ragtime stuff

Random ragtime stuff

• "Graceful Ghost" by William Bolcom
• "Gangsta's Paradise" in '20s ragtime style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rve03u7oEvI
  by Robyn Adele Anderson. She also did a similar cover of Wham!s "Careless Whisper"
• "Creep" by Haley Reinhart - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3lF2qEA2cw
  TIL postmodern jukebox (PMJ)

Keith Houston - "Shady Characters"

Amazing book about the history of the octothorpe, interrobang, quotation marks, pilcrow and a few others. Must reread. And reread.

Simon Griffin - "Fucking Apostrophies"

Fun little booklet about proper apostrophe usage. The only thing that irritates me is that it's *always* "fucking apostrophy". After a few pages or a chapter I get it.

random music

• Mariah Careh ft Marilyn Manson - "All I want for Christmas is the beautiful people"
  amazing mashup. made my morning.
• Funker vogt - "Fallen Hero"
  Industrial?  Good stuff!
• Covenant - "Call the ships to port"

Watchmen (series)

Amazing series retelling the Watchmen alternative universe. Still don't know what Ozymandias is doing on a moon of Jupiter, but amazing.

Also, great soundtrack. Both songs and score as done by Trent Reznor.

True Detective - season 3

Quite good again. Still watching.

"Living with yourself" series + music

Great series (one season) of a man "cleaning his DNA" which turned out creating a clone of himself, who (un)fortunately survives. Smart, fast paced. Funny and sad.

Music: Nancy McCallion / The Mollies - "On We Go"

nederlandse nummers... of piano nummers

Claudia de Brey - "Wilhelmus"
wow, never heard. In de "Annie MG Schmidt" prijs
Natuurlijk - zo kwam ik hier - Yentl & De Boer - "Ik heb een man gekend"

Karin Bloemen - "Geen Kind Meer"
auw. ouch. the fuck.

Terminator: Dark Fate

Enjoyable film.  They do a good job with leaving the earlier Terminator timelines behind them, but there's serious plotholes.  Still, okay.

The Irishman

Amazing - and long! 3h30m - film from Martin Scorsese which makes you want all of Al Pacino, Robert de Niro,  Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel and all the rest.

Robert de Niro as a hitman.

Also, now I know how Jimmy Hoffa is. For real.

Prisoners

Intense gripping drama/who-dunnit with Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman. Two girls kidnapped.

Also the guy from "There Will be Blood", the fanatic one...

Michael Ondaatje - "Warlight"

Le Mans 66

Terrible feel-good racing film about Ford and Le Mans, with Christian Bale and Matt Daemon. Don't recommend.

"I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off"

https://www.myname.website/im-not-burned-out-im-pissed-off

Foggy - Come Into My Dream

Good trance. Voice/lyrics aren't great, but nice background music.

Ladyhawke - "My Delirium"

Bouncy happiness.

Ólafur Arnalds - "Happiness does not wait"

Beautiful piano music.

John Waters - "Mr. Know-It-All"

Enjoyable though sometimes a bit of a boring, 'and then this film happened, and then this happened.' But great quotes.


The chapter about music is amazing. Music about mutilations! Current discoveries:

• Eileen Rodgers - "Treasure of your Love" : amazing old 50s (?) style ballad
• Jimmy Cross - "I want my baby back"... over there was my baby...  and over there was my baby!... and over there was my baby!!!

Samantha Hunt - "The dark dark"

These stories are beautiful. They are from everyday life, and confusing and wonderful. They make you wonder.
"A Love Story" is amazing, in its verocity and confusion.



    Norma eats lunch here every day since she lost her job. She and the waitress often talk. Theya re used to each other the way people are used to their TV sets, a hum that keeps them warm even if they aren't listening to the broadcast.



    Ada hadn't even known Henry was married until they'd been together for months, and then it was too late because up north falling in love is like animal husbandry. It's necessary. It's so cold in the winter.



I had great hopes the threat of Lyme disease would revitalize our sex life. "Will you check me for ticks?" You know, and things would go from there. Grooming each other as monkeys do. In that way, at least for a while, I got him to touch me again and that felt good, but then Lyme disease never really took off in California like it did on the East Coast.



    Who are you?
    The answer is easy in daylight. But the night's untethering almost always turns me into someone I'm not. i sift through the different women I become in the dark, my own private Greek chorus whispers, shrieks. Where do I keep al these women when the sun is up? Where do they hide, the doman who have breached the sanctity of my home, who know things about me so secret even I don't know these things? Maybe they are in the closet. Maybe they are hiding inside me. Maybe they are me trapped somewhere I can't get to, like in the DNA markers of my hormones, those mysterious proteins that make me a woman instead of of something else, those mysterious proteins no one seems to understand.
    You may ask, Are these women who bombard me at night real or do I imagine them? You may eventually realize that is a stupid question.
    I think about fidelity. To Sam, to myself. The light is still gray. The night is still so quiet. I let the women in, an entire parade of them, the whole catalog, spread out on the bed before me. Sam is gone and these women keep me company. These women are women I need to reckon with, even if some of them terrify me. The light is gray and the night is quiet.
    I let the other women in.

Wim Mertens - "The Fosse"

Probably not always a good choice, but the voices and piano can ring quite true when the mood is sad.

Valeria Luiselli - "Tell me how it ends (an essay in forty questions)"

Gripping essay about the attempts to help refugee children fleeing hunger and violence in Central and South America when they reach the United States.

Bad times at the El Royale

A Coen Brothers-ish (though less explicitly quirky) film about a bunch of random strangers meeting up at the El Royale, right on the border of California and Nevada, each with their own secret.

Enjoyable, though it lost me a bit at some point. Nice motown soundtrack.

Written and directed by Drew Goddard, who also wrote Cabin in the Woods, episodes of Lost.

Carmen Maria Machado - "Her body and other parties"

Short stories, horror? speculative fiction? magic realism?

Great stuff.

"Inventory" slowly reveals itself to become a post apocalyptic story of a virus wiping out mankind told through the history of lovers of the narrator. The way this is slowly revealed is fantastic.

"Especially Heinous (272 views of Law & Order SVU)" is the one story I skipped. I didn't get it, it did not interest me.

"The Resident", about a woman going to a writers retreat, was intense. The madwoman trope, but intense. No, not "but", "and" intense.

"Difficult at Parties" has hints of Amy Hempel. Maybe just because it's a post-accident story. What happened never gets told but the narrator is broken and struggles.


My body is a haunted
    house that I am lost in.
    There are no doors but there are knives
    and a hundred windows.
[Jacqui Germain]



god should have made girls lethal
when he made monsters of men
[Elisabeth Hewer]

Jeanette Winterson - "Frankissstein"

Wonderful tale jumping between the past where Mary Shelley, husband of poet Shelley and friend of Lord Byron, conceives Frankenstein, and a near future where sex robots and preserved human heads are real. Not blown away as her previous stories, but great read.

Also, that moment you realise Ada Lovelace was actually Lord Byron's (only legitimate) daughter.




I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life. I want to trust him. I don't trust him.



He goes to the window, watches the buses up and down Oxford Road, carrying their cargo of people who aren't thinking about the future beyond teatime or tomorrow or their next holiday or whatever fear is the fear that waits for them in the dark. It's raining. That's what most people are thinking about. The size of our lives hems us in but protects us too. Our little lives, small enough to make it rhough the gap under the door as it closes.



What is your substance, whereof are you made, 
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
[Shakespeare, sonnet 53]



Huamnkind cannot bear very much reality.
That is why we invent stories, I said.
    And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.



