I'm so sorry to clutter your feed with a picture of a lemon ?, but I couldn't resist buying this amazing fruit, it looked so tempting! Now, to justify buying it, I'm making a White Lady cocktail ?, and to justify posting about it, I'm going to read the story in which I first came across the drink, Tove Jansson's eponymous "White Lady" from the tagged story collection ???
#BooksAndBooze

I enjoyed these poems at least as much as I recall enjoying those of Clarissa's younger brother, Robert Graves, though I've not taken the trouble to do a direct comparison. Still, while one sibling should be lauded and the other largely forgot is a cause for wonder 🤔 The only information I've found about Clarissa is as footnotes in articles about Robert, so she's rather eclipsed by him, which seems a shame.

"I cannot be what you would have me be,
Lopped, pruned within a form, a man-made thing;
Who'd wreak his will upon an almond tree
Wrapped in the bright luxuriance of spring?
And yet to her returns, spring after spring,
The old, pure glory from her blackened bough;
Had I a spring but once in seven years
I would not leave you now.
How many times my heart was sick and sore
At your rough handling ... no, I will not tell,
⬇️

Peter Case's second album, "The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar" is a mix of folk rock & country rock wrapped around lyrics that are perfect narrative miniatures. Hard to pick favourite tracks, but probably "Entella Hotel", which wouldn't be out of place on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" album, and "Poor Old Tom". These are both slow songs, but there are plenty of up-tempo ones, too.
#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

FitzGerald's Rubáiyát = 5⭐
Euphranor is an earlier work taking the form of a Platonic dialogue one day in late spring in Cambridge between a doctor and several young students while they drink beer and play bowls. It's a reply to a popular book of the 1850s on the proper education of English manhood which, little known today, set the tone for a certain kind of Stiff Upper Lipped Englishness that inspired the Scout movement and running towards ⬇️

This is one of the longest inscriptions I have in a second hand book. There's obviously a story in Caroline's heartfelt poem to the unnamed recipient of what was presumably a gift for Christmas 1972, but tantalisingly I'll never know, though it opens up realms of speculation 🤔💭💔💘
#inscription

"We often sing lullabies to our children that we ourselves may sleep."

"The song that lies silent in the heart of a mother sings upon the lips of her child."

“Long ago you were a dream in your mother's sleep, and then she awoke to give you birth.”

We took a walk on Formby beach today, and seeing the sand and the foam whipped up by a bracing wind off the Irish Sea inevitably brought to mind Kahlil Gibran's inspirational book of aphorisms. Time for a re-read 📖
I'm not sure if there will be any quotable passages that I *didn't* post here six years ago! We'll see 😏

This is the poem I released by cutting the uncut page:

~The Caryatid~
"None now serve Artemis: earth's temples fall,
Her columns are all broken, her priests fled,
Her watchers passed like shadows on the wall;
But better are the living than the dead.
For Caryatids still stand. Blear mortal eyes
See little but the moulding of the shell;
Could for those eyes one mighty form uprise
In constant bliss, what wonders they might tell." ?️

In the 97 years since 1927, when this book was published, I find it hard to believe that it still has uncut pages! This is the third such I've got to, and there may be more. It feels disrespectful to the poet to leave her lines captive and unread and, as with the earlier ones, I'll be cutting them free! ???️
"Seven Days and Other Poems" by Clarissa Graves

"LOOK not with curious eyes, gentle friends, who are turning my pages;
None, not even myself, could declare what truth is behind them." ?

From "Seven Days and Other Poems", by Clarissa Graves

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"I carry my body
in and around
many rooms,
most of them
much quieter
than this nervous
chatter within."

- A Thousand Empty Rooms

[Image: George Tooker]

This was my day's #bookhaul 📚
• Seven Days is a poetry collection by Clarissa Graves, Robert's older sister. 1927 first edition, a browse through which seems promising.
• Songs of Waking is a poetry collection by Jonathan Simons of offline publisher Analog Sea. I love their books and picked this up without noticing the rather hefty-for-a-slim-book price of £16.99 😳 Still, a thing of beauty is a joy forever!
• A Book of Narrative Verse is a ⬇️

My intention today was to recreate a childhood impression of coziness by going shopping in the rain, getting drenched to my underwear, then find a café and steam up the windows as I dried out over a cup of tea and a plate of toasted teacakes. Well, the shopping was to pick up ONE book, but that became a two-package #bookhaul and a jigsaw, so, money for tiffin spent, I dripped home and made my own afternoon tea!

I read a review for this album last week in Weird Walk #4 zine, and listened to it on Bandcamp. It captures the artist's (Charles Vaughan) impressions of walking through the British countryside near or in sight of electricity pylons.
The listener may either find this a pleasantly relaxing and atmospheric experience (me) or "about as musically interesting as listening to the compressor pump on the fridge" (my wife).
#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

A couple of finds today: a not very old Puffin edition of former National Poet of Wales, Gwyn Jones' Mabinogion retelling, but it has an evocative cover and some nice line illustrations.
The Golem is one of my favourite books, and this is a new to me translation, published in Czechia, so I'm guessing the original owner bought it as a souvenir, but that's an assumption as unreliable as the narrator.
🧀+🍷+🌰+📚+🎶=😌

I saw this book on the Feature Table at my local bookshop, and it piqued my interest.
Set in an abandoned Italian village, peopled with ghosts who no longer experience the passage of time, however, their liminal existence is threatened by an impending landslide that will destroy the village.

