Woke to loud, mechanical screeches — imagine the angry, metallic buzz of a nest of alien hornets. 400 metres along the dock, small starfighter-like, F1 hydroplane racers have been hoisted from trailers into the sea. A score of uniformed crews tend to them as their engines are ignited and revved.

"Democrats are getting it wrong again." Tina Brown's caustic, cautionary take on Trump and the looming mid-terms: not waning, winning. [sigh] tinabrown.substack.com/p/trumps-swe...

"When I see my name etched in marble or granite, I remember the stories told by my family of my uncle’s closed-casket funeral: a box of body parts & my grandmother clawing at the lid. When I die, I want to be anonymous, with no memorials…."—from "Blood Drive" minorliteratures.com/2024/02/07/b...

I long for you, as one Whose dhow in summer winds Is blown adrift and lost, Longs for land, and finds — A grey and empty sea. * Like a tall tree which, fallen was set alight, I am ashes. -Somali poem (from Kenneth Rexroth’s The Poetry of Pre-Literate Peoples, ca. 1975)

Japanese sci-fi: two robots in space, yearning American sci-fi: man gets the author's beliefs on polygamy confirmed by the aliens of ramalama IV french sci-fi: two horny bounty hunters visit the Galaxy of Breasts British sci-fi: nuclear war. Everyone dead. America's fault

Yes, and only nine years in my case.

#RIP one of the indisputable greats of jazz, Sonny Rollins, aged 95.

A 1908 map (published by l'Istituto Geografico Militare) of the volcano, Vesuvius, as it rises above the Bay of Naples, Italy. It describes, among other details, the historic tracks of lava flow.

If you can spare a couple of bucks, the wonderful writer @ccohanlon.bsky.social and his wife Given could really use the help. gofund.me/93c724837

After a few days of low-calorie rations, no fruit, no veg, an unexpected windfall allowed Given to shop for fresh groceries today and prepare a 'proper' lunch. Our metabolisms were unprepared — we've spent the afternoon laid out on our bunks, in 'food comas'. Photo by Finn O'Hanlon.

Ditto.

The marina pontoons are empty. All the day-sailers, over-engined RIBs, charter yachts, sports fishermen, and service vessels are outside the breakwater, an improvised flotilla of viewing platforms for the start of the America's Cup prelims and the alien-insect-like AC40s, foiling at 30+ knots.

Late night reading: Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (2011) by Charlotte Gill, about the hard-scrabble labour of itinerant commercial tree-planters in the Pacific Northwest, with deep dives into the natural history and ecology of the trees themselves.

from the road / returning again from Kochi

At night, the sea now absent, the trace remains. In a small Renoir reproduction on the wall, material, a gesture fixed in color; on film, temporal, each frame a record of a moment that is no longer; on the page, mnemonic, language remembering what time has eroded.

"We feel less confined attaching our abyss to that of someone else, rediscovering the community of the demolished, finally breaking from our own isolation... If God exists, he can only be made up of those friends, living or dead, who also have known the abyss." @autreauxp.bsky.social

Watchman, Cinecittà, Rome, 1956. Photo by William Klein.

A morning lost in 'Irwin Klein and the New Settlers' by Bernard Klein (2016) and the late Irwin Klein's haunting b&w photographs of 'hippy' communities and homesteads in New Mexico between 1967 and 1971.

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” – William Gibson

Wake to clear skies and stillness...but wait, what are all these Prada-adjacent Luna Rossa flags along our pontoon? Oh, right. The bloated, billionaire-funded boat races — a.k.a. the Preliminary Regatta of the Louis Vuitton 38th America's Cup — kick off in Cagliari today. [sigh]

Whitey America, you need help. Not everything you do needs to always be the absolutely most racist thing you can think of. I don’t even want to hear from you again until after you’ve started therapy.

I just signed a petition to Stop Seismic Blasting from Australian Marine Parks . Sign here: www.saveourmarinelife.org.au/actions/stop...