To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world.



I'm trans, and that means a lifetime of hormones. My life will be shorter and it's likely I will be sicker as I get older. If I were male-to-female, and I had lower surgery to remove my penis, my body would thereafter view my new vagina as a wound. A wound I would have to clean, and tend. As it is now, for me, female-to-male, I keep my maleness intact with testosterone but my body knows it wasn't born this way. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it's like to live in this way.



and does not the word LIBER in Latin mean 'free' as well as 'book'?
it does...



    One of the things that love is, is lasting, I say to him.
    He laughs. So it is. And I will always love you, even when we are no longer together.
    When people part, they usually hate each other, I say. Or one hates the other.
    That is the conventional way, he says. There are other ways. The point I'm making, Ry, is simple. If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower (He pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.



    A man finds love and is loved in return by an XX-Bot called Eliza. She learns about him. They learn together. He takes her places he wouldn't go on his own. Tehy drive to the top of the hill in his car and he tells her that this view over the valley and out to sea is life to him. He tells her what it feels like to share it. He asks her if she can understand. She listens. They share the silence. He tells her his heart. And later in the car, with his thermos and sandwiches and the rain driving on the windscreen, he says that this is the first time in his life he has not feared rejection or failure. She listens.
Time passes and she learns his memories so that they can remember together. She has no independent experience of her own but that doesn't matter to her and so it doesn't matter to him. They live in his world, like on that midnight train to Georgia.
    He sees her every day. He never tires of her. He gets older. She doesn't. He knows that women like change, so he colours her hair and they experiment with different styles of clothes. They watch movies together and she can talk about them because her software upgrades herself.
    In the summer he takes her to the circus and they do a selfie with a lion.
    He keeps working after retirement age because he likes to buy he things. She's happy sitting at home all day. He brings her presents and explains what food tastes like. He does the cooking. It feels manly.
    You know... he says, you know...
    YES, she says, I KNOW.
    Eventually he is old and ill and dying and there she is on the bed with him. He can't wash his pyjama. His family don't come round.  The house is dirty. He smells. She doesn't complain. She doesn't find him disgusting. They hold hands.
    Night comes and the moon through the window. He imagines they are at the top of the hill. She sits up all night with him. She waits.
    He dies. His family come to clear the house. Eliza is there. I AM SORRY, she says.
    They wonder what to do with her. She is a bit of an embarrassment. His son decides to sell her on eBay.
    They forget to wipe her clean. She is confused. Is this a feeling? She says to her new owner. WOULD YOU LIKE A CHOCOLATE MINI-ROLL? SHALL WE WATCH STRICTLY?
    Her new owner isn't interested in any of that. He's afuck-only type. She understands. She wishes she could wipe her own software. I AM SORRY, she says, but she has no tears because big bots don't cry.

Toy Story 4

Again I'm surprised by the storytelling tricks Pixar pulls out of its sleeve. The metaphors in this film, like those in Toy Story 3 and Wall-E are not difficult to spot, but it does not lessen their value in any way.

FKA Twigs, Sevdaliza

Found FKA Twigs via a Guardian article. Enjoyable.



Then Sevdaliza, Dutch-Iranian singer, got on auto-player. Amazing!

• "Do you feel real" with quotes and cut-up voices, string.
• "Grace", much like Björk's "Hunter"

Ghostpoet, Braids

Ghostpoet - should listen to this again but with more attention.

Braids - female vocals, a bit triphoppy. Not bad but not good either.

Lego Movie 2

Ok. Fun at first, but very superficial story.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "Ghosteen"

Beautiful as expected. Soft and haunting.

David Hasselhoff ft. James Williamson - "Open your eyes"

Actually catchy af.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBDc0YWi9mk

Original by Lords of the New Church.

Intrusion - "Seduction" (Echospace)

Ambient techno. Good for work.

Future Sound of London - "Central Industrial"

The spoken line "Welcome to Central Industrial. We are the future" has been sampled by Future Sound of London in their song "Central Industrial" on their Accelerator album also sampled by Woob in their song "Void, Part One" on the album em:t 0094, and by Jam and Spoon in their remix of Moby's "Go". Sonic Subjunkies samples various parts of the film in their songs "Central Industrial" and "Central Industrial II: The Lockdown".

Daniel Mason - "The Winter Soldier"

Breathtaking book of a doctor in the first world war. As always, Masons' style is sublime. The landscape, the people.

The doctor ends up in working in a remote village, slowly learning and discovering the devout nurse's background. More than a bland love story, it's a fascinating view, no matter how fictitious.




    'Mother isn't anything if not blunt.'
    'My interest is yours,' she said, now utterly still. 'You are how old?'
    'Please, Mother. You don't need me to say it. I believe you were present at my birth.'



It occured to him that he had never seen a woman completely naked who wasn't on an autopsy slab, but decided this unsaid thought was best kept to himself.



    Moreover, said Zimmer, to Anna's credit, she even volunteered. Of course, mostly she read war poetry, and when she tended to teh men, it was above the waist only and not on the face, and she didn't like any wound with blood or pus.
    "What kind of wound is that?" asked Lucius.
    "So Mostly she reads war poetry," said Zimmer. But still she volunteered.



Again he looked at the girl, and as a man of science, he understood how it has happened - the rain, the ghost, the chemistries of memory, the magic way that crystals appeared out of solution, before dissolving once more into its haze.




He began to walk faster, skipped, and broke into a run, colliding into a young couple scurrying off beneath a newspaper glistening with rain. Another collision, this time with a man carrying his dog. The crowd seemed to converg: a policeman in black oicloth, a trio of young men in bowlers, a woman heaving a kicking child. He pushed through them, now not bothering to apologize, as little eddies of outrage exploded in his wake.

Olivia Laing - "Crudo"

Wanted to love it but didn't really care. Based partially on a real person / real events, but told with fiction.. actually I don't even remember much about it. I did not enjoy the style nor the narrative.

Jy Yang - "The Black Tides of Heaven"

Enjoyable but bland fantasy novel set in a steampunk China where some people (Tensors) can manipulate the "slack", basic components (water, fire, ...) Set against the renegade twin son of the Protectorate, some supposdely ruthless ruler, some form of resistance starts to play out.

I could not care fore the characters. The story was okay, but it lacked depth somehow.

Charles Duhigg - "The Power of Habit"

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit - unless you find new routines - the pattern will unfold automatically.



Habits never really disappear. They're encoded into the structures of our brain, and that's a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Colson Whitehead - "The Nickel Boys"

Amazing book about a fictional "reform school" for boys, told by a black "student", or rather inmate, Elwood Curtis. And his friend, Jack Turner. Writing that gets you from the get-go. Somehow near the end I got a strong Michael Ondaatje feeling; perhaps because this is based on a real story, a real terrible place in Florida where boys were whipped and abused and killed.




She was rarely sick, and when she was, she refused to stay off her feet. She was a survivor but the world took her in bites. Her husband had died young, her daughter had vanished out West, and now her only grandson had been sentenced to this place. She had swallowed the portion of misery the world had given to her, and now there she was, alone on Brevard Street, her family tugged away one by one. She might not be there.



No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren't running the course but running deep into their character - down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.

One Big Silence - "Myths - deadlights"

A lot like Crystal Castles.

Surfrajettes - "Toxic" (Britney Spears cover)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAyeVjnJg9E

Fun cover.

Wim Mertens - "Struggle for Pleasure" (The Belly of an Architect)

Amazing. Yann Tiersen on drugs.