"When Bowie was on the road in those days [1976], the convoy was made up of several vehicles, including a Ford Transit that carried his gear and a trunk containing the dozens of books he refused to be parted from." ???
#BooksAndBowie

"During the time of my pretending to practice Medicine at Cambridge, I was aroused, one fine forenoon of May, by the sound of one running up my staircase, three or four steps at a time; then, directly, a smart rapping at the door; and before I could say, 'Come in,' Euphranor had opened it, and, striding up to me, seized my arm with his usual eagerness, and told me I must go out with him - 'It was such a day - Sun shining - Breeze blowing - ⬇️

"I have a metaphor in mind,
large and complicated,
when from my morning bowl of muesli I
clumsily fish out a precious
hazelnut,
It's burrowing all the way to the bottom.
I, vigilant hunter,
will find it in the end.
That effort is rewarded with delight,
though what's left is a lot of muesli
and no hazelnuts."

- Hunter

"It so happens that before you fall even deeper
below the rustling thirst of leaves, loose soil,
through the chasm of memory before awakening,
you will fall in like a puzzle piece
among the mingled bones of lovers,
between his fragile metatarsals
and her white femur.
Taut in frozen horror,
witness to their endless intercourse,
you won't move, for fear of being caught."

“Mourning is an orderly expression of grieving."

- Celebration

Ahh 😌 I love the quietness of Simak's writing. He deals with big questions calmly, he's enchanting and optimistic, but tinged with sadness, opening majestic vistas while acknowledging the transitoriness of life and the inevitability of change. I think the sadness is in the limitedness of individual experience, the optimism in the potential of collective growth, and his magic is in seeking to reconcile us to both realities.

“Who owns the British countryside?“

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

My daughter bought me this zine, Weird Walk: A Journal of Wanderings and Wonderings from the British Isles, which focuses on “walking [as] an active engagement with the British landscape and its lore“. This is issue 4, dated Imbolc, 2021.
There are essays about the intersection of British Afro-Carribean culture and British folk traditions by broadcaster Zakia Sewell, ⬇️

I appreciated my coffee this morning! ☕
Listening to coffee-related songs, they were all about relationship breakups and, in Kate Bush's case, murder, so despite it not quite being my mood (homicide only rarely is), as it's a fantastically theatrical and quirky song, I thought I'd offer Coffee Homeground for #TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude The video quality is poor, but Kate's live vocals are amazing 🤩
https://youtu.be/pTak-tMlzJo?si=iWYMfWqs1KyP13I-

Given Gillian Clarke's been the National Poet of Wales, there's a lot of Wales in her poems, which is all to the good.
She also has a couple of poems about the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, which I hadn't heard of before. It's another in the catalogue of Nazi atrocities: the whole population of a French village murdered in reprisal for Resistance activity. 643 dead, including 247 women and 205 children burnt to death in a church. Bastards.

This is the MC's drink of choice: straight gin with *loads* of angostura bitters! 🍸
What to call it? The Thomas Jerome Newton? An Anthean Martini?
I cannot drink it in the volumes that Newton does, and it won't be a regular feature on the drinks trolley, but it does taste medicinal, so perhaps if I need a bracing pick-me-up?
#BooksAndBooze

Breughel's "The Fall of Icarus", explicitly referenced at the novel's start, sets the tone of grand failure. This is a pessimistic examination of humanity's probable (though not certain) inability to save itself from destruction. While Tevis had nuclear apocalypse in mind, there are parallels with the structural inability of vested interests to deal with the present climate crisis.
Re-read upgrade from 4 to 5⭐
#LitsySciFiBookClub #LSFBC ?

"After two miles of walking he came to a town."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

#TenuousLiteraryConnection 1: The epigraph for TMWFTE is a verse by Hart Crane, who was friends with poet Samuel Loveman, who was also a friend of H. P. Lovecraft, whose story "The Statement of Randolph Carter" I've just read, in which the doomed character Harley Warren is based on Loveman. (Yes, this is exceedingly tenuous!)
#LSFBC #BooksAndBowie

I'm starting The Man Who Fell to Earth for the March #LitsySciFiBookClub choice, and at 170 pages it hopefully won't take long. This is a re-read for me and I remember enjoying it, although I note the reviews of other #LSFBC members are mixed, so let's see if I enjoy it as much the second time around. Undoubtedly, my judgement will be positively affected by the Bowie connection 😁

"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference between those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
- The Silver Key ?️

I was saddened to hear that Steve Harley died a couple of days ago. I've loved his music for ages and felt he never got the recognition he deserved. His early albums are witty, intelligent and complex. I saw him live a few years ago and his voice was still fantastic, his stories between songs funny and down to earth. A great singer-songwriter who will continue to 🎶Make Me Smile🎶 with his music. 🖤
#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

