May is the best month to get these two neat gems (god only knows when I’ll manage to go through them: let’s hope it happens in the near future):

Merry May!
***
Pink, small, and punctual,
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May ©

A tiny shrub that L. bought four or five years ago for our front garden is blooming intensely at the moment: due to lack of space we didn’t manage to plant a *real* lilac (they are fairly large), but the mini version isn’t bad at all! It’s luscious, and fragrant, and as beautiful as its big counterpart.

“Harsh Sentences: H. P. Lovecraft v. Ernest Hemingway”: a brilliant comparative essay from Deepcuts

TWIMC. Just a friendly reminder of how a picture perfect article in comparative studies must look like. Impeccably done: chapeau, Bobby Dee.

For H. P. Lovecraft, missing Hemingway would have been much more difficult—nor did he. Though they were very different in their fictional focus, output, and success, Lovecraft and Hemingway were still contemporaries, and there are a number of references to Hemingway and his works in Lovecraft’s letters. These mentions of Ernest Hemingway, who had not yet become “Papa” of later years, reflect more on Lovecraft than on Hemingway himself, but show Lovecraft both coming to grips with a Modern writer of very different style and interests and how Hemingway’s influence spread.

Trends come from deeper sources than what is written on the surface of literature, and the average domestic adjustments of 1980 or 2030 will not depend on the question of whether Ernest Hemingway is suppressed or encouraged in 1930.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, June 1930?, LMM 267

So, since L. is an FRS, he got an invitation to the annual July soirée with the endnote: “Carriages at 10 p.m.”

What it means is that the soirée itself will be over at ten (with no carriages waiting for you), but I love that instead of saying “you’ll be kicked out,” the organisers are using a dainty euphemism. Nice!

Nothings and triviality

Came across the workshop in my subscription titled “Between SCOPUS fetishisation, predatory journals and survival strategies of researchers.”

Immediately felt like one of those characters in zombies/dystopian/Apocalypse games.

Getting a random notification from Academia dot edu that my paper was cited by a dear colleague of mine who’s long dead made me extremely sad. Not that it happened for the first time (it didn’t) and I am not a huge fan of the randomised revenue model of the platform either, yet it somehow hit differently today. Memento mori, but without the usual irony.

I found a new little piece for one of our smaller rooms, a lovely one by the Norfolk born and bred artist, Dee Nickerson. Dee’s sublime artworks perfectly reflect the rural world of East Anglia: that’s why she’s so loved here. One can find some of her prints and cards on the Green Pebble website (highly recommended, if you want to greet your friends with something really beautiful and special).

...и немножко нервно

«24-летний поэт Александр Блок курит папиросу за папиросой, то и дело вскакивает и подходит к окну: он слышал выстрелы и знает, что войска стреляли в мирных людей» © etc. — а где про нервные тонкие пальцы, густые клубы дыма и зарево над крышами™? Унесите.

A Gothic Machen-esque/Jamesian hauntological travelog that I briefly mentioned in March, is finally here. The chapter that immediately drew my attention was the one about Sebald’s Land: so far so good.

A brief disclaimer

I’ve seen discussions about the 2010 adaptation of “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” (featuring the late John Hart as Parkin) resurfacing, and all I can say is to repeat my previous comment about it: it’s overall an ok film, if one likes Haneke and his grim portrayal of relationships in the later stages of life, but an awful adaptation, which doesn’t do any justice to MRJ.

Down through the tomb's inward arch

He has shouldered out into Limbo

to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:

the merciful dead, the prophets,

the innocents just His own age and those

unnumbered others waiting here

unaware, in an endless void He is ending

now, stooping to tug at their hands,

to pull them from their sarcophagi,

dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,

neighbor in death, Golgotha dust

still streaked on the dried sweat of his body

no one had washed and anointed, is here,

for sequence is not known in Limbo;

the promise, given from cross to cross

at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.

People still ask me sometimes why I bother with making Kulichi, or Paski*, every year, as it involves a lot of effort and time, and, as per usual my only answer is cherished memories of my Babushka who made them following her own recipe, with cinnamon and cloves (yes, I told her story at some point, but quite a while ago).

Our neighbours, whom she always shared her Kulichi with, praised them as the most delicious out there—“those dark Paski by Valentina Alexandrovna are the best,” they repeated. It was true: they were perfect. And it was my duty to figure out the recipe and then to try and recreate it, so every year I do exactly this.

No matter how hard I try, I know that hers were better anyway, and, paradoxically, it makes me happy, as it evokes lots of lovely memories about her and my childhood. I guess, it is my service now, which confirms to me that He is truly Risen.

_______________

* You can call them either Orthodox Easter cakes or, more correctly, Easter feast bread

Пасха-2025

Христос Воскресе! Christ is Risen! Χριστός Ανέστη! Christus Resurrexit!

Христос воскресе из мертвых, смертию смерть поправ, и сущим во гробех живот даровав!

Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

Holy Saturday: Orthodox Eve

When You descended to death, O Life Immortal, / You slayed hell with the splendor of Your Godhead, / and when from the depths You raised the dead, / all the Powers of Heaven cried out, / O Giver of Life, Christ our God, glory to You!

The Angel came to the myrrh-bearing women at the tomb and said: “Myrrh is fitting for the dead, but Christ has shown Himself a stranger to corruption.”

Holy Friday

Easter eggs (Pysanky) are ready, it’s time to do the rest.

Byzantium art doesn’t need your validation. And neither does Eastern Orthodoxy. Place your arrogance towards something *more* exciting, as you’ve always managed to do before.

