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Do you suppose Harry’s House is a Joni Mitchell reference?

Good to have The Feed published in its correct order

Be interested to hear your take on Rumfitt - I read it a couple of months ago and used a passage from it with a class to look at contemporary approaches to the gothic.

My copy arrived today. It’s a handsome volume, well done @luka

Remember seeing one of these at a British Museum exhibition looking at ideas about memory: "The rebbelib were used for centuries, but they're not particularly good as a visual map. They're not to scale, and someone unfamiliar with this type of map would have trouble using one to navigate. And...

Good stuff in that Romantic Moderns book on the thirties on how garden design became a big thing among the posher end of society - “In the garden, Gertrude Jekyll had discovered that April was not necessarily the cruellest month and planted ‘bright swathes of perennials’ while William Robinson...

Been doing a bit of reading on gardens as I’m teaching The Merchant’s Tale: the idea of your own private, prelapsarian Eden where you can frolic. Priapus, apparently, is the classical god of gardens which makes a kind of sense. Mary is often depicted being visited by Gabriel in a garden, she...

And again it seems agentless - who is doing the doing? Is there an implicit subject? Or is it an evasiveness with no definite subject? Who is getting it done?

Is it because the object is sitting between two verbs get and done? ‘Get’ working like an auxiliary but in English we can’t really say ‘get done it’ maybe we would just need to ‘do it’

I think what you’re talking about was something touched upon upthread - youngsters trying to write about ‘now’ in a ‘now’ kind of way - Lerner, Tao Lin were two I mentioned but I also suggested it ever was so - Afternoon Men by Powell, Waugh, Hope Mireles all doing in the twenties (Lawrence...

Oh my days

Well…everything by Gordon Burn probably. I re-read Fullalove not that long ago and it still is grimly brilliant.

I was talking to a friend about the collection and we both felt like he’d set up some promising stuff - The Alps particularly and then he didn’t do anything with it. What was interesting was this was the first collection that dealt with lockdown - again not 100% successfully but maybe a pointer...

The one Covid dividend in schools is the remote parents evening - five minute online slots - teachers love them, no long meandering ‘chats’ cut to the chase, give them the news, move on. I do wonder if we’ll go back to F2F ones.

And I think they have the immortal line on Live and Dangerous- if it’s too loud, you’re too old.

I had a student write about it for coursework recently so I have done a bit of work on it myself - this blog post discusses the leopards: https://thechildanimalpoetandsaint.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/three-white-leopards/

Just finished Cousin Bette which I thoroughly enjoyed as there is probably not one likeable character - a veritable nest if vipers. This the third Balzac I have read in recent months - as @craner wrote he’s obsessed by money and more importantly debt - the mind boggling financial comings and...

There’s a very good Backlisted podcast on her ghost stories which does much to reevaluate her as more than certain kind of English ‘lady’ novelist. And Amis is an odd one isn’t he? Apparently wracked into near paralysis with all kinds of fears in his later life - from that cocky young gun...

That carcanet selection which has most of the good stuff in but only extracts of the later stuff. She’s great in that first flush of Pound’s Imagisme but kind becomes more erratic later. the Francesca Wade book is worth investigating - essentially five women writers all lived Mecklenburgh Sq...