Haruki Murakami - "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World"

The elevator continued its impossible slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure; it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn't movingat all. But let's just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Mayb ei'd gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I'd circled the globe. How would I know?

[Although, in any strict sense, it's not killing time at all.] For only through assiduous repetition is it possible to redistribute skewed tendencies.

The bit about him renting a car - no idea what he's getting - and buying a few tapes - better play it safe, what goes with the car? - and harmlessly flirting with the girl, p345 and p346 in my version, is amazing. It's beautiful in its 'end of the world and (quote) I felt better for having met her (endquote)"' sense."

In one word (two) Beautiful book. Amazing. An ending that is no ending and in so, it is perfect.


It takes you along and soon you're running ahead of it, needing to know where it goes. Story telling at its best.

Bristlecone trees

“Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past.” Whether we’ve grown up in the big city, a small town, or in the middle of the woods, most of us are familiar with the concept of tree rings. As children, we were taught that a tree is a kind of natural clock: count its rings, and find out how old it is. But what we may not all have learned, is that tree rings can tell a larger story. Dendrochronology, or the science of tree-ring dating, has discovered that the rings on a tree not only record the number of years a tree has lived; they also preserve the memory of what those years were like. The thickness and coloration of tree rings speak of droughts and storms, unusual heat, excessive cold – even of sunspots. Trees are a living record of long-term climate change, geological evolution, and of life on earth in general. Unfortunately, Ross Andersen recently wrote in Aeon magazine, human civilization has a long history of wiping out that record. In fact, the practice of deforestation may be as old as civilization itself. We felled trees for practical purposes: because we needed wood to build houses, fires, and weapons, or because we needed open space to cultivate our crops. But Andersen suggests we might be driven by a deeper motivation, as well: “…a suspicion of forests as dark, shadowy places is written into the basic texts of Western culture. In Greek mythology, Dionysus, the ivy-wreathed god of the ‘wooded glens’, threatens civilization with a return to animalistic primitivism. In the Old Testament, Yahweh commands Hebrews to burn down sacred groves wherever they find them. Christian culture has traditionally identified the forests as a pagan stronghold, a gloomy haven for witches and outlaws. In Dante the forest is demon-haunted and evil, the underworld out of which the hero must ascend. For Descartes the forest is the precursor to enlightenment, the physical embodiment of confusion, the maze that the light beams of reason must penetrate.” Early on in human history, Andersen writes, our small numbers and limited technology kept our resentment relatively contained. But as civilization expanded, we developed the capacity to destroy trees on an ever faster and larger scale. We’ve now managed to overpower the forests we so resented: our rate of destruction has become greater than their rate of growth. Our powers of deforestation have grown to such heights, Andersen writes, that they now threaten to affect a particularly remote and hardy species: bristlecone pines. Among the oldest living creatures on earth, bristlecone pines have a particularly significant story to tell about the history of time on Earth. Preferring cool and dry climates, bristlecones have thrived for millennia in remote areas beyond the reach of pests, parasites, and predators. Its particular biological properties allow it to continually regenerate itself; provided it is left alone in a comfortable, alpine environment, bristlecones could – hypothetically – live forever. Unfortunately, however, the changes of the Anthropocene seem to be catching up with the bristlecones. “In 2005, a researcher from Arizona’s tree-ring lab named Matthew Salzer noticed an unusual trend in the most recent stretch of bristlecone tree rings. Over the past half century, bristlecones near the tree line have grown faster than in any 50-year period of the past 3,700 years, a shift that portends ‘an environmental change unprecedented in millennia,’ according to Salzer. As temperatures along the peaks warm, the bristlecones are fattening up, adding thick rings in every spring season. … This might sound like good news for the trees, but it most assuredly is not. Indeed, the thick new rings might be a prophecy of sorts, a foretelling of the trees’ extinction.” As climate change gradually warms the Earth, bristlecones have been climbing ever higher up their mountain ranges in search of the isolation they prefer. Eventually, however, there will be no place left for them to go. As their surroundings warm up, pests, parasites, and other effects of global warming will invade their habitat, threatening these trees with extinction. Salzer’s finding is, indeed, a warning sign. “If global warming drives these trees to extinction it will signal an evolution in the technology of deforestation. In the past we have menaced trees with axes and torches, but now it will be the hot, aggregated exhaust of our civilizations. Deforestation once arose out of our animosity towards particular forests, those that stood in the way of our future homes and crops. But deforestation is becoming delocalized; it is becoming an unavoidable byproduct of our existence, a diffuse, Earth-spanning emanation no tree can escape – even those that take root at the far reaches of the bio-inhabitable world.” Read: The Vanishing Groves by Ross Anderson in Aeon Magazine http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/ross-andersen-bristlecone-pines-anthropocene/

La Luz - "Damp Face"

instrumental surf, quite good

other than...

