me, habitues with a coffee and a scone or a sandwich. Who knows what we’re writing, if anything. Sometimes on a sofa, one of us will doze off, head dipping and the thumb on his phone creaking to a stop in its scrolling, the screen darkening ten seconds later. A few moments later, one of the very Gen Z staff, frequently androgynous (and we know we’re not meant to use that word any more) will cough tactfully. And then again, louder if necessary. It’s quiet here. Safe.
He’s woken by her twitching beside him in the undergrowth, dreaming. Small gasps and whimpers as she squirms and jerks, eyes closed, body tensing and arching in the pitch dark under the black polythene sheet. It crackles as she moves, water dripping off the branches above them. He wants to reach out to muffle her but even twisting his body risks being heard. and he can hear the men smashing through the trees, closing in. She spasms awake, terrified eyes opening, looking straight at him. He shakes his head. Stay quiet. A boot drives down on the polythene covering them.
#microfiction
Two of us were studying music for the exams at the end of high school, and I was the only one also in the school band, private piano lessons, the village brass band, a swing jazz band doing gigs in the evenings. Music, as someone said, was my life. But I wasn’t on the list of the school’s best musicians, I’d just found, left by the school music teacher at the end of last term for his successor. This adult was wrong about me and for once, I wasn’t going to accept their judgement. I was going to prove the adults wrong.
Finished reading: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota 📚
Very English -Yorkshire countryside, botched communication, embarrassed romance, virulent racism.
Finished reading: Hello, Transcriber by Hannah Morrissey 📚
Midwest smalltown shithole noir, feels like no-budget indie film. Enjoyably scuzzy and down at heel.
Finished reading: Torch by lin anderson 📚 Meh.
Trump’s best thought of as a social media platform in himself. He exists to keep people’s attention; that’s his remuneration. more than the money. He has to come up with more and more weird, demanding stuff to keep that attention. The rest is just a means to that end.
The woman in the supermarket queue in front of me is swivelling left to right, eyes panicky wide, combing the gaudy aisles of the supermarket. Wedged into place, she tries to bend light around people cross-currenting through the wide gutter between the cash registers and the rows of shelves to see what she was looking for. At the other end of the cereal aisle, a young girl takes a man’s hand and walks away from her. The woman takes a deep breath and turns back to the till. Job done, she smiles at the cashier over her shopping. ‘How much?’.
Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein 📚
Everybody should read this. It manages to put both the Holocaust and the Stalinist famines in human terms and closer to comprehensible than anything else I’ve read.
Finished reading: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd 📚 More of the reliably cracking mid-20th century Zeligishness, somewhere in the general ballpark of Greene, Deighton and Muriel Spark.
Finished reading: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov 📚
Snarky and charming police procedural where the police are ambivalent and making up the procedure as they go along.
On the opposite pavement, a bloke in a tracksuit has paused, phone in hand, to shout at my compost recycling bin.
Abandoned: Death Under Little Sky by Stig Abell 📚
This is what happens when an arts journalist thinks he’ll knock out a cosey whodunit during lockdown and it turns out he’s never heard a human speak and can’t manufacture a moment’s suspense. Holy fuck it’s awful. Did not finish.