Scratch Pad: Passarell, Murata, Collins
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ The wind is fairly intense today. There’s a buzzing outside the office that half the time is like the world’s largest fly, and sometimes like the dentist from Marathon Man moved next door.
▰ I feel like if my call was really important to this company, I wouldn’t still be on hold after 28 minutes and 49 seconds
▰ I was using speech-to-text in the car to reply to a message, and the system was stalling, I think because when I, myself, paused to formulate a sentence, the microphone picked up the podcast being listened to loudly one car over.
▰ Apparently the great musician Tony Passarell has died. While I have tons of his albums, I’m listening to Miles Davis’ Dark Magus in his memory. First time I heard it was at a party at Tony’s place back in the early 1990s. I wandered into a room and didn’t leave until the second side ended, and we bonded heavily over it. Tony’s music will never end so long as it’s out there — and he was, to his credit, always out there.
▰ A new Sayaka Murata novel, Vanishing World, is due out on April 15. I have never been this excited to pay my taxes.
▰ The TV show’s caption read “[gentle tense music]” and I wondered, is such a thing possible? Like, what’s “gentle tense”? Then the next show happened to have a similar caption: “gentle, tense music,” which made more sense, though this seemed to be using “gentle” as an unnecessary synonym for “quiet.”
▰ I’ve finished reading one book so far this year, and I finished it a week ago but forgot last Saturday to note it. It’s Nicolas Collins’ excellent new memoir, Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket, which comes out later this year. He’s best known for his book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. And so far this year I’ve read three graphic novels: Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures by Yvan Alagbé (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith from the French), the first volume of Once & Future (by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Dan Mora), and the first volume of Ultimate Black Panther (by writer Bryan Edward Hill and artist Stefano Caselli). And while I haven’t finished reading a novel yet this year, I have read 300 pages of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (which I’m currently re-reading for the first time in at least a decade and a half) and 200 pages of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (which I’m reading for the first time), so that’s gotta count for sumthin’.
