2024-12-19
I read 74 books this year. I’m not reviewing them all; I don’t remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons: The Golden Notebook, The Magus, The Interrogators, Martyr!, Money… It’s been a good year.
Posts
2024-03-10
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We’re through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there’s sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark months I kept my head down and worked. Ugly, stupid work. Pointless work. Now just as spring comes I’m sick.
2023-12-28
Berlin has cash only bars, stickers to put over your phone’s camera before you can come into the party, and a strong poster culture. The surfaces of the city are covered in a growing, shedding, and regenerating skin of posters. Most are good. Here are the ones I liked this year.
Notes from Granta 165 (Deutschland)
2023-12-27
Notes from a really damn good issue of Granta about Germany. Featuring non-fiction by Alexander Kluge, Peter Handke, Fredric Jameson, Lauren Oyler, Michael Hofmann, Peter Kuras, Adrian Daub, Peter Richter, Lutz Seiler, Ryan Ruby, Jan Wilm and Jürgen Habermas. As well as a conversation between George Prochnik, Emily Dische-Becker and Eyal Weizman.2023-12-16
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I’ve deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I’ve tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety. I try to do less of that. Touch grass, if you will. I still read a lot but I try to read fewer feeds and more books and long articles. Is it helping? Do I still feel obligated to have a working knowledge on this or that current thing? Well…
2023-11-27
It feels like there’s a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here’s what I’ve been reading lately about war.
2023-11-22
Right now I am in England. It’s the first time I’ve been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes… like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I’ve just finished reading: Vile Bodies. The book is full of social climbers, aristocrats, nobility and the dreary functionaries of government too. All of this to say, did you know you can read what all the royals are up to on any given day in the Court Circular?
2023-11-05
First here’s Sequel, which is one of those apps for tracking the stuff you watch and read and listen to, and the stuff you want to watch and read and listen to. I do a lot of that, and this app looks slick, but I probably won’t switch to it because it’s iOS only. For you, maybe that’s perfect.
2023-08-29
While I claim that the reason I haven’t emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don’t have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: “I am more interested in his insurance affairs.”
2023-07-30
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let’s be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you’ve figured that out, why don’t you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It’s time for a vibe shift.
The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world. Culture and reality do not reside cleanly in a single realm; they slosh back and forth (an ass smashing into an ass, forever). The seemingly rigid schemas and structures in computing are in fact as plastic as our human messiness demands they be. As such: the definitive guide to vaporwave text encoding.