David Toms
Writer. Pacemaker (Banshee Press, 2022). Northly (Turas Press, 2019). Writing recently in Magma, DRB, aswirl, Banshee, Gorse. New poetry coming soon.
🇮🇪 living in 🇳🇴.
- Day one of the winter games I've spent at home minding a sick child and loving every second of the figure skating pairs. God I love the Olympics, for all its faults.
- Got a really lovely message from a young person today who was fitted with a pacemaker at the age of 20 and they messaged me to say what my book Pacemaker, which they'd got as a Christmas gift this year, meant to them. Humbling to think my little book about walking and my wonky heart has that effect.
- It's something I'm hugely proud of artistically, and in moments like this, socially. If I do not much else, I've done that. bansheepress.org/shop/p/pacem...
- My least favourite genre of NRK article: historically high food prices, but it's up to you start baking your own bread in order to save money: www.nrk.no/nordland/sti... The problem with this a) not everyone has the time and b) you can't change structural issues alons
- What would help would be the breakup of the supermarket oligopoly in Norway where three or four companies completely control the supply chain with exception vertical integration across the entire food system. Bake your own bread, it's fun! But it's not a viable long-term solution to rising prices
- Watched this tonight, on loan from our library, on DVD. I've not been this frustrated by a film in a long time and by the end we were left just baffled. A garbled mess of visuals and while narrative always took a backseat, the last 30mins it just seemed to collapse.
- Understanding skiing for me has been relatively easy in that it kind of occupies the same place in Norwegian life that the GAA does in Ireland. It is the national sport and the nation-building sport. Also once ostensibly amateur. And as @bernhardellefsen.bsky.social notes, ideally it's heroes
- Should be of humble stock, rooted in the rural, and so on. The key difference of course is that skiing is practiced internationally and so much of the Norwegian self image as the best at skiing is rooted in the need to show their superiority at the sport over those who merely adopted it.
- Getting ready for the winter Olypmics with this excellent examination of skiings place in contemporary Norwegian society, the age of the attention economy and the society of the spectacle.
- Especially interesting to read in light of the efforts of Irish-Norwegian Tom Maloney Westgård, someone who barely ekes a living out of skiing but who will be representing Ireland in a sport that is currently dominated by Norwegians to the point of tedium.
