Happy Black Helicopter Day to all who celebrate.

AI camera-enabled litterbox

Doing something on Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlett Tracings next year for 40th anniversary. Reading book that inspires subplot of Royal Conspiracy concerning JTR murders. Nearly 140 years later, the idea of a Royal covering up son's mess with the help of a secret society doesn't feel so crazy

Finally got around to watching Longlegs, which successfully interrogates the pure weirdness of birthdays. They're truly eerie things. The fact I'm born on the 14th too (date of murders in film) made it feel more cursed.

Reading this again for something. every time I return to it the anger and sadness gets more intense

Turned away from football lately. I follow cycling now which is by all metrics a real beast of a sport.

I don't know that much about Steve Albini / Shellac / Big Black etc. but I found this a really touching piece www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

This article is staggering at a sentence by sentence level. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Wishing a very happy 89th birthday to the great Thomas Pynchon! His books changed my life.

Me seeing Gibbs-White's face just now

Spent more time thinking about / viewing this painting than anything else. I have no art credentials, but it blows my mind how Van Eyck tied in the octagonal design of the fountain of life (8 sides to represent the 8th day i.e. Judgement Day) into the arrangement of the visitors in the central panel

My friend told me her friend's 7 year old kid had a tablet and was playing a stupid game and that it prompted them to go to an ad-free tier by proposing "UPGRADE YOUR BRAIN ROT".

Sometimes I'm too on the pulse (I know I'm late).

Somehow already an iconic album. Has the best hip hop song in last ten years too youtu.be/2oDSwJmm-g0?...

They say Freud was the first to take the inner world of dreams seriously, I'd wager that J.G. Ballard was the first to take the outer world of consumerism seriously

I stand by this late-night post. The adult content is just a rad expressionist painting with the outline of something approaching nudity FWIW

OK, I'll bite, what's a Ben Lerner?

I'm nearing my forties, it's too late for me, but somebody young and brash needs to just start a band and call it 'What Shall We Do To Pay The Rent.' and use the Walter Sickert painting of the same name as a self-titled album cover. Say you're antenatalist or something, get the streams in, LIVE!

The Atrocity Exhibition @ The Saatchi Gallery

People are reviewing donner meat and chips on YouTube Shorts now and saying things like 'look at the browning on that kebab meat'

FINALLY finished this. An uneven novel that I think has to be considered a failure in whatever it was trying to achieve. Although I had a lot of fun with it, it's not cracking top 5 Delillo for me. A less good Against The Day.

‘Len Deighton’s reputation was established as the creator of an anti-Bond, and it’s at least true that 007 wouldn’t be found messing around with eggs in the kitchen until Roger Moore whips a quiche out of the oven for Tanya Roberts.’ @moonjets.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Watching original 'I know what you did last summer' & I genuinely think it is a few decisions away from being a mythic cult classic in the vein of 'The Wicker Man'. The music, the scenery, the deep Americana, the reverence for folkloric gestation. But then the guy from the big bang theory turns up

Forgot so much of this novel, most crucially the band 'Sick Dick and the Volkswagens' and their single 'i want to kiss your feet'. Obviously all Beatles references, which I did not have the intelligence to realise when I was 17 and reading it for the first time

Relaxing at the beach, re-reading Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 when I realised Pynchon's abrupt transitions in passages between space and time are really reminiscent of Burroughs Naked Lunch. I'm sure that's not a revelation, but never made that connection before

Elvis-suspicious minds John Leyton-Johnny remember me Norma Jean-Memphis will be laid to waste(live) Bowie-strangers when we meet(BoS) Eminem-Brain damage Dizzee rascal-jus' a rascal 1975-sex Donna summer-journey to centre of heart Danny brown-30 MCR-not a fashion statement, it's a deathwish

I've gone back to listening to Geese again after this Chaotic Good business. I still like it. And I wonder if just staying in the press is a strategy. Like metrics, KPIs & salience is the new sex, drugs and rock & roll.

Reading Don Delillo's resurfaced novel 'Amazons' which he wrote under the name Cleo Birdwell and only recently (this year?) admitted to authoring. It's the memoirs of a female hockey player and so far is shaping up to be one of the funniest things I've ever read. It's this every page so far:

All the 'cool' guys at my school who put together shitty Arctic Monkeys knock-off bands do policy lobbying for Amazon now.

Died (alas!) on this day in 1444, Robert Campin of Tournai. Here, his beautiful Annunciation in a Gothic chapel. Mary trying to finish the chapter before she has to deal w/ this.

The wheel has turned back on itself. YEARS of articles about Millennials ruining every known industry to man and we have finally got to the other side

‘There were opaque, exquisite experiments in lyric, on the one hand, and, on the other, long, argumentative pieces, densely intuitive, often obscure.’ On the blog: the editors on J.H. Prynne, who died on Wednesday. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ap...

I feel like Muse never get their flowers . They were far and ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to enshittitification.

Finally finished this slim work, which by its end was rather disappointing.

'The idea of the end is a neat / but mostly dull falsity, since the / biologic collapse is violence reversed, / like untying a knot' (J.H. Prynne, 'A Gold Ring Called Reluctance')

Farewell J.H. Prynne. A writer of astonishing beauty and modernist zeal. The extract beneath is called 'Airport poem', the words only as impressive as the form, built to resemble an airplane (I believe). He was almost a single source of connection between US experimental black mountain poetry & 1/2

Linkedin Park. Is that a thing? *Gets mic cut off*

‘Prynne’s writing is not impersonal; it is constantly and urgently concerned with questions of personal agency and presence, and with the natural, political and social environments these are involved with or alienated from.’ Patrick McGuinness (@padrig.bsky.social): www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...

Standing by the window I heard it, while waiting for the turn. In hot light and chill air it was the crossing flow of even life, hurt in the mouth but exhausted with passion and joy - RIP J.H. Prynne

This book absolutely changed my life 15 years ago. And like all great loves, I let it go (sold it / loaned if / lost it). But unlike love, it's mass-produced, so happy to pay the fee and have another copy again!

Reading Delillo's Underworld exposed me to so many curiosities of the 1950s & 60s. In particular, Lenny Bruce. It's like watching the absolute ur-text of alternative comedy. It's genuinely shocking and electrifying to hear today.

The obvious answer, but the correct one. '...Baby hit me one more time' by Britney Spears. We still haven't crawled out from the crater of that impact.

Hey, #SNLUK, why is Belgium the sea?

Bolaño lived here

Read an extract from Mark Fisher's book The Weird And The Eerie, where he gets to grips with 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Stalker, Solaris and Interstellar #MarkFisher On Kubrick, Tarkovsky & Nolan - #ThePortal: Your Weekly Quietus Archive Dive buff.ly/MJbmsHR

This was a great way to spend the day. Finally hit gold on Underworld and got some Mao 2 level prose

My girlfriend told me I should relax and I agreed, so I took Don Delillo with me to the wellness spa

Looking forward to speaking to Nina Allan at Argonaut about the new biography about J.G. Ballard written with her late husband, Christopher Priest on May 7th.

Picked this up while in Goes. Never heard Screamin Jay Hawkins. This shit rocks. I also enjoyed the liner notes on the back. Did everyone just write like this in the 1970s? It feels exhausting.

John Lawson Johnston (buried at West Norwood) made his fortune from his hugely successful ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef’ renaming it with the more appealing name of ‘Bovril’, combining Bovine with Vril from the then popular novel ‘The Coming Race’. He lived at Kingswood House (‘Bovril Castle’) #Bovril