Daneet Steffens

Hello Bluesky! I am looking for anyone who cares about/writes about/thinks about Rebecca West.

I've been on a 10 year mission to get her a blue plaque in London and am finally allowed to re-apply after it was last turned down.

I'd welcome help building a strong application.

Thank you 💙🙏

This month, in the wonderful little cinema in Cromarty:

Portinari's pencil sketch of two men with hats having a conversation in a park

"I just left Villa-Lobos. But he speaks only my music, my music, and I just like to talk about my painting, my painting."
- Candido Portinari

✏️ Dois Homens Conversando, 1960

Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles wins this year’s Clark Fiction Prize. The 2026 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize has been awarded to Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a funny novel about a dissatisfied and underemployed young woman who …

The 2026 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize has been awarded to Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a novel about a dissatisfied and underemployed woman who decides to keep a baby, let her estranged pro-wrestler father move in with her, and start an OnlyFans.

As a day 1, read-THEM-when-it-was-first-published-25-years- ago Jon Ronson fan, this is very cool. 🙏

Ursula K. Le Guin — Nominate a Book for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

It's time! Nominations are now open for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which will be given to a work of imaginative fiction, published in 2025, that reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work.

A photo of a copy of the 1988 Picador edition of The Fictions of Bruno Schulz. The cover art is by Andrej Krauze.

If there is another book out there that packs more startling imagery, deep wonder, wide possibilities and surreal imagination into just 300 pages? Let alone ones weaving through narrow streets, bare squares and cramped rooms?

(But his vast skies.)

Simply extraordinary.

Powis Castle stands talll on top of a hill, daffodils grow in the garden below

The house at Bodnant Garden viewed across a large expanse of grass with daffodils blooming

Dyfryn Gardens with the house and daffodils bathed in sunshine

A child is stood on top of hay bales with the Welsh flag placed in them

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus | Happy St David’s Day

Here’s to Cymru! The nation’s language, traditions, culture, and the heritage that connects us. From dragons to daffodils, Wales’ story is told through the places we look after.

Photos: Powis Castle, Bodnant Gardens, Dyffryn Gardens, Chirk Castle.

Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source by A. HEWISH S. J. BELL J. D. H. PILKINGTON P. F. SCOTT R. A. COLLINS Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge Unusual signals from pulsating radio sources have been recorded at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. The radiation seems to come from local objects within the gala‹y, and may be associated with oscillations of white dwarf or neutron stars. In July 1967, a large radio telescope operating at a frequency of 81-5 MHz was brought into use at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. This instrument was designed to investigate the angular structure of compact radio sources by observing the scintillation caused by the irregular structure of the interplanetary medium'. The initial survey includes the whole sky in the declination range - 08° < 8<44° and this area is scanned once a week. A large fraction of the sky is thus under regular surveillance. Soon after the instrument was brought into operation it was noticed that signals which appeared at first to be weak sporadic interference were repeatedly observed at a fixed declination and right ascension; this result showed that the source could not be terrestrial in origin.

Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish announced their discovery of a “rapidly pulsating radio source” — what we now refer to as a pulsar — with a paper in @nature.com #OTD in 1968. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️
www.nature.com/articles/217...

Tom Noonan, Actor Renowned for Onscreen Menace, Dies at 74

One of the absolute greats.
(And if you've never seen WHAT HAPPENED WAS, do yourself a favor and watch it.)
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/m...

Literary superstar @legroff.bsky.social will be reading in my backyard on March 7. If you would like to meet a master craftsperson working at her peak form, I suggest you come.

Tickets include the book and support of our brilliant opening act Sabine McCalla. bluecypressbooks.com/product/laur...

This PEANUTS comic strip was published #OTD on February 19, 1977.

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

This PEANUTS comic strip was published #OTD on February 17, 1978.

Frederick Wiseman showed us the world and its institutions in all their cruelty and humanity. A prolific and essential documentarian, he will be missed.

RIP, 1930-2026

“In filming all of these people…he told us we ought to care about them in the here and now. They are your neighbors, even if you’ll never know them. And he did it with such close attention that it registers onscreen as something very beautiful. It is the sort of filmmaking that feels like love.”

This is how you live a life

An Onion Walks Into A Classroom | Litro Magazine I know in my heart that it was not Carol Ann Duffy’s fault. It was my own fault, and to a lesser extent the pupils I tried to teach on that fateful day. I know these things yet I still cringed when I ...

An Onion Walks Into a Classroom…

“I genuinely hadn’t anticipated just how volatile a bag of onions could be in a classroom with thirty teenagers”

—a cautionary tale from Alan Gillespie on the perils of #teaching Carol Ann Duffy’s #poem “Valentine”
www.litromagazine.com/literature/a...

Phinney Books is one of the finest bookstores in Seattle because it's so well-curated. I always walk out of there with two or three new books. They're books that I had never heard of before I walked in, but I suddenly could not live without them.

The two young women looking super-cool in a Parisian sidewalk café.

Juliette Greco & Françoise Sagan by Karl Bissinger
St. Germain-des-Près, 1948

I don't know who the man on the right is. In any case, this might be the coolest photograph ever taken.

Greco looks back over her shoulder at the camera

Remembering Juliette Greco on her birthday 🎂
📷 Gjon Mili, 1957

"Her voice is like a warm light that revives the embers burning inside of us all. It is thanks to her, & for her, that I have written songs. In her mouth, my words become precious stones."
- Jean-Paul Sartre

Film star Albert Finney, a bookmaker’s son from Salford, died on this day 2019, aged 82. Here he is at his dad's betting shop, Broughton Road, Salford, 1970s.

It’s National Storytelling Week! 📖
Storytelling connects generations and cultures. Alasdair Gray was a master of the form. Join us on 25 Feb at Òran Mór for Gray Day, marking Lanark (1981). Tickets via bio.

Paddington in Star Trek

I Photoshop Paddington into a movie, TV show, or pop culture until I forget: Day 1784

Remembering Catherine O’Hara: On 'SCTV' and elsewhere, when she was on screen no one was funnier We were lucky to be able to experience her talent.

Some thoughts on one of the greatest to ever do it: decider.com/2026/01/31/r...

Paperback cover image of Adelle Stripe's Base Notes featuring a woman in flip flops posing on a car roof, late 1980s.

The SMOKING HOT new paperback edition of Base Notes @whiterabbitbks.bsky.social is almost ready to fly. If you’d like a signed / dedicated copy, those lovely people @forumbooks.bsky.social are now taking pre-orders. Sink your teeth...

www.forumbooksshop.com/product/base...

Know your design icons ...

#Mackintosh #Macintosh

Raeburn was commissioned to paint it in 1803 by Burns’ publishers. By the mid-19thC it had disappeared. It surfaced at auction last year, and was acquired by the Blackie House Museum and Library in Edinburgh, a centre of Burns scholarship (and where I’m a Visiting Fellow). 2/3

Have a good Burns Night everyone. The first in which we can see him through the eyes of one of Scotland's greatest painters, Henry Raeburn.

Great to see SAINT OF THE NARROWS STREET in the Washington Post’s paperback roundup. Thanks to Krista Farrell for the heads up (and the pictures of the print edition). And thanks again to E.A. Aymar for the great words in his original review. www.washingtonpost.com/books/2026/0...