Lorrie Moore - "Birds of America"

Only just started, but already amazing sentences.

The story "Community life".



    She looked at him darkly. "What the hell were you thinking of, recommending that stock?" she asked. "How could you be such an irresponsible idiot?" She saw it now, how their life would be together. She would yell; then he would yell. He would have an affair; then she would have an affair. And then they would be gone and gone, and they would live in that gone.



    They stopped briefly at an English manor house, to see the natural world cut up into moldings and rugs, wool and wood captive and squared, the earth stolen and embalmed and shellacked.



    No one had toasted Abby and Bob at their little wedding, and that's what had been wrong, she believed now. No toast. There had been only thirty guests and they had simply eaten the ham canapes and gone home. How could a marriage go right? It wasn't that such ceremonies were important in and of themselves. They were nothing. They were zeros. But they were zeros as placeholders; they held numbers and equations intact. And once you underwent them, you could move on, know the empty power of their blessing, and not spend time missing them.



    "Gee, I thought you guys would never break up!" he says in a genuinely flabbergasted tone.
    "Really?" I find this reassuring somehow, that my relationship at least looked good from the outside, at least to someone.
    "Well, not really," admits Cal. "Actually, I thought you guys would break up long ago."
    "Oh," I say.
    "So you could marry her?" says the amazing Eugene to this father, and we all laugh loudly, pour more wine into glasses, and hide our faces in them.



    She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust, and when she did go out, to work at least, his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at. She turned to inspect the face of every pageboy haircut she saw from behind and passed in her car. She looked at them furtively or squarely - it didn't matter. She appraised their eyes and mouths and wondered about their bodies. She had become hi: she longed for those women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up.
    A rapist.
    She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.
    But for a while, it was the only way she could be.
    She began to wear his clothes - a shirt, a pair of socks - to keep him next to her, to try to understand why had done what he'd done. And in this new empathy, in this pants role, like an opera, she thought she understood what it was to make love to a woman, to open the hidden underside of her, like secret food, to thrust yourself up in her, her arch and thrash, like a puppet, to watch her later when she got up and walked around without you, oblivious to the injury you'd surely done her. How could you not love her, gratefully, marveling? She was so mysterious, so recovered, an unshared thought enlivening her eyes; you wanted to follow her forever.
    A man in love. That was a man in love. So different from a woman.




    She went home, poured herself a drink, stood by the mantel. She picked up the pink-posied tin and shook it, afraid she might hear the muffled banging of bones, but she heard nothing. "Are you sure it's even him?" Jack asked. "With animals, they probably do mass incinerations. One scoop for cats, two for dogs."

Deru - "Torn In Two"

When life is fucked up, and Deru turns out to have a new album, life is slightly less fucked up.

Louis MacNeice & W. H. Auden - "Letters from Iceland"

Finally started reading it. Some parts are fun, recognizable. Others long and dreary. I'm not too much fan of the poetry in here.

Hanna

Cool film about a young "assassin trained" girl (who at the end turned out to be some biological experiment... bit sad that, the original Scandinavian detachment from those plot details was a lot better). Quite enjoyable.

Julian Barnes - "Pulse"

Amazing short stories. Some of the chapters are dinner party discussions and are simply amazing.



    TA few minutes later, the Twin Otter took off straight out across Orosay and the open sea. There was no farewell view of the island before that world below was shut out. In the enveloping cloud, he thought about marriage lines and buttons; about razor clams and island sex; about missing bullocks and fulmars being turned into oil; and then, finally, the tears came. Calum had known he would not be coming back. But the tears were not for that, or for himself, or even for her, for their memories. They were tears for his own stupidigty. His presumption too.
    He had thought he could recapture, and begin to say farewell. He had thought that grief might be assuaged, or if not assuaged, at least speeded up, hurried on its way a little, by going back to a place where they had been happy. But he was not in charge of grief. Grief was in charge of him. And in the months and years ahead, he expected grief to teach him many other things as well. This was just the first of them.



The city of Carcassonne looks solid and enduring, but what we admire is mostly nineteenth-cenutry reconstruction. Forget the hazard of 'whetehr it will last', and whether longevity is in any case a virtue, a reward, an accommodation or another piece of luck.

Jeff Vandermeer - "Southern Reach Trilogy"

Three books, "Annihilation", "Authority" and "Acceptance"

Strange books about "Area X" where modern equipment doesn't work and the air is pristine. Different search parties are sent in, covered by Annihilation. Authority describes the Southern Reach, the research station and its political and power games, and finally Acceptance is an amalgamation of these, of past and current, of the Area growing. Never is everything completely explained, but enough so, but you'll have to read up to and including book 3 to figure things sorta out.

Sjón - "Moonstone - the boy who never was"

A story spanning a few days in Reykjavík during the eruption of the Katla volcano and the end of the Great War. Main character, "moonstone", a slurring of his real name, is a teenage male prostitute obsessed by a local girl onto whom he has projected a film star. Interestingly written, fast read. The dreamlike parts a bit confusing.