Within these collections and exhibitions are the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy – those haunting faces of Christ, the Virgin and saints, anonymously executed in the monasteries of the ancient Christian East – and precious refractions of a vast inheritance that we will never comprehensively know. In the academy, these images have long been treated as the primitive products of superstitious, religious folklore. ‘The Greek [icon] painter is the slave of the theologian… bound by tradition as the animal is to instinct,’ wrote the 19th-century French art historian Adolphe Didron. ©

А давненько здесь не было лингвистических коллабораций с до-дефисной частью моей фамилии. На этот раз я Чунугноув-Полсон.

Очень хорошо, я считаю.

(И детеныши игуанодонов по-прежнему принимаются неуклюже резвиться)

I found April in my arms ©

World Fantasy Convention 2025: saving the dates for the late October 2025

Looks like NecronomiCon, but in autumn Brighton: there’s time to make plans! Added to my bookmarks.

We had a lovely mostly dry March and so far April gives us lots of sun, but because last year was pretty much sunless and dull, all the flowers in the garden started later than usual. The first of a bunch of these opulent fairy-tale-like tulips are finally here:

It’s been a hot minute since I posted any garden updates, and this situation needs an improvement.

So, here we go: our young apple tree and a first (peony) tulip:

“Mission impossible: can English translations ever measure up to Dante’s epic poem?” by Harry Cochrane (TLS)

What a brilliant piece: comparing a variety of translations is difficult per se, and comparing it professionally is nearly impossible. Personally I am partially familiar with Singleton’s translation, but I simply cannot fathom the amount of work that should be done in order to approach an impeccable original.

Despite the seeming impossibility of translating Dante, so many feel compelled to try. Translation is a broad church, though, and applies across media as well. Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A biography gives a succinct sketch of Dante’s own afterlife – and literal sketches, at times, in the form of prints of Botticelli’s illustrations for the Commedia. (Viewers will be “swept away by the tidal force of Botticelli’s line”.) As one of the pre-eminent pop-dantisti, Luzzi does not have much to say – not to Dante scholars, at least – but he says it very well. His brushstrokes are predictably broad (“Most of the great Romantic readers of Dante were simply not interested in his Christian world”), while his examples are necessarily cherry-picked. But his later chapters especially give a rich sense of Dante’s presence in different forms, genres and media. When Victor Frankenstein rallies his pursuit force at the edge of the Arctic Circle, we are apparently reading an adaptation of the brilliant, disingenuous speech with which Ulysses urges his crew past the straits of Gibraltar (Inferno 26.112–120). ©

На одной модной литературной площадке попалась фраза, которая по уровню языкового смятения может соперничать с моими абсолютными фаворит(к)ами*:

«Об истинной личности лысеющего американца узнали абсолютно случайно».

Вот как надо писать: не в бровь, а в глаз. Или даже в ухо.

___________________

*1. Иногда детеныши игуанодонов принимались неуклюже резвиться. ©

2. Мне стало так нехорошо, что я чуть не свалился с дерева. ©

“Rebirth of the modern: The future of art and artists in the era of artificial intelligence” by Aaron Peck (TLS)

*Sigh*

Same as it ever was ©

Eno is, in many ways, an heir to a more traditional, “brandless” concept of the avant-garde. The generative music that he began making in the 1970s – which he called “as ignorable as it is interesting” – endeavoured to synthesize environment and music, an attempt of a sort to merge art and life. What Art Does is thus an unexpected extension of those sensibilities. His theory – that art allows humans to explore and engage in how they feel – conceives of artistic ideas as shared, from how we design a screwdriver to how we enjoy a picture. “When we see a new earring, or any artwork”, he writes, “we look at where this new one sits in our history of looking at artworks. It’s like being presented with the latest sentence in a long story.” ©

“The Chronicler of Unhappiness” by Michael Dirda (The New York Review)

Brilliant Michael Dirda (many of my colleagues know him as a reviewer of Lovecraftian/Gothic/Weird fiction) about F.M. Ford.

Did we really “have it all” (meaning the best iterations of a classical novel) in the 20th century? Looks like it.

In truth, for relentless and layered tricksiness, only Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire can rival The Good Soldier. It employs the entire modernist playbook—a carefully orchestrated, almost fugue-like unfolding of the action, multiple time-shifts, a limited narrator, symbolic historical allusions, the speeding up and slowing down of narrative pace, foreshadowings and reversals, double entendres, and much else. 

In particular, the novel’s surface text, reliant on ambiguity, foregrounds the untrustworthiness of first impressions. Dowell’s wife, for example, likes instructing people about European history, so it’s only later that one begins to wonder about the statement “At that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence. 

“Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia” by William Burns: already in Cambridge

I finally got my copy of a book I featured in my post a week or so ago: a brief look gives a pretty good idea of what this book is about (“A critical analysis of the 21st-century fascination with the past, from horror films to haunted music,” as the publisher’s website describes it), and I like it so far.

Anglesey Abbey Gardens: misc.

We haven’t been recently to Anglesey Abbey; it’s much closer to us than Audley End, yet it’s a bit of a pickle to reach if you don’t have a car—it could be either a lengthy-ish walk (albeit not too pleasant, as the main part of it goes along busy Newmarket Road) or a bus, but its schedule isn’t as frequent on weekends as on weekdays.

Anyway, we arrived there around half one, and it was packed with people, as the weather was incredibly gorgeous—warm, radiant and full of joyful springy buzz.

The daffodils are mostly faded away already, and the rose garden was on the brink of awakening (the stems were already full of fresh leaves, yet the time for the first buds was way ahead), but we were super lucky to catch the hyacinth garden—symmetrical lines with purple and snow white flowerbeds looked absolutely splendid, and the scent was marvellous, too. I did love the tongue-in-cheek positioning of the statues of Pan and fauni: their bottoms reflected lots of sunshine.

Anglesey Abbey Gardens: a perfect April spot

A splendid day to spend in the glorious gardens of Anglesey Abbey.