On the Line

"Her own sound was singular, in life as in print. If you called her, as I often did while working with her as a fact checker, a decade ago, and then as an editor’s assistant, you got used to waiting out a dozen rings and the answering-machine greeting — she screened the old-fashioned way — followed by the sudden burst of that rich, deliberate voice picking the conversation up midstream.

That is Alexandra Schwartz memorializing the late critic Joan Acocella, who died on Sunday, in The New Yorker.

. . .

"He cut the tape, built a loop, excised the guitar, slowed it all to a narcotized pace, and played along, augmenting the phrases where he saw fit."

That is Grayson Haver Currin writing about the process behind Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1: Music for Airports for Pitchfork’s Sunday review. 

. . .

"Now came an auditory impression. It must have been there all along, but I was only now processing it. Low voices, coming from the other side of the door. Footsteps, doors opening and closing. Beeps and electronic tones. Telephone sounds, hospital noises. The ordinary, busy clamour of a large institution. It could be a school, a government building, our own project. It didn't sound like the past."

That is from Permafrost, the first novel I’ve read by Alastair Reynolds. I’m currently 79% of the way through, according to my Kindle. It’ll likely be the first novel I finish reading in 2024, unless Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky comes to a close sooner. It’s a fantastic story of time travel, especially in terms of how it depicts perception, as shown here, when the protagonist is transported several decades into the past (more to the point, this being time travel, into “a” past). I’m a big fan of heavy in medias res storytelling — “hard science fiction” being a recognized subgenre, I kinda wish “hard in medias res science fiction” was a subgenre — and it’s an approach that is particularly useful in Permafrostbecause we experience the book with the same initial bewilderment that several characters experience in the scenarios they find themselves facing.