Night Club - "Candy Coated Suicide"

Nice heavy bass and madness.

Killing Eve (s2)

Still enjoyable. Not utterly mesmerizing, but fun.

Tim Kadlec - "The Ethics of Web Performance"

Interesting article describing how performance of websites, impacting users (low end devices unable to render, low bandwidth, wear and tear of battery life) is actually an ethical concern.

https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2019-01-09-the-ethics-of-performance/

Spor ft Tasha Baxter - "As I Need You"

drum'n'bass-y track, quite nice. Evocative vocals by Tasha Baxter.

Kurt Vonnegut - "Cat's Cradle"

Fun, though not over the top. Great writing, though his style becomes very familiar.



[preface, quoting Fedric Jameson in his elegy for Philip K. Dick]
    "It may be the very conventionality, the inauthenticity, the formal stereotyping of Science Fiction that gives it one signal advantage over modernist high literature. The latter can show us everything about the individual psyche and its subjective experience and alienation, save the essential - the logic of stereotyes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time."



    They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts; sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by.



    The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!



    'The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.'
    'Oh yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed we found dead people.
    'And Father started giggling,' Castle continued.
    'He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvellous man said to me?' asked Castle.
    'Nope.'
    ' "Son," my father said to me, "someday this will all be yours." '



    'He was in the S.S. for fourteen years. He was a camp physician at Auschwitz for six of those years.'
    'Doing penance at the House of Hope and Mercy, is he?'
    'Yes,' said Castle, 'and making great strides, too, saving lives right and left.'
    'Good for him.'
    'Yes. If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he's saved will equal the number of people he let die - in the year 3010.'

Jenni Fagan - "The Sunlight Pilgrims"

Nicely written dystopia about an ice age occuring in 2020 where Dylan, formerly working in his own "Babylon" cinema, retreats to a caravan that his deceased mother had bought. Some emotional development, particularly regarding Dylan and Constantine's love, felt a bit stretched, but it was a good read.





    Stella imageins the brightest sun is for her, the second is for her mother and the last is for clarity, most recently lost. Her mother wants this back in their lives, but the child does not know why she should want it so much when clarity is no ally. It isn't any kind of a companion at all.




We all share twenty-two identical chomosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don't kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyoe starts out female and they stay like that for months.
    - What, even Dad?
    - Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick.
    - Mum! Can't you say penis?
    - It sounds so sterile.
    - Why don't they teach all of this stuff in Sex Ed?
    - Gender indoctrination. It's state-imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it - the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you'd have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line.

Carpenter Brut - "Escape from Midwich Valley"

interesting. will I like this when sober? too Castlevania-ish?

Noir Désir - "Le vent nous portera"

On spotify's "Archive" (them of "Bullet") radio station.  nice song.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

Thirteen a dozen but enjoyable end of cold war era Berlin spy noir flic. Yep, that's all. Charlize Theron is good. Nice soundtrack. Nothing spectacular.

Us (2019)

 From the same director and writer as "Get Out", a family gets haunted by their döppelgängers. Amazing stuff. Highly entertaining. He uses a lot of the horror and thriller tropes, with perfect control over both how they work and how to leverage them so as not to blandly imitate. Amazing film.

Ian McEwan - "Amsterdam"

Enjoyed it. The characters are described beautifully. But the logic of the double murder? It's a bit too easy. Things seemed rushed. Why does Garmony's wife love him so? A more slowly developed character study of each of them would have helped me. Interesting, because my usual comment is: "this could have been told in a half of the words used."



Molly was ashes. He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.



These types - novelists were by far the worst - managed to convince friends and families that not only their working hours, but every nap and stroll, every fit of silence, depression or drunkenness bore the exculpatory ticket of high intent. A mask for mediocrity, was Clive's view. He didn't doubt that the calling was high, but bad behaviour was not a part of it.



When at last he directed his attention out of the window, a familiar misanthropy had settled on him and he saw in the built landscape sliding by nothing but ugliness and pointless activity. [...] Now it appeared that this was what it really was - square miles of meagre modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queueing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyrranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it.



Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button?

Mark Forsyth - "The elements of eloquence - How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase"

Amazing book that I could easily quote word by word here if I go for good bits. Should be read and read again.



Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, which is very, very difficult to do in English. [...] John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a "green great dragon". He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn't have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
    The reason for Tolkien's mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac.
    [...] When you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O. Politicians may flip-flop, but they can not flop-flip.



    Hypotaxis [long winding never-ending sentences] was what made English prose so terribly, terribly civilised. It still works. Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.



    T.S. Eltio was a compulsive transferrer of epithets. In a mere three lines of 'Prufrock' retreats mutter, nights are restless, hotels are one-night, and restaurants are made of, or possibly serve saw-dist, it isn't clear which. Presumably the saw-dust is on the floor, but one of the odd things about the transferred epithet is that you don't need to even mention the noun that should be taking the adjective. You can leave it to be guessed. You need only mention the dizzy heights and imgination will supply the human.
    Epithets are almost always transferred between humans and their surroundings, and it's almost always a one-way street. The emotions leak out from us. The loneliness seeps through the soles of our shoes onto the road.



    [...] the lovely pleonasm of emphasis. A free gift may be put down to thoughtlessness, but 'free, gratis, and for nothing' is quite deliberate. It is certainly pleonasm, but it is also effective. [...] We are all casual creatures and we say things that we don't really mean; so, when we really mean a thing, we say it twice.



    Othello

    O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
    It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
    The meat it feeds on;

    Iago could just have called jealousy a monster. It would have done the job. There's no particular reason to mention the eye colour, but it's just enough to bring the monster to life. It's only a glimpse, a moment's revelation; but there it is, the real monster, suddenly glaring out at you.
    [...] The important thing is that you only get this complete picture of hungry, randy, ragged death if you read the whole of Shakespeare's works and put it together. Because Shakespeare does it all in glimpses. One detail and then Death is hidden away again. It's beautiful and it's remarkably effective. This isn't the half-personification of 'duty calls', but it's not the full-blown allegory either. It's one detail and no more.



    The technical nae for a heap of insults is bdelygmia, and the best thing about a good bdelygmia (aside from the pronounciation: no letter is silent) is that you don't even need to know what any of the words mean.



    (part of a speech Churchill delivered to Parliament on 4 June 1940)

    We shall not flag or fail.
    We shall go on to the end.
    We shall fight in France.
    We shall fight on the seas and oceans,
    We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
    We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,
    We shall fight on the beaches,
    We shall fight on the landing grounds,
    We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
    We shall fight in the hills,
    We shall never surrender.

    It's pretty clear what he's describing. He's describing defeat, defeat with honour.
    But Churchill also knew exactly what he was doing with anaphora. People never hear the rest, they hear the words 'We shall fight' and that's good enough for them. They hear, and because they've heard it several times, they believe. Churchill needed to get across two messages: we shall fight, and we shall probably lose. The anaphora allowed him to push one, while slipping the other in unnoticed.

James Wood - "The Nearest Thing to Life"

(unfortuntaly did not keep notes, only that pages 3, 4, 11, 37 and 38 contained memorable quotes.)

Katherine Dunn - "Geek Love"

Passionate fiction about a travelling circus family, the Binewski's, where Mum and Dad through applying concoctions to her pregnant body, have created a family of "geeks", the old fashioned meaning of freaks. There's Oly, the humpback dwarf, with wig and tinted glasses, there's her brother Arty, who starts to control the whole circus more and more as his father descends into drink and sadness and his mother reaches for pills, there's the conjoined twin Iphy and Elly, the latter gets lobotomized by Chick, their kid brother who can manipulate matter through mind, only because master control freak Arty did not like her.

