Sup? I'm home sick from work today with either the flu or side effects from a minor medical rigamarole I went though yesterday. Not my favourite! I always lament that Sundays are the slow day for longform and essays, on the internet at least. I should get a newspaper subscription or something. Anyway, here are some things that caught my attention this week:
Short and Sweet:
Just @ me next time, Molly! “My husband is an extremely handsome white man with an advanced degree whose dick still works. He will do just fine without me. Hell, he’ll be way better off without a vainglorious whore like myself dragging along behind him like some cross between a blow-up sex doll and a Speak-n-Spell that never shuts the fuck up no matter what you say or do.” (emphasis mine)
On Insomnia: “If you live in a city, other people's apartments are a matter of much concern. The lights in the building across the street go out, one after another, but in one window a television flickers, its invisible owner keeping you company late into the night. He is your first mate, your loyal fellow officer: together you sail into the vast night. Then, without warning, he jumps ship. The television turns off. You cruise on alone. The night is as deep and endless as the ocean.”
What's the point of work? “A limper narrative arc seems at least as likely: a long rearguard action against social and environmental entropy—trying to keep what we’ve got together as long as we can while growing increasingly tired in the process. We might even perversely hope that this fatigue amounts to a force in its own right, to the point where we can’t find the energy to keep ruining everything so fervently. One must imagine Sisyphus napping.”
Listen up!
A authoritarian dystopia glimpsed through the medium of found audio? Yes please. Within the Wire's fourth season is my favourite by far! The structure of the show means you don't need to listen to the previous three to jump right in, but if you want to preserve the game of trying to figure out what the hell is going on, start with the first - audio relaxation tapes from a quasi-medical prison (that turn out to be so much more than that.)
Maybe facts are more your thing? I loved the Lupinology episode of the podcast -Ologies. The host is like your favourite enthusiastic nerdy friend. She's totally stoked about every single expert she interviews, but her chatty conversational style never overpowers the science. She just makes it fun! “Ask smart people stupid questions!” Yes!
Get thee to the library!
I caught up with my reading this week, since I had a lot of waiting room time. Two books I absolutely loved:
The Secret History by Donna Tartt - honestly, I think I liked this better than The Goldfinch, her most famous work. One criticism often leveled at her work, which I think is fair, is that she is too fascinated by and even fetishistic of the trappings of upper class society, leading to a curious flattening of social relations. Here, though, the main character's relative poverty and work ethic sets up the main, incredibly tense conflict in the book, a clash between him and his dissipated old-money schoolmate. Someone gets murdered. Possibly a Greek God is involved. I couldn't put it down!
Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer - another less-famous book that I enjoyed more than its celebrity cousin. Annihilation, which was turned into a film of the same name, scared me so thoroughly that I had nightmares about it for literally months. Seriously. It's a scary fucking book. It's fantastic, but I can't get up the courage to read the sequels. Borne, on the other hand, is more of a horror-dystopia. No less visceral than the other novels, but set in a world totally unlike our own and therefore not quite so chilling. A woman scavanges in a city corrupted and overrun by biotech gone wrong - one day, she finds a curious anemone-like creature and against her better judgement takes it home. It's a fractal mother-child drama, set against the backdrop of the most creative post-apocalypse I've ever read.
That's all for now, folks! Please suggest something to read - right now I'm trying to get through Arthur Miller's ouvre and searching for a distraction!
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Sunday Snacks // Dec 15
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Sup? I'm home sick from work today with either the flu or side effects from a minor medical rigamarole I went though yesterday. Not my favourite! I always lament that Sundays are the slow day for longform and essays, on the internet at least. I should get a newspaper subscription or something. Anyway, here are some things that caught my attention this week:
Short and Sweet:
Just @ me next time, Molly! “My husband is an extremely handsome white man with an advanced degree whose dick still works. He will do just fine without me. Hell, he’ll be way better off without a vainglorious whore like myself dragging along behind him like some cross between a blow-up sex doll and a Speak-n-Spell that never shuts the fuck up no matter what you say or do.” (emphasis mine)
On Insomnia: “If you live in a city, other people's apartments are a matter of much concern. The lights in the building across the street go out, one after another, but in one window a television flickers, its invisible owner keeping you company late into the night. He is your first mate, your loyal fellow officer: together you sail into the vast night. Then, without warning, he jumps ship. The television turns off. You cruise on alone. The night is as deep and endless as the ocean.”
What's the point of work? “A limper narrative arc seems at least as likely: a long rearguard action against social and environmental entropy—trying to keep what we’ve got together as long as we can while growing increasingly tired in the process. We might even perversely hope that this fatigue amounts to a force in its own right, to the point where we can’t find the energy to keep ruining everything so fervently. One must imagine Sisyphus napping.”
Listen up!
A authoritarian dystopia glimpsed through the medium of found audio? Yes please. Within the Wire's fourth season is my favourite by far! The structure of the show means you don't need to listen to the previous three to jump right in, but if you want to preserve the game of trying to figure out what the hell is going on, start with the first - audio relaxation tapes from a quasi-medical prison (that turn out to be so much more than that.)
Maybe facts are more your thing? I loved the Lupinology episode of the podcast -Ologies. The host is like your favourite enthusiastic nerdy friend. She's totally stoked about every single expert she interviews, but her chatty conversational style never overpowers the science. She just makes it fun! “Ask smart people stupid questions!” Yes!
Get thee to the library!
I caught up with my reading this week, since I had a lot of waiting room time. Two books I absolutely loved:
The Secret History by Donna Tartt - honestly, I think I liked this better than The Goldfinch, her most famous work. One criticism often leveled at her work, which I think is fair, is that she is too fascinated by and even fetishistic of the trappings of upper class society, leading to a curious flattening of social relations. Here, though, the main character's relative poverty and work ethic sets up the main, incredibly tense conflict in the book, a clash between him and his dissipated old-money schoolmate. Someone gets murdered. Possibly a Greek God is involved. I couldn't put it down!
Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer - another less-famous book that I enjoyed more than its celebrity cousin. Annihilation, which was turned into a film of the same name, scared me so thoroughly that I had nightmares about it for literally months. Seriously. It's a scary fucking book. It's fantastic, but I can't get up the courage to read the sequels. Borne, on the other hand, is more of a horror-dystopia. No less visceral than the other novels, but set in a world totally unlike our own and therefore not quite so chilling. A woman scavanges in a city corrupted and overrun by biotech gone wrong - one day, she finds a curious anemone-like creature and against her better judgement takes it home. It's a fractal mother-child drama, set against the backdrop of the most creative post-apocalypse I've ever read.
That's all for now, folks! Please suggest something to read - right now I'm trying to get through Arthur Miller's ouvre and searching for a distraction!