"gangs of wasseypur" soundtrack. (part 2)
One song struck me, yet proved in-shazamable. Now, without lyrics, is it still as good. Is this actually even the one?
Thursday, 11 April 2013
Sunday, 7 April 2013
China Miéville on the weird, the strange
I’ve been thinking about the traditional notion of the “sublime,” which was always (by Kant, Schopenhauer, et al) distinguished from the “Beautiful,” as containing a kind of horror at the immeasurable scale of it. I think what the Weird can do is question the arbitrary distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime, and operate as a kind of Sublime Backwash, so that the numinous incomparable awesome slips back from “mountains” and “forests,” into the everyday. So…the Weird as radicalised quotidian Sublime.
There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it. I think they also are surprised by how much they enjoy making up monsters.
I spend a lot of time arguing for literalism of fantastic, rather than its reduction to allegory. Metaphor is inevitable but it escapes our intent, so we should relax about it. Our monsters are about themselves, and they can get on with being about all sorts of other stuff too, but if we want them to be primarily that, and don’t enjoy their monstrousness, they’re dead and nothing.
it’s what Toby Litt brilliantly called the “Scooby Doo Impasse” – that people always-already know that they’ll pull the mask off the monster and see what it “really” is/means. The notion that that is what makes it legitimate is a very drab kind of heavy-handedness.
I’m tempted to say that part of the job a monster can do best is refuse to satisfy me, completely — which is good, because what I want for satisfaction is a kind of satiation, which usually translates into too much information, into overkill, into shining a light where a light has no business shining. In other words, the frustration that I feel at not understanding everything about a monster (indeed the weird, indeed anything fantastic) is both a sign that I am not fully satisfied and the only way of doing this with anything approaching success, I imagine. I want to know everything, but I don’t want that desire to be fulfilled.
Given the somatic impossibility of monsters — without which they are nothing – their simple there-ness and specificity is indeed part of what makes them what they are, a self-contained, if highly and, one hopes, effectively hermetic, narrative, an implied “There was a thing that was, impossibly, like this.”
There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it. I think they also are surprised by how much they enjoy making up monsters.
I spend a lot of time arguing for literalism of fantastic, rather than its reduction to allegory. Metaphor is inevitable but it escapes our intent, so we should relax about it. Our monsters are about themselves, and they can get on with being about all sorts of other stuff too, but if we want them to be primarily that, and don’t enjoy their monstrousness, they’re dead and nothing.
it’s what Toby Litt brilliantly called the “Scooby Doo Impasse” – that people always-already know that they’ll pull the mask off the monster and see what it “really” is/means. The notion that that is what makes it legitimate is a very drab kind of heavy-handedness.
I’m tempted to say that part of the job a monster can do best is refuse to satisfy me, completely — which is good, because what I want for satisfaction is a kind of satiation, which usually translates into too much information, into overkill, into shining a light where a light has no business shining. In other words, the frustration that I feel at not understanding everything about a monster (indeed the weird, indeed anything fantastic) is both a sign that I am not fully satisfied and the only way of doing this with anything approaching success, I imagine. I want to know everything, but I don’t want that desire to be fulfilled.
Given the somatic impossibility of monsters — without which they are nothing – their simple there-ness and specificity is indeed part of what makes them what they are, a self-contained, if highly and, one hopes, effectively hermetic, narrative, an implied “There was a thing that was, impossibly, like this.”
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Denis Johnson - "A Car Crash While Hitchhiking"
Intense short about a raving high hitch hiker describing the car crash he was into. The intro analyzed and read more into the story than I could. Should read again, without the intro.
Jeffrey Eugenides on writing
about short stories: "..., writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that's missing."
Friday, 5 April 2013
Ohio Players - "Funky Worm"
really strange breakbeat-ish, vocoder-voiced song. "you gone too farm"
Should look into for the weirdness of it.
Should look into for the weirdness of it.
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Monday, 1 April 2013
Bing Cosby on speed reading
(not something in years past I thought I would've enjoy reading)
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/16/how-to-read-faster-bill-cosby/
Bill Cosby may be best-known as the beloved personality behind his eponymous TV show, but he earned his doctorate in education and has been involved in several projects teaching the essential techniques of effective reading, including a PBS series on reading skills. In an essay unambiguously titled “How to Read Faster,” published in the same wonderful 1985 anthology How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (UK; public library) that gave us Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 timeless rules of writing, Cosby offers his three proven strategies for reading faster. Apart from their evergreen application to the printed word, it’s particularly interesting to consider how these rules might translate to the digital screen, where structural factors like scrolling, pagination, hyperlinks, and adjustable font sizes make the text and the reading experience at once more fluid and more rigid.
