David Hayden

What drives a painter like Poussin to bring the material reality of paint up to the surface - what makes painted-ness worth relishing, in other words - is that in it and through it other identities (I want to say "all other identities," or all the relevant ones in a particular case) are bracketed, and made to occur again - here, now, like this... And for a moment we do not know how to react to them; we haven't got our understanding of grass or horror or light in place - or not this grass or horror or light. We enter into the identity in a new way: that's the hope.

this grass or horror or light

T.J. Clark, from ‘The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing’

God’s Impertinent Prophets | Erin Maglaque A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un u...

A well-deserved, excellent review by @erinmaglaque.bsky.social in @nybooks.com of @drnaomibaker.bsky.social's 'Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century', which I edited for @reaktionbooks.bsky.social. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Mi chiederai tu, morto disadorno, d'abbandonare questa disperata passione di essere nel mondo? Would you, in death unadorned, have me abandon my desperate passion for being in the world?

being in the world

Pier Paolo Pasolini, from ‘Gramsci’s Ashes’, tr Stephen Sartarellli

Mi chiederai tu, morto disadorno, d'abbandonare questa disperata passione di essere nel mondo? Would you, in death unadorned, have me abandon my desperate passion for being in the world?

being in the world

Pier Paolo Pasolini, from ‘Gramsci’s Ashes’, tr Stephen Sartarellli

This mournful empire is the losers lot John Dryden, Lucifer speaking in ‘The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man’, 1674 Screen still from ‘La Flor’, directed by Mariano Llinás, 2018

God’s Impertinent Prophets | Erin Maglaque A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un u...

A well-deserved, excellent review by @erinmaglaque.bsky.social in @nybooks.com of @drnaomibaker.bsky.social's 'Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century', which I edited for @reaktionbooks.bsky.social. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

And this the Climate we must change for Heaven?

John Dryden, from 'The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man', 1674

Dressed as my favourite Virginia Woolf novel...

*waves*

I agree. Spending a great deal of time lately advising authors on AI-generated ‘book club’ scams. Just one example of the vast amount of sludge engulfing everyone. But it’s become the job now, and I still think we should make space to communicate courteously, at least with ‘good actors’.

In the book trade in recent years I’ve noticed a growing preference to abruptly ceasing communication rather than, I presume, to risk appearing disagreeable. It’s in all directions too: agent to publisher, agent to author, author to publisher etc. (I’m excluding unsolicited here).

This mournful empire is the losers lot John Dryden, Lucifer speaking in ‘The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man’, 1674 Screen still from ‘La Flor’, directed by Mariano Llinás, 2018

Funds sought to open archive of renowned Dorset writer and LGBTQ+ pioneer Dorset Archives Trust launches £48,000 appeal to catalogue and digitise Sylvia Townsend Warner archive, preserving the Dorset author and LGBTQ+…

www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/2590162...

Lorna Goodison translation of Dante Inferno Canto VI When I come back to myself after I faint like I dead after I heard that tragic tale about those two unfortunates that made me feel so sorry for them, I sight up new torments and ones that get tormented wherever I set foot or look, in the third circle where I find myself; it cold so till, and sheeting hard rain. A dark and stubborn man-rain that rush down wet same way from beginning to end, pissing a stream of dirty ditch water mixed with hail and ice fragments pelt down without stop through the foul air of hell; and where it drop it give off a renking frowsy smell: Sir B. Russ with him three head, a monster well wicked. The dog-heart bark three time louder at all the duppy down here; for is three throat him have, him eye red, him greasy beard black; him big belly is a wanga gut. ...

new torments

Lorna Goodison, from her translation of Canto VI of Dante's Inferno

The first page of my essay ‘Nothing Except Nothing: Living With Duras’ Cinema’, published this year in @fallowmedia.bsky.social fallowmedia.com/shop/fallow-02

Olga Ravn, The Employees, James Plunkett, Strumpet City, Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen, Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance.

The regulars

James Merrill, from ‘Scripts for the Pageant’ in ‘The Changing Light At Sandover’

the colour of the whole

Marguerite Duras, from ‘The Embassy is a Boat Riddled With Holes’, in ‘My Cinema’, tr Daniella Shreir

Arthur Machen’s influence might be seen in Robert Aickman, Daphne du Maurier, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mark E. Smith, among others. Written in the late 1890s his ‘The Hill of Dreams’ is a decadent occult novel, visionary, bitter and unsettling, that moves between rural Wales and literary London.

Transit Books — Darker With the Lights On David Hayden Driven hypnotically forward by a powerful, deeply felt narrative force, the stories in this debut collection pull off that rare trick of captivating the reader, while twisting the form i...

A Bluesky introduction: I am a writer with work in Granta, Zoetrope All-Story, A Public Space, Georgia Review, Stinging Fly, Winter Papers etc & a book published @transitbooks.bsky.social www.transitbooks.org/books/darker. And I work for independent non-fiction publisher @reaktionbooks.bsky.social.

'I especially admire how you achieve the sense of being in the presence of deepest meaning, which remains mysterious, through the most vivid, concrete, literal nouns and verbs. I think of the Stevens line, “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”' 'The prose is so moving and accomplished — a beauty and a restraint to its long past present, its cold dirt; and a stubbornly romantic mode within the dark, and with its ode to Liverpool. A stylist’s concern for the composition of a sentence, and also an intimacy.'

Recent rejections.

Transit Books — Postcard from Liverpool David Hayden “I sit on a rotten bench by the river Wensum in Norwich, at the edge of early old age.”

A 'Postcard from Liverpool' that I wrote some years ago for @transitbooks.bsky.social, courtesy of @lizastjames.bsky.social. www.transitbooks.org/postscript/p...

Transit Books — Postcard from Liverpool David Hayden “I sit on a rotten bench by the river Wensum in Norwich, at the edge of early old age.”

A 'Postcard from Liverpool' that I wrote some years ago for @transitbooks.bsky.social, courtesy of @lizastjames.bsky.social. www.transitbooks.org/postscript/p...

Sainted well waters good for all that ails, trapped in the dark, the ghosts of Atticus…great stuff. I hope I’ll get to read more VR.