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“A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container”

That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and the next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction published by Ignota

GC gave me this book the other day, perfectly timed.

It can feel like the path to success, whatever on earth success actually is, takes some sort of aggro-ambition. What if it is gentler, more of a methodical and deliberate accumulation than a conquest?

SB has been playing Death Stranding and I’ve really enjoyed following along. The arc is definitely hero-centric, and of course the story is way out there in sci-fi land, but the main mechanic of accepting and delivering cargo is much more human than so many other supposedly more realistic video games.

I’d like to get and read Elizabeth Fisher’s Women’s Creation from 1975, but it might be tough to find in print. Thankfully the Internet Archive seems to offer it for borrowing. Pretty cool, I didn’t know that they had a lending library for scanned books.

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“5:30am — wake up and lie there and think”

  • 5:30am — wake up and lie there and think
  • 6:15am — get up and eat breakfast (lots)
  • 7:15am — get to work writing, writing, writing
  • Noon — lunch
  • 1–3pm — reading, music
  • 3–5pm — correspondence, maybe house cleaning
  • 5–8pm — make dinner and eat it
  • After 8pm — I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this

Ursula K. Le Guin’s daily routine

Via GC who I think may have come across it via this tweet. Can be found in the book Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interview.

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The wonderful world of BBC Sounds

BBC Sounds is such a treasure trove.

It introduced me to You’re Dead to Me, a very funny history podcast by Greg Jenner. My favourite episodes so far are probably the ones on Mansa Musa and Harriet Tubman.

Around Halloween I came across Haunted Women, a one-off program exploring how women have used the ghost story form. Reminds me, I am way overdue reading some Shirley Jackson. I’ll probably start with the bookends, The Road Through the Wall and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Will definitely have to read The Haunting of Hill House as well, The Haunting is one of my favourite horror films. The film was released in 1963 under the Hays Code, so I’ll be interested to see how much more of Theodora’s character is revealed in the book.

Other BBC Sounds programms that I’m planning to listen to include:

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Pikelets

Makes about ten pikelets that are 7 cm (~3″) in diameter. For the unfamiliar, pikelets are kind of like small American pancakes.

In a large bowl, whisk together 155 g (1¼ c) plain flour, 2½ t baking powder, and 2 T sugar. Sift your flour and baking powder if it’s a little lumpy, it’ll make a big difference. In a separate small bowl, whisk together 1 egg and 175 mL (¾ c) milk. Non-dairy milk works if that’s what you prefer. Pour the wet in to the dry and then whisk until barely combined. There may still be a few small lumps of batter. Let this sit in the fridge to homogenise for at least 5 minutes while you prepare the pan.

Lightly oil or butter a large nonstick pan or griddle and then heat it over medium. Don’t use too much fat – the thinner the coat, the more evenly coloured your pikelets. When the pan is hot, dollop in 2 T (about half of a ¼ scoop) of batter. Allow the pikelet to cook without pestering it until there are small holes forming on the top side and the batter begins to set, then flip and cook the other side. The second side usually needs a little less time.

Serve immediately with butter and jam, or let cool and store in the fridge. Pikelets are great reheated in the toaster.

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Ikigai 生き甲斐

Ikigai 生き甲斐 = the ideal reason to get up in the morning. There are web articles aplenty on this topic but it doesn’t need much explaining, it’s just a more structured way of thinking about things you already have knocking around in your head. Worth keeping in mind.

                         . . . . . . .
                    .                     .
                 .         FOR               .
               .                LOVE           .
              .                                 .
             . . . . . . .           . . . . . . .
          . .               .     .               . .
      .     .   PA            . .        MI       .     .
   .        .    SS        .       .      SS      .        .
  .         .     IO      .         .      IO     .         .
 .           .      N    . . . . . . .       N   .  FOR      .
.   FOR       .     .   .             .   .     .             .
.              . .      .             .      . .    CO        .
.   TA         . .      .      🌱     .      . .     MM       .
.    LE       .     .   .             .   .     .     UN      .
 .    NT     .  PR       . . . . . . .           .     IT    .
  .         .    OF       .         .   VO        .      Y  .
   .        .     ES       .       .     CA       .        .
      .     .      SI         . .         TI      .     .
          . .       ON      .     .        ON     . .
             . . . . . . .           . . . . . . .
              .                                 .
               .          FOR                  .
                 .             MONEY         .
                    .                     .
                         . . . . . . .

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Gogo Penguin + Koyaanisqatsi, and the memory of a tower in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Last night I went to a live screening of Koyaanisqatsi at EartH in Hackney with GC. I knew Gogo Penguin would be playing live, but I didn’t realise they’d be playing their own re-scoring! Pretty impressive, both the execution and to even take it on considering the epic proportions of Philip Glass’s original score. The synchronisation of the rhythm and the visual was maybe not quite as intricate as the original but it was expertly handled, particularly for a live performance. Most of the time the pace was frenetic, frantic. There weren’t quite as many despairing moments as in Glass’s score, but the overall vibe was very similar.

I need to listen to more Gogo Penguin and definitely need to watch the original film, before this I’d only seen small bits of it.

The derelict facade of the Ljubljanska Banka Tower, or “Sniper’s Tower”, in Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina)

Photo taken 15 April 2009

The second half of the film includes many clips of derelict housing projects and other buildings. Those clips unearthed a ten-year-old memory of a tower I’d seen when visiting a good friend in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The angular concrete structure loomed over the playground in Park Zrinjevac. It was an inanimate casualty of the catastrophic conflicts that consumed the region in the early 1990s, abandoned but clinging to a few remnants of glass and insulation.

That much I knew from the pocked concrete, but I didn’t know the specific role it played in the war until today. Once called the Ljubljanska Banka Tower, it’s now known to some as the Sniper’s Tower. It was used by gunmen targeting people below during the 1993–1994 Siege of Mostar. The multiple sieges led to the widespread destruction of the city, and almost 100,000 people fled.

I searched everywhere online for pre-war photos of the tower but couldn’t find any, just this photo taken a few months after I was there. The photographer captured it in much better light than I, the photo hints at the building’s formerly mirrored, golden facade. It still stands from what I gather, but the exterior structure has been removed and the entries have been blocked off. Graffiti artists use it, and urban explorers try to have a poke around. It looks like a skeleton in the more recent images I’ve seen. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable going in.

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More sci-fi

While I was away in France, I read The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. The contrast between good and bad is pretty b/w, a little less nuanced than in some of her other books, but I really enjoyed it. It had some Heart of Darkness and Planet of the Apes (2010s reboots) vibes.

Off the back of that, these are a few new sci-fi items for the reading and watching lists:

  • La Planète des singes by Pierre Boulle published in 1963. I didn’t realise that the whole Planet of the Apes world started with this novel.
  • A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be, an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin. It can be found in her essay collection Dancing At the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, can also be found bouncing around online. Recommended by GC. I need to get a better handle on Le Guin’s work in general actually, there’s just so much!
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer published in 2014. The movie was based on this book, apparently both are pretty good but the book is particularly strong. Recommended by FB and GC.
  • FB, GC, and I were talking about how the strength of so much great literary fiction lies in the fuzziness, the areas where the reader is trusted to fill in the gaps. This is so often lost when a book is adapted to film. David Lynch is good at hanging on to this stuff (see Mulholland Drive, for example), but I’m not a big film buff and couldn’t think of many others. FB suggested we check out some Andrei Tarkovsky films, particularly Solaris (1972).
  • Related to that read Solaris, the 1961 philosophical sci-fi novel by Stanisław Lem. I had no idea the movies were based on one of Lem’s books.