iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

I don’t carry a torch for Shriver - the darker the place she is condemned to, the better - but her Spectator column does ask some of the right questions. Which are better considered through the exemplary AI-collaborative indie writing practice of Joanna Walsh (e.g Autobiology, Mis-Communication).

120

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

for some reason Alfred Jarry crossed my mind when I saw Morland’s cartoon in today’s Times

030

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

A seriously impressive review in the LRB which hasn’t sent me to the title, but headfirst back into the 73 hours of David Lynch’s ten movies and three series of Twin Peaks. I know Godard didn’t like him but Godard wasn’t always on point. The soundtracks are almost as good as JLG’s.

040

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

No longer Manga and Murakami. Prospect surveys the boom in fiction translated from Japanese. I guess I should take a look at Murata

020

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Many thanks! to Rónán Hession for his appreciation of TOOTHPULL in the Irish Times this weekend

050

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

I can’t help but read the latest Maggie Nelson as a flipside to Toothpull, my recent memoir of a troubled dentist. Pathemata, dis-Latined, is a Book of Suffering. Death is in the air. It’s a COVID era narrative. “Pain pretends urgency” she says, “one has to become cold-hearted to its entreaties.”

020

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

as i think (in fact hope) you aren’t likely to be readers of the remote right monthly The Critic, here’s a kiss and tell feature you might otherwise miss - an author’s step by step account of the collapse of Unbound

021

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

I’m impressed and also disappointed that the centre right/FT appears to understand the contested and intricate links between literary form, imagination and politics better than the left.

100

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Thank-you Will Davies for reviewing Toothpull of St Dunstan - the memoir of a Canterbury dentist tugging and plugging at the gate to the city for 700 years - in today’s Times Literary Supplement.

051

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

OutCalvino-ing Calvino in ‘89! This and The Lay of Sir Tristram - and the musicological expertise of Griffiths’ work on the Second Viennese and Darmstadt schools - are the seedbed for the revoiced Ophelias of LET ME TELL YOU and LET ME GO ON, now combined by NYRB. Republish the backlist, someone.

042

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

“Literature is becoming culturally marginal”; “the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking”; its “prestige has declined precipitously.” This week’s New Statesman includes a lamentable Jeremiad by James Marriott, name-checking no writers after Trilling and Auden. Though he does have a point.

000

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Philip Hensher self-puffs his forthcoming history of the novel in this week’s Spectator, trashing Eimear McBride as he goes. Not a volume I’ll be pre-ordering.

130

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

TOOTHPULL OF ST DUNSTAN - The startling memoir of a dentist who for 700 years pulled teeth in the approach to Canterbury, beside its city gate. Your copy is ready at Aaaargh Press www.aaaarghpress.com/product/toot...

110

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

The pre-packaged sale of Unbound cancels the crowdfunder publisher’s many debts, replacing them with damage control pledges that no-one can rely on; tweaks the brand to Boundless; and leaves the trust and respect of users where? (The Times)

020

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

It’s rare I nod my head when reading Shriver

210

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Good company for spring, a brace of poets who never met, each war-wise and more (Pushkin Press). “You can paint with whatever you like, with pipes, with stamps, postcards or playing cards..” - “Ride forward humanity. Saddle the wild herd of sounds!”

040

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

FRIENDS IN LOVE AND WAR / L’ELOGE DES MEILLEURS ES ENNEMIE ES at the Ikon in Birmingham is a visual arts reset with Europe. The highlight is undoubtedly Rachel McLean’s video The Lion and the Unicorn (2012), a comic take on our disunited kingdom in the run up to Scotland’s independence referendum.

010

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

frontispiece to Elfriede Jelinek THE CHILDREN OF THE DEAD (Yale UP) / can anyone help?

220

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Paris, November 2015 - the horror. A harrowing read. Stade de France, Belle Equipe, Petit Cambodge, Le Carillon, and Bataclan. Nine Islamists, one night, 130 murders. Hundreds maimed. Emmanuel Carrere on the victims, the killers, the responders, the trial. Hard to read, and necessary.

140

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 24/10/2024

I recommend Nell Dunn’s LIVING LIKE I DO as the follow-up read to Susanna Crossman’s candid and compelling memoir of childhood in a commune, HOME IS WHERE WE START. In the mid-70s Dunn visited a range of alternative households in which children thrived. I was a teenager in Chapter 9 Ramsgate.

041

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 12/10/2024

Halfway through the Goldsmiths shortlist: Cusk ahead even though I’m only a few pages in (I’ve come late to her). Pawson a powerful read, daily life boiling over then losing intensity, heated by memories of the Congo, Iraq, Angola. Bowles an over-hyped faux-angry campus novel.

010

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 31/08/2024

“Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices.” Caliban has found me at Faversham Hop Festival. www.shepherdneame.co.uk/hop-festival

010

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 13/08/2024

Sinclair’s psychogeographical writing is sometimes trite, frequently striking, often gnostic, highly influential. PARIAH GENIUS is a remarkable text about John Deakin, the lensman Bacon commissioned to shoot images of his hard drinking Soho courtiers. Sinclair raises the dead and it’s unnerving.

020

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 16/07/2024

if you’re having a Bonnard moment - they’re deeply pleasurable - you might enjoy Contre-Jour to extend it?

110

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 13/07/2024

If the first poem, The Rollright Stones (they’re neolithic, and not far from chipping Norton) is anything to go by, then Minden’s latest collection, POPPY, will be well worth the effort: “the excavation of indefinite pasts in the spirit of presence.”

000

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 01/06/2024

far too close to everyday east London earnestness for comfort / Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis played as farce

000

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 11/05/2024

Diane Di Prima: “halfway around the world the bombs are falling… Do not think to correct this by reading.”

100

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 26/04/2024

I rate Peter Brookes very highly but the use of Beckett in political cartoons inevitably mocks and caricatures the drama too

110

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 20/04/2024

Wonderfully paced narrative pivots and returns, moving where next, towards what? Bought on the strength of a passing comment made here by Jonathan Gibb I think…

120

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 16/03/2024

my weekend is making room for this new white spine - tho unlike the author, I’m won’t be walking as I read it

030

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

Another of our Brechts leaves the stage

000

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 11/02/2024

We will fight them on the beaches. Whitstable, by the Old Neptune.

000

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 11/12/2023

I’m sure there are Russian infantry in Ukraine this December who’d nod their heads vigorously on reading SONG OF THE BOWMEN OF SHU. Ukrainians too. Very few IDF: Pound’s the ‘translator’ and Israel’s arrows are American smart munitions and bunker busters in seemingly unlimited numbers.

000

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 25/11/2023

Intriguing to see today’s Daily Torygraph commend left wing Verso as the indie publisher “gem of the year” with “one of Britain’s most interesting fiction lists.” The case can be made.

000

kevin davey @kvind.bsky.social · 24/11/2023

“The Booker is lost… The twilight of English literary fiction is far more troubling”. Finn MacRedmond, half correct at best, in the Statesman.

150