1. Preview — If It’s Long and Hard
Previewing is especially useful for getting a general idea of heavy reading like long magazine or newspaper articles, business reports, and nonfiction books.
It can give you as much as half the comprehension in as little as one tenth the time. For example, you should be able to preview eight or ten 100-page reports in an hour. After previewing, you’ll be able to decide which reports (or which parts of which reports) are worth a closer look.
Here’s how to preview: Read the entire first two paragraphs of whatever you’ve chosen. Next read only the first sentence of each successive paragraph. Then read the entire last two paragraphs.
Previewing doesn’t give you all the details. But it does keep you from spending time on things you don’t really want — or need — to read.
Notice that previewing gives you a quick, overall view of long, unfamiliar material. For short, light reading, there’s a better technique.
2. Skim — If It’s Short and Simple
Skimming is a good way to get a general idea of light reading such as popular magazines or the sports and entertainment sections of the paper.
You should be able to skim a weekly popular magazine or the second section of your daily paper in less than half the time it takes you to read it now.
Skimming is also a great way to review material you’ve read before.
Here’s how to skim: Think of your eyes as magnets. Force them to move fast. Sweep them across each and every line of type. Pick up only a few key words in each line.
Everybody skims differently.
You and I may not pick up exactly the same words when we skim the same piece, but we’ll both get a pretty similar idea of what it’s all about.
To show you how it works, I circled the words I picked out when I skimmed the following story. Try it. It shouldn’t take you more than ten seconds.
Skimming can give you a very good idea of this story in about half the words, and in less than half the time it’d take to read every word.
So far, you’ve seen that previewing and skimming can give you a general idea about content — fast. But neither technique can promise more than 50 percent comprehension, because you aren’t reading all the words. (Nobody gets something for nothing in the reading game.)
To read faster and understand most, if not all, of what you read, you need to know a third technique.
3. Cluster — to Increase Speed AND Comprehension
Most of us learn to read by looking at each word in a sentence — one at a time.
Like this:
My — brother — Russell — thinks — monsters…
You probably still read this way sometimes, especially when the words are difficult. Or when the words have an extraspecial meaning, as in a poem, a Shakespeare play or a contract. And that’s okay.
But word-by-word reading is a rotten way to read faster. It actually cuts down on your speed.
Clustering trains you to look at groups of words instead of one at a time, and it increases your speed enormously. For most of us, clustering is a totally different way of seeing what we read.
Here’s how to cluster: Train your eyes to see all the words in clusters of up to three or four words at a glance.
Here’s how I’d cluster the story we just skimmed:
Learning to read clusters is not something your eyes do naturally. It takes constant practice.
Here’s how to go about it: Pick something light to read. Read it as fast as you can. Concentrate on seeing three to four words at once rather than one word at a time. Then reread the piece at your normal speed to see what you missed the first time.
Try a second piece. First cluster, then reread to see what you missed in this one.
When you can read in clusters without missing much the first time, your speed has increased. Practice fifteen minutes every day and you might pick up the technique in a week or so. (But don’t be disappointed if it takes longer. Clustering everything takes time and practice.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/16/how-to-read-faster-bill-cosby/
Bill Cosby may be best-known as the beloved personality behind his eponymous TV show, but he earned his doctorate in education and has been involved in several projects teaching the essential techniques of effective reading, including a PBS series on reading skills. In an essay unambiguously titled “How to Read Faster,” published in the same wonderful 1985 anthology How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (UK; public library) that gave us Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 timeless rules of writing, Cosby offers his three proven strategies for reading faster. Apart from their evergreen application to the printed word, it’s particularly interesting to consider how these rules might translate to the digital screen, where structural factors like scrolling, pagination, hyperlinks, and adjustable font sizes make the text and the reading experience at once more fluid and more rigid.
1. Preview — If It’s Long and Hard
Previewing is especially useful for getting a general idea of heavy reading like long magazine or newspaper articles, business reports, and nonfiction books.
It can give you as much as half the comprehension in as little as one tenth the time. For example, you should be able to preview eight or ten 100-page reports in an hour. After previewing, you’ll be able to decide which reports (or which parts of which reports) are worth a closer look.
Here’s how to preview: Read the entire first two paragraphs of whatever you’ve chosen. Next read only the first sentence of each successive paragraph. Then read the entire last two paragraphs.
Previewing doesn’t give you all the details. But it does keep you from spending time on things you don’t really want — or need — to read.
