The first novel in the three-book omnibus, "Judge Dredd: Year Two", was better than I'd anticipated.
Dredd is still new on the streets of Mega-City One, & having brought down his corrupt clone-brother, Judge Rico Dredd, in the previous trilogy, makes him more, not less, suspicious in the eyes of the Special Judicial Squad's Judge Gillen. Proceeding from an assumption of guilt, Gillen's investigation sees Dredd sidelined & seconded to guard duty ⬇️

In an America riven by factional violence, political in-fighting, gangs, and gun crime, in which human life is held cheap and social cohesion is threatened, a para-military police force rises to enforce the Law, regardless of Justice, to quell protest and protect the vested interest of a rich elite.
So, to distract myself from all that, I thought I'd read a Judge Dredd novel.

A book of poems for children? Perhaps, if written by Uncle Edgar Allen Poe for niece and nephew Wednesday and Pugsley Addams 💀
While not overtly horrific, the overall atmosphere is of melancholy, loss, death, night and febrile passion.
The opening poem, The Horseman, initially reads as a bit of nonsense nursery rhyme, but then, surely, the pale rider on his ivory horse coming over the moonlit hill can be none other than Death stalking the ⬇️

I picked this up in Keswick Oxfam last week: a 1942 illustrated edition of a Walter de la Mare collection of poems for children. It's in reasonable shape, except that Oxfam vandalised it with non-removable stickers on the rear of the dust jacket! I mean, why would you? 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, de la Mare is one of those authors I've always known of, but never read other than the odd short story here and there, so worth reading a book just to have done so.

Just to connect for a moment with something lighter than my previous few posts, this dapper gentlecat is Leto, my son's pet, wearing his harness in preparation for an outside walk 🐈‍⬛
He's a former homeless cat himself (I now realise a connection to previous posts!) and has settled into his forever home very well. He came on a visit to our house at Easter and adjusted very quickly. Sweet little guy 😺
#CatsOfLitsy

Incredibly moving and emotional account of the reality of living as a street homeless woman in 21st century Britain. The dark-edged pages are transcripts of Perriman's interviews with women living in the streets, all of whom report (not graphically) sexual harassment and rape by men with homes to return to, and the common degradation of being urinated on by drunken clubgoers 😮‍💨
The contributors are keen not to present homeless people as ⬇️

"It is far stronger to acknowledge an issue, accept it and attempt to restore it than it is to bear the pain, dismiss what it calls for and carry on. Moving on in this way is not being strong or positive; it is denial. Being positive is not plastering a smile over a hard experience; being positive is recognising this experience for its negative nature and acting upon it to make it transformative.”

- Violence and Trauma: Laura E. Fischer

"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich."

Well, it's hardly the Hound of the Baskervilles, but the eponymous yellow dog of the story is considered a harbinger of ill fortune by the Breton townsfolk of Concarneau: a relative of the folkloric hellhounds of Britanno-Celtic legend.
Maigret is on one of his many secondments to Brittany, and also in one of his most quixotic moods, presenting himself as bumbling, unconcerned and obtuse, all the while unerringly closing in on his suspects 4⭐

"Since 2010 [when the Conservatives were elected into government] rough sleeping has increased by 169% due to substantial changes to the welfare system, the impact of austerity, the national housing crisis and landlords ending shorthold tenancies. Alongside this, voluntary sector services supporting people who are homeless, women fleeing domestic abuse, mental and drug and alcohol services have decreased due to large-scale funding cuts."

"In this doorway the police used to always move me on, but they never told me where I could go."

Bekki Perriman was a homeless street sleeper, who now uses art installations incorporating photography & audio clips to make visible the invisible people, and give voices to the voiceless. This book collects some of her work together with essays & commentaries from activists, academics, etc., and interviews with rough sleepers about their experience.

"On this night, I met the Arctic Angel and vowed the 22,000 miles of her migratory path between the Arctic and Antarctica would not be in vain. I will remember her. No creature on Earth has spent more time in daylight than this species. No creature on Earth has shunned darkness in the same way as the Arctic tern. No creature carries the strength and delicacy of determination on its back like this slight bird. ⬇️

"I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women."

