Jonathan Gibbs

I mean, I can’t remember the last time I *consciously* thought about a wombat, so I’m impressed by the fact that my subconscious knows they dig burrows.

Wombat dream. Various animals in the garden, then I spotted a wombat through the hedge in next door’s garden. Next the wombat wobbles into our garden and hangs out with fox, rabbits etc. Next I find out they’ve dug a massive burrow under the garden with babies in.

Books on the tube

Everywhere an Oink-Oink by David Mamet
The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James
Empire of Storms by Sarah J Maas
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

Nothing Ever Happens: “Mister Squishy” and the Year of the Sentence Diagram | Los Angeles Review of Books Hannah Smart writes about her attempt to diagram a 900-word sentence in David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy,” and what the efforts taught her about human inertia and meaningless language.

thx to @saintsoftness.bsky.social's substack (avmarraccini.substack.com/p/a-list-of-...) for alerting me to this very smart essay by Hannah Smart, on David Foster Wallace's sentences @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social

lareviewofbooks.org/article/noth...

But it’s encouraged me to go back to the books themselves. Opening RB by RB I find particular passages (fragments) marked. Yes, there is very good stuff in here, but you’ve got to read it slowly, non-programmatically, against its own grain, very much NOT “as if spoken by a character in a novel”

As Culler says (and as Barthes well knew), the risk of searching always for the paradox in the system, is that the paradox becomes the new Doxa, and you’ll always need to be on the move, to be looking to pull the rug out from under your own position.

In a similar vein, I’ve always been mistrustful of the studium/punctum dichotomy in Camera Lucida, which seems to claim a special understanding of the photograph only for the writer himself, by virtue of his wound, his sensibility and sensitivity.

But there’s something a bit tiresome about the idea that looking for meaning (e.g. in an artwork) is for the little people; the real thinkers are interested only in understanding the meaning-making apparatus itself. It’s always a useful manoeuvre, but if it’s all there is, then meaning evaporates.

I particularly liked Culler’s description of Barthes’ tactic in later critical work as being the production of “disposable typologies”: “suggestive, perhaps witty, but with no theoretical claims and little chance that others will try to integrate it in a theory of reading.”

Jonathan Culler is an excellent guide, patient, careful, a critical friend to the writer, and clear by the end that we mustn’t privilege the late Barthes (stylist, écrivain) over the early Barthes (theorist, system-builder) even though Barthes seems to have rejected him himself.

Small paperback book on a white bedspread. The cover has what looks like an abstract painting, dark blue at top and turquoise below with brush strokes visible and a white horizontal splodge in the middle.

2026 Reading 19: Barthes, A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler. Borrowed from the library and read over a week or two. I find Barthes equally fascinating and frustrating as a writer, full of exciting ideas but maddeningly mandarin in style: opaque word choices and contrary in positioning.

MEET THE BÀRD: Stu Hennigan | Bard Books We are delighted to be hosting the first London event for Stu Hennigan's hotly tipped debut novel 'Keshed', a brutally poetic examination of class, belonging, masculinity, addiction and fatherhood. St...

Roll call, motherfuckers. It's costing me about six hundred quid to do this and people have started bailing on me again. The toys are going RIGHT out the pram if the gaff's half-empty this time and I ain't organising another one. Who's definitely coming? 🤘💪

www.wearebardbooks.co.uk/event-detail...

Got myself a ticket, Stu. I’ve got an ex-student launching a book on the same night, a bit earlier, so I’ll try to make it along after I’ve been there.

Country diary: A riverside walk reveals the city’s history written in plants | Susie White Lower Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne: Under boardwalks, in concrete, on window ledges, seeds borne by water and carried on feet survive

In today's @theguardian.com country diary, Susie White checks out Newcastle's urban plants with James Common, whose new book - Urban Flora of Newcastle and North Tyneside - is out today! commonbynature.com/urban-flora-...

@bsbibotany.bsky.social #countrydiary #naturewriting

Three Lives by Gertrude Stein (lovely old orange and white Penguin Modern Classics edition)
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo

Books on the tube

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Soul Tourist by Bernardine Evaristo
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown

But the clarity and patience of her articulation of determinedly uncomplex thought is brilliant at opening the reader’s mind. You end up coming away with highly useful thoughts of your own, that seem to peel directly off her pages, her prose. There’s something almost ambient about it.

As always, what Davis writes seems in one light very obvious, almost not worth saying at all, but in saying it she makes it seem worth saying; she convinces you that these simple obvious thoughts have never been more clearly, or certainly more patiently expressed. And for that we thank her.

I won’t spoil it by naming the other writers she comments on in this digressive, diaristic essay. Part of the pleasure is seeing whose names crop up, and then crop up again, and these are often delightfully surprising.

A hardback book with a white dust jacket lying on a white bedspread. It features a large photograph of the author who is wearing a loose longsleeeved russet coloured top and a long dark blue skirt and is sitting leaning slightly forward on a rather naff sofa with a blue throw or sheet on it, smiling in a way that makes it look like she doesn’t particularly care to be photographed just now.

2026 Reading 18: Into the Weeds by Lydia Davis.

God bless Lydia Davis.

What a treat this small short book is: based on the author’s Windham-Campbell Lecture, necessarily on the subject of ‘Why I Write’: not something Davis has shied away from in other essays and stories.

It’s the Ginger Rogers edit: backwards and in heels. 💃🕺

Catshit is tricky as a normative term. If it’s in the house (in a litter tray or box), yes it smells dreadful, but then cats often shit outside and secret, no bother to humans, whereas dogshit always needs dealing with.

Foxshit on the other hand is absolutely dreadful stuff.

As before, a ginger and white cat sleeping on a light brown leather chair with a patterned cushion behind it. The cat is now sleeping facing to the right.

Important update.

A ginger and white cat sleeping on a light brown leather reading chair with a patterned cushion behind it. You can see some bookshelves behind it and a foot stool In front of it.

The local pundit here (23yo) says no.

Useful too for its narrative shape as it moves through its chapters themed almost as essays. There is a first build towards Liptrot going into AA, and a second as she settles into her return to Orkney. I feel like there’s room there for a ‘third act’ that doesn’t quite appear, but no biggie.

Read as prep for teaching an MA Creative Writing module on memoir (along with The End of Eddy and In the Dream House). This is useful for its treatment of place, and how often Orkney and London are contrasted or even elided. Also how Liptrot’s memory devolves to lists, a rolling montage of moments.

Rather battered hardback copy of The Outrun on a light brown leather chair. Cover illustration shows dark blue island against light blue sea with many white seabirds flying across; also white lines for the perpetual wind.

2026 Reading 17: The Outrun by Amy Liptrot. A first full read, though it’s been on my shelf for years, and I saw the film on release. The book doesn’t have the wide shots of Orkney, but then the film doesn’t have Liptrot’s interiority, moving deftly between island and city, sobriety and alcoholism.

Yes I went to that - blubbed most of the way through. As I shall to Arcadia.

Thomasina: "How can we sleep for grief?"
Septimus: "By counting out stock..."

I've got tears in my eyes just typing the start of his speech...

Oh man, just you wait. I’m going in a couple of weeks. I have an early review from someone who’d never seen it before who says it’s great!