Usher Gallery, Lincoln

Stumbled across the Usher Gallery, which currently has an exhibition called Modern Masters, with prints by Dali, Picasso, Matisse and Warhol. As cool as that was, the highlight was the gallery itself, which contains surprises from all over the place and all over time, including this Lowry painting, currently tucked away down a small corridor: 

You, The Living

An excerpt from Roy Andersson's extraordinary film, You, The Living...

New Ebook - Spiders Inside by Lacy Lalonde

Lacy Lalonde’s Spiders Inside is a somewhat unnerving short story collection about our relationship with arachnids.

Download for free here. 

Can't help thinking they're taking this a little too seriously

 http://tinyurl.com/kmotxjq

Anemone Sidecar

Very much enjoyed the current issue of Anemone Sidecar: http://tinyurl.com/q7a79ju 

ShortStops

Brand new website dedicated to short stories and their writers, masterminded by Tania Hershman: http://shortstops.info/

Much respect. 

Raymond Carver

Josh Jones's overview of Raymond Carver's work sums it up very well (an appropriate treatment for an author famous for summing things up).

This post on Open Culture also features three audio versions of Carver's stories. Brilliant.

Pigeons at Dawn by Charles Simic

Extraordinary efforts are being made 
To hide things from us, my friend. 
Some stay up into the wee hours 
To search their souls. 
Others undress each other in darkened rooms. 

The creaky old elevator 
Took us down to the icy cellar first 
To show us a mop and a bucket 
Before it deigned to ascend again 
With a sigh of exasperation. 

Under the vast, early-dawn sky 
The city lay silent before us. 
Everything on hold: 
Rooftops and water towers, 
Clouds and wisps of white smoke. 

We must be patient, we told ourselves, 
See if the pigeons will coo now 
For the one who comes to her window 
To feed them angel cake, 
All but invisible, but for her slender arm. 


http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16876#sthash.RkB7HhS7.dpuf

Gay marriage in prison

I've been doing some research for a story I'm writing about gay relationships in prison.

I missed this story first time round.  No doubt someone's going to make a film about this at some point - I look forward to seeing it.  

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

I began serialising this classic text on this blog, but for boring technical reasons the process of doing so has proven rather difficult, so here's a link to the complete book which can be downloaded in various formats through Archive.org.