Buried Alive, from the book Livia (1978) in The Avignon Quintet .

A poem filling with water,
A woman swimming across it
Believing it a lake,
The words avail so little,
The water has carried them away
Frail as a drypoint the one kiss,
Renovation of a swimmer’s loving.

Attach a penny calendar to the moon
And cycle down the highways of the need,
The doll will have nothing under her dress;
With an indolence close to godhead
You remain watching, he remains watching.

When she smiles the …

Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has crept into a couple of my go-to podcasts; folks I respect are talking about it so I wanted to learn it for myself. In this post I describe the approach I took to learning the Terra Blockchain. We set aside GUIs and Web Applications and instead interact with it programatically through the Python API.

What is DeFi? I’m not an expert and I’m not a Twitter shill so I can’t …

An extract from Monsieur - Or the Prince of Darkness by Lawrence Durrell. Part of The Avignon Quintet .

In those days there were no real suburbs - the desert began almost at the gates of Alexandria and with it of course the damp enervating heat which soaked and bathed one, until one could feel the sweat trickling through one’s clothes into one’s very saddle. Our breathing was laboured. There were small villages giving (so many were the mirages) the illusion of being fictions; their …