Such important reflections!

The Rape of Lucrece?? Bit of a deep cut that. Errr Burton?!!!

Yes!!

Hmm...what about A Ramble in St. James' Park by John Wilmot. Always getting their fundaments confused, those Restoration fellas. (Except hang on. The timing for this wld be off. It's paper 3 or Shakespeare)

Yes! I am saving mine until next week anyway...

Yes. That society having to morph, in order to accommodate them...

I taught it for the first time last year at Oxford and it was fantastic. It was for a course about word and image. We ended up spending far more time thinking about missing mothers than anything else. !

I absolutely love Ali Smith!! How to be Both is one of my favourite novels of the last 50 years. So excited to read your thoughts on her!

Me too! It's magnificent!

But volume 2 is perhaps more Proustian. The final paragraph made me squeak!

Interesting!! Yes, the papers are very loaded, aren't they. I read the first volume as being about a marriage failing. Two people who are in love who begin to inhabit different worlds in the same space, and who cannot recover their twoness. maybe even an alzheimer's allegory! Very not Proust!!

I also adored it. The Paris aspect of lost time would seem to urge this reading, but I hear nothing else of Proust, anywhere in Baille. Do you? How can I wait (!!) for the next installment. I feel like a lover of Tristram Shandy, circa 1763...

Where are you headed, Declan?! Am impressed by the rude health of your office plants 🪴 xx

Why do so many of them have featherless penguins??

I am mad on so many fronts today that I am incoherent with rage.

I love you too, Max.