The much anticipated book by Luke Sherlock, “Forgotten Churches: Exploring England’s Hidden Treasures,” has finally reached Cambridge, and it’s a very atmospheric read.

 That boisterous April.

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.16 “P. S. The gift from Poppyland”

 The subject:

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.15 “P. S. Misc.”

Life on Holidays:

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.14 “P. S. Cromer as Kêr-Is”

Kêr-Is (or Ys) was a mythical city swallowed up by the ocean.

King Gradlon ruled in Ys, a city built on land reclaimed from the sea, sometimes described as rich in commerce and the arts, with Gradlon's palace being made of marble, cedar and gold. In some versions, Gradlon built the city upon the request of his daughter Dahut, who loved the sea. To protect Ys from inundation, a dike was built with a gate that was opened for ships during low tide. The one key that opened the gate was held by the king.

Most versions of the legend present Gradlon as a pious man, and his daughter, Princess Dahut, as wayward. Dahut (sometimes called Ahez) is often presented as frivolous and an unrepentant sinner, or, sometimes, as a sorceress. However, in another version, that of an ancient ballad, Gradlon himself is blamed by his people for extravagances of every kind.

In most variations, Dahut acquires the key to the dikes from Gradlon, and its misuse leads to catastrophe. Commonly, Dahut steals the keys (made either of silver or gold) from her father while he sleeps, either to allow her lover inside for a banquet or after being persuaded to do so by her flattering lover. She opens the gates of the dikes, either in a wine-induced folly or by mistake, believing she is opening the city gates. ©

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.13 “P. S. Lovely pests of Cromer”

It turns out, starlings are the most adorable pests of winter Cromer: they can sit in the closest imaginable proximity to you, singing you the best song of their people and waiting (somewhat impatiently) for whatever you nibble. If you don’t eat anything, they perform for you for another minute or two and then leave with “smh” expressions plastered all over their silhouettes

(Upd. Apologies for the “toilet” part in the video: not exactly demure, but it is what it is)

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.12 “Winter Cromer as a memory”

Winter Cromer is already a memory, and looking at the photos I think it was a joyous dream.

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.11 “Time to go home”

It’s time to go home, but it was one of the most wonderful celebrations of my slowly acquired Britishness.

Also on Thursday before the opera.

We decided to eat al fresco in our favourite restaurant (it has a nice glass terrace). Since it’s still a bit chilly, the radiators are cleverly disguised in beautiful foliage, a centrepiece of the terrace, and in the lights above. And then the dialogue below happened:

Me: “Could you bring us a blankie, please?”

A lovely young waitress (somewhat perplexed): “The what a blanket, you mean?”

Me (absolutely mortified): “Yes, please!”

…The very idea that not everything in the outer world is one big cat community, struck hard.

“Turandot”: a very brief review (if I may)

Yesterday’s “Turandot,” revived after a long break on the ROH stage, was spectacular, bombastic and, oddly enough, less camp than one could expect from the post-commedia del’ arte opera buffa opulently decorated with chinoiserie. Those who still remember that notorious headline from 2013, “Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption” by Michael Tanner, won't be disappointed: it’s a qualified guilty pleasure for the “Nessun Dorma” admirers against all odds.

To be serious, I can’t see any flaws in the modern production: the performance itself, the set design (no performative “cultural appreciation”, but love to carefully curated grandeur) and, of course, the soloists themselves—everything was solidly enjoyable and delightful. However, unlike the Spectator's music critic, I preferred SeokJong Baek (Calaf) over Sondra Radvanovsky’s Turandot: something in her soprano, certain metallic undertones that never went away throughout the second and third acts, put me off. But Baek’s tenor, magnificently strong and effortlessly smooth, was a treat for the ears.

“Turandot”: the one that came back

 It was vibrant enough.

“Horrifying children” (Bloomsbury, 2025)

The collective monograph on hauntology as a core element of British children’s television (Bloomsbury, 2025) has arrived: the authors of the essays are analysing the spectral elements of the cinematic (as well as living) experiences of children on British TV in the past and present. I am reading a novel recommended to me by a dear friend, so I’ll have a chance to read this one a bit later. At first glance, not all pieces sound equally interesting, but the vast majority of them look good; let’s see.

