Niall O'Sullivan

I've been thinking about the imagination and some terrible guidance I once shared with my students about using AI. buttondown.com/niall/archiv...

Your Harry Potter dollars funded this.

Just waiting for The Guardian to commission my "I gave up administering crack cocaine smoke directly to my brain through my eye socket and embraced the joys of not doing terrible things to fund my habit as my eyes got a bit better" piece. I told them I was middle class, so fingers crossed.

I'm pretty sure I haven't described another poet as "bold" for over twenty years. I still remember the one time I did it, and saw my error immediately.

I only found out about Anne Carson winning the Nobel Prize on the train home and wish I'd shouted out "Anne Carson just won the Nobel Prize for literature!" because if one person had said, "Get in!" it would have been worth it.

Best thing about being over-50 is playing the guessing game of 'which part of my body is going to hurt all day?' before getting out of bed and finding out.

I’m going to write some poems today. No idea what theme or style. It’s just one of my favourite ways of being in the world. For me, one of the best times to write a poem is when you don’t really have time to do so. I’ve never been good at the “emotion recollected in tranquility” thing.

On the train listening to two priests talk about a visit to Down House and Darwin's religious wife. I love being sober.

I'm in what I hope is just a tricky interregnum at the moment as multiple pitches & jobs fell through & unfortunate circumstances have delayed moving ahead with my new book at the pace I'd like. I'm trying to find solutions but if you like my work, a few tips would quickly add up: ko-fi.com/timclare

I feel quite smug because I'm going to set the wonderful text-based adventure game Citizen Sleeper to accompany Brave New World and Neuromancer for my half of a "Moderns to Contemporaries" module. Told some of my students and they were really happy about it.

Tried doing a pullup on some playground bars and immediately got leg cramps. It's like my legs were saying to my arms, "Don't worry lads, we got ya. Limbs united!"

Me hearing Cliff Richard's Devil Woman on the Grand Theft Auto 6 preview. www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4aD...

Ed Sheeran’s pledge to donate $2m to some intentionally vague “regional aid“ makes up a smaller fraction of his reported $400m fortune as the meal deal I bought from Sainsburys has in relation to my current bank balance.

After a six-year hiatus, Poetry Unplugged is returning to Covent Garden's Poetry Cafe one more time for NATIONAL POETRY DAY UNPLUGGED!!! Thursday 1st October, 7.30pm (doors 7pm) for details and booking please visit the Poetry Society website. poetrysociety.org.uk/event/poetry...

I don't know what Nick Clegg just said, but Tom Watson replied with, "Hold my beer..." www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

There's a lot of English born, second generation Irish catching strays right now ... (Keep sticking it to him though, we can take it).

I am genuinely more excited for new Castlevania than I am for GTA6.

One good thing about getting older as an artist, for me at least, is seeing any display of eminence, or gravitas, as bullshit. It's utterly hollow and performative, but age can lend an air to it that younger artists are particularly vulnerable to.

Old man gripe: why can't I see a single page telling me what services are running from my local station tomorrow? Why do I have to visit the engineering works pages of each operator and scan through a dense wall of text summarising for each route? AI is also really useless at finding this info too.

There's a degree of simultaneous smugness and unfunniness that can only come from a Guardian columnist. Other papers might throw in some reactionary vitriol or pure hatred, but Guardian columns always make me think of someone writing while trilling out little opera laughs at how clever they are.

Sometimes I go on Threads and the first thing I see is a funny video and the next thing I see is a reminder of why I never go on Threads.

Just found out you can buy a ".irish" domain extension now, which is the most American thing I've seen in quite a while.

There's been some discourse that makes me think my old foe, the page/stage divide, is stirring up again. Whenever shots are being fired from one end to the other, remember that there are a great number of poets bridging the two poles and all are welcome to cross back and forth in each direction.

RIP Wendell Berry. His poem, Questionairre, is more apt than ever.

Okay, so I really wasn't expecting Cliff Richard's Devil Woman to be the thing that finally got be feeling a bit hyped for GTA 6.

I get that headlines have to be cautious during a disaster but the videos of the Nepal flash floods are horrific. Thousands must have died.

RIP Tim Curry. Yesterday death messed up and took the wrong 80 year old. Today it messed up further and took the wrong 80-year-old from Home Alone 2.

My kids ended up getting a bag of books when they were little because Dolly Parton bought them for every child in Southwark that year. They didn't know who she was so I told them that she was famous for being a very kind lady. RIP

There's been some Gen X/sick day discourse and I have to admit that I once wrote down "ennui" as my reason for sickness. Nobody came back to me about it.

In the Guardian’s review of ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’, Lucy Mangan writes that the mother of a boy featured in the documentary “decides to keep him off the drugs”. In the end credit sequence of the programme, it says she put him back on the medication “after poor exam results”.

Roma. It looked fantastic, was brilliantly shot and acted. But I hated how working class people were depicted as a one-dimensional dichotomy of subservient mutism or toxic masculinity while middle class characters were depicted as conflicted and complex.

I reckon the "race realist" is going to find himself at the sharp end of the hate campaign that he set in motion as the journalistic institutions seek to distance themselves from their part in it. They will also blame Cambridge, but he's going to find that the press were never his friends.

If the world ever gets too depressing, may I recommend watching a Maki Itoh wrestling match? I did not know about her cardboard home made championship belt gimmick but I am most definitely here for it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukze...

TW: Suicide If you tell people you have SI, many are likely to suggest you call 988 or text the suicide lifeline. These are good resources *if you need to be kept physically safe;* they are not as helpful if your ideations are passive. Allow me to share some things that have helped me. /1

Made the mistake of posting in the main reddit news sub under a post about Arday as the place is obviously full of racist gowls. The three digit hit to my reddit karma was a worthwhile price for telling them exactly what they are.

This is the coverage of Arday **just in the Telegraph** in the UK. This is only the first four pages of results, just in one outlet.

I genuinely can't process the terrible news about the death of Jason Arday, which might not be properly confirmed at this point. I feel like one of many slow motion car crash watchers that have followed the story with occasional clever observations and now I have nothing to say.

What if somebody crashed their car into a forest due to that alert noise, and it exploded, and led to a firestorm in Ross-on-Wye? Is that what Andy Burnham wants, because that's what'll happen!

⚠️ EMERGENCY WARNING ⚠️ EVERYONE IN THE UK IS DEAD DEAD EXCITED THAT IS, FOR THE NEW SERIES OF CELEBRITY TRAITORS TUNE IN ON BBC & BBC IPLAYER