We were surrounded by five and twenty boatmen, each of whom exerted himself to get our custom: these were the ciceroni of the Blue Grotto. I chose one and Jadin another, for you must have a boat and a boatman to get there, the opening being so low and so narrow that one cannot enter unless in a very small boat.

…

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“Satyrs are they who are called Pans in Greek and Incubi in Latin And they are called Incubi from their practice of overlaying that is debauching. For they often lust lecherously after women, and copulate With them.” - Blessed Isidore

The Background to Fayrie

The fair…

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It is true that many answers have suggested th…

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“What’s that?”

“A piece of brontosaurus.”

M…

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It’s true.
Our ending is inevitable:
long years betray the beautiful.

This manuscript is ancient, priceless,
bamboo-rolled, perfumed with musty spices.
Sit comfortably by this good light, t…

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In this interview, carried out over a Paris-to-Dublin vid…

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Paris-based writer Will Mountain Cox is the editor of The Relegation Reader, a pocket-sized anthology doubling as “a rebellion against machine made art”. For his ‘Why do you like this?’ interview, he chooses the first two episodes of the TV show Baseball.

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Here as a joy-hog: a pleasant change after that pension on the Giudecca two years ago. We went to the Lido this morning, and the Doge’s Palace looked more beautiful from a speedboat than it ever did from a gondola. The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one’s mouth, …

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These interviews are the product of thinking about black metal music. I don’t personally listen to Dialectic of Blood or Lichen Throne (yes I made up those names) but I’m fascinated by the question: what is it like to like them?

Tuning into The Archers, the “comfortingly boring” BBC radio soap about life in a British farming village, couldn’t be further …

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From writing novels to curating sound, this week’s guest Tasha Young has consistently grappled with the conditions that make creativity possible. With her new app, oevra, that experience is augmented by research on neuroscience and psychology to help facilitate the fabled and increasingly hard to achieve ‘flow stat…

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1. A new clock every day.

2. A few months ago, somewhere in Paris, a poster on Reddit known as Sh3nlong found a Tintin album called Le Passage Incertain (‘The Uncertain Passage’) in their local book exchange box. There’s no ‘real’ Tintin book with this title, so what is it and why was it made? The album contains no information about who was behind it. Is there just one copy, or many? Did it already circulate in some way, or is the idea to distribute it through the book box system? The more you look, the weirder it becomes: a series of sparse, dialogue-free scenes surrounded by barely-legible passages lifted from works of theory and philosophy. One page contains a hand-altered quote by Jacques Derrida: “A preface comic book is not merely the presentation of a text: something of it remains, outside the book — a residue, a fall, dropping away like an empty husk.” A professor has described it as a masterpiece.

3. In 1969, John Giorno launched Dial-a-Poem, a service that saw millions of people listening to poetry recitals via a dedicated phone number. It was as if the talking clock had gone to Woodstock and come back with long hair and a paisley shirt. Dial-a-Poem was closed down (allegedly by the FBI) in 1971 but revived several times since in exhibition form. Now it has finally embraced the information superhighway in the form of a simple website which you can find at dial-a-poem.org

   

4. Essex Honey, the new album by Blood Orange, contains cameos from Lorde, The Durutti Column, Caroline Polachek and, quite amazingly, Zadie Smith. It’s great and is on heavy rotation on the Read Me Sonos device along, if I’m honest, with Not for Lack of Trying by Dodie, the Youtube star and indie-folk singer, also from Essex.

5. The cover image of Essex Honey, of a boy in a school uniform, basketball in one hand, iPhone in the other, tie whipping in the wind, was taken by my friend the photographer, writer and broadcaster Johny Pitts, whose latest book is Afropean: A Journal.
   ME: I always like the way your work — in which I include your Instagram stories — grapples with the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a time which many of us find hard to remember as ‘a time’. You’ll excavate everything from the movie The Beach to the aesthetics of, say, coffee machines in 2006. Is this coming from a place of nostalgia, because it’s when you grew up, or something else?

   JOHNY: I think every generation would be nostalgic about where they were 20 years earlier, but then what I think is different in this case is that I’ll speak to my mum and then I’ll speak to a 22-year-old runner at the publisher and everyone actually seems to go back to that moment. Everyone, whether they lived through it or not, looks back at the end of the 20th century as a place of potential. It’s nostalgia not for what was, but for what might have been. Walter Benjamin called it a “weak messianic power” where you can just feel these sort of energies of what could have been but didn’t emerge in the present moment.

   ME: You’ve often used this interesting term: “the haunted 2000s”.

   JOHNY: I think it’s about that ‘end of history’ thinking that was proposed by Fukuyama in 1992, and the idea that there’s no alternative vision following the triumph of western liberal democracy and capitalism. Everyone was operating under this moment of what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism, where it was just like there’s nothing else you could possibly imagine. Everything was commodified. It was the era of the Che Guevara T-shirt that you buy in Camden for 30 quid, the decade when assimilation won. Pirate radio was absorbed into BBC 1Xtra, indie into Britpop, rebellion into Blair’s Cool Britannia. You could say “fuck MTV” and MTV would clap. Laura Oldfield Ford wrote that to come of age in the 2000s was to always yearn for the time that had just eluded us. You knew about the miners’ strike, about punk, about rave culture, but you were too young to take part. And by the 2000s it was gone, but you carried its shadow. You were nostalgic not for the past, but for the potential that the 1990s had once embodied — the ghosts of other potential futures.

