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2025

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Jan 2025

1^st January

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush (1900)

p align="center">8^th January

You were the kind that is so scared of life that you only know how to despise it, for fear you might be tricked into liking something that wasn't up to the standards of a handful of people you admired

Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975)

15^th January

I’m happier with writers who, perhaps suffering less from the famous “anxiety of influence,” have enough sense of their own worth to appreciate their predecessors and fellow-workers in the saltmines of literature. The whole history of a literature and of every genre within it is a chain of influences, inventions shared, discoveries made common, techniques adopted and adapted. Must I say again that this has absolutely nothing to do with copying texts, with stealing stuff?

Ursula K Le Guin, Art, Information, Theft, and Confusion, Part Two, 1 August 2010

p align="center">22^nd January

But robo art did not take off. Art has always thrived on biography – it exists in every piece like a watermark.... There was no madness in the robo artists, no sawn-off ears or suicide, no history.

Sam Mills, The Watermark (2024)