When the sky looks like a sea or snowy mountain

The spirit of Christmas can be found in working with cookie cutters that are old enough to require tetanus shots while interpreting handwritten recipes that are the gentle ravings of a madwoman

"He was not a friendly man. When I told him I was in oil he said his first guess would have been grease."

Not enough Portis content on my skyline. On the merits of the ending, I place this on the list of best Christmas novels. On the merits of the entire book, one of my favorite reads of the year.

Oddly, everything I need to know I learned from a restroom, not Roald Dahl

Happy tenth anniversary to the first of all those posthumous J.D. Salinger books we were supposed to get: www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/b...

The most unrealistic thing about The Shining is that whenever Jack tells someone he’s a writer, they don’t ask “What genre?”

If you only look at one year-end "best of" books list, make it this thoughtful one of underrecognized gems from @literaryhub.bsky.social lithub.com/100-notable-...

Its Blake Friday! You know, when William Blake’s birthday falls on a Friday? Anyway here are his Toeses of Moses:

Gertrude Abercrombie. The Church. 1938.

Video game w Sebald walking and reciting from his books and fighting villains along the way

Here's a great poem for everyone to enjoy, especially @mbwwelch.bsky.social and @awestfell.bsky.social

no babe i loved your substack essay if anything i wish it was less publishable

I TRUST WE ARE ALL OBSERVING EDMUND FITZGERALD DAY

In his novel "Tomás Nevinson," Javier Marías describes the expressions on the faces of people in a photograph shown on the next page. The idea of reading faces like this gets its public scientific stamp of approval from Charles Darwin in 1872. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/t...

Silver gelatin print made circa 2011 / looking through old work #darkroom #silvergelatin #darkroomprint #bnwprint #bnwphoto #leeds

One of my projects has me immersed in Victorian literary culture, and anonymous reviews were a major component of that thriving print ecosystem.

Each day you will be confronted with three unmarked doors. Behind door one is getting all your work done. Behind door two is getting enough rest and exercise. Behind door three is a tiger. Good luck.

"...feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages."

“On the other side of the barrier of language, behind its curtain, stripped of its husk of speech, the spirit of man wanders ceaselessly.”

I also enjoyed John Robert Cozens and his 'Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro', probably because it reminded me of Rembrandt's 'Rest on the Flight Into Egypt', which I'm a bit obsessed by.

if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities

"London has always been a vast ocean in which survival is not certain." the superb opening of Ackroyd's "biography of London"

Daedalus adding hot sun skeptics to his prototyping team for viewpoint diversity

Yes! This (Titian's The Young Englishman, 1540-45) is the portrait that stopped me in my tracks in the Pitti Palace: a completely real person - although identity unknown in this case, I think - calmly looking back at the viewer. 🎨 #Titian #PalazzoPitti

They are set free, they have overcome death, and they return to share our lives. Marcel Proust, The Swann Way (transl. Brian Nelson) #AContinuation25

Early Warming Over the Southern Ocean During the Last Deglaciation - Zheng, Bauska and Osman - 2025 - GRL agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... I promise to write a serious thread of what (IMHO as Peisong's advisor) is an innovative analysis. This will have to suffice for now.

Happy birthday to Elizabeth von Arnim, author of one of my favorite books, The Enchanted April. She was also a very mischievous person, scolded often throughout her lifetime, and was once called an “outrageous baked fish” (but in German). From The Solitary Summer:

A daguerreotype by Hermann Biow (1804-1850) of the destruction of the great Hamburg fire of 1842, a view from the roof of the stock exchange in the direction of Lombardsbrücke. One of the first photos of the city of Hamburg, and one of the first news photos in the world.

“Vates was the Greek word for the inspired bard, speaking the words of a god. To most people, this voice speaks only in a dream, and only in unremembered dream.”

“in the wide swathes of time, everything will wash over us” Afterbody, Medha Singh @medhawrites.bsky.social Blue Diode Press

Last glow of the evening sun.

“The soul is not to pile up defences round herself. She is not to withdraw and seek her heavens inwardly, in mystical ecstasies. She is not to cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown…”

"Description gets badmouthed these days, by impatient readers wanting to get on with the story and stylists who privilege voice, but description was how I got serious about this business." Enjoyed this interview with Alvin Lu, and am really enjoying his DAYDREAMERS.

“Each year should be one day longer than the previous one,” writes Canetti. “A new day when nothing ever happens, a day when no one dies.”

"...Kafka deletes with remarkable consistency passages that are too psychologically revealing, too readily interpretable, and too intimately personal". Mark Harman on translating Kafka over @literaryhub.bsky.social lithub.com/the-case-for...

Humbled and beyond pleased to be working with Belt on this project! Stay tuned...

This is me: happy with this platform but social media skeptical, an overthinker with real life distractions that nudge me from posting. But I like the people I find here.

“We pursue them until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night."

Literary solutions to male loneliness:

last night's discussion on LITERARY PLEASURE is now up on YouTube ... you can watch/listen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B89u...

Love has its triumph and death has one, in time and the time beyond us. We have none. Only the sinking of stars. Silence and reflection. Yet the song beyond the dust will overcome our own. - Ingeborg Bachmann, "Songs in Flight"

It's Kate Bush's birthday. It's Emily Brontë's birthday. It is Kate Bush's and Emily Brontë's birthday.

Reassuring that even Keats's descriptive powers deserted him from time to time: 'it is composed of rocks, Mountains, mountainous and rocky Islands, more rocks, those pointy hilly things, large stones aka rocks, those things that are the opposite of valleys, small boulders or, you know, rocks'

25 July 1829: Bristol artist & fossil collector George Cumberland publishes an article about fossil marine reptiles, highlighting the important contributions of 'three female pioneers' at Lyme Regis: #MaryAnning, Anne Congreve and Elizabeth Philpot, and of Etheldred Benett in Wiltshire.

“These moments of time will disappear. You yourself will forget my voice, the body you desired, your tremblings, your hesitations. I would so like for you... to carry away a part of me... Not a vague memory... but the energy of a star, its vibration in the dark. A truth.”

“It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not possibly pick up the same stones, so true is it that we find only what meets a deep need...” www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/07...