@peterkravitz
Couples, individual & trauma psychotherapist in Edinburgh. Climate grief, poetry relief. Editor: The Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction. Shakespeare for everything & nothing. (And my Great Aunt Fanny ran The Vegetarian Hotel in the Catskills.)
Stunning piece by John Darnielle of @themountaingoats.bsky.social on William Gass’s prescient novel The Tunnel, a forensic examination of how fascism can arise in any of us. Also chase down a crucial essay by Joy Williams on the @dalkeyarchive.bsky.social site
Got caught in a storm, had to walk for half an hour with lightning flashing, got soaked to the skin, arrived back to find a note on my door from my new flatmate. "I hope you're not too wet. I have made a tart. Knock on my door & I'll heat it up for you. We will drink wine." Feel like I'm 19 again.
Ethel Mannin’s AN AMERICAN JOURNEY is being republished in May by Boiler House Press thanks to Brad Bigelow who is the force behind @neglectedbooks.com
There is a story here: Back in 2023, I had been posting photos from my trips on the Greyhound bus. Brad saw them & got in touch asking if I… (1)
Contending moral positions seem to presuppose a reference to some shared impersonal standard, yet the poverty of current arguments and the characteristically shrill mode in which they are uttered suggest strongly that there is no such standard.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre (2007)
Yes Kirrie is landlocked but North Sea Poets will be there, live, in a kirk on Good Friday. Poetry and music - join us! Details below.
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Seven words that will drive your lover wild
‘We need to be intensely curious up to a point, but we must decide what our goal is, in order to move strongly in a direction and not be all over the place.’
from her interview with www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/eacuteliane-...
From 1998-2008, thousands of queer women went to York for YLAF - the York Lesbian Arts Festival. It was a glorious annual event & trans-inclusive in its DNA. This great film about YLAF is in York this w/e for #IWM2026 & a lovely full circle moment. www.picturehouses.com/movie-detail...
I can't wait for this. Come roam the streets of Berlin with me...
Interested in studying Creative Writing at MA level in London? Come along to this free online 'taster session' next Weds 4th March (5.30pm) in which I'll be talking about the counterintuitive plotting of Sally Rooney's novels.
Register here:
www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...
YouGov polling 'commissioned by student support company Studiosity' finds that students are stressed by being accused of misusing AI in assessments.
Absent from the article is any mention of Studiosity's intensified UK marketing of its AI tools for student assessments. Conflict of interest?
"Nature recovery cannot be left to distant organisations alone. It has to be embedded in the places where people live, learn and work."
Share This Article insideclimatenews.org/news/1902202... Judges are examining, for the first time in the country’s history, whether a multinational oil and gas company can be legally required to reduce its fossil fuel production in line with climate objectives
‘Imagine a cross between a Pevsner guide, Ian Nairn at his most bilious, Herman Melville and (particularly) Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, (Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien)…Mardell does for New Lynn what an earlier writer did for the city of Dublin.’
Toni Morrison, born on this day in 1931. This, from her ‘The Source of Self-Regard’ collection:
“Freak maps”, utterly chilling…
Still, thinking of what’s happening as the rule of rentiers, who are getting their interests served at the expense of the real economy, helps make sense of the situation.
Paul Krugman NYT 6 June 2011
[things are worse now]
archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blog...
Poet, traveller, novelist but probably it’s his essays will live on and on…
And now for a dose of proper morning light from Reykjavík…
“I believe, if you were made of rocks, I would love you with such faith that I could make you run to me.” Michelangelo casting himself as Pygmalion.
But what’s on the menu?
Lots to marvel at here, but marvel most at the fact that this went out in the schools programme education slot on a weekday. "The past is a foreign country". Not if you spoke the language.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7xi...
“Being present is another way of staying awake, of being in touch with your own mind, being connected with other people, of making space for exuberance amid so much terror and heartbreak. The smile that Bad Bunny flashed throughout his show looked very real to me.”
Another fine piece by Niela Orr
From the horse’s mouth
@andotherstories.bsky.social are a properly decent, fine and determined publisher. They are bringing back into print A Chancer, The Busconductor Hines and Kieron Smith, boy.
Here are some words from James Kelman:
A sleepover plan
Wouldn't you like to be 8 again?
This portion of the play Sir Thomas More, is attributed to Shakespeare. It was written (but suppressed) around the time of the anti-immigrant riots in 1593 and the protests of a thousand English apprentices two years later against incoming workers:
Gray Day 2025 marks 45 years of Lanark. Alasdair Gray’s novel, published by @canongate.co.uk, fuses visual art and text: self-designed covers, allegorical panels, Glasgow landscapes, and an eccentric 3-1-2-4 structure—learn more about the familiar faces he used for the book cover 👇🏽
Only seven days to go.
Get your orders in…
Well-timed, finely-written lunch shows how gambling has embedded itself in global finance.
And a smart recommendation from ‘Western Mash’ in the Comments section below:
‘I first learned about prediction markets from The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)’