Jonathan Gibbs
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jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Jonathan Gibbs
@jonathangibbs.bsky.social
2.8K followers 1.1K following 4.7K posts
Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at City St George's, Uni of London. I curate the short story project apersonalanthology.com. Novels are Randall or The Painted Grape, and The Large Door. Poetry is Spring Journal. https://linktr.ee/jonathangibbs
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jonathangibbs.bsky.social
If you see this, post an album cover with a motor vehicle on it.
Cover of ‘Girl’ by Girl Ray, with the band (three young white women) sitting in a red classic two-door convertible. The photo is taken at an angle from above showing that the car is parked on a drab concrete piece of hard standing. They are all wearing what look like white jumpsuits and are leaning back in the black leather seats with their hands behind their heads. They are all wearing sunglasses. The sun is not out.
November 8, 2025 at 10:40 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
The invention of cuneiform
A sandy beach with lots of tiny pebbles casting sideways shadows from a low sun. You can also see the toes of the photographer’s shoes at the bottom of the frame.
November 1, 2025 at 3:08 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Apple’s Dictionary app being pleasingly opinionated in its comment on the word ‘sere’, here:

“A good word now relegated to bad poetry”
sere /si:r/ **) adjective 1. (used especially of vegetation) having lost all moisture • the desert was edged with sere vegetation syn: dried-up, sear, shriveled, shrivelled, withered ORIGIN: Old English sear "dried up, withered, from Proto-Germanic *sauzas. A good word now relegated to bad poetry. Related to sear.
October 25, 2025 at 7:43 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
William Gaddis, in the Recognitions, giving us American expats jawing away in post-war Paris. Just delightful.
“On the right bank, a lady said, — You'll like Venice. It's so like Fort Lauderdale. At the same table, a man said, — I'm going to look her up. She's lived here for years, right outside Paris, a place called Banlieu. At another table someone said, — By God, you know, they're almost as rude to us as they are to each other.”
October 21, 2025 at 10:16 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Entering the phase of middle-aged ‘second teenagerdom’ where I have acquired a band poster*. These days, though, it goes in a frame, rather than being blu-tacked directly onto the wall.

*free with the latest Necks CD, rather than bought from a poster sale in the student union during freshers week.
A large black wood frame with a poster inside largely take up with a nondescript sepia photograph of some high straggly foliage inside what might be a tent - perhaps trees in a mystery. Text along the bottom: The Necks • rapid eye movement • ghost net • causeway • warm running sunlight • Disquiet. (The Necks is the band. Disquiet is the album title. The rest is the track titles.) The poster frame is leaned against a bike against some bookshelves.
October 20, 2025 at 6:15 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
And here’s me with my emotional support buddy @neilcole.bsky.social who knew I’d need some by my side in case the movie *wasn’t* an acceptable homage to the movie that’s made up so much of my cultural DNA.
Two men standing on a red carpet under a digital image of the poster for NOUVELLE VAGUE, which has gone all weird because of digitisation. Both men grinning, arms around each other’s shoulders, looking very happy.
October 18, 2025 at 5:26 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
I bought tickets without realising it would be a gala performance, with a red carpet and everything. Anyway we hung out by the barrier and here’s a photo of Richard Linklater. Even if I’d thought to bring along my copy of the Slacker book he’d have been rushed past me before I could get it signed.
Director Richard Linklater on the red carpet outside the Royal Festival Hall. He’s being chivvied along by PR people while talking animatedly to someone, raising both hands to chest level to indicate something. He’s wearing a brown suit with black shoes and a black T-shirt.
October 18, 2025 at 5:19 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
#NowPlaying. Obviously there’s a LOT of solo piano Keith Jarrett out there, but this is the first one that’s grabbed me in the way that Köln Concert did. Picked up a secondhand vinyl copy in the hope of instilling into my listening ‘regime’, such as it is. Sounds lovely on a Saturday morning.
A copy of the ECM double album Staircase by Keith Jarrett, set in a wooden Now Playing stand with a potted plant to the left, white slatted blinds behind, and a slice of the vinyl playing to the right. The album cover is white with an inset rectangular abstract painting in grey and and brown of an external staircase going up towards a wall and the turning right to ascent out of frame.
October 18, 2025 at 10:50 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Delighted to have my copy of @saltpublishing.com’s Best British Short Stories 2025, edited by the indefatigable @nicholasroyle.bsky.social, who in his wide-ranging and goodness-filled introduction very generously bigs up the “brilliant idea” of A Personal Anthology, my online short story project.
A bright orange copy of Best British Short Stories 2025, edited by Nicholas Royle, stood on an orange metal railing of a bench, the slats of which are rich mahogany-looking wood.
October 16, 2025 at 9:55 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
I suppose you have to call it tragicomic. This kind of epic complaint about the world is a) true and b) stupid, but c) makes pure sense for the character (Mr Eszther).
“could mean only one thing, sure as the toxin, the undeniable fact that nature herself had laid down her tools and finished her regular task, that the once-brotherly bond between heaven and earth was well and truly broken, and that the last act had assuredly begun wherein we were orbiting alone among the scattered detritus of our laws and would soon be left staring, as fate had decreed, idiotically, uncomprehendingly, watching and shivering as the light steadily withdrew from us.“
October 16, 2025 at 7:46 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
2025 Reading 61: The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, trans. George Szirtes. Picked up after the news of LK's Nobel Prize win. My third of his, after a long-ago struggle through Satantango, and a more recent relative breeze through the much shorter A Mountain to the North...
Paperback copy of The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai. Black, with white text and three symbols in a shiny copper colour showing the moon with small partial, large partial and then total eclipse. Other text: "One of the great novels of the last quarter-century... a mitteleuropean Moby Dick" - Garth Risk Hallberg. Also: Winner of the Man Booker International Prize
October 16, 2025 at 7:22 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Béla Tarr’s ‘One War, One Battle, One Conflict After Another’, anyone?