अयोनि
ayoni  (m.f.) (Sanskrit)

any place other than the vagina

random words (looking for the one about unread books (Tsundoku!))

Mise en abyme (French)

“Mise en abyme” is the process of making an image that contains itself with infinite recursion (for example, as observed while standing between two mirrors). It can be used metaphorically to describe infinite nesting (a dream within a dream, a story within a story) or self-referential discourse (a book or a movie whose content refers to itself).


Ikigai (Japanese)

Ikigai is a Japanese word meaning “reason for being.” On the island of Okinawa, it is thought of as “a reason to get up in the morning,” a philosophy which has been linked to the longevity of the people there.


Tsundoku (Japanese)

The act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piling it up together with other such unread books.


Goya (Urdu)  

A contemplative “as-if” which nonetheless feels like reality. The transporting suspension of disbelief that can occur, for example, in good storytelling.

Julio Cortázar - "Hopscotch"

"My love, I do not love you for you or for me or for the two of us together, I do not love you because my blood tells me to love you, I love you because you are not mine because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump because in the deepest moment of possession you are not in me -- how you like to use the verb to love, with what vulgarity, you toss it around among plates and sheets and buses -- I'm tormented by your love because I cannot use it as a bridge because a bridge can't be supported by just one side, Write or Le Corbusier will never make a bridge that is supported by just one side, and don't look at me with those bird's eyes, for you the operation of love is so simple, you'll be cursed before me even if you love me as I do not love you."

NovaPlanet

From the "10 best online radiostations outside of California" : the French NovaPlanet.

Have been enjoying them for quite some time now. Sometimes eclectic, sometimes wonderful retro.

Keeper!

Trent Reznor - "Ghosts I-IV"

Eerily strange instrumental songs.

The soundtrack to the dreams of old houses, to the wishes of aging children and toothless mothers.

Nine Inch Nails - "Head Down" (The Slip)

Particularly good chorus.

Jesse Miksic - "Digital Disquiet: How 8- and 16-bit Games Taught Me the Power of Dread"

Wonderful article about death, the meaning (or absence) of continuous dying and "continue?" in games.

http://www.berfrois.com/2012/06/jesse-miksic-digital-disquiet/

thrownness

Martin Heidegger spoke of something called ‘thrownness’ – that we are born into a universe not of our own choosing, and we have to confront it on its own terms and attempt to carve out a space within it.

source: http://www.berfrois.com/2012/06/jesse-miksic-digital-disquiet/

William S. Burroughs - "Dead City Radio"

Amazing collection of spoken word, much much better than him reading "Naked Lunch", which for some reason fails to grab my attention

• A Thanksgiving Prayer
• Kill the Badger
• Love Your Enemies
• Apocalypse (in the apocalypse, man will see what he sees, hear what he hears, taste what he tastes...)

Awesome stuff.

Berfrois - "Jungly Corridors"

The corridor is inherently authoritarian, seeking to corral unbounded biological movement into unnaturally linear paths. Early man did not grow up in corridors but on wide savannah plains, which is posited by some evolutionary anthropologists as the reason why our field of vision is wider than it is tall. To put a human being in a corridor, then, is to create a tension between our sensory equipment, tuned to one environment, and the artificial new surroundings. It is to say to us, with a sneering challenge: ‘Adapt to this!’

http://www.berfrois.com/2013/01/jungly-corridors/

Sword Art Online

24 episodes.

In the near future, a Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMORPG) called Sword Art Online has been released where players control their avatars with their bodies using a piece of technology called Nerve Gear. One day, players discover they cannot log out, as the game creator is holding them captive unless they reach the 100th floor of the game's tower and defeat the final boss. However, if they die in the game, they die in real life. Their struggle for survival starts now...

The first part, in SOA; I liked that a lot. There was the strange element of dying in game = dying in life, which made it different from normal VR, raised the stakes, and yet not the same as fantasy, where VR is simply used to create a fantasy world.

It had enough speed. Plots were not dragged on, and I liked even the love story; married life in VR = married in real life? Love is love...

But the 2nd part, after he ends the game, then has to enter a copy-world, where his love is kept locked up, was disappointing. All characters were predictable. Only his sister, in real life in love with him, in VR in love with his character (not knowing it is him), was the only non flat character.

Kiritu was flat, the hero. His love was flat, the locked up princess. The evil guy was flat...

Too bad.

Chinese Man

Forgot the name of the song. Came by on NovaPlanet.

Could've been on the Wax Tailor station in Pandora.