Octavia E. Butler - "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents"

Amazing story about post apocalyptic America. People being addicted to "pyromania", or "ro", and wanting to burn everything. Neighbourhoods with large walls around them. Main character has to flee when her neighbourhood gets raised. She is writing "Earthseed", basically a new religion, about God being Change, to make mankind reach the stars. Enjoyed the second book as well, although the pace of the first half of the first book is nowhere to be found. "It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their faear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach themm, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching." All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund, Understand this. Use it. Shape God. Pray, But beware, Your desires, Whether or not you achieve them Will determine who you become

Steven Poole - "A Word for Every Day of the Year"

Entertaining, though not every word is great. 20th of May: Quodlibetarian: "people who express half-formed opinions on any subject under the sun. [...] one willing to talk, as though knowledgeably, about anything at all."

Wind of Change

Amazing podcast investigating whether "Wind of Change" by the Scorpions was written by the CIA to further the opening of the cold war East Europe. Wonderful facts. About the Glomar expedition, where a fake mining ship grabbed parts of a Russian nuclear submarine. Asking the CIA for information resulted in the very first "we cannot confirm or deny"... Being glomarred, it's now called. About how the CIA, via front companies, made musicians go to communist countries. Maybe even Nina Simone, without her knowing it (she hated the USA, denounced it, calling it the United Snakes of America)

"Maniac"

Series on netflix. Not yet sure where this is going. retro-future situation. Old screens and VHS tapes, and yet mind altering drugs. Girl's sister: same girl as from Ozark. Great series. Bit saccharine at the end? Who cares. Not too much. "If an addict dies, do you think it's suicide?"

Unorthodox

Amazing short series about a girl fleeing from her orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Williamsburg, NY, to Berlin. Main actress... Sira Haas? Something Haas.... She's amazing.

The Sound - "Skeletons" (From the Lion's Mouth)

Bit like old fashioned The Cure

Emily St. John Mandel - "Station Eleven"

Amazing post-apocalypse story, after a pandemic "Georgian Flu", how fitting, has wiped out most of mankind, of Kirsten who travels with the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors performing Shakespeare for the few communities left in America. Great back and forth between the post apocalyptic scenes and pre-pandemic moments where she was a child actor, supporting a main character who is basically dead all throughout the book, actor Artur, his three (ex) wives and his friend and laywer Clark, who she meets at the very end, as he has been stranded in an airport since Year One. Beautiful character building and story telling. Strange to read during covid-19. How things we take for granted, are not. How little attention we pay the world around us. Jeevan lay on the sofa, entertaining flashes of random memory and thinking of things like cappuccinos and beer while Frank worked on his latest ghostwriting project, a memoir of a philanthropist whose name he was contractually forbidden from mentioning. Jeevan kept thinking of his girlfriend, his house in Cabbagetown, wondering if he was going to see either of them again. Cell phones ahd stopped working by then. His brother had no landline. Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall. As Jeevan walked on alone he felt himself disappearing into the landscape. He was a small, insignificant thing, drifting down the shore. He had never felt so alive or so sad. He bought another tea, because the first one had gone cold, and also he was beset now by terrible fears and walking to the kiosk seemed like purposeful action. Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn't noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn't yet known that everything was coming undone.

Bright Eyes - "Persona Non Grata"

Bit Placebo like in voice, though way more muted guitar wise.

Chelsea Peretti & Reggie Watts

Fun songs about Oat Milk and being late with coffee. (Reggie Watts, him of fuck-stack...fuckstack)

N. K. Jemisin - "The City We Are (Great Cities Trilogy)"

Written wonderfully and I'm quite enjoying it. One thing that currently slightly irks me is the wishy-washy description of power and city-ness. There's multiverses. Sure. Cities squash through planes. Okay. Cities have power, and the Enemy can't fight them after they are born, but can stop the birth from happening. Okay. But where do they get their power from. What are the rules? Currently it seems the moment one of the boroughs, Aislyn (State Island), Bronca (the Bronx), Brooklyn, Manny (Manhatten), Padmima (Queens) "tap" into their power, they can just expel the Enemy. Is it that easy? I wonder if we will learn more of the rules, the backdrop, those infinite planes and multiverses (why do born cities squash through thousands of planes?) and I hope we get a deeper glimpse of the characters of each of these people.

creepy / swing / cabaret / piano

nice playlist on spotify This Way To Egress - "Rogue Trip" (like a slow sad Gogol Bordello)

The Bullfight - "The Death of Martin van Dongen" (La Chasse)

Wonderful honkytonk piano piece.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

www.anceintmarinerbigread.com

Tara Westover - "Educated"

Immensily gripping rooted in autobiography story of a girl growing up in a conservative Mormon family. Particularly how her dad assigns every action to God and his angels, how he hurls iron bars and other heavy objects in the junkyard towards the pile where his daughter stood, not caring whether the thrown junk would hit her "because angels guide us". Or how she got pierced by metal and fell down. How twice they crashed with their car after driving at night. The feeling I had when she described how she didn't know the word "holocaust", or how her brother kept dominating the family. It was gripping until the very end. For two days I tried to wrestle meaning from the textbook's dense passages, but terms like "civic humanism" and "the Scottish Enlightenment" dotted the page like black holes, sucking all the other words into them.

Ewun - "Phone Tap"

industrial with phone sounds.

DEVS

Enjoyable scifi series about a super-magicky Googly-ish company that developed a quantum computer able to simulate basically everything, thus being able to see both backwards and forward in time, all because its founder (played by Nick Offerman, him of Parks and Recreation and the best "There's only one thing I hate more than lies, and that is skimmed milk. Which is water lying about being milk.") lost its daughter. Lots of discussions about multi-vs-single world. Nice, but... geeks don't all know fibonacci sequences by heart. That's not what coding looks like. There's technical illogic (why can't she reinstall dead boyfriend's phone from the cloud *again* after it has been wiped?) Where are the Russians? They don't care one of their operatives & handlers just disappears? (oh they do. sorta) I didn't like the end. Suddenly they run simulations as a world? And why is there no DEVS machine in the simulation? That would make it really interesting, and make the jump to "we are living in a simulation" ourselves. 6 out of 10, I'd say. Also, had a bit of a Utopia feel to it. And I did like some of the visual tricks to show multiple worlds.

Lucio Battisti - "E penso a te"

The original of Tanita Tikaram's "And I think of you". That one was from 1996. The original from 1970...

"Contemporary British Short Story" (edited by Philip Hensher)

Mr Philip Hensher has strong opinions when it comes to short stories. I liked some, but have not properly kept track of which ones. Except that I remember Lucy Wood's "Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict" as beautifully haunting and melancholic, about an elderly couple living close to the beach where more and more waste keeps turning up.

the Dead Don't Die

Typical Jim Jarmusch film. Bill Murray, small role for Iggy Pop. Enjoyable and as strange as to be expected.

diary

glansrijk verpatst. Alles waar ik uit klom. Ik proost op troost... maar niet op herbegin. Wende - "Gin" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Iy-AQ2rMkQ Serge Reggiani / Ramses Shaffy / Wende - "Laat me" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFSlSsldk94 Jacques Brel - "Voir un ami pleurer" / "ne me quitte pas" Stef Bos - "Wodka" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEhS9Y9HYjU