The streets yawn, empty of people, except for glimpses here and there of the odd shadowy figure out and about. These are the old women, bundled up in black clothes, wearing shawl upon shawl to keep out the chll. They have given room to so many ailments in their day that the scourge now making a meal of their descendants can find no morsel worth having on their worn-out old bones.


He is a shadow that passes from man to man, and no one is complete until he has cast him.

the Death of Stalin

Not as funny as the trailer suggested. Was ok. Big cast, big names, but ultimately nothing crazy, in contrast to what rottentomatoes said.

Haunting of Hill House

Nice series where the old horror of Shirley Jackson's story is nicely interwoven with a struggling family's mental issues.

yūrei-moji - “ghost characters”

Floating around the murky regions of digitized Unicode values are anywhere between 60 and 100 yūrei-moji — literally, “ghost characters” — haunting the Japanese kanji lexicon.

One such example is 彁 (pronunciation unknown). Unlike 妛, which found its corporeal counterpart in the 国土行政区画総覧 (Kokudo Gyōsei Kukaku Sōran, National Conspectus of Administrative Districts), 彁 was documented as “completely unique among the graphic characters encoded in these standards, with absolutely no means of identification.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2018/10/29/language/ghost-kanji-lurk-japanese-lexicon/

Amanda Palmer - "I Want You, but I Don't Need You"

Great example of wonderful song writing. Funny, sad. It made me laugh and cry a little.

tsundoku

(n.) buying books and not reading them; letting books pile up unread on shelves or floors or nightstands

Emilie Pine - "Notes To Self"

Essays about her personal life, her alcoholic father, her inate tempering of feminism, her struggle with voicing her opinion, her rough teenage years... Amazing personal writing.



Recalling the hurt and confusion in my sister's voice at that moment, I realise that we both needed the same thing: some promise of unconditional love, some security, unavailable to either of us. And I think that maybe, in the end, we got it from each other. Two years later, when I had screwed up again and feared my mum would kick me out, my sister promised she'd keep the screw-up a secret. She told me she'd still love me, no matter what. Tehn she came to me with her bank book and, with great seriousness, offered to sign over all her savings so that I'd be okay. I couldn't take it, so I hugged her, I reassured her, I smiled and joked until the worry left her eyes.



My parents separated when I was five and my sister was a baby. Though I am a long way from the difficulties of my childhood, I still dwell on the stories of those years, hoping that they might explain the troubling residues of so many feelings and thoughts and actions. My parents did not speak. My father suffered from depression. I was a lonesome child. Those facts, and all the accompanying stories, whirl around. I write them down. Perhaps they will be less overbearing that way, pinned in one place.
As I step away from the page, and I look at what I have written about myself and my family, this family, our family, I see that in the end it is always going to be both a complicated and a simple story. In this story, which I may never stop telling, I try to remember what i was like for me as a child, and what I did and what I could have done differently. I try to imageine what it was like for my parents, and what they did and what they could have done differently. I remember us happy, and I remember us sad. I remember us divided and I remember us together. I remember everything, and I remember only fragments of a whole that will always be beyond me.

GlerAkur - "Augun Opin"

Great soundscapes. Found via Iceland Airwaves spotify playlist. Much like Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Khruangbin

Perhaps a bit tiresome after a while, but this instrumental guitar psychedelic music is kinda cool

3:10 to Yuma

Remake of the original: trying to deliver an outlaw to the 3:10pm train to Yuma prison.

Supposedly different from the original regarding its ending, but impressive.

The Homesman

Sad western about a woman (Hillary Swank) who decides to take it upon her to deliver three mentally disturbed women to a village several weeks traveling away. She is accompanied by Tommy Lee Jones, and the two have a sad sad connection. Did not see her suicide coming. Sad but deep.

James Joyce - "Ulysses"

that podcast... amazing.

buck: originally not the gracious male deer, but a buck goat...

"sat down in a pet"... they are being like a pet, you need to "pet" them, to show them affection

"kip": very Dublin slang, originally Danish, "kipper" - low pub where hookers used to hang out.
"what kind of a kip is this"

"when I makes tea, I makes tea! When I makes water, I makes water! but not in the same pot!"

The Rover

Amazing Australian dystopic story of a man whose car get stolen after The Collapse. Packs quite a punch near the end. Sad, dreadful, amazing. Him of the Twilight Films, it seems, but an amazing performance as Rey, the not-completely-full-witted brother who is left for dead

I Don't Feel At Home in this World Anymore

Sad nice story about a girl (unknown, but just as good as Elijah Wood) who accepts all the bad things life throws at her... until no more. Elijah Wood plays a silly almost Coen-brother-esque tough-guy-who-isn't. All ends well.

Still, a good movie.