Williams's title essay is about the carcinogenic legacy of 1950s atomic bomb testing in Utah, which the government knew was a threat to the health of its citizens, but went ahead and then covered it up.

The other essays deal with the environment, ecology and conservation, and the book is part of the Penguin Green Ideas series ???

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

I bought a guide to Castlerigg Stone Circle from the ice cream van park on the roadside, staffed by a guitar-playing vendor - definitely part of the experience! I bought a lolly ice, too🍦😊
Mrs B reminded me I'd been before in 2016, but it was pissing down, so that was a brief visit. This time was sunny and more leisurely and immersive. I touched all the stones, but didn't count them as legend says it's impossible! ⬇️

#DayOffAdventures
I wanted to visit one of the sites described in the book while reading it, & I've driven 2½ hours to Castlerigg by Keswick, Lake District. Even with tourists here (of which I'm one) is a special place. A natural amphitheatre on a colossal scale which my photos can't do justice to. Sounds of crows, tweety birds, lambs and the occasional car, engine struggling up hill. The people are quiet and respectful, as befits the setting 😌

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
'80s sophistipop sounds like it should be awful, but Prefab Sprout were in a class of their own. I love their first few albums, and "Steve McQueen" is just full of wonderful, emotional music. I'll link to the single, "When Love Breaks Down", but the whole album is exquisite. Takes me back to the year me and Mrs B first met ?
https://youtu.be/QeZkLV3ZjeI?si=xe7nhHgBfcONXHzG

#BookMail
PROTOTYPE 1 is the first yearly anthology from indie publisher Prototype, issued 2019. It's a collection of poetry, essays and images, the quality of which I'm about to test, and if it's good I'll see about getting the later editions.
Doorways is about the experience of homeless women, mixing poetry, essays and photographs of public doorways used as shelter by homeless people. Editor/photographer Bekki Perriman was herself homeless ⬇️

I've just finished the chapter on one of my favourite Bowie albums, "Heroes", learning about yet another of David's influences from the art world. The cover itself references Dali examining his hand for ants in "Un Chien Andalou", Heckel's painting "Roquairol" (which also inspired the cover for Iggy Pop's "The Idiot"), and Schiele's stylised hand gestures. The title song was famously inspired by David seeing two lovers ⬇️

I kinda lost interest in Rebecca about ⅓ in, probably my scattergun neurodivergent brain as the writing is excellent, but it's long and I have so many other books to read!
Anyway, I picked it up again this morning and read the chapter about the broken Cupid ornament. A significant theme of the book is the English class system, and this chapter seems to emphasize the way the "lower" class defers to the "higher", how we're complicit in our own ⬇️

French detective, French cake, French apéritif. Literary flavour 🙂
Maigret had quite a few clues to follow and deduce from in this story, though it was, as usual, his psychological insight into victim and perpetrator that led him to the solution.
Unusually, I figured out the key elements of the MO early on, but probably only because it has similarities to one of Doyle's Holmes stories: 🔎⚡🔨⚡🌉

Inspired by Scott's @vivastory post last week about Maigret, I'm continuing my own journey through Simenon's extensive novel series about the gruff but empathic French Chief Inspector.
These three #LibraryHaul are all coincidentally early in the series, 3, 4 and 6 from left to right. Simenon's dating of the tagged story within the narrative is a giveaway, as the later novels contain only vague hints to date, which gives them a fuzzy, ⬇️

"At the close of the last Ice Age, over 12,000 years ago, people walked to a place that would one day become known as great Britain."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"Later she enjoyed a delicious chicken salad on the balcony. She treated herself to a glass of port to accompany the ice cream, and she topped it off with a cup of coffee. If it hadn't been for the dead body in the gentleman's room, it would have been the perfect conclusion to a lovely summer's day."

Now that I've thought of Helen Mirren as Maud, I can't unthink it. She's perfect casting, & I'm now finding the unlikable Maud a bit more bearable.

