Big news - my mum has seen The Odyssey. "It's very nearly very good."
🎧 Listen to Adrian Duncan on The Library of Lazy Thinking podcast 🎧 The author of the upcoming #AThoughtWithoutCollision talks Jo Lloyd's collection, 'The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies' and how these stories relate to his own work. Listen here: lazythinking.substack.com/p/adrian-dun...
Adrian Duncan on The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies by Jo Lloyd
Writer and artist Adrian Duncan shares his thoughts on The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies by Jo Lloyd
lazythinking.substack.com
Putting off starting the final volume of Proust because I don't want it to be over, also because then I might have to actually read Infinite Jest
How have I read *five* of the Booker longlist?? Unacceptable. Hate myself. Also the fourteenth book on the longlist, Dooneen, will win
Raffle at the senior centre. A bottle of Pimm's was announced as one of the prizes and everyone booed
[Annette Bening in American Beauty "I will sell this house today" voice] Dooneen will be on the Booker longlist tomorrow
Finalising my trip to Edinburgh and fondly remembering all the terrible Edinburgh shows I have seen. Once I ended up in the front row, and the solo performer did a big serious stare directly into my face and I laughed aloud, into mEaNiNgFuL siLeNcE. Then: blackout. It was the end of the show.
it is 2066. roving bands of brits pin scraps of the bayeux tapestry to their rags as they traverse the blighted wasteland. musk’s head in a jar rules the badlands, the crystal tower of number 10 north crumbling in the distance. lisa nandy is still culture secretary
Is the 50-something man in a Siouxsie Sioux T-shirt and Birkenstocks dating the much younger woman with the stick'n'poke tattoos, or is she his London-raised, equally hipster daughter? You literally NEVER know the story in a Peckham coffee shop
In 24 hours EXACTLY I will be unemployed and it's already making me a more appealing person
Swithun@swithuncooper.bsky.social · 3w agoTeaching finishes tomorrow at 5pm, after a class trip to the Soho Theatre, and I will be downing 2 espresso martinis and going drunk shopping in Fopp and Foyles immediately after
Teaching finishes tomorrow at 5pm, after a class trip to the Soho Theatre, and I will be downing 2 espresso martinis and going drunk shopping in Fopp and Foyles immediately after
This led me to look this guy up and he's 48. FORTY EIGHT! That's nothing! Gay men older than you go clubbing in mesh vests! Stop going to bed at 4pm and comparing erections with your son whose blood you inject, or whatever it is you do, and just LIVE! Then maybe you'll be okay with dying someday.
weeder@weeder.bsky.social · 3w agoWhen a narcissist has been a huge asshole and one person tells them:
Why am I always at work, why is it never my turn to lie on the sofa drinking sweet tea and reading Eudora Welty
I think much British schooling functions, tacitly, through bullying. I had several teachers who picked a kid to victimise each year, to scare the rest of us as a form of class control. Often that kid was already marked as "different", & it gave silent permission for other kids to bully them in turn.
Professor Peter Matthews@urbaneprofessor.bsky.social · 3w agoThese sorts of stories turn me into a right reactionary - why aren't some of these kids being charged with assault?! I suspect it's because I was bullied so badly so I empathise with the victims www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
How does Nigella make having a drink and a bag of crisps during a shoddy football match sound like she's having the time of her life?! My mouth actually watered. We have, as ever, no choice but to stan
Nigella Lawson@nigella.bsky.social · 4w agoI’ve had the iciest of martinis and a couple of packets of salt and vinegar hula hoops to bolster me for the second half. I just hope it’s enough.
If I could travel in time I would use it only once, to go to San Francisco in 1979 and brush past Robert Glück in a sauna one midweek afternoon
New York Review Books@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social · last mo."I want the reader to feel implicated in my books like the audience of a performance artist—the performer takes a risk by making themself naked in some fashion, but there can be no risk and no performance without a complicit audience." —Bob Glück interview in @zyzzyvamag.bsky.social
Repurposed this class for the summer school today and it went down like a lead balloon 🙃
Swithun@swithuncooper.bsky.social · 9mo agoBack on the train, bébé! It's ANNE UBERSFELD week. I love this essay, it combines the two things students love: deep reliance on a since-discredited psychologist, and untranslatable sanskrit.
I have a story in Radio 4's new Once Upon a Time series - a week of reimagined fairytales in the Book at Bedtime slot Lineup includes Katherine Rundell, Ben Okri, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, and David Almond (I KNOW!!!) My story "Kakapos" is on 30 June and then on catchup www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
BBC Radio 4 - Once Upon a Time..., Kakapos by Jo Lloyd
In Jo Lloyd’s story, very ordinary Muriel meets Rip Van Winkle in the below world.
bbc.co.uk
It is, in my opinion, not a B-52s concert until I have been danced into by a stranger who is joyfully apologetic about it, and it happened twice tonight. Fantastic night 🫠💖
Really enjoyed the rural queer lives exhibition - but why nothing on Bernd, the patron saint of gay rural Germans, from 'Taxi Zum Klo'?
Swithun@swithuncooper.bsky.social · last mo.The Schwules Museum has exhibitions on Susan Sontag, rural LGBTQ+ lives, and queerness and Christianity. Because they knew I was coming, presumably?
The Schwules Museum has exhibitions on Susan Sontag, rural LGBTQ+ lives, and queerness and Christianity. Because they knew I was coming, presumably?
Doing a really good job of not buying too many new books - only five so far today!
I'm in Berlin - a city I think is okay, but which hates me, presumably for not loving it. Haven't even left the airport and already it's given me lip
Thrilled to be (very briefly) in Zurich, and most importantly to look at a map and learn where in Switzerland Zurich actually is
Don't know what I was expecting of Proust by volume 6, but it wasn't "then I asked a friend of my dead queer ex-girlfriend if I could watch her fuck a woman, so I could understand their inner lives better, and strangely she said no"
Extreme sugar high from breakfast of chocolate almond croissant, fizzing like a spinning top made of Tangfastics but trapped on the train, send help