peroration

the concluding part of a speech, typically intended to inspire enthusiasm in the audience.

John Crowley - "Ægypt"

"When he was very small he had been told the story of the man who was caught in a rainstorm and sought shelter in an old barn. He fell asleep in the hayloft, and when he woke it was deep midnight. He saw, walking on the rafters of the barn, a clowder of cats; they would walk the rafters and meet, and seem to pass a message. Then two cats met on a rafter very near where he lay hidden, and he heard one say to the other: "Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead." And so they parted. When the man got home that day, he told his wife what had happened, and what he had heard the cats say: "Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead." And on hearing that, their old family cat, dozing by the fire, leaped up with a shriek and cried out: "Then I'm to be king of the cats!" And it shot up the chimney, and was never seen again.
That story had made him shiver and wonder, and ponder for days; not the story that had been told, but the secret story within it that had not been told: the story about the cats, the secret story that had been going on all along and that no one knew but they."

Crowley has a manner of interrupting the thoughts of his characters as if he is literally following their thoughts. Also, probably related, he does not fear to repeat words and sentences. Cool technique.

The premise, or one of its premises; how outside our thoughts, our dreams, the layers of our myths, lies the cold, real world. A world bereft of dreams and thoughts. How perhaps these two worlds, ours and the physical world, are not so different after all. The universe: a safe with a combination lock, the combination hidden inside itself. But aren't we part of the universe's dust. Isn't the combination inside us, inside our stories, and the stories hiding underneath our stories?

"Renaissance ... all their scholarship, all their learning, was bent towards re-creating as best they could the past in the present, because the past had necessarily been better, wiser, less decayed than the present. And so the older an old manuscript was, the older the knowledge it contained, the better it must turn out to be, once it had been cleansed of the accretions and errors of later times: the closer to the old Golden Age."

from the introduction: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." [LP Hartley's novel "The Go-Between"]

"'It seems ... that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives ... is not logical development so much as thematic repetition, the same idea or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances. ... A hero sets out ... to find a atreasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms, like a set of nesting boxes - each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told. ... Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in a story's premises - logical completion as a vehicle of meaning - all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like  The Fairy Queene, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisne satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there.'"

Bill Bryson - "the mother tongue - english and how it got that way"

The Cree Indian language has a special that [for] things just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist.
[The Story of Language]

"An earlier meaning of prove was to test, which makes "the exception proves the rule" suddenly make sense."

"The names of Britain's 70.000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the imporbable, from the deft ot the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners - this is a basic requirement of most British institutions - and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. ... the present quirky system dates mostly from the Middle Ages, when it was deemed necessary to provide travelers, most of them illiterate, with some sort of instantly recognizable symbol."

It's a fun book, but entire chapters are dedicated to summing up examples of something strange or illogical, groundless claims are based (the Dutch preferring their "almost invariably palpably inferior" shows to British shows... Maybe, but can we have some sort of example that shows how Dutch shows are invariably palpably inferior?

onomastics: the study of names.

Ludovico Einaudi - "Uno"

A haunting sound of classical piano and soft electronic accents.

via http://8tracks.com/cephalopodface/a-future-prometheus

The Caretaker - "Patience (After Sebald)"

Instrumental, the hiss of old records, dulled piano sounds, ambient noises.

Interesting.

Maybeshewill - "Not For Want Of Trying"

typical post rock song but with a cool rant right in the middle.

Mirel Wagner - "No Death"

Found in a "Southern Gothic and swamp" playlist on 8tracks. Definitely suitable girl-with-guitar. Dark and slow and jaundiced voice.

Bersarin Quartett

Very slow, mellow, electronic soundscapes, strings. Good for writing and/or coding?

Mumford and Sons - "Broken Crown" (Babel)

I make it a juvenile point not to like any Mumford song, but this one has a certain appeal that of course I will be refusing to admit anytime.

Quotes (and something about the em dash)

"The erotic apparition of two blind children, their sockets are hollow and seem to have been filtered through with blue, the one, bigger, is holding the other by the shoulder, and they charge through the crowd with savagery, they must have terrible secrets."

from The Mausoleum of Lovers, the notebooks of Hervé Guibert (trans. Nathanael, published by Nightboat)

"Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me."

from Antonio Porchia’s Voices, translated by W.S. Merwin

"Literary dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their products hook sentences together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras. But the dash provides instruction in them. In the dash, thoughts becomes aware of its fragmentary character. It is no accident that in the era of the progressive degeneration of language, this mark of punctuation is neglected precisely insofar as it fulfills its function: when it separates things that feign a connection. All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising."

Adorno on the em dash

"There is a ‘black wind,’ the beshabar, a dry melancholy wind that blows northeasterly out of the Caucasus. Even such winds as these have their own merit… the clouds brandish great masses of shadow.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, as quoted by Alexander Theroux in the essay, “Black”

Walking, morphing guy animation

Strange and at times eerily scary animation of a walking guy / vertex skin, slow morphing and changing.
http://vimeo.com/85596568

Darkside - "Beats Or Pills"

Reminds me of Wax Tailor; slow, triphop like beats. Lots of sampled voices, with strange little 'stories'. Classical influences and jazz notes.

Strange and eerie places

http://butdoesitfloat.com/I-suddenly-forget-What-space-is-like-and-time-Instead-of-horizontal

Hannibal (series, season 1 & 2)

Immense and beautiful take on the characters from Thomas Harris' "Red Dragon"

The dialogues are intricate, the reversal of roles and positions really beautiful. At some point a bit too much eye candy depicting a mental state, but it never got out of hand