A GN for teens, but certainly helpful for adults.
The Sad Ghosts represent people experiencing anxiety and depression, and several have neurodivergent traits. They develop a community and found family, supporting each other and providing a positive counter-view to each others' low self-esteem.
In this one, Rue takes on lots of tasks to support the club & starts to feel overwhelmed.
Cute & effective look at mental wellbeing & self-care. 💕👻💕

Estella, a defrocked nun turned governess, lives in a decaying house in an abandoned Italian village perpetually threatened by engulfment in a slow landslide. While she is alone of the living, ghosts of the former inhabitants are drawn to her, and they reluctantly relive their sadnesses. There's a nod to Poe's House of Usher in the metaphor of the collapsing structures mirroring Estella's psychological decline.
I learned of Derrida's concept of ⬇️

"The butterfly that shakes the dust from its wings before resuming its flight cares little for the remains of the chrysalis in which it once lived.” ??

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
Impossible for me to choose a favourite Cocteau Twins album, so "Treasure" stands in for their amazing body of work. I've never taken hallucinogens, but I imagine this album is what it might feel like.
https://youtu.be/nmLJgh6yyoE?si=7EgwDeKgApk3KjtQ

Reading about neolithic monuments, folk traditions and the re-enchanting of the British landscape, & Julian Cope appears in the Avebury chapter, so I'm listening to his albums Jehovahkill & 20 Mothers, which have a high quotient of lyrical & musical relevance to these topics. Julian was well into his Modern Antiquarian phase with these recordings, including songs and poems about stone circles, henges and paganism. It's a mood! 🪨🛸
#BooksAndMusic

I like reading about other people getting their exercise. You keep walking weird, I'll keep reading weird!
I might've expected the hardcover to be a collection of articles from the zines of this collective of ramblers through the British pagan countryside, but I didn't think of it, so now I'm less sure about collecting all the zine issues, but that petty quibble aside, this is a lovely book in the tradition of Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian.

"I didn't want to feel unloved. No one should be condemned to see the contempt in the eyes of the one who brought you into the world, to be born, to reach a certain point and a little further than that: all denied. Denied the healing word - 'take care of me because I can't make it on my own.' Denied the chance to reach the source of all beauty. The love that moves the world. While I was moved only by the abyss within."

“I was so convinced that I couldn't be loved that loving me must have been difficult.”

"The room will be warm and filled with the smell of fried food."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

I'm so sorry to clutter your feed with a picture of a lemon ?, but I couldn't resist buying this amazing fruit, it looked so tempting! Now, to justify buying it, I'm making a White Lady cocktail ?, and to justify posting about it, I'm going to read the story in which I first came across the drink, Tove Jansson's eponymous "White Lady" from the tagged story collection ???
#BooksAndBooze

I enjoyed these poems at least as much as I recall enjoying those of Clarissa's younger brother, Robert Graves, though I've not taken the trouble to do a direct comparison. Still, while one sibling should be lauded and the other largely forgot is a cause for wonder 🤔 The only information I've found about Clarissa is as footnotes in articles about Robert, so she's rather eclipsed by him, which seems a shame.

"I cannot be what you would have me be,
Lopped, pruned within a form, a man-made thing;
Who'd wreak his will upon an almond tree
Wrapped in the bright luxuriance of spring?
And yet to her returns, spring after spring,
The old, pure glory from her blackened bough;
Had I a spring but once in seven years
I would not leave you now.
How many times my heart was sick and sore
At your rough handling ... no, I will not tell,
⬇️

Peter Case's second album, "The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar" is a mix of folk rock & country rock wrapped around lyrics that are perfect narrative miniatures. Hard to pick favourite tracks, but probably "Entella Hotel", which wouldn't be out of place on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" album, and "Poor Old Tom". These are both slow songs, but there are plenty of up-tempo ones, too.
#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

FitzGerald's Rubáiyát = 5⭐
Euphranor is an earlier work taking the form of a Platonic dialogue one day in late spring in Cambridge between a doctor and several young students while they drink beer and play bowls. It's a reply to a popular book of the 1850s on the proper education of English manhood which, little known today, set the tone for a certain kind of Stiff Upper Lipped Englishness that inspired the Scout movement and running towards ⬇️

This is one of the longest inscriptions I have in a second hand book. There's obviously a story in Caroline's heartfelt poem to the unnamed recipient of what was presumably a gift for Christmas 1972, but tantalisingly I'll never know, though it opens up realms of speculation 🤔💭💔💘
#inscription

"We often sing lullabies to our children that we ourselves may sleep."

