BOKS Six-Hundred and Nineteen - Seeing Further, Esther Kinsky. " ... they said you only needed to climb on a pumpkin to be able to see all the way to Budapest. Imagine that, she said, shivering, just imagine it: You climbed on a pumpkin and up there you could see further, on and on and on."

BOKS Six-Hundred and Eighteen - How to Research Like a Dog, Aaron Schuster. "The possible is impossible. Reality is split from the inside. The world is not defined by the transcendence of another world, nor by the immanence of this world alone, but by a crack within this one-and-only world."

BOKS Six-Hundred and Seventeen - Distance and Memory, Peter Davidson. "The southern sky changed from overshadowed grey to cobalt half and hour ago ... But, as I write, light and time and summer are unstill, and the instant has passed into memory even as it is described."

BOKS Six-HUndred and Sixteen - Paradise Lost, John Milton. "Obedience to the law of God, impos'd On penaltie of death, and suffering death, The penaltie to thy transgression due, And due to theirs which out of thine will grow: So onely can high justice rest appaid."

NEW ALBUM, BY ME Exploring emotive states from the anxious to the absurd, Andrew Bentley’s “Efforts of Affection” mixes avant-electronic noise & beats with all too human clarinet figures. - David B. Applegate for Immigrant Breast Nest immigrantbreastnest.bandcamp.com/album/effort...

BOKS Six-Hundred and Fifteen - London Orbital, Iain Sinclair. "... the idealised borough. Without crime and drugs and craziness. Without sound or smell. Drills or dogs. The secret city in which a couple will sit smiling on a sofa: for ever. In which there is no weather, just drawings of weather."

BOKS Six-Hundred and Fourteen - Beckett's Dying Words, Christopher Ricks. "one can't go on one can't stop put a stop"

BOKS Six-Hundred and Thirteen - Maiden Voyage, Denton Welch. "Sitting upstairs on the bus I felt light, as if I were hollow and empty. Something inside was churning in me too, like a sea-sickness."

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twelve - Los, A Chapter - Helene Cixous. "... I'm sure I hadn't feared for him, I now realise that I thought of him as immortal, someone I had no fear of losing ..." Reflections on love and loss. Fragile threads form a delicate web. Human and heartbreaking.

BOKS Six-Hundred and Eleven - The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig. "War was here again, a war more terrible and far-reaching than any conflict had ever been on earth before." How quickly things can fall apart.

BOKS Six-Hundred and Ten - Omnibus, B.S. Johnson "Yes, yes, all those loves and wished for loves, I need never think of you again ... you will never enter my thoughts again in the same way ... I am glad to be rid of you." Three novels by the great B.S. Johnson. Basically, amazing.

BOKS SIX-HUNDRED AND Nine - Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes . "What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past?" Roland Barthes writes about himself. Or, often, the impossibility of writing about himself.

immigrantbreastnest.bandcamp.com/track/the-ou... Me n' @andybley.bsky.social shred on this post-rock bash-out.

NEW MUSIC by ME. A weird mix of clarinet, synths, vocals and tape recordings. Please listen if you have a spare moment in yr busy day. Pass it on if you like it. monstercave.bandcamp.com/album/i-will...

BOKS Six-Hundred and Eight - Mansfield Park, Jane Austen. "" We shall probably see much to wish altered in her, and must prepare ourselves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and very distressing vulgarity of manner ..."" Austen again. Fantastic and funny as usual.

BOKS Six-Hundred and Seven - Valis, Philip K. Dick. "I am, by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy." Fantasies have a lot to answer for. This is a rollicking and very entertaining bok.

BOKS Six-Hundred and Six - The Dyer's Hand, W.H. Auden. "To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally." A wonderful mind.

A wistful and sentimental mood rearranged to blast you towards futures unknown. All life is here. All pasts and tomorrows reborn, re-energised.

Fresh and raw. By turns, gritty and psychedelic, wistful and pounding. Strange, wonderful and mind-blowing. It's like listening to a great mixtape and you can't wait to hear what the next track will sound like because all the sounds are so fresh and interesting.

BOKS Six-Hundred and Five - Milton's Grand Style, Christopher Ricks. "To me, Milton is a great poet ... comparable as it is to Shakespeare and Dante." Why did Milton need defending? Well, it seems he did. And that spurred Ricks to write this grand book.

My song "Going to the Friend's House" (mostly clarinet and vocals) gets remixed. Not once, but six times. With fantastical and fascinating results.

BOKS Six-Hundred and Four - Volcanic Tongue, David Keenan. "Beyond meaning, outside the realm of language, there is no past and no future, hence rock music's obsession with the immediacy of experience, with the now." A beautiful, wonderful, life-affirming read.

BOKS Six-hundred and Three - Voices of the Old Sea, Norman Lewis. "Life had always been hard - an existence pared to the bone - and local opinion was that it was getting harder, purely because mysterious changes in the sea were directing fish elsewhere."

BOKS Six-Hundred and Two - A Time in Rome, Elizabeth Bowen. "Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. Substantiality comes through touch and smell, and taste, and tastes of different dusts."

BOKS Six-Hundred and One - Careless Love, Peter Guralnick. "This is a story of fame. It is a story of celebrity and consequences. It is, I think, a tragedy." The second part of this massive, amazing, awesome, tale of strange, extraordinary life.

BOKS Six Hundred - Pariah Genius, Iain Sinclair. "Memory is contained in architecture: doors, walls, high ceilings. secret spaces without names."

BOKS Five-Hundred and Ninety-Nine - Dedalus, Chris McCabe. "Stephen caught his scornwet eyes and waited. Mulligan's head dipped and resurfaced. silver rivulets of water raced along his plumpwet frame. Wellfed jowls smiled back at him."

BOKS Five-Hundred and Ninety-Eight - Another Country, James Baldwin. "For to remember Leona was also - somehow - to remember the eyes of his mother, the rage of his father, the beauty of his sister."

BOKS Five-Hundred and Ninety-Seven - Helene Cixous, Nicholas Royle. Royle is amazing. "There is immense tenderness and generosity in Cixous's writing. At the same time there is a constant challenge to the reader to aspire to thinking what he or she has perhaps never previously thought."

BOKS Five-Hundred and Ninety-Six - Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenblatt. "... Shakespeare achieves the remarkable effect of a nebulous infection, a bleeding of the spectral into the secular and the secular into the spectral."

BOKS Five Hundred and Ninety-Five - Ulysses, James Joyce. “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

BOKS Five-Hundred and Ninety-Four - Disowning Knowledge, Stanley Cavell. Most of it is the essay "The Avoidance of Love". Cavell outlines his idea of how Shakespeare's tragic heroes avoid acknowledging something right in front of their eyes. Challenging, wonderful stuff.

BOKS Five-Hundred and Ninety-Four - Joyce's Voices, Hugh Kenner. Kenner is an amazing writer. This is as exciting as reading Joyce himself.

BOKS Five-Hundred and Ninety-Six - Three Novels, Samuel Beckett. The very definition of bleak. Yet, funny too.

My latest effort. A big mess of clarinet, drum machines, synths, guitar etc. ----> monstercave.bandcamp.com/album/are-we...

Shameless self-promotion ---> "Cracks in the cement, deep sea vents, in the seemingly endless emptiness of the universe, a strange light blinks. Zooming in reveals Andrew Bentley's luminous first solo effort on Immigrant Breast Nest." immigrantbreastnest.bandcamp.com/album/life-i...