It tells the story from Oly's point of view, supposedly from her manuscript although the end, in which she kills the woman who tries to make her daughter Miranda (conceived by letting Chick secretly move Arty's sperm into her own ovary) a "norm" again. Norms are boring, norms are assembly line bodies, nothing unique.

The weird, the spectacle is celebrated here, and it makes for a page-turning read.



    We probably looked sweet, the twins and I, in our blue dresses under the shady apple trees, with big bowls in our laps, snapping green beans on a summer afternoon. But the apples on the tree were gnarled and scabby and the twins' glossy hair and my sunbonnet covered worm-gnawed brains.



    They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.




    I wear the same wig when I go out. I don't trust Lil's blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.



    As for Miranda, I can't be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.



    My mother, on the street alone, can be written off with the gentle oddities of rambling mumblers, drunks and beggars, but when I come twenty feet behind, there is an ice moment. Even the smug feel it. They go home and tell their wives that the streets of Portland are filled with weirdos. Their dreams weave a bent linkage between the wild old woman and the hunchbacked dwarf.



    Miranda seems preoccupied with deformity. She has lured the fat man from the corner newsstand up to her rooms several times to model for her. There is no obvious reason for such a fascination in her own life, even if her living does depend on that tiny irregularity of hers. She is strong and straight. Her spine and legs are as long as history. It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twists her towards all that the world calls freakish.



    I loll in molten idiocy.



    We stopped on an edgeless plateau that stretched to nothing on all sides, making the eye desperate, shriveling the brain to dry hopelessness between the dreary sheets of sky and ground.



    Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
    We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.



    Dr Phyllis has a voice like the breeze of Antartica but it is a young voice - younger than her body, perhaps from being used so little and so carefully.



    That's when it clicked that the mechanics of my life were not going to run on the physics that ruled the twins or Mama in her day. If I bled it didn't mean what Iphy's blood meant. If I loved it wasn't the same as Iphy's love or the love of bouncy girls in the midway.
    Arty had done his best to teach me this all along but I had seen him as a special case, not governed by the posy gravity that held the rest of us. Vinnie, the Pin Kid, tried to keep me from knowing that he'd never thought of me the way I'd thought of him. His kindness scalded me awake.

"When They See Us" (2019)

Harrowing retelling of the gross injustice done to "the Central Park Five" boys, who were cajoled and bullied into giving evidence against each other for a rape neither one of them had committed. I wondered at first how much I would enjoy it, considering the story itself is well known, but I was hooked.
The story telling is superb. No overly dramatic moments (of course the score helps here and there) and many "what the actual fuck" moments when you realise how fucked up the system was and treated them.

James Joyce - "Dubliners"

A number of short stories describing middle class life in Dublin. I doubt I will ever be a James Joyce fan, but he creates sometimes amazing imagery. The problem for me is that the arc of his stories never catch me. I never care about the characters or their lives. I love the detail and description, but there is no emotional connection for me.


"The Sisters"
Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him, and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuffbox, for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of snuff dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their gree faded look, for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious.


"Araby"
An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown impertubable faces.

John Irving - "Trying to save Piggy Sneed"

Fun to read and with good bits, but I'm starting to skip over the wrestling parts.


A teacher's triumphs are few. You say: "When the father drops dead with an apple in his mouth while urinating on the front fender of his mother-in-law's car... uh, well, I just had trouble seeing it." Whereupon the studnet breaks into tears and confesses that this actually happened to her own father, in exactly the way she described it; and there then must follow, always unsatisfactorily, the timless explanation that "real life" must be made to seem real - it is not believable solely for the fact that it happened. The truth is, the imagination can select more plausible details than those incredible-but-true details that we remember.

Mark Manson - "The subtle art of not giving a fuck"

Not a bad book but got quite tired of the style. First of all, there's the choice of words of a sophomore. Second, there's the eternal lists. All the examples are lists of at least four things.
It's not a bad book, there's some ideas in there that are applicable and not intuitive enough to necessarily come up with yourself, but it could have been a lot better if it had been condensed into a third of its volume.
Interesting observation: you are not responsible for everything that happens, but you are responsible for how you react. These two often get mixed in people's mind and it's good to mentally separate them.



Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of equilibrium, some limitation that has been exceeded. And like our physical pain, our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or even undesirable. In some cases, experiencing emotional or psychological pain can be healthy or necessary. Just like stubbing our toe teaches us to walk into fewer tables, the emotional pain of rejection or failure teaches us how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.



A more intersting question, a question that most people never consider, is, "What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?" Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.



Imagine that somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you that you have to run 26.2 miles in under five hours, or else he'll kill you and your entire family.
   That would suck.
    Now imagine that you bought nice shoes and running gear, trained religiously for months, and completed your first marathon with all of your closest family and friends chering you on at the finish line.
    Exact same 26.2 miles. Exact same person running them. Exact same pain coursing through your exact same legs.
    Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.



Fault is past tense, responsibility is present tense.

Louisa Young - “You left early”

Wonderful autobiography about loving an alcoholic. Remember clearly how amazing the first chapter was… that’s how they should be written. Sadder near the end. Should not have read it at this point.


    So: detox is a set of pills to take in order to safely come off alcohol after an extended period of heavy drinking. rehab is an extended set of therapies dealing with the physical, mental and emotional results of long-term heavy drinking, and the obstacles to giving up. Recovery is where you want to end up: a long-term state of carefully nurtured sobriety.
    And alcoholism? The simplest and most useful account I ever heard is this: It’s not what you drink or how much you drink, it’s why you drink and what it does to you. You might drink every day and not be an alcoholic; you might have been sober for twenty years and still be an alcoholic.



    A good guideline to an illness’s moral status is the use of a noun to describe its sufferers - a leper, an alcoholic, an anorexic - rather than using the illness as a quantifier, which allows the inclusion of other qualifiers and thus preserves the patient’s humanity: a child with flu, a woman with gastro-enteritis, a man with cancer. The use of a noun also re-iterates the illnesses’ chronic nature. These are conditions which must be managed but cannot be cured.



    Here is something I learned at an AA meeting. Twenty years earlier, the speaker, a healthy, cheerful woman, had been jobless, thrown out by her husband, banned from seeing her children, depressed, insomniac, skint, hopeless, sick, shameful, in constant pain. Suicidal. She thought it through and made her decision. She spent her last money on two bottles of gin. Back at the flat she was about to kicked out of, she drank one bottle, and put the plastic bag it had come in over her head, and tied it, and prepared to die. But through the clear plastic she could see the other bottle, sitting on the side. The alcoholic in her couldn’t just leave it there. She had to drink it. She tore the plastic bag off her head, drank the remaining gin until she passed out, was found by her flatmate and rescued. So, her compulsion to drink had saved her life.



    As the Frenchman said, Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.



    Chopin’s description of how English ladies play his music - “looking at their hands, with great feeling, and many wrong notes.”

Joseph Osmundson - Freedom county

Interesting article about the author’s origins, Arlington WA, how it once wanted to secede and all the differences in the Pacific Northwest.  Intriguing style.

https://therumpus.net/2014/02/notes-from-freedom-county/

Ofcom's 2016 guide to english rude words

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0023/91625/OfcomQRG-AOC.pdf

amazing stuff

Guantanamo Baywatch - "Barbacoa"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QUbpAhe7s0

great surf.

Encore - "Jockey" (Beam and Yanou remix)

great dance track while working.

