Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎

@jolloyds

Writer The Earth Thy Great Exchequer Ready Lies (UK) Something Wonderful (US) Winner BBC National Short Story Award #bbcnssa O Henry Stories in Zoetrope, Southern Review, Ploughshares, BBSS, && She/her Ally

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Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 21d

The little fox stepping out

The little fox stepping through a patch of sun-bleached grass - one paw and both ears raised

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 23d

Moon and sun

The young moon through the sun rays of a window

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 24d

Crocosmia and friend I hope you can see friend's adorable fair isle hem

Elegant long orange and yellow crocosmia petals on one of which crawls a small very bug-shaped bug with a black front and a greenish end and its bottom hem neatly ribbed in green and black

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 25d

You can see the lighthouse from here

A headland where the top of the lighthouse can be seen - sparkle, heat haze, and a bit of cloud

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 25d

Also:

Dylan Thomas The Outing - small ochre booklet with black and white engraving of an old-fashioned bus labouring over a hump-backed bridge amid swirls of hilly Welsh countryside stretching, allegedly, between Swansea and Porthcawl, tho' if you've ever travelled that road you'll know it's all dune and beneath them ancient ruins swallowed by the sand and above them distant views of the grey sea

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 25d

Crocosmia and sky

Orange and yellow crocosmia petals with a cloud streaked blue sky behind

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 26d

Sun and shade

Rayed yellow flower part in sun and part in shade topped by yellow stripes of hoverfly

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· 28d

OK but have you seen Trotsky feeding his rabbit from a tin mug? From www.hoover.org/research/tro...

Trotsky looking at the camera somewhat impishly while feeding a white rabbit from a tin mug

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 25

Brilliant - thank you - this is my favourite of the Festival posters - The Way to Go Round Outer Space

Festival of Britain poster showing the recommended navigation from Time, through the Earth, round the Planets and the Moon, past the Sun and other Stars, and finally down the stairs to Sky

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 25

"beginning in the morning, difficult, going on and on" Osip Mandelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin

Orioles in the woods: length of vowels alone
makes the meter of the classic lines. No more
than once a year, though, nature pours out
the full-drawn length, the verse of Homer.

This day yawns like a caesura: a lull
beginning in the morning, difficult, going on and on:
the grazing oxen, the golden langor powerless
to call out of the reed the riches of one whole note.

1914

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 20

The little fox contemplates things that fly

Starlings lifting off - below them clouds of white roses - in the distance, haze and blue hills

The little fox pausing in the froth of long grass and hawkweed as if struck for the first time by the idea of flight

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 15

From the remarkable "Chronicles of a Village" by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện (Yale University Press, translated by Quyen Nguyen-Hoang) I'm not usually a fan of full-stop-less prose - but here, where it is relieved by short chapters, it is done with such playfulness and an ear for the resulting ambiguities

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 14

It's all very sporty here this morning. Here is some very happy bird's foot trefoil (birds' foot trefoil?)

Happy yellow froth of pea-like trefoil flowers among the long green grass stems

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 12

Peony season!

Baby pink peonies at their peak of fullness - red tinged petals in the centre

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 7

Pinks and grey

Sea pinks in front of a grey sea and an only slightly less grey sky - the foreground pinks are out of focus, those further away are sharper

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 6

Rising tide

A sea of green bracken in front of a sea of grey water

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 5

And isn't it nice when the outside of a book is so perfect for its insides?

Cover of Sail Away Land: a blue sky bisected by a lamppost topped by pigeons, against which a cloud stops and after a small shift in time or space starts again

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 5

I am loving "Sail Away Land" by @benpester.bsky.social - surreal stories, told in crystalline prose, and with a huge sympathy for the ordinary pain of human life (and death)

Two paragraph exerpt from Sail Away Land:

"I suggested that he might enjoy coming to see me for a cup of tea one day soon. I explained about the ladder I have set up in the garden, where we can say frivolous things and hope we become lighter for it, and the hole a few of us have dug which feels like you are being incubated in an egg if you lie in it. We talked about the possibility of flight. Sean only really committed to having a cup of tea.

He said he was not sure about heights. He remembered a window, long ago, a window where he stood looking down at the night and feeling a long, enduring surge of loneliness."

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· Jun 3

They'll need to make a new space on the chart

Chart comparing Emily and Charlotte Bronte's height to that of an emperor penguin

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 23

This one just smells of lemon - but look at those gorgeous doe-eyed flowers!

Geranium flowers - the top two petals are ombred from deep magenta in the centre to palest pink edging - the bottom three petals are pale pink with darker pink markings in the shape of a celestial jellyfish

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 22

And this one, I swear, has the exact bubbles up the nose scent of opening a bottle of cola on the terrace of a restaurant in the nearby walled town

Pelargonium flowers - pale pink just starting to think about lilac - dramatic streaks of deeper pink on the two upper petals - also please admire the whirly dark pink stigma in the middle

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 22

I do love a scented pelargonium - this one, with these gorgeous wee red flowers, smells of that thin strip of pine and scrub next to a deserted beach in Croatia

Close up of red flowers the upper petals streaked with a darker red

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 12

The damp valley in May - glorious

A flood of pink campion, gold buttercups, and frothing white umbellifers, leading to hills thick with blackthorn, whitethorn, and probably all the talking beasts of Narnia

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 10

More of the same

Milkwort down in the grass - this one a beautiful shade of ultramarine like the very last blue before darkness

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 10

Milkwort was traditionally woven into wreaths on rogation Sunday, the day for beating the bounds On the commonland here it weaves through the turf like blue pearls

Close up of tiny milkwort in the grass - this one is mid blue with white markings - buds a darker blue - open flowers were said to resemble a milkchurn - back when milkchurns were a familiar sight

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 9

Sigh

Sea milkwort - waxy green leaves, sugar-pink flowers, tough as old boot soles washed up in the tideline

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 8

It's a day to go back to bed or look at flowers

Sun yellow cowslip with pretty orange markings inside

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 8

The flowers keep on flowering

Campion in full pink flower under a blue sky

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 5

Tharoor talks about The Mirrors of Iskandar here (lareviewofbooks.org/article/inte...)

Interviewer: Earlier you connected entertainment and the unpredictability of autocrats, which made me think of my favorite part of your book: “The Mirrors of Iksander,” a set of 14 very short stories nestled at the heart of the collection.

Tharoor: That’s my favorite part, too. Like I wrote in the preface to that section, each of them spring from an episode of “the Alexander romance,” a cycle of stories about Alexander the Great, which were shared by cultures as far flung as Scotland in the West and Aceh in Southeast Asia. I was intrigued with what was done with the form by Arab and Persian writers, who referred to Alexander as Iskandar, among other names, and transformed him into a Muslim hero. My stories follow their tradition.

Interviewer: The vignettes are very light, in a way that reminded me of Italo Calvino.

Tharoor: Definitely.

Jo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎@jolloyds· May 4

Monster designs in progress: prototype cyberheads observed by a line of truly shocked square daleks (with thanks to @andrewmale.bsky.social)