As I'm waiting for a part for my car, and there is no public transport on a Saturday where I live, I thought I would try to hitchhike to the railways station (~15km) to get to a vernissage this afternoon. No luck, so I gave up after a couple of hours. I'm not surprised, but slightly disappointed.

Okay, a list of a hundred books I've read and think are quite good. Only one book per author, no particular order. It reveals the peculiarities and prejudices of my taste, certainly... But I tried to be honest with what I've read and recall. I might make some annotations below...

So many amazing things to read, so little time, so much lack of language skills (can there be a lot of a lack?)...

You go into the Scuola di San Rocco and see the most amazing Tintorettos and then the exit leads you straight into an alleyway where the walls are covered in pigeon shit -- From the sublime to the profane in one go...

You go into the Scuola di San Rocco and see the most amazing Tintorettos and then the exit leads you straight into an alleyway where the walls are covered in pigeon shit -- From the sublime to the profane in one go...

Thresholds / passages.

General tarnishing and decay of the world...

The interior of San Marco Cathedral was pretty breathtaking...

'Presentation at the Temple' Giovanni Bellini (Venice, ca. 1438/40 - 1516).

Venetian façades.

I think I took more pictures of the textures of the walls in the Arsenale than any of the artworks...

Venice textures...

This evening's film lined up already, plus supplementary reading material. Happy May 1st!

Tonight!

Sunday morning was perfect for finishing up Ice by Jacek Dukaj. Fascinating alternate history set in 1924, where the Tunguska event unleashed freezing gleissen upon the earth, with implications for science, society, and capital H History.

Next Wednesday, @lindapersson.bsky.social is part of the show 'Survival Kit' opening at Kalmar Konstmuseum. If you are nearby, please come along! www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se/event/vernis...

No Kingston University, I don't think I will sign up for the Alumni 'Inspire the Future' programme, seeing as how you closed the department where I studied with you... That bit of cultural vandalism was unforgivable.

I took this picture nearly 10 years ago by the chalk cliffs of Møns Klint in Denmark. There had been big storms in the preceding days, strange days around midsummer with visits to barrows, bonfires, and nighttime bicycle rides with lightning flickering all around us...

I love these slate panels on the side of a local building...

This was such a beautiful and tender article, about beautiful and tender lives... I had not heard of Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi before, but this sent me to search out some of their music... and it did, as it says in the article, bring me to tears. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/a...

This texture was also photographed in Norway... From a hotel room that was overlooking a building site. A demolished building had exposed this strange grey paper-like wall.

More textures. A Norwegian mine, photographed nearly ten years ago now... I remember these dark rocks.

Textures...

I still have a few copies of my novel Dead Ice available if anyone would like one. I would be especially interested in doing a trade of some sort... Please send me a message if you are curious. Edition of 50. 299 pages. 25 black and white photographs.

The difference between an em dash, an en dash, a hyphen, and a minus sign is important.

Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras... It can't happen soon enough. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXU9...

This beautiful icon arrived last week. Although, is 'beautiful' really the correct word? Icons are prayers or instances of the divine, a material link in an order that these days feels faint and distant. Does beauty still have a place in this disenchanted world, isn't it now a rub on a wound...

This beautiful icon arrived last week. Although, is 'beautiful' really the correct word? Icons are prayers or instances of the divine, a material link in an order that these days feels faint and distant. Does beauty still have a place in this disenchanted world, isn't it now a rub on a wound...

Watched Aki Kaurismäki's 'I Hired a Contract Killer' last night. Wonderful as all his films are. I love how he makes London look like one big desolate factory/demolition site (or maybe it looked like that in 1990...?) www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN80...

I enjoyed this immensely. It has been on my shelf for a long time (years?) and is unexpectedly wonderful. I thought it would be different from his other work, but didn’t realise it was such a meditation on a diverse range of art and artists, and on the intangible sense of the nebulous within them.

People should take advantage of this generous offer from Toby. Glantz is a disconcerting book, right down to the level of sentence structure, that thrusts you right into the contingency of the world, where the only certainty feels like a monolithic yet somehow inchoate sense of oppression.

A beautiful publication, gratefully received in the mail today. Many thanks Alexander @wordkunst.bsky.social I will return with more thoughts once I have made the time to read with the consideration it requires.

The sun is definitely getting higher in the sky...

The snow is on its way out now, but I'm still lost in its textures...

A chance to once again share the most unpardonable printing error I have ever found. In the faber & faber reissue of Thomas Bernhard's Extinction, page 10.

After reading the Krasznahorkai story 'A Murderer is Born', I've discovered/realised that I can bid on auctions for icons. This is maybe dangerous...

I found these old pictures from the first year I moved to Sweden and spent much more time out in the landscape. At some point I lost the feeling of wonder that I had. This winter has been the coldest I've experienced, but I've neglected to really experience it.

Over the ice to visit this little island.

The most perfect lyric in the German language: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkcU...

Stone wall, snow, trees, sun.

I enjoyed the two shows at Moderna Museet Malmö: Redoubt by John Skoog, a reconstruction of a monolithic bunker built by agricultural worker Karl-Göran Persson (1894 –1975), & Fractured Horizons by Edi Hila, paintings of what I think of as a sort of corroded realism from Albania.

New book acquisitions: Ice by Jacek Dukaj & The Children of the Dead by Elfriede Jelinek. The former came with appropriate weather; woke up to a cool minus twenty and Jack Frost on the windows.

The lilacs in the back garden are looking particularly grim and frostbitten this evening...

Can the idea of 'cathedral thinking' really mean all that much when it is isolated from the ordo of the medieval world? It predates Luther's separation of the temporal and sacred realms, and the development of the cogito, the modern subjectivity of the self.

I have a memory of reading about an author who wrote a novel in, I think, a prisoner of war camp, which was burnt by the guards and had to later be reconstructed through hypnosis. But I can't remember the author... does anyone have any idea who it might have been?

This used to be a lovely spot of stillness amid the trees. We usually pick bucket loads of blueberries here in the summer... I doubt there will be any this year. Just a reminder that I don't really live in the forest, but rather a giant industrial farm for the production of cardboard boxes...

I enjoyed this. Mainly for the the descriptions of London areas where I used to live -- Deptford, Greenwich, Blackheath --albeit in a different era. Despite the rather grim subject matter -- death, the devil, occultism, murder -- it felt like a light read.

Last night in a dream, I was debating a quote with someone. I was sure that it was from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', and they said something else that I didn't recognise and can't remember. Now awake, I can't remember the last time I read Prufrock either, and certainly can't quote it...

Wow... This was both devastating and tender in its stripped back simplicity, the simple possibility of a life. It is also perhaps one of the best contemplations of the place of meaning and meaningless in the world, the relation of human and non-human, and the reality is the event that I have read.

In 1989, at school camp, we attempted to have a séance where, at my friend Maki's suggestion, we tried call up a professional wrestler named King Kong Bundy, who Maki said died by choking on an ice cream scoop. I'm only getting round to fact checking this now...