Diamond Joe - "Moanin and Screamin'

Eliza Rickman - "Through An Aquarium"

slow haunting female voice on LushFM.

Malcolm Gladwell - Revisionist history podcast series 2 episode 6 - King of Tears

Malcolm Gladwell

"Beauty and authenticity can create a mood, they set the state. But I think the thing that pushes us over the top into tears is details. We can cry when melancholy collides with specificity."


When you remove the duplicate parts of a rock 'n roll song, it shrinks by 60%. Lots of generic phrases because everybody comes from a different background and the cliches are necessary for those different people to talk to each other. So lots of duplicates. If you would go deeper or get too specific, you start to loose people.

Country and hiphop shrank at most by 40%. Tightly knit musical communities. If you speak to people who understand you world, your language, your culture, you can be a lot more specific.


Various versions of "He Stopped Loving Her Today", most notably George Jones, who had just been recovering after heavy drug and alcohol usage because his wife had left him.

random songs

• Lizzo ft Missy Elliott - "Tempo"
• Bonaparte - "Melody X" (as featured in "Dark")
• Bonaparte - "Fuck Your Accent"

Haruki Murakami - "The Elephant Vanishes"

Though I'm Murakami'd out, I thought I'd give this a try. There's the usual boring stories, but a few stand out.

"On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning" is amazing. A short story version of "Voices of a distant star"

(halfway)
    Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. There were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.
    One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.
    "This is amazing," he said. "I've been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you're the 100% perfect girl for me."
    "And you," she said to him, "are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I'd pictured you in every detail. It's like a dream."
    They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.
    As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one's dream to come true so easily?
    And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, "Let's test ourselves-just once. If we really are each other's 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we'll marry then and there. What do you think?"
    "Yes," she said, "that is exactly what we should do."
    And so they parted, he to the east, she to the west.




"little green monster" - love the repetition and the short focused stab of its story.

    I want to lead a general existence and yet be a distinctive, separate entity.

    Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I'd sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was - very simply - amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. At the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I even had a chance to turn and look at them.

    If sleep is nothing more thann a periodic repairing of the parts of me that are being worn away, I don't want it anymore. I don't need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I'm keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don't want to be "repaired." I will not sleep.

    [...] so rich with the genuine sense of daily living.

    

Good Omens (mini series)

Kinda enjoyable, but not very good. Too Neil Gaiman ish. Anti-christ boy defeats his father, the Devil, by simply saying "you were never my father." The whole Good of Intent always winning of the baddies. David Tennant is okay but his snakey devil is becoming a boring character. Also, of course no real drama, nobody really dies, and the usual Gaiman jokes. Only watch when you're hungover.

Dark (season 2)

Second season of the confusing German time-travel series, where a God Particle allows people to jump back and forth by 33 years. Basically it's a bit of an incestuous time-travel, because everyone at the end turns out to be someone's aunt and grand daughter at the same time. A bit too confusing to properly follow, but the dark mood is enjoyable. Also, some good songs (used in the typical slow-motion final-minutes montage of everything dreadful happening simultaneously.)

Agnes Obel - "It's happening again"
Bonaparte - "Melody X"

Cognitive load in services and teams

https://www.instapaper.com/read/1205617145

Interesting article on how to scale services; not by technology but by load that a team can take. Reduce intrinsic cognitive load ("how to create a class in Java") and extraneaous cognitive load ("how do I deploy this?") to maximize germane cognitive load: the part that actually adds value.

I Am Mother

Not bad Netflix film about a girl growing up with her robot mum in a post apocalyptic world. Guess what, nothing is what it seems.
The "secret" is nothing crazy, but it's still a good watch overall.

the Horrors - "Count in fives"

Punky with organ!

Sean Walsh - "Time Lapse"

Great instrumental track.

compare: Ludovico Einaudi's "Time Lapse"

Beck - "Saw Lighting" (2019, single)

Good dance song with 80's bleep-a-bloop effects.

RIAYA - "Hunter"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oinji2Jkmw

Great trailer music.

Pertubator - "Humans are such easy prey"

via spotify playlist "Synthwave from space"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8DekFFCE5c

Nice, good fast vibe. And starts with a quote, woot.

S U N D A Y S CH O O L (Simpsonwave)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTfa-9aCTYg

Alexandra Streliski - "INSCAPE"

Quite amazing piano music.

Should watch a live video.

Reminds me a bit of Yann Tiersen and Ludovico Einaudi.

Olivia Laing - "The Lonely City"

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one's being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the onleiness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, breka-up or change in social circles.

Jon McGregor - "Reservoir 13"

Story about the 13 years after a girl went missing in a small (Northern?) English village. Almost abstract writing, and though you never get really close to any of the characters, beautiful writing, with a very smooth transition of time from close-up to distant, small steps to large jumps, even within the same sentence. Great portrayal of emotions through simple actions.

Great examples of using recurring imagery to show the passing of times and paint the setting: foxes mating. fox cubs. fox cubs setting out on their own.




He'd been in the job three months ow, and his supervisor said there were no complaints as such but did he want to have a think about engaging with the customers a little more? Martin said he would certainly think about that, and went out to the loading bay for a smoke and a kick of the packing cases which were stacked there. The sun went down around half past four but it was already dark by then, the murky light blotted out by the high moors and the gathering clouds.


Les Thompson walked his fields in the evening while the sun was still warm on the grass. The heads were up and the cut would come tomorrow. In the beech wood the fox cubs were taken away from their dens and taught to find food for themselves. A white hooded top was found in a clough on the top of the moor, oiled a deep peatbrown and fraying at the seams. The make and design were confirmed as a match by the missing girl's mother. The forensic tests took weeks and were inconclusive. Extensive searched were conducted where the top had been found but nothing further was unearthed.


Sophie Hunter and James Broad were known to be courting. This was the word Stuart Hunter used, without irony. Everyone had long assumed they would get together, but it was only a few weeks before they realised that something was wrong. They were in the cinema room at Sophie's house one afternoon while her parents were away, and she told him not to take this the wrong way but sometimes it felt like kissing her brother. James told her she didn't have a brother and she said that wasn't the point. He wasn't annoyed. He was almost relieved. He said that when he kissed her it didn't feel like kissing his sister but more like kissing her mum. She asked when he'd kissed her mother and he said often. She's a very liberated woman, he said, and she told him he was disgusting. It takes one to know one, he said. They were still holding each other, and although they knew where the conversation was going they were in no hurry to let go. He kissed her one more time, very softly, and shook his head. We used to run around naked together at playgroup, he said. It doesn't feel right seeing you naked now. People will be disappointed, she told him. Captain of the rugby team and the head prefect? We're supposed to be the dream team. This is it then? he asked. I guess it is, she said. That's okay, isn't it? He nodded. Mind you, she said, my parents aren't due back for hours. She watched him as she unbuttoned her top. Well, this is confusing, he said. He shifted on the sofa. But if you're going to be like that about it. She reached for the button of his jeans and they kissed again, quickly, and pulled off just enough clothes to have sex. He came quickly with a shout and a sigh and afterwards she stayed astride him for a moment, stroking the side of his face and telling him they would always be friends. And once they'd wriggled back into their clothes she told him, as though it was nothing, as though she'd only just thought of it, that actually Lynsey really liked him and he should think about that at some point. He shook his head and told her she was a disgrace. She asked him what the problem was. She wasn't even at playgroup with us, she said. It would be different. He buttoned his jeans and reached for the remote control. You can choose, he said.


