you could surely try to be more alive

[ashlyme]

Today the rain looks like window bars. I hoped to get out to a film showing today on John Madin and the lost Central Library but tickets have sold out.

I got back last night from a few days spent with cybermule . We went up to an installation in Bath Wednesday called The Brutalist Playground, which was pretty bloody amazing: I texted John H to say It's like Ballard wrote a kids' book! All but one segment came from a real 60s playground in London: a tilted "flying saucer", a monolith of a slide, an angular tunnel you could crawl through... all built from the variegated foam they used to stuff seventies crash mat with. On the walls they were projecting photos and plans of brutalist estates: it was an eerie effect when the projections fell across peoples' faces, as if architects had designed what lay beneath the skin. I played too, half-hoping that when I came out of the tunnel I'd find myself in another decade. If I'd seen this a few months ago, The Concrete Child might have been a slightly different story. We got out into the car park and rooks were settling down to sleep in the tree above our heads; and a copper-pink full moon followed us home.

I'm juggling a few books right now. Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat, found for fifty pence. Roy Vickery's Garlands, Conkers and Mother-Dies, on British plant-lore, found in the same charity shop. And Mark Valentine's wonderful collection of essays on landscape and literature, A Country Still All Mystery. This was an unexpected gift from the author and ranges over musings on lost fantasy novels, yew trees, the falling-place of the last English wolf, land left outside parish boundaries.. After all this I have Sarah Orne Jewitt's The Country of Pointed Firs to read. Do any of my New England friends know of this one - asakiyume ,sovay ?