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.