February 2026 Updates
February is a transition month, where we leave behind the long winter and the days start to get longer. It's still a slog, but we are over the worst of the dark and light is beckoning us forward. Irises emerged in my garden. Roses have started to show life.
Life
I turned 38, which seems too old to be true but here we are. My birthday coincided with a trip to Glasgow, which was great. We ate good food, shuffled round art galleries and generally had fun exploring a cool city. I walked an average of 20,000 steps a day, so I was tired but in a good way. It made me want to shake off the lethargy of winter and explore more.
Books
Not much read as it was a short month. I have about three books on the go at the moment so more next month.
The Broken Kingdoms - N. K. Jemisen
Second book in the Inheritance trilogy. Does the Earthsea trick of being a story about someone else in the same world, with the links to the first story only revealing themselves towards the end. I found this compelling and interesting, the world uniquely setup and rich in detail, with new gods multiplying. Jemisen's style is to throw a lot of information about the world at you initially, then you figure out how the world works. The protagonist feels unique due to her limited sight and ability to see magic, which enlivens the writing. A step up from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I enjoyed but felt a bit rushed.
Train Dreams - Denis Johnson
Short novella about a man living in the woods alone, who believes himself to be cursed. I sped through this but loved it. For such a small novella it contains so much - meditations on grief, an uneasy relationship to modernity and how it ruins nature. And so much of it is unspoken or hovers in the sidelines. I want to go back and read it again.
Articles
How Far Back in Time Can You Understand English- Colin Gorrie
The English in which I write this paragraph is not the English of fifty years ago, and it will not be the English of fifty years in the future. Go back far enough, and English writing becomes unrecognisable. Go forward far enough and the same thing will happen, though none of us will be around to notice.
Poetry Reminds Me of the Holes in My Memory - Victoria Kornick
Seizure and caesura have no common etymology, nor do seize and cease. The constellation of words I wanted to use to describe what happened were related only by sound, that ghost of one thing in another that creates meaning in poetry, but elsewhere, creates no viable connection, much less a conclusion.
20 Years Ago I Bought a Tank of Gas at the BP Station on Hwy 82 in Starkville, Mississippi and Decided to Draw It - Kate Bingham-Burt
I chose drawing because it was my least favorite way to make things. It felt slow and awkward and a little exposed. But after a few months of drawing those statements, something shifted. I started to appreciate the pace of it, the quiet of being alone with the page, the repetition of lines and numbers and type that I would never actually use again. Somewhere in there, I tricked myself into actually liking to draw.
New Moon Letter 1 - John Higgs
Today’s counterculture, in contrast, has no interest in the online world’s controlling metrics. This comes at a cost – or at least, what appears to be a cost if you accept the mainstream worldview. It means that this counterculture is intentionally invisible to the online world. The fact that you can’t see it in your online bubble is a feature, not a bug. It takes place in the real world, with people getting together and having the sort of experiences you don’t get online. It takes place in pubs and halls and fields, and involves community and relationships. The subjective experiences at the heart of it can’t be measured. Their value is judged not by metrics, but by how they make you feel.
Music
After discovering his incredible album End of the Middle last year, I'll follow anything Richard Dawson does. Hen Ogledd's album Discombobulated is a side project with other musicians, often singing in welsh and scots gaelic.. It's a varied, interesting album that ranges in style while keeping a theme of protest.
Craven Fault's album Sidings is built around minimal synth loops, with long tracks that don't change too much. It somehow becomes utterly hypnotic and transports me to somewhere else entirely
Final Thoughts
Erasure poem taken from The Skinny.
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