Notice that previewing gives you a quick, overall view of long, unfamiliar material. For short, light reading, there’s a better technique.
2. Skim — If It’s Short and Simple
Skimming is a good way to get a general idea of light reading such as popular magazines or the sports and entertainment sections of the paper.
You should be able to skim a weekly popular magazine or the second section of your daily paper in less than half the time it takes you to read it now.
Skimming is also a great way to review material you’ve read before.
Here’s how to skim: Think of your eyes as magnets. Force them to move fast. Sweep them across each and every line of type. Pick up only a few key words in each line.
Everybody skims differently.
You and I may not pick up exactly the same words when we skim the same piece, but we’ll both get a pretty similar idea of what it’s all about.
To show you how it works, I circled the words I picked out when I skimmed the following story. Try it. It shouldn’t take you more than ten seconds.
Skimming can give you a very good idea of this story in about half the words, and in less than half the time it’d take to read every word.
So far, you’ve seen that previewing and skimming can give you a general idea about content — fast. But neither technique can promise more than 50 percent comprehension, because you aren’t reading all the words. (Nobody gets something for nothing in the reading game.)
To read faster and understand most, if not all, of what you read, you need to know a third technique.
3. Cluster — to Increase Speed AND Comprehension
Most of us learn to read by looking at each word in a sentence — one at a time.
Like this:
My — brother — Russell — thinks — monsters…
You probably still read this way sometimes, especially when the words are difficult. Or when the words have an extraspecial meaning, as in a poem, a Shakespeare play or a contract. And that’s okay.
But word-by-word reading is a rotten way to read faster. It actually cuts down on your speed.
Clustering trains you to look at groups of words instead of one at a time, and it increases your speed enormously. For most of us, clustering is a totally different way of seeing what we read.
Here’s how to cluster: Train your eyes to see all the words in clusters of up to three or four words at a glance.
Here’s how I’d cluster the story we just skimmed:
Learning to read clusters is not something your eyes do naturally. It takes constant practice.
Here’s how to go about it: Pick something light to read. Read it as fast as you can. Concentrate on seeing three to four words at once rather than one word at a time. Then reread the piece at your normal speed to see what you missed the first time.
Try a second piece. First cluster, then reread to see what you missed in this one.
When you can read in clusters without missing much the first time, your speed has increased. Practice fifteen minutes every day and you might pick up the technique in a week or so. (But don’t be disappointed if it takes longer. Clustering everything takes time and practice.
James Salter - "Bangkok"
One dialogue between ex-lovers. Rancune.
As Dave Eggers points out; the amazing thing to create tension: he does not want to be there. Good read.
As Dave Eggers points out; the amazing thing to create tension: he does not want to be there. Good read.
Jane Bowles - "Emmy Moore's Journal"
Paris Review collection.
Never heard of her. The story is intense, not happy, though a few 'humoristic' notes (as the introduction called them. They might just as well be labelled "sad") about a woman writing letters to her husband to explain, to clarify, her stay in Hotel Henry. Why exactly, where her fascination with Turkish women comes from, what the war is about, nothing is explained. Not much even happens. But it is an intense picture nonetheless.
The author died around the age of 57, and was an alcoholic, which made the story chave.
Never heard of her. The story is intense, not happy, though a few 'humoristic' notes (as the introduction called them. They might just as well be labelled "sad") about a woman writing letters to her husband to explain, to clarify, her stay in Hotel Henry. Why exactly, where her fascination with Turkish women comes from, what the war is about, nothing is explained. Not much even happens. But it is an intense picture nonetheless.
The author died around the age of 57, and was an alcoholic, which made the story chave.
Sunday, 31 March 2013
Leonard Michaels - "City Boy"
Another one from the Paris review. Not amazing, but interesting to read the introduction and see it happen: from real to absurd, then back to reality again. It creates tension. Good lesson. Also, it'll be a tightrope not to get too absurd.
Saturday, 30 March 2013
Joy Williams - "Dimmer"
About the boy Mal, whose father dies in the first sentence, and his mother in the second. How he moves around, no friends, though sometimes people leave him food. How he saves an old lady, and they don't know what to do with him, so they thank him and send him to America. From LAX he is rescued by a girl who drives cars back and forth.
Finished reading "Dimmer" by Joy Williams, the first in the Paris Review short story collection bought not too long ago. Strange story. Sometimes I literally didn't understand sentence after sentence. The words, yes, most of the time. But the sentences were strange. I cannot say I liked it much, but it put my mind in a weird place, which is a compliment.
Thomas Truax - "Everything's Gone Halloween"
https://soundcloud.com/thomas-truax
Strangest musical clic-n-plop music. From England. Nice stuff. Spoken word at times.