"...outbreaks like this expose something fundamental about how interconnected human beings really are. A virus emerging in a remote forest region can eventually become a regional or global concern." – Peter Bach (@lyst.bsky.social)

pasolini forever

An uncomfortable day aboard: a strong mistral, gusting Force 7 at times, has driven a short, steep chop into our corner of the harbour. Wrack is hobby-horsing between her lines, snatching at them violently. Moving around the boat, inside or out, is impossible and even lying down is a challenge.

retired ego, wandering on the mountain no more conquests, no longer an enemy to anyone ego retired, wandering -Agnes Martin

Friends, last tickets for my #autofiction #masterclasses @londonlitlab.bsky.social beginning 21/05. Join us for writing 'the bad genre', reading Ernaux, Dante, Knausgaard & more, uncovering auto-fiction, breaking rules, thinking about POV, ethics, & resistance. www.londonlitlab.co.uk/course/autof...

'Championing'? More like discouraging any inclination towards it (my default position). As for Kafka's 'frozen sea within', all one can ever do is lend a friend a pick-axe.

A pleasant morning with Leo, who flew from Verona to Cagliari to inspect Wrack, before considering whether to become her new custodian. He arrived just as a strong mistral was setting in, which made boarding the boat something of an adventure.

Having fallen overboard from Wrack in a Cagliari marina few weeks ago — ending up with a couple of fractures and huge, purple, Rorschach test-like contusions all over my body — I fell on the foredeck yesterday and broke half a molar (and no, I can't afford to repair it).

"Jim Brodey was a messenger of chaos who blazed through the rock music and experimental poetry scenes of New York. What happened to him?" Differing Freak Wonder: a 2021 profile by Nick Sturm (@nicksturm.bsky.social) www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/155...

"On Wednesday, this week, a possible new custodian for Wrack is flying to Cagliari from Northern Italy to spend a couple of days aboard, to view the boat, and discuss the 'nuts and bolts' of a transfer of ownership." www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

At dusk, rolling thunder, lightning, and rain, driven across the Gulf by a hard sou'easterly. Wrack yaws in the strongest gusts and tugs against her doubled bow lines. Below decks, unbothered, I listen to Cecil Taylor as I read Raymond Horricks' The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy.

7 a.m. cool air … new small lavender-pink flowers along the path to the gate … singers: tailorbird, ashy prinia, white-breasted waterhen, myna, white-cheeked barbet

"This one glacier presently loses several metres of thickness each year. "This is measured. Cross-checked. Published. The numbers grow with a clarity that resists metaphor. "And still, people come. They lay out their blankets. "Not in denial of the data, but in its presence." – Peter Bach

04:00: wake to rain on the deck above my head.

"Resist much, obey little." – Walt Whitman

"For decades, untreated sewage has poured into the Mediterranean from the southern tip of the peninsula at Europa Point, where the government of Gibraltar says there are 'high levels of natural dispersion'."

Wake to light rain and an eddy of cold air through the open companionway hatch.

The pickpocket on this train looks like Fetterman. And that’s about right.

Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free. - David Graeber on prefigurative (as-if)...

"One of the symptoms of the pathology known as 'billionaire brain' is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening." – George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social

"Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city 'may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century'."

Grocery shopping in a scirocco: a walk of about a kilometre, each way, to the nearest supermarket, then the acrobatics of passing shopping bags along a narrow 1.5-metres-long gangplank, between an agitated dock and Wrack's after-deck. Rain and thunderstorms, maybe, in the graveyard hours tonight.

At dusk, leaden skies and a 30-knot scirocco, Wrack dancing like a marionette between bow and stern lines.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

We Live in a Time of Monsters, a powerful essay (from March, 2026) by my friend Lina Mounzer @warghetti.bsky.social, senior editor at The Markaz Review, in Lebanon. themarkaz.org/we-live-in-a...

Browsing any of the Israel-related subreddits is a fascinating and horrifying glimpse into the Israeli psyche. Truly Cirque-du-Soleil worthy mental gymnastics in order to avoid accountability and willfully misunderstand why the world might rightfully hate them

A dry scirocco has set in, gusting 20 knots over the deck under a cloudess sky. Given is preparing a simple Greek vegetable soup (peas, potatoes and carrots) while I make to-do lists for next week's maintenance push.