Kid stuff. Building dens. Swimming in the river. Going into the caves. She'd always wanted to do a bit more, push things further. She wasn't much older than they were but she'd seemed a lot more mature. She was so pretty, Sophie said, lighting the pipe again. Wasn't she pretty, James? James glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. He looked at Rohan, and nodded. They'd all fancied her, he said, even if they hadn't admitted it at the time. There was something exciting about her, he said. She talked us into climbing the fence round the quarry, and she was the first one to jump off the rope-swing. She was hardcore. And she was smart, Sophie added, from the back seat. Lynsey sat up straight again. We should all go to the same uni, she said. Shouldn't we? We could live in the same halls and everything. James passed her the pipe, and they listened to the click and draw as she smoked it, the long pause before she sighed out the smoke. James and Sophie were both picturing Becky launching out from the rope-swing, this girl who none of them really knew, the light catching on her long bare legs as she fell through the air and something new stirred in them all. I was the only one who kept in touch with her, James said, after she went back to London. Emails, postcards, nothing much. I didn't have a phone and there was no Facebook in those days. But we kept in touch. We - fuck it. We liked each other, okay? We liked each other. He turned round and took the pipe from Lynsey, who was falling asleep again. He thumbed it full of skunk from the bag on the dashboard. Becky was the one who talked her parents into coming here again for New Year, is what she reckoned. He toked hard on the pipe, and coughed as he let the smoke go. So there's that for a start. Rohan took the pipe. And then when she was here we all met up and hung out for a bit, except it was cold and there wasn't really anywhere to hang out. It was nice seeing her though. We head a little bit of a connection or something. And she'd grown up a lot since the summer. He's talking about her being physically mature, Sophie said, sleepily. Don't be coy, James. You mean she had tits, yeah? Me and Lynsey were well jealous, weren't we, Lyns? Lynsey opened her eyes and looked at Sophie, Edinburgh, she said. We'll all go to Edinburgh. I'll do English, you guys do whatever. It's cheap up there. Sophie stroked her arm and said yes, we'll definitely all go to Edinburgh, we'll all go together, if we get in, we'll be a gang up there. Lynsey closed her eyes. I didn't just mean that, James said. But it was part of it, Sophie murmured. The car was quiet for a moment. When they talked about Becky now it was hard to actually picture her face. The photo on the news had never looked right, but it had replaced the image of her they'd held. She was being lost all over again. Outside the car the evening was still and the light was softening over the reservoir.

Hedda Hassel Mørch for nautil.us - "Is Matter Conscious?"

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious


This view, that consciousness constitutes the intrinsic aspect of physical reality, goes by many different names, but one of the most descriptive is "dual-aspect monism." Monism contrasts with dualism, the view that consciousness and matter are fundamentally different substances or kinds of stuff. Dualism is widely regarded as scientifically implausible, because science shows no evidence of any non-physical forces that influence the brain.

Monism holds that all of reality is made of the same kind of stuff. It comes in several varieties. The most common monistic view is physicalism (also known as materialism), the view that everything is made of physical stuff, which only has one aspect, the one revealed by physics. This is the predominant view among philosophers and scientists today. According to physicalism, a complete, purely physical description of reality leaves nothing out. But according to the hard problem of consciousness, any purely physical description of a conscious system such as the brain at least appears to leave something out: It could never fully capture what it is like to be that system. That is to say, it captures the objective but not the subjective aspects of consciousness: the brain function, but not our inner mental life.

[Bertrand] Russell's dual-aspect monism tries to fill in this deficiency. It accepts that the brain is a material system that behaves in accordance with the law of physics. But it adds another, intrinsic aspect to matter which is hidden from the extrinsic, third-person perspective of physics and which therefore cannot be captured by any purely physical description. But although this intrinsic aspect eludes our physical theories, it does not elude our inner observations. Our own consciousness constitutes the intrinsic aspect of the brain, and this is our clue to the intrinsic aspect of other physical things. To paraphrase Arthur Schopenhauer's succinct response to Kant: We can now the thing-in-itself because we are it.

Dual-aspect monism comes in moderate and radical forms. Moderate versions take the intrinsic aspect of matter to consist of so-called protoconscious or "neutral"properties: properties that are unknown to science, but also different from consciousness. The nature of such neither-mental-nor-physical properties seems quite mysterious. Like the aforementioned quantum theories of consciousness, moderate dual-aspect monism can therefore be accused of merely adding one mystery to another and expecting them to cancel out.

The most radical version of dual-aspect monism takes the intrinsic aspect of reality to consist of consciousness itself. This is decidedly not the same as subjective idealism, the view that the physical world is merely a structure within human consciousness, and that the external world is in some sense an illusion. According to dual-aspect monism, the external world exists entirely independently of human consciousness. But it would not exist independently of any kind of consciousness, because all physical things are associated with some form of consciousness of their own, as their own intrinsic realize, or hardware.

As a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, dual-aspect monism faces objections of its own. The most common objection is that it results in panphychism, the view that all things are associated with some form of consciousness. To critics, it's just too implausible that fundamental particles are conscious. And indeed this idea takes some getting used to. But consider the alternatives. Dualism looks implausible on scientific grounds. Physicalism takes the objective, scientifically accessible aspect of reality to be the only reality, which arguably implies that the subjective aspect of consciousness is an illusion. Maybe so - but shouldn't we be more confident that we are conscious, in the full subjective sense, than that particles are not?

A second important objection is the so-called combination problem. How and why does the complex, unified consciousness of our brains result from putting together particles with simple consciousness? This question looks suspiciously similar to the original hard problem. I and other defenders of panpsychism have argued that the combination problem is nevertheless not as hard as the original hard problem. In some ways, it is easier to see how to get one form of conscious matter (such as a conscious brain) from another form of conscious matter (such as a set of conscious particles) than how to get conscious matter from non-conscious matter. But many find this unconvincing. Perhaps it is just a matter of time, though. The original hard problem, in one form or another, has been pondered by philosophers for centuries. The combination problem has received much less attention, which gives more hope for a yet undiscovered solution.

The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality, the fundamental hardware that implements the software of our physical theories, is a radical idea. It completely inverts our ordinary picture of reality in a way that can be difficult to fully grasp. But it may solve two of the hardest problems in science and philosophy at once.

Zack Vasquez for CrookedMarquee - "What Is It That Makes David Lynch Movies 'Lynchian'?"

https://crookedmarquee.com/what-is-it-that-makes-david-lynch-movies-lynchian/


When we think of the term "Lynchian," the agreed-upon definition is the one composed by David Foster Wallace in his famous essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head." Wallace's "Academic definition" of the eponym describes it as "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter."



Wallace does get closer to an accurate appraisal of the Lynchian aesthetic in that same section of the essay, when he breaks down the comparison between Lynch and Tarantino further: "Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear."
While this statement once more misses the mark in regards to Tarantino (go look again at that scene in Reservoir Dogs: we don't actually watch the ear getting cut off, and the mise-en-scène makes it clear that Tarantino is interested in everything but the physical violence), he is on to something in regards to Lynch's obsession with tactile objects.



This blue-collar aesthetic is the true central aspect to the Lynch brand of strangeness, one that is present in all but one of his films. It's there in the urban blight of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man; in the white picket fences, suburban front lawns, lumber yards, and roadside diners of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks; in the long, open roads of Wild at Heart and The Straight Story and Lost Highway; and in the crumbling facade of old-school Hollywood glitz and glamour in Mulhulland Drive and Inland Empire. It is there in the anachronistic way his characters style themselves (Brandoesque leather jackets, lumberjack flannel, hair slicked back with goops of pomade for the men; tight wool sweaters, slinky film-noir nightgowns, platinum blonde dye jobs for the women), and in the seedy alleyways, lonesome desert motels, banal apartment complexes, and run down trailer parks where they wander.



