A GN for teens, but certainly helpful for adults.
The Sad Ghosts represent people experiencing anxiety and depression, and several have neurodivergent traits. They develop a community and found family, supporting each other and providing a positive counter-view to each others' low self-esteem.
In this one, Rue takes on lots of tasks to support the club & starts to feel overwhelmed.
Cute & effective look at mental wellbeing & self-care. 💕👻💕

Estella, a defrocked nun turned governess, lives in a decaying house in an abandoned Italian village perpetually threatened by engulfment in a slow landslide. While she is alone of the living, ghosts of the former inhabitants are drawn to her, and they reluctantly relive their sadnesses. There's a nod to Poe's House of Usher in the metaphor of the collapsing structures mirroring Estella's psychological decline.
I learned of Derrida's concept of ⬇️

"The butterfly that shakes the dust from its wings before resuming its flight cares little for the remains of the chrysalis in which it once lived.” ??

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
Impossible for me to choose a favourite Cocteau Twins album, so "Treasure" stands in for their amazing body of work. I've never taken hallucinogens, but I imagine this album is what it might feel like.
https://youtu.be/nmLJgh6yyoE?si=7EgwDeKgApk3KjtQ

Reading about neolithic monuments, folk traditions and the re-enchanting of the British landscape, & Julian Cope appears in the Avebury chapter, so I'm listening to his albums Jehovahkill & 20 Mothers, which have a high quotient of lyrical & musical relevance to these topics. Julian was well into his Modern Antiquarian phase with these recordings, including songs and poems about stone circles, henges and paganism. It's a mood! 🪨🛸
#BooksAndMusic

I like reading about other people getting their exercise. You keep walking weird, I'll keep reading weird!
I might've expected the hardcover to be a collection of articles from the zines of this collective of ramblers through the British pagan countryside, but I didn't think of it, so now I'm less sure about collecting all the zine issues, but that petty quibble aside, this is a lovely book in the tradition of Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian.

"I didn't want to feel unloved. No one should be condemned to see the contempt in the eyes of the one who brought you into the world, to be born, to reach a certain point and a little further than that: all denied. Denied the healing word - 'take care of me because I can't make it on my own.' Denied the chance to reach the source of all beauty. The love that moves the world. While I was moved only by the abyss within."

“I was so convinced that I couldn't be loved that loving me must have been difficult.”

"The room will be warm and filled with the smell of fried food."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

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 😌