neoteny lobotomy

A reader asks:
“Uncle Zip, what shade is ‘neoteny pink’ (Nova Swing) & can I get it?”
Yes, reader, it is easy to get if only you follow one simple rule. Evolution, as many admit, sometimes proceeds by retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult form: but neoteny pink is not like that. It is a pure [...]

benighted

Jonas wakes up and the world is empty. What is happening ? Is this a disaster, or only a disaster for Jonas ? His fantasies–now that they can be fulfilled in an empty world–now that he’s “free” –reveal themselves as ordinary. All Jonas really wants is that the world be dependable & right again. But [...]

chimurenga

Lara Pawson draws my attention to a “sci fi and speculative” edition of Chimurenga. Meanwhile Lara herself has a chapter in Rasna Warah’s anthology Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits (it originally appeared in Radical Philosophy). & I’m off to Helsinki tomorrow for the run up to FinnCon. When I come back from FinnCon I am going [...]

skeleton keys of the rain

Unconvinced by Nova Swing, a friend asks me, “Are you happier than before, or something ?” The Course of the Heart, she says, scared her stiff. “This book doesn’t scare me at all.”
I answer that I don’t think it’s happiness. But I’m definitely less angry than I was. “Also,” I remind her, “The Course of [...]

ghosts

I loathe Rudyard Kipling for the obvious reasons, yet I’ve read “They” four or five times since 2004, & I’m increasingly fascinated by Adam Nicholson’s narrative (in Perch Hill) of Kipling at Bateman’s. I’m trying to understand what I might be hearing–or what, at least, I might be trying to listen for–under the sentimentality & [...]

90-400-1

The bird calls here get stranger & stranger. Sometimes I wonder if I’m in Stoke-on-Trent at all. I sit & count our mosquito nets, while aircraft lug themselves into the air above me like suitcases full of cheap new clothes. Yesterday evening there was a wedding in the courtyard. The bride & groom processed slowly [...]

& speaking of helmets

Here on the third floor of the Ambiente Hotel Retirement Unit we barely remember last week, let alone 1979, so Brian Cropper’s pic of the novice MJH grinding up Mississippi Variant on Stanage is a valuable aid. Helmets, de rigeur now, had just gone out of fashion then; unless you were on a proper mountain, [...]

don’t watch the movie without your helmet, darling

Andrew Pulver has a point here until he runs out on it & effectively turns his own piece into a coffee table conversation. It happened to books across the same period. The reading group & literary festival select for clever, nuanced, unchallenging product. It’s a process of flattening. There’s no point blaming the publishing industry [...]

start

A website for The Broken World.

a castle of perseverance

Andrew McKie’s obituary for Tom.