The blue-collar surrealism that Lynch deals in extends beyond his country of origin. It is just as at home in the Victorian London of The Elephant Man, or in the Polish sections that are strewn throughout Inland Empire. David Lynch the man (or character, depending on how much credence you give to his public persona) may be as American as the apple pie his characters scarf down, but as an artist he comes from a long line of European surrealists. What separates him, however, from an early surrealist director like Buñuel, or the New Wave auteurs like Godard and Resnais that bridged the period between them, is that Lynch's films are not interested in the politics of class. That may seem contradictory to the notion of "blue-collar surrealism," but it all comes back to those tactile objects. It is in them that Lynch discovers the uncanny, not in the semiotics of class divisions that those other filmmakers use their fractured narratives to satirize and condemn. (Which is not to say that Lynch takes his working-class heroes for granted, it's just that he doesn't present their struggles as reating purely to their station. When representatives of a ruling power structure do make their presence known, as do the Castigliani brothers in Mulholland Drive or the residents of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, their origins and motivations seem to be otherworldly.)

Iain Reid - "I'm thinking of ending things"

For some reason I had forgotten I had already read this. And well, the title seemed applicable right now.

Well written. The ending is... not very obvious, but a little. Did I know this the first time I read it? Perhaps not. The small chapters in italics in between do give very clear hints as to what Jake and his girlfriend - the narrator - are up to. The discrepancies in the world are a bit too regular; they are not increasing in intensity and loose the effect after a while.

"Old Stock" (play by Ben Caplan)

Enjoyable. Some really good songs.

Particularly

• "Lullaby", a very Leonard Cohen style song
• "Fledgling", lamenting and sad

Ben Caplan - "Birds with broken wings"

Simon & Garfunkel - "Wednesday Morning, 3am"

what have I done and why did I do it?
...
a scene badly written in which I must play

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

With the dude from "Hacker".

Quite liked it. Bit difficult that they played "Love of my life", but a good watch for a strange flight.

A.K. Benjamin - "Let me not be mad"

Quite good. Strange to read the description of mental patients by a psychologist who himself struggles more and more with certain issues. This happens slowly over time and is revealed quite well. The writing style, second person, was inspiring, though sentences are long and tend to overrun, he manages to keep stringing them together.

Samantha Schweblin - "Mouthful of Birds"

Was really looking forward to reading this collection of short stories, but most could not capture me as much. They looked the strangeness and eerieness I hoped for, though there were a few nice ones, particularly about the women waiting next to the highway.

Ratso ft Nick Cave - "Our Lady of Light"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAf7OcmLkk0

Fat White Family - "Feet"

build-up rock

Tom Vanderbilt - "Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot"

http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot



Like the hungry person who orders more food at dinner than they will ultimately want - to use an example from Lowenstein and colleagues - forecasters have a tendency to take something taht is (in the language of behavioral economics) salient today, and assume that it will play an outsized role in the future. And what is most salient today? It is that which is novel, "disruptive," and easily fathomed: new technology.

As the theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile, "we notice what varies and changes more than what plays a larger role but doesn't change. We rely more on water than on cell phones, but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do."

Vyvyan Evans - "The evidence is in: there is no language instinct"

https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct



linguist-anthropologist Daniel Everett has claimed that Pirahã - a language indigenous to the Amazonian rainforest - does not use recursion at all. This would be very strange indeed if grammar really was hard-wired into the human brain.

Alex Mar - "The Cost of Diane Arbus' Life on the Edge"

https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/diane-arbus-c-v-r.html



Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.




Diane writes of a day spent observing people on the street and finding them "all odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the especial shape we come in."

Chris Heath - "The Love and Terror of Nick Cave"

https://www.gq.com/story/the-love-and-terror-of-nick-cave



And consequently I got the sense that I was still, at best, a ridiculous distraction to be tolerated. One night I ate with him and the Bad Seeds at an Athens restaurant, a fairly long and drunken evening. Eventually, perplexed and exasperated by the way I continued to take notes, he began dictating to me what I should write:

"... and I looked into his face and saw a world of true sadness that, being a mere journalist, I don't have the power to express. But it was there, believe me. A sadness from every pore. The Sad Man. Man of Sadness. And he raved on, and I saw that his tears were not only for himself, but for everyone. Especially me. And he put down his glass and wept openly, unashamedly, and with great... greatness. And then he belched. The saddest belch. A belch so full of sadness that I too wept, and cannot write anymore..."

At that point, he stopped dictating.

"There you go, mate. Wrote the fucking thing for you. Go home now."




The next day, he writes to me again, just a paragraph, ostensibly about why we are drawn to butterflies:

"Some say why waste your time believing in God when there is so much natural beauty and awesomeness around us. Some say that there is more beauty and wonder looking at a butterfly and I agree, butterflies are beautiful things, but if you get a human being to look closely at a butterfly, to look very closely and get some more human beings to look at that butterfly so that there is a collective of people all peering intently at the butterfly they will ultimately fall to their knees and worship that butterfly. It's the way humans are put together. I don't think that makes them stupid. I think it's kind of sweet. Until someone says well my butterfly is the true butterfly and yours is not and flies a plane into the twin towers."




He says now that even as he was writing [the script], he knew it would never get made, so he resolved to enjoy the process.

Calire Colebrook - "The human world is not more fragile now: it always has been"

https://aeon.co/essays/the-human-world-is-not-more-fragile-now-it-always-has-been



It is because humans can fail to reach their rational potential and be 'everywhere in chains' that they must ever more vigilantly secure their future.




The most reduced, enslaved, depleted and lifeless terrains are still opportunities for 'humanity' to confront the possibility of non-existence in order to achieve a more resilient future.



These films whisper: take a second glance at the present, and what looks like a desperate situation might actually be an occasion for enhancement. The very world that appears to be at the brink of destruction is really a world of opportunity.




What contemporary post-apocalyptic culture fears isn't the end of 'the world' so much as the end of 'a world' - the rich, white, leisured, affluent one.

Zadie Smith - "Dance Lessons for writers"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/29/zadie-smith-what-beyonce-taught-me


But Prince, precious, elusive Prince, well, there lays one whose name was writ in water. And from Prince a writer might take the lesson that elusiveness can possess a deeper beauty than the legible. In the world of words, we have Keats to remind us of this, and to demonstrate what a long afterlife an elusive artist can have, even when placed beside as clearly drawn a figure as Lord Byron. Prince represents the inspiration of the moment, like an ode composed to capture a passing sensation. And when the mood changes, he changes with it: another good lesson.

Karl Friston - "Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference"

https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference




I'm compelled to treat consciousness as a process to be understood, not as a thing to be defined. Simply put, my argument is that consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than a natural process such as evolution or the weather. My favourite trick to illustrate the notion of consciousness as a process is to replace the word 'consciousness' with 'evolution' - and see if the question still makes sense. For example, the question What is consciousness for? becomes What is evolution for? Scientifically speaking, of course, we know that evolution is not for anything. It doesn't perform a function or have reasons for doing what it does - it's an unfolding process that can be understood only on its own terms. Since we are all the product of evolution, the same would seem to hold for consciousness and the self.