(Quote from The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai- which, yes, has already been adapted as ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’)
A page of text with one line underlined: ”It was one war, one battle, one conflict after another”
October 14, 2025 at 9:13 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Some excellent ‘quote mark’ usage here from your man László Krasznahorkai.

‘systematically beat his fingers to a pulp’.
“After all, the hammer in his hand felt increasingly unsteady and the results of such experimentation would become ever more unpredictable, so, after the third effort, he had to admit that the fact that he hadn't missed the nail in three successive goes, far from being due to his level of concentration, was probably down to sheer luck, or, to employ his own formulation, to a certain ‘benevolent grace' that offered him ‘a moment of respite' before he ‘systematically beat his fingers to a pulp'”
October 14, 2025 at 5:59 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
E. L. James’s The Children of Men…
Quote post: “While the film Children of Men is one of the best SF films of the past 30 years, the EL James novel upon which it is based is pretty terrible. Also, as a bonus opinion: Novellas are criminally underrated as an art form. Give me a fluff-free story taken to its logical end point and walk away.” Original post: “Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social • 6h Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat”
October 13, 2025 at 7:08 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Just absolutely LOOK at the art direction (or whatever the job title is actually called) in the page layout from the FT’s Life & Arts section from yesterday. Genius!
A page of a broadsheet newspaper largely taken up with a fashion advert of a woman lying on the ground with her left arm folded up by her head, hand not far from her ear. Above it is a feature on Cecil Beaton illustrated with a black and white photograph of him with his right arm raised in perfect symmetry to the model’s below. To the right is a smaller colour photograph of a model - very red, drawing out the gold-sand colour of the fashion ad.
October 12, 2025 at 12:08 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Update.
POV: me lying in bed holding a copy of The Melancholy of Existence by László Krasznahorkai. Lying on the white bedspread is a sleeping white and ginger cat, looking peaceful.
October 12, 2025 at 10:17 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Might be time for one of these. I’ve only previously read Satantango and A Mountain to the North…

Any thoughts or suggestions welcome!
Three novels by this year’s Nobel laureate, László Krasznahorkai: Seiobo There Below, War and War, and The Melancholy of Resistance.
October 12, 2025 at 9:33 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
2026 Reading 60: Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell. #10 in my year-long reread of A Dance to the Music of Time, and an absolute corker, both for its treatment of relationship between Pamela, Widmerpool and X Trapnel (‘Un Amour de Widmerpool’?) and for the extensive satire of publishing.
Paperback copy of Books Do Furnish a Room, with a pen and ink illustration of X Trapnel, a man with a severe face sporting a beatnik beard and a pair of dark glasses, and wearing a belted Macintosh over a black shirt with a green tie with an illustration of a naked woman on it. Under his arm he has a copy of a literary journal - you can see the title: FISSION - and a long thin stick with a white skull as its handle. Behind him, lying face down on a single bed is a naked woman with her hands seemingly embedded in her long hair.
October 12, 2025 at 7:40 AM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
A fire in heaven
A suburban street seen through a car windshield with a beautiful sky above with low fluffy clouds underlit by red from the setting sun.
October 11, 2025 at 5:29 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Looks a bit like your copy is heading for the same fate as mine.
A copy of Funeral in Berlin by Len Deighton that has started to fall apart. Left to right you can see: the cover, two separated individual pages, and the main body of the book.
October 11, 2025 at 4:05 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
One Battle After Another in Vista Vision, hell yeah! But damn I forgot to bring my binoculars…
Screen One at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square. Yes the chairs are luxurious and the sound is good, but the screen is… small, and… far away.
October 9, 2025 at 6:31 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
Two books I happen to be reading at the moment.
Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell and So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid.
October 7, 2025 at 10:20 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
2026 Reading 59: Brightening from the East by Ken Worpole. A perfectly judged present from @guineagibbs.bsky.social that I finally finished this weekend. The main attraction is the long essay ‘The New English Landscape’, originally published by Field Station with photos by Jason Orton.
Paperback book of Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape and memory by Ken Worpole with a photograph of three shire-type horses walking on an empty country road with crash barriers in the background.
October 5, 2025 at 3:57 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
I won’t quote them in full here, because they probably need their surrounding context, but I will quote one small piece – and this from a person we’ve been led to believe is entirely without imagination. It’s a splendid revelation.
“She would not mind dying, if it could be in summer. She would have liked someone to expose her on a hillside, at dawn, and leave her there to die: she would endure the midday heat and the pitiless afternoon with exaltation, and then, when the light went, she would expire without regret.”
October 3, 2025 at 10:24 PM
jonathangibbs.bsky.social
2026 Reading 58: Fraud by Anita Brookner. You can always rely on AB to help you through a convalescence. Like the middle-aged spinster Anna in Fraud, she is reserved, determined, patient, helpful, and good for you, though not necessarily in the way you might want.
Penguin paperback of Fraud with two details of Titian’s painting Sacred and Profane Love with two women, one clothed and one largely naked, sitting on a tomb, with a cherub between them. There is a quote from The Times: “A writer of bewitching readability.”
October 3, 2025 at 9:48 PM