November 12th 1988: Two contrasting letters from Kingsley Amis
In “The Letters of Kingsley Amis”, edited by Zachary Leader, we find two contrasting and yet in their own way characteristic letters from Kingsley Amis from this day thirty years…
Category: words
An Italian poem of World War I – “Last Rite”, Clemente Rebora
The current TLS has a piece by NS Thompson on Italian poets of the First World War, along with translations by Thompson of some of their works. Futurism, which glorified…
Fighting Talk
The power drips from the open wounds. The big guns lie silent, resting for the next time. The phantom stalks the air, peering Into the muzzles, bathing in their Dominion,…
Nan Shepherd on going barehanded and barefooted
From “The Living Mountain”: The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. When I was a girl, a charming old gentlewoman said something to me that I have…
Fiction (and poetry) update
It’s been a while since I posted a fiction update – Jan 2017 to be precise. The one before that was two years ago. Alas, the pattern of outlets I…
“Still on patrol”
I came across this call for submissions for an upcoming anthology by Otter Libris: There is a tradition in the United States Navy that no submarine is ever truly lost…
“Hugging the cactus”
I came across this phrase in a video of Robert Downey Jr receiving the American Cinematheque Award in 2011. Downey Jr had requested Mel Gibson present the award and went on…
From Maynooth University Library: “Look Out! They’re Lurking About: Books That Go Bump In The Library”
With Halloween weeks away, here is an entertaining post from the blog of Maynooth University on some appropriately spooky books .
Séamus Sweeney 