🎵 PANINARO 🎵

Term on Monday! Sorry kids, no, I can't break down Frederic Jameson for you, my brain needed that space for a full cultural history of "balegdeh" and "all round the towns an evryfin" from this week's Drag Race, which I can provide in full without notice.

When combined with the ‘sex-based’ papers please approach being trailed by Streeting for public institutions, this has the potential to be a massive further clampdown on access to public life for trans people in the UK

News continually dreadful so let's all take a deep breath and look at my mum's puppy's ridiculous ears. The flamingo is her favourite but as yet is not named.

Took a break from The Guermantes Way to read Charlotte's Web last night, and you know what? I do think Proust could learn a few things from Charlotte. She wrote about 5 words on that web across the whole book, made her point, *and* effected social change.

This is very politically incorrect but I do feel Faye Dunaway has this one sewn up, saying that when his character threatened to sexually assault her in Three Days of the Condor, she struggled to act scared and just thought "well go on then"

@miafarlane.bsky.social just saw in the newsletter about your new novel being published next year! Congratulations - so looking forward to reading it xx 🎉⭐️🥰

Not to put too fine a point on it / Say I'm the only freeloading profit

I was quite looking forward to Tales from Ovid, but regretfully I think it might be from one of Hughes's eras where he wrote rather than daring himself to enter a chrysalis stage, and it shows - especially in the lack of line tension, and the way the language is often decorous rather than rich.

Not a massive fan of this country right now. This is appalling. Inhumane. And giving way to fascists.

Fucking belated but it's not nothing

I've got a talented filthy friend. What have you got, huh? Sound mental health?? Loser. (Preorder this book xx)

Quiet, American!

Was a bit self-conscious about being an adult going alone to the family screening of The Optimists of Nine Elms, but, arriving, it seems that in fact there are only two families here, outnumbered 15:1 by the elderly

Went with Mr Norris. I continue to have *questions* about how intentional the complacency of Isherwood's Berlin narrators is, in the face of fascism; and I know everyone comes under that withering gaze, but the dismissal certain Jewish characters receive is... troubling. Onward.

Performatively bought these in charity shops last week. But which shall I performatively read in the 4+ hours that I'll be sitting around getting my hair performatively bleached today? Help! (I'm leaning towards Hesse or Isherwood, but the change in weather has given me an appetite for Gaskell.)

what my feminism looks like

Pen experiences Andy Goldsworthy.

Her little arms. Here I am living my life, but also sick to my soul knowing thousands of children are starving to death in Gaza right now. And the UK continues to trade with Israel and arrest peaceful protesters... Sometimes I think I might go mad. share.google/OeGacK4Al0s9...

Playing the guitar today for a friend's poetry/music show, and had forgotten (a) how bad I am at the guitar, and (b) how much I hate being onstage in front of people. Let the anxiety sweats begin!

My story Expansion Street - about a new street that emerges out of nowhere, and how it ignites issues of privilege and access in civil and romantic relationships - is in the new Desperate Literature Prize anthology:

Coming to the end of 'Man and His Symbols' by Jung et al and feel a great need to rest my brain for nine to fifteen months

Huge respect to my mother for writing me a whole paragraph about hoping to see me before Christmas and how she's doing a Betty's order "with the coffee you like" before pivoting without even a punctuation mark into "and you will know how to set up Alexa on the wifi". (I don't.)

Wanted to share again these awful testimonies from doctors working in Gaza during Israel's campaign of destruction. MPs heard these testimonies while just a few corridors away their colleagues were voting to criminalise support for Palestine Action. hyphenonline.com/2025/07/03/p...

I know I don't have any reach here - but if someone who sees this does! - immigration enforcement vans and officers spotted east off Brick Lane, heading (I think) towards Whitechapel. Stay safe, tell your friends to stay safe, know your rights, and no borders xx

LYNDA BARRY KLAXON Art isn't just another a product consumed by others, success is not likes & shares, attention, "appreciation". What about the stories you made up as a kid, for no-one's pleasure but your own? What if you consider *those* your first works, the lineage from which you develop?!

Back in the midlands (bad) to visit my mum's new dog (excellent)

On the trans pride march today I bumped into four different friends, and later my partner was all sad that none of his friends were there "because they're not really political". Babe you can solve that by radicalising your friendship group. Do it today!

Verified my age on BlueSky by showing them the DVDs I never sent back to LoveFilm

This course woke me back up to my imagination, to being able to play and invent, after five years of total creative silence - I can't recommend it highly enough!

Today, a man in the Southbank Centre was fully screaming about men's toilets being for men at a dad taking his (3 or 4 year-old) daughter to use a cubicle loo. Screaming! I am serious - top of the lungs, red-faced screaming. At one point he screamed "looking after children is the woman's job".

Nobody cares but I am reading 'The Marion Milner Method' by Emilia Halton-Hernandez and am going to use bluesky as a deposit for the parts that really fire my brain up

Dealing with my silly little creative crisis by re-reading Lynda Barry's 'WHAT IT IS', a book that can almost instantly bring me to tears *and* make me feel like art, play and dreaming are possible again.

Not necessarily obscure but fairly silly: A line of dialogue from The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark. Whenever someone's humblebragging, boasting or fishing for compliments, I do my best Selina Redwood voice and say, "Yes, we're all very proud of Joanna."

Can anyone recommend some critical/cultural writing on the white western individualist mindset in left wing activism & art? I mean partly how we see a lot of privileged white westerners thinking they need to locate their own minoritised identities as justification for... (1/4)

Can anyone recommend some critical/cultural writing on the white western individualist mindset in left wing activism & art? I mean partly how we see a lot of privileged white westerners thinking they need to locate their own minoritised identities as justification for... (1/4)

Last night I dreamt I was in a dronepunk band called Rectal Insanity. Awake, I ask myself: why am I not?

Oo remembers lying awake after dinner at Combray for maman to give you a goodnight kiss?

Enjoyed the 'Unearthed' exhibition at the British Library this evening. Great artefacts, and some wonderful rooms on radical gardening.

Summer school starts today, my students will be *thrilled* when a madman shows up humming 'Closer to Fine', then makes them sit through a PowerPoint about how their taste in theatre is in fact the slow manipulation of their minds by empirical power structures.

'Failing and Flying' by Jack Gilbert, from his 2005 collection Refusing Heaven.

"i asked chatgpt" yeah well i went to the doctor, i went to the mountains, i looked to the children, i drank from the fountains there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line and the less I seek my source for some definitive closer I am to fine

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer of 1914, and I had no idea what I was doing on the Left Bank.

brb gotta move to Kassel real quick www.theguardian.com/environment/...

SpaceX is short for SpaceXplode

Weirdest/best/most unforgiving/most grimly captivating bit of the Tom Crewe takedown of Ocean Vuong in the new LRB: the bit where he stops reviewing the book in order to pull apart Vuong's Instagram account.

Got emotional at the AIDS quilt at the Tate today - then cheered up at the Leigh Bowery exhibition watching the 'Useless Man' performance. Worth re-forming Faggot so we can cover it and really let @lenski666.bsky.social loose on the lyrics.

Having an out of body experience that this, 'Wordy Rappinghood', 'Lola', 'Fight the Power' and Björk's Post album all share a birthday. Gemini season, bébé