Still trying to get my head around the fact that Al Green and Jacques Lacan shared a birthday. '(Do Not Imagine For A Second That It Is Not Impossible To Mend) A Broken Heart'.

Nocturnal Landscape wikiart.org/en/paul-nash/n…

Ian Penman, on ‘The Song’.
New Musical Express, 31 July 1982.

More information on the James Tait Black Prizes below. (My absolute heroine Muriel Spark once won a JTB!) | ed.ac.uk/news/2024/love…

Herr Fassbinder! What do you think?

Absolutely blown away that Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors has been long-listed for the Royal Society of Literature/Ondaatje Prize and short-listed for the James Tait Black Prize.

🌟Ian Penman – ‘Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors’ Ian Penman

📢The 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize longlist is here🎇

For 20 years, the Prize has awarded £10,000 to a book that evokes the spirit of a place.

Huge congratulations to the 14 longlisted titles, chosen by judges Jan Carson, Xialou Guo, and Francis Spufford (also a past RSL Ondaatje…

Paul Nash & Standing Stone
📷 Clare Neilson

Ian Penman reviews narcissism and 1981.
New Musical Express, 19-26 December 1981.

Illustrations by Tom Seidmann-Freud — Sigmund Freud’s niece — for her Book of Hare Stories (1924), an uncanny collection of folk tales collected from across the globe, chosen for their leporine heroes. More of the remarkable images in our latest post: publicdomainreview.org/collection/rab…

Tim Buckley’s ‘Greetings From L.A.’, by Ian Penman.
Pic by Joe Stevens.
New Musical Express, 20 June 1981.

James Chance makes the front page.
Pic by Joe Stevens.
New Musical Express, 20 June 1981.

Pierre Klossowski, as befits a French philosopher, of course also had a cat [whom, by the way, he often called 'his son']

I’ll calm down and begin work, I told myself. Again and again I said to myself, I’ll calm down and begin work.

Wonderful essay...

Ian Penman article on ‘torch songs’.
New Musical Express, 28 June 1980.

Was (Not Was), interviewed by Ian Penman.
Pics by Derek Ridgers.
New Musical Express, 19 May 1984.

I'm in the new issue of Harper's Magazine writing about Billie Holiday. Microphones, flowers, Catholicism & 'some of the happiest music ever made!' | harpers.org/archive/2024/0…

'This is not the stoicism of the blues or the expansive outreach of gospel; these songs speak more of individual succor, playfulness, abandon. And other qualities that are harder to name. What is the opposite of anxiety?' Ian Penman on Billie Holiday harpers.org/archive/2024/0…