"The song that lies silent in the heart of a mother sings upon the lips of her child."

“Long ago you were a dream in your mother's sleep, and then she awoke to give you birth.”

We took a walk on Formby beach today, and seeing the sand and the foam whipped up by a bracing wind off the Irish Sea inevitably brought to mind Kahlil Gibran's inspirational book of aphorisms. Time for a re-read 📖
I'm not sure if there will be any quotable passages that I *didn't* post here six years ago! We'll see 😏

This is the poem I released by cutting the uncut page:

~The Caryatid~
"None now serve Artemis: earth's temples fall,
Her columns are all broken, her priests fled,
Her watchers passed like shadows on the wall;
But better are the living than the dead.
For Caryatids still stand. Blear mortal eyes
See little but the moulding of the shell;
Could for those eyes one mighty form uprise
In constant bliss, what wonders they might tell." ?️

In the 97 years since 1927, when this book was published, I find it hard to believe that it still has uncut pages! This is the third such I've got to, and there may be more. It feels disrespectful to the poet to leave her lines captive and unread and, as with the earlier ones, I'll be cutting them free! ???️
"Seven Days and Other Poems" by Clarissa Graves

"LOOK not with curious eyes, gentle friends, who are turning my pages;
None, not even myself, could declare what truth is behind them." ?

From "Seven Days and Other Poems", by Clarissa Graves

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"I carry my body
in and around
many rooms,
most of them
much quieter
than this nervous
chatter within."

- A Thousand Empty Rooms

[Image: George Tooker]

This was my day's #bookhaul 📚
• Seven Days is a poetry collection by Clarissa Graves, Robert's older sister. 1927 first edition, a browse through which seems promising.
• Songs of Waking is a poetry collection by Jonathan Simons of offline publisher Analog Sea. I love their books and picked this up without noticing the rather hefty-for-a-slim-book price of £16.99 😳 Still, a thing of beauty is a joy forever!
• A Book of Narrative Verse is a ⬇️

My intention today was to recreate a childhood impression of coziness by going shopping in the rain, getting drenched to my underwear, then find a café and steam up the windows as I dried out over a cup of tea and a plate of toasted teacakes. Well, the shopping was to pick up ONE book, but that became a two-package #bookhaul and a jigsaw, so, money for tiffin spent, I dripped home and made my own afternoon tea!

I read a review for this album last week in Weird Walk #4 zine, and listened to it on Bandcamp. It captures the artist's (Charles Vaughan) impressions of walking through the British countryside near or in sight of electricity pylons.
The listener may either find this a pleasantly relaxing and atmospheric experience (me) or "about as musically interesting as listening to the compressor pump on the fridge" (my wife).
#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

A couple of finds today: a not very old Puffin edition of former National Poet of Wales, Gwyn Jones' Mabinogion retelling, but it has an evocative cover and some nice line illustrations.
The Golem is one of my favourite books, and this is a new to me translation, published in Czechia, so I'm guessing the original owner bought it as a souvenir, but that's an assumption as unreliable as the narrator.
🧀+🍷+🌰+📚+🎶=😌

I saw this book on the Feature Table at my local bookshop, and it piqued my interest.
Set in an abandoned Italian village, peopled with ghosts who no longer experience the passage of time, however, their liminal existence is threatened by an impending landslide that will destroy the village.

"When Bowie was on the road in those days [1976], the convoy was made up of several vehicles, including a Ford Transit that carried his gear and a trunk containing the dozens of books he refused to be parted from." ???
#BooksAndBowie