   

6. “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” (Yogi Berra on a restaurant in St. Louis)

7. Andrew Samtoy’s list of things to pack when you travel includes one I can’t stop thinking about: a mouth guard. It’s partly as a last resort in the event of physical conflict, but mostly it’s to assert peace through strength:

   a mouth guard can play a preventative role. See, you shouldn’t hide the fact that you’re putting it in; you do it openly, even ostentatiously, and flash it at any aggressor. Show everyone that you are, bizarrely, out to have fun but also prepared to fight. If the other person does not know the significance of someone having a mouthguard, it means they probably have no idea what they are doing, and you will likely destroy them. If they know how to fight, and they see you putting a mouth guard in, they will think: “Uh-oh. This person is not only prepared to fight, they probably train. I should de-escalate. Let’s be cool.”

   Not sure I’ll do this but I’m glad for the brain movie. He does say that he’s never actually used his mouth guard, adding that it’s “an incredibly easy (if certainly strange) way to give me a bit more peace of mind and make me feel a bit more robust.” Andrew — remembered as the US correspondent of my old blog The London Review of Breakfasts — also recommends packing a travel washboard.

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8. The first fifteen pages of the current issue of Fantastic Man (I’m talking after the masthead and contents) are dedicated to phenomena made from the most beautiful, versatile and influential material in the world: paper. Which naturally means novels, memoirs and art books but also stuff like restaurant menus, magazines and Johny’s beloved CD inlays. We’re a long way past the tech optimism of ten or fifteen years ago. Print objects are cautiously on the up, and almost anyone, if pushed, will confess to wishing they had the willpower to spend more time reading them at the expense of the info-heroin of social media. As Real Review founder Jack Self puts it in his contribution:

   the role of physical print has become more important than ever: a space of communication sheltered from the watchful gaze of algorithms. In a strange way the temporal relationship between digital and print seems to have flipped. Digital feels structurally permanent, print feels increasingly ephemeral. Privacy, too, is inverted. Print is unreadable to anyone but humans. Digital is a cacophony of agentic personas.

9. Me: Which books are physically closest to you right now?

   Eszter Balint, who starred in the 1984 Jim Jarmusch film Stranger than Paradise: I’m sitting between Portnoy’s Complaint (Philip Roth) which I took out of the library recently, and am reading and finding extremely hilarious — ashamed to admit I never read it — and there are two books to my right on my dresser. One is Interview with History by Oriana Fallaci, which I’ve read many times and have owned for decades. I just pulled it off the shelf randomly because I thought now might be a good time to revisit it. And next to it is Lucia Berlin’s collection of short stories A Manual for Cleaning Women.

   (Longtime readers will recall a strange coincidence involving my meeting Jim Jarmusch the day after I watched Stranger than Paradise. I actually contacted Balint back then, as I thought it’d be fun to hear from her in that same issue, but she only just saw my message the other day.)

   (BOOK NOW: Balint performs ‘anti-musical’ I Hate Memory! at Joes Pub, Manhattan on 14 January 2026.)

10. The artist Yufeng Zhao has created a beautiful search engine that finds text on the streets of New York. For example if you search for the word ghost you get Street View images containing menus advertising GHOST PEPPER SLIDERS, the awnings of a church called the ‘Holy Ghost Prayer House Deliverance Ministries’, an ad on the side of a bus for Ghost: The Musical... What to do with this superpower?

    

11. I interviewed Jude Law for the cover of Mastermind magazine. It was a really enjoyable conversation, perhaps because we’re both from south east London. Law is observable at the moment as Vladimir Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin and a New York nightspot owner in the Netflix series Black Rabbit. Both, in their way, powerful men. The interview’s not online but Mastermind’s five takeaways are here.

12. Just taking a moment to savour the eerie, promo-poetic way in which Trendhunter describes rising product categories:
    – “cognition-enhancing seasonal snacks”
    – “celeb condiment brand expansions”
    – “essence-enriched toner mists”
    – “expanded pet apparel capsule”

13. How’d it be if Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ was read out not in poetry reading voice but in football commentary voice?

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1.
In 2003, Kevin Kelly made a high-three-figure bet that by 2025 there would be strong evidence (as in, accepted by at least half the relevant scientists) for the existence of bigfoot and/or the yeti.

2.
Click for sound.

3.
In the grounds of a champagne house in Reims, technicians were assembling a stage. To test the sound, they played the song ‘Bookends’ …

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1. [28/04/2025, 14:30:23] Seb: Hi Jenny, this is Seb Emina. I believe we are scheduled to chat around now?

   [28/04/2025, 14:33:27] The singer-songwriter Jenny Hval: Hi! I’m here and looking forward.

   [28/04/2025, 14:35:05] Seb: Great! This is actually my first interview carried out via Whatsapp

   [28/04/2025, 14:35:22] Jenny Hval: This is my third. The fir…

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