Pedro Almodóvar Is Still Making Movies That Shock nytimes.com/2021/12/13/mag… Almodovar and Franco and mass graves and "Parallel Mothers"

US ‘closer to civil war’ than most would like to believe, new book says theguardian.com/us-news/2021/d… the emerging crisis of legitimacy in the US

Today my wife Maria Aitken and myself celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. We got married in Reno, Nevada, on this day, 1991, cost $35, happy as clams ever since.

Gjeraqina Ukshini Oh that's lovely, Gjeraqina--so very full of drama, and humour, and silk costumes, and spilled tea!

Doctor Shop, Human Skeleton Model doctorshop.es/Prodotti/mobil…

Wolf moon – in pictures theguardian.com/science/galler…

Polar bears move into abandoned Arctic weather station – photo essay theguardian.com/world/2022/jan… Come in and have a drink, why don't you?

Good advice to myself

Happy paperback publication day #LastDaysinCleaverSquare 🍁 Patrick McGrath wonderfully atmospheric novel is out today amzn.to/3xeAz2U

When Goethe saw “devil’s violinist” Paganini perform in Weimar, he claimed to have had a hallucination, with a column of flames and smoke cloaking the virtuoso along with hearing voices and feeling a comet rushing past 🎨Delacroix "Paganini" (1832, cropped) #WyrdWednesday

The story of my madness | Emmanuel Carrère theguardian.com/society/2022/m…

Published today. global.oup.com/academic/produ…

“Summer play with Michelle” 📸 fawngalliinteriors via IG stories

Reading Vasily Grossman's masterpiece, Stalingrad. Am at the bit where the Germans beging bombing Russia and WW2, for the USSR, has begun. A savage, unprovoked attack. To think that Russia, today, is doing to Ukraine what was done to it a mere lifetime ago--contemptible, worse--

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, POOR AMERICA, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU... from a Loyal American Citizen

Such an honour. Thank you.

Re-reading #Dracula to prep for viva. Stoker's #Gothic sublime is par excellence from first chapter. 'There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom - apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass spangled with the fallen petals.'

“Ah,distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, & each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor Eagerly I wished the morrow;— vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow— sorrow for the lost Lenore —” Edgar Allan Poe,The Raven #GothicAdvent