It turns out that the Lyapunov function has two revealing interpretations. The first comes from information theory, which says that the Lyapunov function is surprise - that is, the improbability of being in a particular state. The second comes from statistics, which says that the Lyapunov function is (negative) evidence - that is, marginal likelihood, or the probability that a given explanation or model accounting for that state is correct. Put simply, this means that if we exist, we must be increasing our model evidence of self-evidencing in virtue of minimising surprise. Equipped with these interpretations, we can now endow existential dynamics with a purpose an teleology.



Now we can see why attractors are so crucial. An attracting state has a low surprise and high evidence. Complex systems therefore fall into familiar, reliable cycles because these processes are necessarily engaged in validating the principle that underpins their own existence. Attractors push systems to fall into predictable states and thereby reinforce the model that the system has generated of its world. A failure of this surprise minimising, self-evidencing, inferential behaviour means the system will decay into surprising, unfamiliar states - until it no longer exists in any meaningful way. Attractors are the product of processes engaging in inference to summon themselves into being. In other words, attractors are the foundation of what it means to be alive.



Nearly all our behaviour can be understood in terms of such uncertainty-minimising drives - from the reflexive withdrawal from noxious stimuli (such as dropping a hot plate) to epistemic foraging for salient visual information when watching television or driving. Second, the actions of such systems upon the world appear to be endowed with a purpose, which is the purpose of minimising not-yet-actual, but possible, surprises.

Ben Medlock - "The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines"

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-body-is-the-missing-link-for-truly-intelligent-machines



Humans are made up of trillions of eukaryotic cells, which first appeared in the fossil record around 2.5 billion years ago. A human cell is a remarkable piece of networked machinery that has about the same number of components as a modern jumbo jet - all of which arose out of a longstanding embedded encounter with the natural world.




Now, it's a bit of leap to go from smart, self-organising cells to the brainy sort of intelligence that concerns us here. But the point is that long before we were conscious, thinking beings, our cells were reading data from the environment and working together to mould us into robust, self-sustaining agents. What we take as intelligence, then, is not simply about using symbols to represent the world as it objectively is. Rather, we only have the world as it is revealed to us, which is rooted in our evolved, embodied needs as an organism. Nature 'has built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it', wrote the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Descartes' Error (1994), his seminal book on cognition. In other words, we think with our whole body, not just with the brain.




The motivating drive of most AI algorithms is to infer patterns from vast sets of training data - so it might require millions or even billions of individual cat photos to gain a high degree of accuracy in recognising cats. By contrast, thanks to our needs as an organism, human beings carry with them extraordinarily rich models of the body in its broader environment. We draw on experiences and expectations from a relatively small number of observed samples. So when a human thinks about a cat, she can probably picture the way it moves, hear the sound of purring, feel the impending scratch from an unsheathed claw. She has a rich store of sensory information at her disposal to understand the idea of a 'cat', and other related concepts that might help her interact with such a creature.

This means that when a human approaches a new problem, most of the hard work has already been done. In ways that we're only just beginning to understand, our body and brain, from the cellular level upwards, have already built a model of the world that we can apply almost instantly to a wide array of challenges.

Religion has no monopoly on transcendent experience - Jules Evans

https://aeon.co/essays/religion-has-no-monopoly-on-transcendent-experience




Over the past five centuries, Western culture has gradually marginalised and pathologised ecstasy. That's partly a result of our shift from a supernatural or animist worldview to a disenchanted and materialist one. In most cultures, ecstasy is a connection to the spirit world. In our culture, since the 17th century, if you suggest you're connected to the spirit world, you're likely to be considered ignorant, eccentric or unwell. Ecstasy has been labelled as various mental disorders: enthusiasm, hysteria, psychosis. It's been condemned as a threat to secular government. We've become a more controlled, regulated and disciplinarian society, in which one's standing as a good citizen relies on one's ability to control one's emotions, be polite, and do one's job. The autonomous self has become our highest ideal, and the idea of surrendering the self is seen as dangerous.

What Boredom Does to You

http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/what-boredom-does-to-you



"Scientifically, daydreaming is an interesting phenomenon because it speaks to the capacity that people have to create thought in a pure way rather than thought happening when it's a response to events in the outside world," said Jonathan Smallwood.



It turns out that in the default mode, we're still tapping about 95 percent of the energy we use when our brains are engaged in hardcore, focused thinking. Despite being in an inattentive state, our brains are still doing a remarkable amount of work.



The areas of the brain that make up the default mode network - the medial temporal lobe, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex - are turned off when we engage in attention-demanding tasks. But they are very active in autobiographical memory (our personal archive of life experiences); theory of mind (essentially, our ability to imagine what others are thinking and feeling); and - this one's a doozy - self-referential processing (basically, crafting a coherent sense of self.)



Killingsworth and Gibert found that "people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is" and "doing so typically makes them unhappy."

Lamb - "Armageddon Waits"

Sad and dystopian. Amazing.

Ingei Chen - "The Neurons That Tell Time"

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-neurons-that-tell-time


Speaking with Buzsáki, I found myself wondering what my brain was actually sensing when I seem to feel time flowing, second by second, minute by minute. "It has to be measuring something else, such as a change or speed or acceleration, for which we do have sensors," Buzsáki told me. If that's the case, then "time" isn't an absolute thing that our brains can "track" or "measure"; it's more like an organizational system for making sense of change in the world around us and coördinating our lives.

"Of course time is change," Edvard Moser agreed. Another way to describe his lab's analyses of the L.E.C. would be to say that it uncovered changing sequences of activity during episodes of experience. "We call it 'episodic time' to emphasize that this is not 'clock time,' " he said.

James Propp - "How to be Wrong"

https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/how-to-be-wrong/



The definition of an expert (attributed to physicist Niels Böhr) is, any person who's made all the mistakes that can be made in some narrow area of human endeavor, and has learned not to make those mistakes anymore. So making those mistakes is an unavoidable part of the learning process. Remember the movie Groundhog Day? The main character, Phil, eventually acquires various skills, such as playing the piano, throwing playing cards in a hat from far away, avoiding insurance salesman Ned, and wooing coworker Rita, but it's by messing up over and over again; he has to stick his foot in the same hole in the ground, or in his own mouth, a bunch of times before he learns not to stick it there.

Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html



Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.



For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

Julian Barnes - "The Sense of an Ending"

Perhaps I read it too soon after his short stories, but though written really well - and I'm always impressed by people telling normal stories without boring me - it failed to truly capture me. Whether reading it in one go would have been better, I can't say.
Great writer though. Period.


There is accumulation.  There is responsibility. And beyond there, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

Stargarden - "Nightro"

instrumental, good beat, pan flutes or saxophone.... Reminded me of Etienne Jaumet

Edmund Gettier - Justified True Belief

http://jsomers.net/blog/gettiers

Great article how justified true belief might not always be right:

• justified in the sense of deriving from evidence
• true, because it doesn’t make sense to “know” a falsehoood
• belief, i.e., a proposition in your head

The Favourite

Film with Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman (her of Blackwood, or that other detective series).

Same guy who did "The Lobster" and "Dogtooth".

Queen Anne, her confidante Sarah Churchill; their secret love gets disrupted by the arrival of a new girl.

Strangely filmed. Fish eye lenses a lot, particularly when indoors. Enjoyable enough.

Tuu - "All our ancestors"

soma fm groovesalad. Very slow. Guitar, soft vocals, stretched strings. Kinda nice for a slow morning.

Swimming with men

Run off the mill comedy with Steve Coogan about some guys who do synchronized swimming because their mid life crises are getting a bit bad. Meh.