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.