This is my first entry after a few trial posts over the last few weeks.  If you follow me on Twitter – @TredynasDays – or view my Facebook page with the same name you’ll have an idea what kinds of things I’m interested in: books, literature, creative writing, mostly, but also football, dogs, cricket, Cornwall (where I live); sometimes all of these at the same time.  My first piece reflects the wonderful material the internet can throw up; I came across earlier today a wonderful site called Public Domain Review.  It’s a free online journal showcasing the most interesting out-of-copyright material available digitally.  There’s a wonderful article, for example, on Dog Stories from The Spectator by J St Loe Strachey (1895), which contains stories of dogs who could shop for cakes, distinguishing halfpennies from pennies (two cakes for a penny; he wouldn’t leave the shop until the second cake appeared after he’d eaten the first); a dog who would bury live frogs in his garden; hospital dogs, syllogistic and sermonising dogs…you get the picture.   There’s a link to the original text: highly recommended.  Check out the article on Mary Toft, a Surrey woman who in 1726 claimed she’d given birth to a litter of bunnies.  It’s an absolute treasure-trove of the kind Walter Benjamin would have loved; and yes, there’s an article about him and his posthumously published masterpiece, the fascicles (he called them ‘convolutes’) that make up The Arcades Project, a MS of which he had in his bag when he committed suicide at the border town of Port Bou in 1940, having been fleeing the Nazis. Here’s an image from the article by Anca Pusca of a ‘passage’ mentioned in the book; many of Benjamin’s writings have now entered the public domain, and there are links to them after her piece on him.

Galerie Vivienne Paris