Without having intended it, my fiction and nonfiction reading have intersected, with Lovecraft's Randolph Carter journeying to the Dreamlands in search of a vision he glimpsed, and a thought-provoking study of dreamwork, including how one might hold onto glimpsed dream visions. I shall have to keep the narratives separate in my mind 😄

I'm up to David's 1973 album, Pin Ups, in which he glams up some of his favourite songs by bands from the '60s, some of which had played the same circuit of pubs and community centres he emerged from himself. There's a couple of bonus tracks on this disc, including Bruce Springsteen's Growing Up, which David had seen him play at Max's Kansas City a few months earlier. I love that David respects the songs while infusing them with his own energy ⚡

"Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times he was snatched away while he paused on the high terrace above it."
- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Included in the anthology I'm reading, this story is more whimsical than "At the Mountains of Madness", though it is linked to Lovecraft's horror stories through its main protagonist, Randolph Carter, and a selection of Cthulhu Mythos gods, notably Nyarlathotep. ⬇️

The title story is one of my favourites of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories. If "The Call of Cthulhu" is his "Lord of the Rings" then this story is his "Silmarillion" - ok, Tolkien is orders of magnitude greater in terms of literature and sheer depth and complexity of conception, but Lovecraft is great in his own area.
There is no dialogue as the story is the first-person statement of polar expedition lead, William Dyer, who may be a great ⬇️

"I treat my body and mind as two separate entities most of the time, my body is an annoying failing bag of meat allowing me to live, whilst my mind is what I consider to be my actual self. Neither my mind nor my annoying meat would be alive without the NHS."
#AccessibilityMatters #NHS

"If you take one thing from this book let it be this: even the dying are alive. If you're a reader with a life limiting diagnosis: I see you. Grieving your body is continuous, sometimes the pain is intolerable, it is never an act of cowardice to talk about your life. You can't control the reactions of others, only what you do with it. Both the physical and mental aspects of our lives are intolerable some days, and that is okay. Ask for help, ⬇️

An incredibly emotive collection of poems charting Hannah's 163 days on a High Dependency Unit when she was 17 years old, during which time she was diagnosed with a life-limiting set of illnesses. The parts I found hard to read were those extracts from her medical notes in which consultants, doctors and nurses recorded their opinions that Hannah couldn't possibly be as distressed as she was presenting to them, or in which they give their ⬇️

We're staying just outside the little town of Cartmel, which has a huge priory church and a race course, but the main attraction for me was (naturally) a bookshop. Disappointingly, as we're here from Monday to Friday, it's only open for a few hours on Saturday, and even that's not guaranteed. Pity 😔
Today we're going to see what Ulverston has to offer, starting with a guided meditation at a Buddhist temple 😌

"Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames - for they rested and slept upright with folded down tentacles - and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books."

Similarly to the Elder Things, I like to know my books are safely shelved and racked before I settle into my sleeping frame and fold down my tentacles for a quick millennium-or-two nap. ???

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
As you asked for recommendations for upbeat Latin music, I can only really offer Rita Indiana's "Mandinga Times", but I think it's a good one! She's a Dominican musician, author (see tagged) and advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights across the Caribbean ❤️?️‍? https://open.spotify.com/album/027cuwNhwK78Agx2K1N5EC?si=IFXmW5ACQ5SGr2-PylclTA
For a more chill bossa nova beat, I like Paul Desmond's "Take Ten" ??

#BookHaul #SpongeAndCustardHaul
Spending the last few days of my annual leave in the South Lakes, I've visited bookshops in Carnforth and Grange-over-Sands, and tried to visit one in Cartmel, but it was shut, so I had to content myself with buying sticky toffee puddings and custard from the Cartmel pudding shop 🍮😋
The book on the left is a beautiful 1967 Folio Edition of The Song of Songs bound in (I think) salmon-pink silk.
⬇️

The Epic of Gilgamesh has parts dated from 2100 BCE, other elements up to 1200 BCE. It's a fantastic insight into the minds of the earliest settled, literate people. My edition is a Penguin Classic I bought in the 1980s, so I do need to get a more modern edition that incorporates newer archeological findings and historical perspectives.
#SundayFunday @BookmarkTavern

My flibbertigibbet brain is struggling to settle, so I'll feed it something I've chewed before, although not previously this edition, which as well as the title novella includes several Dreamland stories which I also like.
Ian Miller's cover art of an Elder Thing is fantastically chaotic & likely to induce the madness that overruns an ill-fated Antarctic expedition.
Lovecraft's aliens evoke the strange body plans of the vastly ancient Ediacaran ⬇️

"Kate Moss recently [2003] did a photo shoot with Nick Knight for British Vogue and she's wearing several of my outfits from the Ziggy years... She even called me afterwards to tell me I must have been really skinny at the time! When Kate Moss phones to tell you she can't get into your clothes, you know you can't have weighed very much." ✏️
#BooksAndBowie

"I received life like a wound and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar."

"Why should therapists in clinical practice have a practical understanding of how to work with dreams?"

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

“A dream is not the mind's attempt to obscure, but rather the body's attempt to communicate in the way that comes most naturally.”