Strangest musical clic-n-plop music. From England. Nice stuff. Spoken word at times.
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
Dave Eggers - "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
He's a great writer, and the beginning is gripping, but after a 100 pages I know that semi stream of conscious style, that blurting out of sentences rolling down the hill, tumbling over each other, segueing...
And then, what's left? No character arc, unless it's Toph (who *just* started to do something grown-up)
It's kinda amusing to read, but the 'I' character just ambles along. He has a lot of difficulties in his life, but never seems to change, hop, another challange, hop, another difficulty, hop... deeper emotions? Somehow I fail to grasp them.
I think I sometimes see the meaning, and zeitgeist, weltschmerz, oh give it a name. But for me it's over the top, it's forced.
And then, what's left? No character arc, unless it's Toph (who *just* started to do something grown-up)
It's kinda amusing to read, but the 'I' character just ambles along. He has a lot of difficulties in his life, but never seems to change, hop, another challange, hop, another difficulty, hop... deeper emotions? Somehow I fail to grasp them.
I think I sometimes see the meaning, and zeitgeist, weltschmerz, oh give it a name. But for me it's over the top, it's forced.
Monday, 18 March 2013
no more hanging up
"Ian Bogost writes about a cultural tradition we've mostly lost as smartphones have become ubiquitous: hanging up.
While we still use the terminology (in the same way we say 'rewind'
when skipping backward on our DVR), the physical act of hanging up a
telephone when we're done using it no longer occurs. And we don't get
that satisfying crash and clatter when hanging up on somebody to make a
point. 'In the context of such gravity, the hangup had a clear and
forceful meaning. It offered a way of ending a conversation prematurely,
sternly, aggressively. Without saying anything, the hangup said
something: we're done, go away. ... Today a true hangup — one you really
meant to perform out of anger or frustration or exhaustion — is only
temporary and one-sided even when it is successfully executed. Even
during a heated exchange, your interlocutor will first assume something
went wrong in the network, and you could easily pretend such a thing was
true later if you wanted. Calls aren't ever really under our control
anymore, they "drop" intransitively.' It's an interesting point about
the minor cultural changes that go along with evolving technology."
Sunday, 17 March 2013
Utopia
British thriller miniseries about a graphic novel whose second, never published, part falls into the hands of a group of nerds, who in turn are chased by "The Network".
Amazing look & feel. The music by Cristobal Tapia de Veer is amazing.
The story is wonderful. I liked how they did not let it end well. How the 'brother' is confused, a hit man with no soul, and confused that he is different.
Amazing look & feel. The music by Cristobal Tapia de Veer is amazing.
The story is wonderful. I liked how they did not let it end well. How the 'brother' is confused, a hit man with no soul, and confused that he is different.
Teknolust (2002)
Strange film featuring Tilda Swanton, about robots (or, "SRA") who need male chromosomes. One of them, Ruby, goes out to seduce men and so obtain "substance". The sequence in which a used condom is boiled into tea is amazing.
Amusing, a bit slow.
Music by Klaus Badelt.
Amusing, a bit slow.
Music by Klaus Badelt.
Maxim Gorki - 'Kinderen van de zon'
Een groepje / familie intelligentsia bespreekt diepzinnige problemen van de mens terwijl buiten de revolutie en cholera woeden.
De geprojecteerde beelden waarin ze op het toneel rondrent, waren cool. Een deur ingaan die dicht blijft, is intrigerend.
Verder deed 't me weinig. Deels de tekst, het hoogdravend soort spreken over "de mens kan alleen gelukkig zijn.." (ik doe het hier geen recht), deels het acteren, de klucht humor.
De link met de buitenwereld vond ik minimaal. Was het juist het idee om te laten zien hoe soap-achtig ook intelligentsia zijn, daarmee de werkelijke problemen negerend? Misschien, maar dan is het idee te uitgesponnen. De beelden van dictators, wat moesten die?
De geprojecteerde beelden waarin ze op het toneel rondrent, waren cool. Een deur ingaan die dicht blijft, is intrigerend.
Verder deed 't me weinig. Deels de tekst, het hoogdravend soort spreken over "de mens kan alleen gelukkig zijn.." (ik doe het hier geen recht), deels het acteren, de klucht humor.
De link met de buitenwereld vond ik minimaal. Was het juist het idee om te laten zien hoe soap-achtig ook intelligentsia zijn, daarmee de werkelijke problemen negerend? Misschien, maar dan is het idee te uitgesponnen. De beelden van dictators, wat moesten die?
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