Ez3kiel - "Lux"

Drone rock, or simply postrock. Quite nice when you need to drown out the world.

Album "Handle with care" on the other hand, has almost ska-like influences, Death Can Dance vocals...

And "Barb4ry" reminded me a lot of DAAU... which makes sense since they actually played together on the Versus Tour.

Craig Armstrong - "Rosa Morta"

Instrumental and amazing album, good for late nights, and coding and writing,...?

(later edit: upon listening to it again, it suddenly struck me: this is reminiscent of the wonderful "The Virgin Suicides" soundtrack)

Flying Horseman - "Night is Long" (2015)

Particularly the long, last, eponymous song is beautiful and haunting.

This reminds me of both Dead Can Dance as well as Japan's "Nightporter".

FilosofischeStilte - "I Forgot About it, When I Thought About It" (2015)

Instrumental, electronics. Good sound & beat (not fast). The Hague.

Actually, some songs have voices, but the words are hardly recognizable and do not intrude.

Very nice.

Slow West (2015)

Beautiful western with Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Written by John Maclean. Supposedly Fassbender signed up before a single letter of the script was written. Keep an eye on that Maclean guy. Great music, great shots, great pace (yes, slow, as some of the best films are)

Great OST by Jed Kurzel.

As well as "The Minstrel's Song" by Brian Michael Mills.

The film, the story and the music: all are good for writing.

Steven Pinker on language

The man is a wonderful genius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn87EqoBb14

but still, he curses the split infinitive!?! Ok, not curses, but damnit Jim, I'm a wordpress article, not a linguistic professor!

night driving soundtrack

When I'm in a Kazinsky mood, this might be a good one:

http://8tracks.com/aarthii/late-night-drive
hm, maybe not. Soon deteriorates into rapping ugliness.

A Reminiscent Drive - "Smokey Mountains" (Ambrosia)

Amazing instrumental song with a wandering saxophone, strange discordant notes and a slow build up.

Gary Lutz - "The sentence is a lonely place"

Lecture delivered by the short-story writer Gary Lutz to the students of Columbia University's writing program in New York on September 25, 2008. (From believermag.com)

"... a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that is has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround."

"the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself."

"... that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together - as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. ... The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other ... The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter."

"You might come to realize that a single vowel already present in the sentence should be released to run through the consonantal frameworks of certain other prominent words in the sentence, or you might realize that the consonantal infrastructure of one word should be duplicated in another word, but with a different vowel impounded in each structure."

[analysis of "acutely felt, clearly flat" of Christine Schutt.]

[analysis of "Here is the house at night, lit up tall and tallowey" by Christine Schutt.]

[analysis of "An accident isn't necessarily ever over." by Diane Williams]


"Make sure that the stressed syllables in a sentence outnumber the unstressed syllables as in Don DeLillo's "He did not direct a remark that was hard and sharp." or Christine Schutt's "None of what kept time once works."

"we need not shy away from composing an occasional sentence entirely of monosyllabic words, as Barry Hannah's "I roam in the past for my best mind" and "He's been long on my list of shits in the world," and as Ben Marcus does in "They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born there, and most had died."

"Unless you have good reason not to do so, end your sentence with the wham and bang of a stressed syllable."

"Give force to your sentences by stationing the subject at the very beginning instead of delaying the subject until an introductory phrase of a dependend clause has first had its dribbling say."

"Avail yourself of alliteration - as long as it remains ungimmicky, unobtrusive, even subliminal. Such repetition can be soothing and stabilizing, especially in a sentence whose content and emotional gusts are anything but."

"Take advantage of assonance. Keeping a single vowel in circulation through most of the conspicuous words will give a sentence another kind of sonic consummation ... as Sam Lipsyte does with three short u's in 'You could touch for a couple of bucks'"

"You can even divide a sentence into two or more acoustical zones and let a single vowel prevail in each zone. Here is a three-zone sentence by Don DeLillo: 'There were evening streaks in the white of the eye, a sense of blood sun.'"

"Press one part of speech into service as another, as Don DeLillo does in 'She was always maybeing' (and adverb has been recruited for duty as a verb) and as Barry Hannah does in 'Westy is colding off like the planet' (an adjective has been enlisted for verbified purpose as well). A variation is to take an intransitive verb (the sort of verb that can't abide a direct object) and put it in motion as a transitive verb (whose very nature it is to enclasp a direct object). That is what Fiona Maazel is up to with the verb collide, which abandoned all transitive use ages ago, in her sentence 'Often, at the close of a recovery meeting, as we make a circle and join hands, I'll note the odds of these people finding each other in this gropu; our sundry pasts and principles; the entropy that collides addicts like so many molecules.'"

Roll the Dice - "Cause and Effect"

Long lasting synth soundscapes. Good for coding?

"Assembly" : a lot more slow and majestic rhythmical build-up into a crescendo of a soundscape.

Etienne Jaumet

synths and a saxophone. Pretty amazing.

Flug 8 - "Mr. Ito"

Strange electro music with whoob whoob effects. Good for writing? Who knows.

Soap&Skin

interesting minimalist, mostly instrumental, mix of electronica.

Soap&Skin intrigued. How about these song names:

• janitor of lunacy
• turbine womb
• Thanatos - sounds vaguely familiar. Poppier than the rest.

http://8tracks.com/atruma/spies-hackers

psych guitars

http://8tracks.com/james-holroyd/ride-the-highway

• Cian Nugent & The Cosmos - "Double Horse"
  reminds me of The Doors, the slow buildup, the hints of a melody percolating through

Waterfalls - "What is French for Oswald"

Instrumental, folk influences along with ambient trip guitars.

Heard in some neuroscience "what is science" film on Aeon Films. Currently only on bandcamp it seems.

"Are you living in a computer simulation?"

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html#_ftnref12

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea. The rest of this paper will spell it out more carefully.

semi-instrumental playlist

and yes, perhaps good for writing, though it features a fair amount of lyrics and harsh beats.

http://8tracks.com/virtuoso/witching-hour

Son Lux - "Flickers"

Is this truly good for writing? It might, it might not.

Rather meta quantum, so to speak.

Alice LaPlante - "The Making of a Story"

A Norton Guide to creative writing.

Wonderful book with exercises. Too many things to quote here, except; "It's important to understand that there are two aspects to creating truly compelling writing. ... what's needed is both method and madness. The method is what can be learned in an academically rigorous, systematic manner. ... But then there's the madness part - what is more frequently called the inspiration."

Jeff Beal - "Carnivale OST"

Amazing music, immediatly pulling your mind back to the days of Dust bowl, good and evil, the uncanny circus...

Good writing score.