Category: status

Not enough time for all the things this morning. It’s go time over here.

Currently listening:

Currently reading: INVISIBLE CITIES, Italo Calvino (UK) (US)

Link of the morning: Virgil Finlay’s magazine illustrations.

STATUS: I have a lot of complex stuff to get done today, so this is mostly a “don’t break the chain” post.

Listening:

Reading: Primeval and Other Times, Olga Tokarczuk trans Antonia Lloyd-Jones (UK) (US):

Man is a stupid creature who has to learn. So he tacks knowledge onto himself, he gathers it like a bee, gaining more and more of it, putting it to use and processing it. But the thing inside that is “stupid” and needs learning doesn’t change.

Headline: Tanis: Fossil of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike found, scientists claim

Terrible night’s sleep, missed the morning entirely, got to get straight into work and thinking.

Currently reading: THE ANTHOLOGY OF BABEL, ed. Ed Simon

Currently listening:

Coveting: this record.

Woke up to a text telling me that Will Smith smacked Chris Rock and then won an Oscar. First news story I opened on the desktop was the death of Philip Jeck. I feel like today is going to be weird, so I’m going to take it slowly and quietly, and listen to some of this.

I have a lot to do in the garden this month. I also have things to do at the desk, including managing my RSS reader and, most pressingly, a story idea that emerged over the last couple of days that needs a full day of bench-testing to see if it holds up, and at what length.

Epic Games has bought Bandcamp. While I’m sure that’s not the most compelling news story of the day, history has taught me that I will have first-world problems on the way shortly. It would be nice to be proven wrong.

Currently listening:

Currently reading:

It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity. This finding later informed almost everything that Cambridge Analytica worked on.

Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World, Christopher Wylie (UK) (US)

And also:

I’m in my arms, I’m holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness, but faithfully, faithfully. Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.

TEXTS FOR NOTHING, Samuel Beckett (UK) (US)

I overslept. The news is all about Russia, so here’s your top 20 survival foods with long shelf life, and https://thequietus.com/ is having server issues so I can’t read the new Jennifer Lucy Allan column. As I was typing that, the new NEURAL magazine hit the doormat:

So I’ll call this a status post, today, make a coffee and sit down with this, and then get to clearing my inbox out while I wait for LA to wake up.

Making a start on the newsletter for this Sunday, answering a few questions and unpacking a bit of my MOON KNIGHT run with Dec and Jordie. Taking today slow and easy. Wow, my laptop screen is filthy.

Listening:

Reading: The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary, Josh Toth (UK) (US)

The suggestion is clear: without the persistence of this utopian spirit, the possibility of, or reason for, change atrophies: “if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all”

I seem to be on a northern crime tear. But I just finally picked up TREACLE WALKER, so the next couple of days will be loving Alan Garner’s prose while becoming very depressed that I will never ever be able to write that well. And then I’ll spend three weeks wondering how I could write a book with those effects, just like I did when I read BONELAND.

Listening:

Reading: Something Rich and Strange: The Life and Music of Iannis Xenakis at { feuilleton }