“Everybody’s talking: a new production – and translation – of Chekhov’s everyday masterpiece” by Elizabeth Lowry (TLS)

This is by far the funniest description of the most annoying Chekhov’s play:

The Prozorovs are members of Russia’s ineffectual liberal intelligentsia. They are full of ideas about the nobility of work, despite the fact that none of them, apart from the eldest, the stressed-out teacher Olga – played with magnificent restraint by the Globe’s artistic director, Michelle Terry – has ever done much of it. Ruby Thompson’s Irina is woefully naive, enthusing about the importance of manual labour while being easily diverted by gifts of spinning tops and little notebooks and coloured pencils. Andrei, the “intellectual” Prozorov brother, is an eternal student who hopes to become a faculty professor in Moscow. Middle sister Masha, languishing in a boring marriage to the schoolmaster Kulygin (“She was eighteen when she got married, and she thought he was the cleverest man in the world. And now she doesn’t”), craves change. She gets this when she meets the sexy, sad Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin, with his depressed wife and his musings about destiny and human evolution. ©

Cambridge academic hauntology

Apparently, Cambridge academic hauntology and ghost studies were a thing: go figure.

The society was not cloistered off from the rest of the academic world. Discussions about psychical phenomena spilt over into the most respected philosophy journals of the period. For example, one of the 1902 issues of The Monist included a paper entitled ‘Spirit or Ghost’ by Paul Carus (the journal’s editor), and musings about life after death, precognitions and telepathy also appeared in the journals Mind, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Philosophy. Soon after the turn of the century, popular interest in psychical research began to wane. Ectoplasm turned out to be cheesecloth. Levitating tables were discovered to be attached to fishing wire. Ghosts emerging, in near complete darkness, from ‘spiritual cabinets’ looked suspiciously like the mediums themselves dressed in white robes. But the philosophical fascination with paranormal phenomena continued. Long after psychical research had been pushed out of biology, psychology and physics departments to the margins of academia, professional philosophers continued theoretical discussions about its findings unabated. There is no better example of the symbiosis of academic philosophy and psychical research than C D Broad. ©

Два года, как не стало папы.
Много тюльпанов и память.

М. Кузмин «Материалы к «Смерти Нерона»» (Публикация Константина Львова)

Тут уважаемый Константин Львов проделал огромный археографический труд по подготовке материалов к кузминской «Смерти Нерона».

Коллеги, плотно работавшие с ф. 232 (Шумихин, Н.А. и другие) и с ремизовским архивом, всегда вызывали мое неизменное восхищение.

Спасибо!

“Viennese whirl: a collection of ‘lost souls’ in postwar Austria” by Karen Leeder (TLS)

Postwar Austrian literature gave us Thomas Bernhard, too.

What might have been a tired formula – the run-down café transformed into a sanctuary for a band of likeable oddballs – is lit up by its cast, all in some way struggling with “a hairline rupture”, all seeming to watch life pass them by. And while the novel stands up for the dignity of the human amid the casual violence of progress, it contains something more existential at its heart. ©

Nothings and triviality

На вопрос, что именно для меня является определяющим фактором для (не)вовлечения в сетевые дискуссии о социокультурной политике, я неизменно цитирую своего дедушку, который отвечал на все похожие просьбы следующее: «Мне это нужно, как зайцу стоп-сигнал».

…Мастер точных формулировок, говорю же.

***

Никогда бы не подумала, что инста-шитпостинг будет доставлять мне столько чистой незамутненной радости. Только небо, только ветер, только балет и керамика, причем вполне буквальные: подписалась на костюмеров Ковент Гардена и на бесчисленные паблики художественных мастерских и артелей по изготовлению красивой посуды*.

Надо было давно устроить себе цветовую арт-терапию, но уж лучше поздно, чем etc.

_______________

* Не только на них, конечно: томные девицы из Вагуэ ходят у меня на стартовой странице табунами туда-сюда — лепота!

 37 лет, как ушла мама.

Подумалось тут.

Не очень хорошо образованные, но энергичные люди, любящие наукообразный волапюк, напоминают мне одного гражданина, который призвал оппонента в споре прекратить изъясняться эмфиземами. На робкий вопрос последнего «может быть, эвфемизмами?» гражданин яростно потребовал прекратить балаган.

