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Calum Barnes

@balumcarnes.bsky.social

590 followers 1.9K following 280 posts

melancholic resister | words Tribune, The Quietus and 3:AM | beats Shinlifter | keep cool but care sigmaportfolio.substack.com

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · Nov 16

i’ve not written much recently for *reasons* but thought i should at least post a thread of recent stuff so folk know my jam. first up, the review @ewangibbs.bsky.social and i wrote of the Poor Things film. tribunemag.co.uk/2024/01/alas...

Alasdair Gray’s Universal Story

Poor Things is a scabrous satire of the stifling rationalism and oppressive hierarchies of class, imperialism and gender which propelled Glasgow’s rapid industrialisation in the nineteenth century. Bu...

tribunemag.co.uk

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Reposted by Calum Barnes

ottilie mulzet @ottiliemulzet.bsky.social · 1d

It has been such a great honour to be one of Krasznahorkai's interpreters into English (since 2008), along with George Szirtes and John Batki. I also have to mention the visionary New Directions and my beyond stellar editor Declan Spring 🧡

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/b...

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

www.nytimes.com

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

in honour of Krasznahorkai’s Nobel, here’s a video of me and my buds at the bar recreating the iconic scene from The Melancholy of Resistance/The Werckmeister Harmonies on my 30th birthday in 2019

Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · Dec 1

it was recently the five year anniversary of this event

Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

is the video actually there? i uploaded it but can’t see it

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

when i saw László Krasznahorkai at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2012, the interviewer asked him to give some context for the reading he was about to give and he bluntly replied, ‘No, this is literature!’ then launched into a spellbinding twenty minute monologue from Satantango

Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

big fan!

Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

The Melancholy of Resistance!

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

possibly one of the few shops in the UK with this in stock so get it while it’s hot!

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 2d

can’t believe the Nobel went to a guy who i’ve genuinely read all the available books in English by. so pleased for László!!!

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 8d

obsessively consuming the biggest release in American pop culture this week

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 10d

46. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. Starting in the deceptively humdrum environs of a Christian old folks home, soon we’re thrust into a madcap epic of global import, built upon a glorious melange of mythologies. A bonafide surrealist novel that I will treasure.

Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 11d

45. Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said. A typically lucid and incisive set of lectures on the function of the intellectual that still have much to offer the present, particularly in light of events in Gaza.

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 15d

life achievement unlocked: visiting every poet’s grave mentioned in The Smiths’ Cemetery Gates

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 19d

44. Modernism by Terry Eagleton. A handy refresher on literary modernism that breathes new life into the old debates while illuminating its utopian dimensions but not shying away from confronting its reactionary tendencies.

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 19d

43. The Threshold and The Ledger by Tom McCarthy. McCarthy applies his sui generis literary analysis to a single Bachmann poem. Yes, literature remains a transmission on the threshold of meaning.

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 22d

FAO Your Party

Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 23d

obsessed with Bob Dylan’s new dripped out look wearing a North Face with the hood up on stage

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 29d

42. Vaim by Jon Fosse (tr. Damion Searls). Memories and the mystical mingle in this Septology writ small, rendered in Fosse’s characteristic peristaltic prose, dripping with existential ennui.

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 29d

41. The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter. A bonafide coming of age classic by a peerless innovator in the English fabulist tradition.

Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 29d

40. 62: A Model Kit by Julio Cortázar (tr. Gregory Rabassa). A novel making it new by dissolving the form’s traditional space-time to conjure linguistically pleasurable work that reads like The Waves if it were about disaffected bohemians scattered across European capitals.

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · 29d

39. The Letters of Muriel Spark, Vol. 1: 1944-1963 (Ed. Dan Gunn). Utterly compelling portrait of the artist as a young woman that reads more like an epistolary Künstlerroman.

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · Aug 27

The Assignment by Friedrich Dürrenmat

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · Aug 26

this is quite the effusive cover quote. too bad it wasn’t for the book it was on as i’d probably have bought it immediately.

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Calum Barnes @balumcarnes.bsky.social · Aug 21

can’t believe Nice N Sleazys kb’d Michael Shannon last night and he left shouting ‘Fuck this place. Fuck Glasgow’

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Reposted by Calum Barnes

hannah @hannahkateboast.bsky.social · Aug 21

The UK government will evacuate nine of the 40+ students in Gaza with scholarship at UK universities. My PhD student Shaimaa isn't included. We must now make sure they help the other students - email your MP today. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

UK to evacuate nine Gaza students with university scholarships

Move follows months of pressure from MPs, academics and campaigners, with dozens of other students still stranded

www.theguardian.com

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