a writer's notebook
An extreme drought in parts of the Amazon has led to a dramatic drop in river water levels, exposing dozens of usually submerged rock formations with carvings of human forms that may date back some 2,000 years.
See also: hunger stones.
Comments closedNick Harkaway:
How often do you print?
I just realised this is a thing; that’s to say, a part of the process. Or, of my process. There’s a sense of reality in printing (and reading on paper) a finished novel. In theory, you can go through an entire creative effort without ever producing paper on your desktop, but for me there’s a separate space of “tangible book” which has a particular moment and a set of uses. This morning I printed the first two chapters to look at, and aside from the sense of pleasure in seeing a physical manifestation of work done (in this instance a sort of echo, because I held the whole book in A4 recycled a while ago) there’s a difference between words on screen and words on paper.
Holding paper, I notice different things. The work feels different – different tonal issues arise, new sections I need to rewrite. It’s akin to – but different again from – reading a book aloud and hearing the cadences, the unintentional repetitions and homonyms, the blunt force wrongness of an unmodified word. The text is not different, but the experience is, and of course it’s still the paper experience of my book that most people will have.
Fascinating. I never print! Printer ink is too bloody expensive!
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From Imagine… Marina Abramovic: The Ugly Duckling, BBC Television. I caught this on BBC Four the other night and was particularly struck by this image. She breathes and the external skeleton flexes gently. It’s the simplest thing, but it somehow has levels and powers.
One CommentComments closedIn a world first, scientists say an 8cm (3in) worm has been found alive in the brain of an Australian woman.
The “string-like structure” was pulled from the patient’s damaged frontal lobe during surgery in Canberra last year.
“It was definitely not what we were expecting. Everyone was shocked,” said operating surgeon Dr Hari Priya Bandi.
The woman, 64, had for months suffered symptoms like stomach pain, a cough and night sweats, which evolved into forgetfulness and depression.
She was admitted to hospital in late January 2021, and a scan later revealed “an atypical lesion within the right frontal lobe of the brain”.
But the cause of her condition was only revealed by Dr Bandi’s knife during a biopsy in June 2022.
The red parasite could have been alive in her brain for up to two months, doctors said.
In 1675, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire instructed his army to attack a fortress belonging to the Zaporozhian Cossacks. They were quickly and heavily defeated. Rather than surrender, the Sultan then wrote to the Cossacks and demanded that they submit to him. This fiery exchange was the result.
I came across this last night and didn’t want to lose it. Taken from what is evidently a literary forgery, but wonderful for its insult-comedy language. Capaldi is a perfect choice and gives it the full medieval Malcolm Tucker.
One CommentFor a certain kind of movie fan, Anderson’s movies are a Rorschach test of how we look at film, not just whether we value story or character or spectacle, but how we even define these core elements of the art form.
I look at something like this and just think: Angus McKie was right. Angus McKie’s starscapes always looked like that. (Yes, I had three out of the four original Hamlyn TTA books as a kid, as well as McKie’s own COMIC TALES)
Comments closedThis is fascinating. The book Forgotten Heritage: Uncovering Singapore’s Traditional Chinese Puppets comes in a fabric case that you have to cut and unfold to begin the book. There’s a video at this link.
This is the sort of thing that keeps physical publishing a living and growing thing: you can’t download that tactile, revelatory experience. That would be an object to delight in owning and reading. I bet you some people buy two – one to cut and one to keep intact, as they both have their joys.
Comments closedComments closed“Lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness,” the researchers explained.
Additional research is needed in order to determine the underlying cause of these results, however, Baek said.
“One possibility is that lonely individuals do not find value in the same aspects of situations or scenes as their peers,” Baek and colleagues wrote. “This may result in a reinforcing feedback loop in which lonely individuals perceive themselves to be different from their peers, which may in turn lead to further challenges in achieving social connection.”
Another possibility is that loneliness itself could lead people to process information differently, the researchers added.