Суетное-сокрушительное

Завела Инсту (не спрашивайте: про джинсы и отсталые слои населения все еще помню).

После бесконечных срачей в х-виттере, которые обозревать все скучнее, и фейсбучного фида, состоящего чуть более чем полностью из рекламы и редко долетающих до середины страницы постов друзей*, захотелось скроллить еще бездумнее, перечитывая «Постмодернизм и общество потребления» симпатичных картинок, на которых длинноволосые девы грациозно пьют кофе в кинематографичных интерьерах.

Все это у меня теперь есть; как им пользоваться, я пока что не имею ни малейшего понятия: как всегда, я приземлилась ровнехонько к шапочному разбору, когда все коллаборации уже заколлаборированы, все модные интеграции заинтегрированы, а хэштеги рисуются сами собой.

Ну и ладно: будем развлекаться как умеем.

________________

* которые, судя по всему, тоже давно уже выгорели (еще бы-то: не первый год здесь сидим)

The mediaeval macabre: a new exhibition in Clare

Thanks to L. and his fellowship, I was lucky to attend a new exhibition at a marvellous library in Clare, dedicated to the whole memento mori discourse in the ecclesiastical books and manuscripts of the late Mediaeval—early Modern philosophy era. Neo-Thomism, Scholasticism with lots of the weirdest baroque opulence, and the Grim Reaper doesn’t seem to look that grim anymore.

You who own this little book after I am dead, please say farewell for ever Prytherch.

As I came on Earth naked, so I shall go away naked, I have no idle ambitions, seeing the naked dead.

What could we wish to hope for here since is a penalty to be born and a pain to live, to exist to die.

Man dries up like a flower of the field.

(William Lyndwood, “Constitutiones provinciales ecclesiae anglicanae”)

HPL: 88th anniversary of death

Lovecraft died on this day 88 years ago.

He met his death stoically and was granted a peaceful departure from all his torments and the anguish of the final years of his life, filled with unbearable cancerous pain. It’s somewhat consoling to think that the 1937 Lovecraft was not the same as the Lovecraft of the 1910s or 1920s—he had become less and less rigid and deplorably prejudiced in his societal views than before, his milieu had got more diverse, but we will never know for a fact about the ultimate result of it all.

He was challenged by life yet persevered through his works: not exactly a cautionary tale for any resentful hypochondriac, but a complex (for the lack of a better word) story of a mighty talent that emerged and grew against all odds. And, of course, his own narration of what later was called by Ligotti “The Nightmare of Being” is a seminal continuation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism, Mainländer-Nietzschean Deicide and “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches” frustration in the face of cosmic indifference.

I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name. ©

Planets will roll; casting aside aloofness, we will remember.

Сезонное-(полу)рабочее

Дала себе зарок не жаловаться и не писать ничего личного, но иногда все же не могу удержаться: отправила рецензентам работы авторов своего сборника, получила приглашение на манчестерскую конференцию, провела занятия с ученицей по русскому, заказала несколько интересных книжек, а сезонная усталость все равно выводит из себя — легко злюсь, раздражаюсь по пустякам и работаю через силу. Видимо, приближающиеся пятьдесят потихоньку дают о себе знать... Ну да бог с ними. Март нужно просто перетерпеть.

Софья Асгатовна Губайдулина (1931 — 2025)

Она, Эдисон Денисов и Шнитке.

Папа иногда иронизировал над цветущей сложностью атональностей и диссонансов, но музыку их нежно любил — особенно ее камерные вещи; я слушала ее сонаты вместе с ним.

Для меня Губайдулина навсегда останется в первую очередь создательницей музыки к «Маугли» — яркой и странной, но очень точной и благодатной для детского стихийного воображения.

Замечательно длинная и творчески насыщенная жизнь: светлая ей память.

“Gothic Crossroads” 2025

On a brighter note, my abstract “The concepts of the Supernatural path and barrier as markers of “outsideness” in the works of Leonid Andreyev and M.R. James” has been accepted for “Gothic Crossroads,” a conference in Gothic and Horror Studies organised by Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.

See you later in June, Manchester.

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.10 “8th Anniversary of British Citizenship”

It’s been exactly 8 years* since I got my British citizenship, for which I am forever grateful to my beloved Stepmotherland. It’s a great coincidence (I didn’t plan it beforehand) that I am celebrating it being here, in one of my most essential places, where the country that accepted me showed me its incredible glory.

