{"id":4849,"date":"2024-01-23T13:14:37","date_gmt":"2024-01-23T13:14:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/?p=4849"},"modified":"2024-01-23T13:14:39","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T13:14:39","slug":"where-youll-find-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/where-youll-find-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Where You’ll Find Me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Anybody who came here looking for my annual best songs of the year blog posts will, I\u2019m afraid, be disappointed. The best of year compilations that I put together with my partner, Sue, who died in June, won\u2019t be carrying on. I might do a playlist this year, and I might write about it. Or I might not. Everything, as they say, is still up in the air, and I shan\u2019t begin to make any long term decisions until the summer, after I return from my long-delayed fellowship in the Ransom Center, Austin, where I will conclude research on my novel about Graham Greene\u2019s four months in Nottingham, which I hope to publish in late 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, if you\u2019re interested in my current work, this probably isn\u2019t the best place to find out more about me, but you can read all of my posts from the last twenty-odd years. Social media is very fractured these days and nobody reads blogs unless they\u2019re very well promoted and curated, neither of which I have time for. I am still on the site formerly known as Twitter, primarily because I have a still growing number of followers (despite keeping my following feed to manageable proportions, rather than following everyone back, which is the easiest way to build engagement). I post much less often, not least because the new owner\u2019s algorhythms mean that my posts are seen by a miniscule proportion of the number who used to see them (hint: to only see posts from people you follow, use the \u2018following\u2019 tab at the top. If you use \u2018for you\u2019 you won\u2019t see me, but you will see endless clickbait, ads and hate speech).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am on Instagram (as david_belbin) but only post photos a couple of times a month. I do see Threads and have an account there but it doesn\u2019t seem to have any traction, so I\u2019ve stopped using it. For the sort of thing that I used to post on Twitter (that is, music and literature, but definitely no politics) I\u2019ve started using Bluesky, although it does seem quite hard to build engagement there, possibly because it\u2019s still in Beta. There are some of my favourite people though and I have a few invite codes, so if you\u2019re interested, use the \u2018contact\u2019 button above to email me and if I have any left, I\u2019ll send you one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yes, I am on facebook, though I use the site primarily for keeping up with friends, so not everything in my feed is public and I don\u2019t accept friends requests from people I\u2019m not connected with in real life. By the way, I have memorialised Sue\u2019s facebook feed. This means people won\u2019t get notifications about her birthday, which would have been this Friday, but anyone can still see everything that\u2019s been up before. And since I haven\u2019t posted anything about this here before, I would like to thank everybody who packed University Hall for Sue\u2019s memorial celebration on November 5th<\/sup>. In particular, I want to thank my dear friends Michael Eaton for MCing and Mike Atkinson for doing the interviews for the memorial video<\/a>, which was superbly put together by him (audio) and Graham Lester George. Sue would have been thrilled that Seckou Keita performed in her honour (along with the house band from Peggy\u2019s Skylight, the jazz club we loved so much. Thanks also to Sophie and everyone at NTU for your help and all of the speakers on the video and at the celebration, including Sue\u2019s old friend Jackie Kay who read her poems \u2018Fiere\u2019 and \u2018Darling\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a link <\/a>to a slideshow of Sue with friends, accompanied by one of the two pieces Seckou played, \u2018Missing You.\u2019 I do have a video of the entire memorial service available for friends of Sue who, because of distance or illness, were unable to get there. Contact me if you need the private link. I also wrote a long biographical introduction to Sue\u2019s final collection of poetry \u2018What to do Next\u2019 which is available from Five Leaves Bookshop<\/a> and Shoestring Press<\/a>. The response to the book has been wonderful. I\u2019m sure Sue would have been very proud of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know how often I\u2019ll post here in future but thanks for coming, and happy new year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anybody who came here looking for my annual best songs of the year blog posts will, I\u2019m afraid, be disappointed. The best of year compilations that I put together with my partner, Sue, who died in June, won\u2019t be carrying on. I might do a playlist this year, and I might write about it. Or I might not. Everything, as they say, is still up in the air, and I shan\u2019t begin to make any long term decisions until the summer, after I return from my long-delayed fellowship in the Ransom Center, Austin, where I will conclude research on my novel about Graham Greene\u2019s four months in Nottingham, which I hope to publish in late 2025. In the meantime, if you\u2019re interested in my current…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4851,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4849\/revisions\/4851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}