My mother was born on 20 August 1923 and christened Sheila Mary Felicity Cobon. At some stage she was told the supposed meaning of these names, or looked them up in a book. Her forenames meant by derivation Blind Bitter Happiness. As an adult Sheila found this augury ruefully amusing, or faintly ann…
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Is there in fact a jostling for dominance between the art forms, some barely suppressed competitiveness?’
Adam Mars-Jones on music and ceremony.
‘When I was put on Granta’s first Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983, no novel of mine had been published.’
‘Obscure repertoire is a sensible hiding-place for mediocre technique.’
‘At the end of the year, an ambulance brought Suseela home from hospital to die’.
‘I put my trophy on a high shelf, and at some stage laid it face down.’
‘He'd have to keep an eye on his liver now, the way you do with cars, if you want them to last: regular washing and greasing, an eye cast over the electrics, the injectors, all the pumps, the battery and the brakes.’