Love you wholeheartedly, England.

____________

* I am a bit behind my posting schedule: it was originally written on February 2.

“There Is No Happy Nonsense”: Mark Dery reviews “From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey”

Oh dear, so what?

To be sure, Gorey could be cartoonish. The bell jar world of his cozy-sinister stories, set in the England of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Bright Young Things eras and populated by vamps, shifty-eyed vicars, doubtful guests, deranged opera fans, and, famously, little dears whose absurd deaths are played for laughs (The Gashlycrumb Tinies), threatens at times to tip into goth kitsch. Gorey’s style and sensibility are so instantly recognizable, yet so uncategorizable, that, like David Lynch, he’s earned his own adjective: Goreyesque. The trouble with becoming an adjective, of course, is that it flattens you out, reduces you to a checklist of stylistic tics and well-worn themes that can quickly become the straitjacket of cliché—or, worse yet, self-parody. ©

“The Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz” by Katherine Kerestman

What a fabulous present for International Women’s Day! A great Lovecraftian scholar and a dear friend of mine, Bobby Dee, has a guest post in his legendary blog, “Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein”—“The Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz” by Katherine Kerestman. Working with David on Lovecraftian Proceedings is a true honour.

I think I first learned of Lovecraft when I saw a paperback of his stories at a department store. The Colour out of Space from Lancer, with its ridiculous cover depicting a skull amid flames. It may be—I can’t remember—that I first heard of him when I read Bradbury’s “Pillar of Fire,” when in the future, all morbidness in life is gotten rid of. Cemeteries are destroyed, and the works of morbid writers are destroyed. He mentioned Poe, but the other authors he named . . . Lovecraft, Bierce, Derleth, Machen. Well, basically Bradbury was telling me “Go look for these authors’ works!” And so I did. Bierce puzzled me, because the book I found had stories about the civil war and a “devil’s dictionary.” But upon closer examination, there were some outré stories. Many years later, I prepared an annotated “unabridged” edition of The Devil’s Dictionary. ©

A few slogans do no harm on that one day when women are reminded of their free will—mostly, alongside pictures containing flowers.

So, fellow women

Please, take care of yourself.

Once you do it properly, it helps to take care of those who’re dependant on you (children, the elderly, the sick, pets). Please, remind men that taking care of those who’re weaker is a shared responsibility; let’s hope that the men in your life don’t need this reminder, but if they [constantly] do, maybe it’s time to separate your paths: it is not your duty to change the mindset of a fully grown person if they don’t want to change to be more conscientious.

Please, focus on your needs, professional and whatnot.

The older you get, the better it will reward you. You are supposed to be not only your own harshest critic, but your own sympathetic companion. Hard, I know, yet possible (don’t ask me how: despite my advanced age, I have still not figured it out myself).

Please, be independent.

“Literature in Laputa: AI’s transformative translations” by Tim Parks (TLS)

What’s left? The feeling of humane coarseness, the range of relatable imperfections that hopefully will still make translation work.

So, at seventy, I find myself revising the assumptions of a lifetime. However humbling this may be, you have to admire the creativity of the scientists who have produced a machine that demonstrates how little of what you do is creative. At the same time an uneasy inkling tells me deep down we always knew this, or feared it. What were Jonathan Swift’s parodies of mindless, jargon-spouting hacks, or, in Laputa, his vision of a machine thanks to which “the most ignorant person … might write books in philosophy”, but the betrayal of an anxiety that mechanically produced language could prove indistinguishable from our own? Doesn’t Barbara Pym, in A Few Green Leaves, have a protagonist who delights in predicting how others are going to finish their sentences? Wasn’t Samuel Beckett obsessed with the concern that everything said is perfunctory and compulsive. “The word is not out”, he wrote in 1936, “before I am blushing for my automatism.” ©

Nothings and triviality

The art of mastering small talk has been lost a while ago: as of now, we are observing its last death throes. Everyone is so used to the casual drabness of shitposting on socials (I am no exception) that going irl and facing other people turns into a disaster.

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.9 “Overstrand”

I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a
Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come
near us no more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the
flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on
the foam of the sea ©

Кромерские tutti quanti: P.8 “To Overstrand!”

To Overstrand!