Showing posts for Reading
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Macbeth (1623, 2025)
Better than I remember. I read Hamlet and Macbeth at around the same time, a long time ago, and I remember disliking Macbeth. Thinking that it was a bit dark and messy.
Still definitely dark. But much tighter than I remember. There's very little fat on the story — it's all propulsive and action-driven. There's not a ton of soliloquising or emotional gymnastics. No scenes where people go off and just mull around. I dig it.
Just after reading it we went to see the film of the production with David Tennant from back in February 2025. It was good but some of the casting choices were weird. David Tennant was actually remarkably not good. Banquo was terrific, and Macduff got better and better as the play went on. The person who played Malcolm gave off the impression that they hadn't rehearsed at all, and in fact that there was a person with cue cards standing just offscreen. Rigid, table-read-type stuff. The visual language was very cool, but maybe not particularly original.
Play, by William Shakespeare |
Show, with David Tennant | -
Now: 3 - 9 March 2025
Thursday was maybe the second or third Nice Day of the Year—a pleasure. Doors were opened and washing was hung out on lines across the neighbourhood. The solar panels booted back up and charged up the battery downstairs to like full power. The grass and the trees and the hedgerows and thickets all across East Durham came alive and started booting pollen out into the hazy sky and pretty much disabled me from like 10am onwards.
Then at the weekend we had a couple more nice days; on Sunday I even went for a run in just a t-shirt. The Boston Marathon (not that one) is looming and I want to make sure that I’m prepared, so I’ve been out pretty consistently as the weather has gotten better.
A bit of sweat and fresh warm air feels like just about the only thing keeping me together, mentally, at the minute. I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I’m starting to butt up against the limits of my background: yes I can read Shakespeare (with annotations) but no I don’t have the muscle memory to keep track of Turing machine states in my head. I can understand—and handle—feeling out of my depth, but reading through historical computer science A-level exams, or trying to figure out logic puzzles, makes me feel like I’m in a whole nother body of water, in terms of out of my depth.
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I’ve given up YouTube for Lent, which is one of those things that only 30ish-year-olds in 2025 do, because 30ish-year-olds in 2025 have impulse control problems related to YouTube Shorts. In February I spent probably more time than I want to know about watching 22-second clips of men laying concrete or traffic accidents on UK roads. I’ve lost that time for good, but the Lenten Spirit of Jesus Christ is going to help stop me from losing any more time in the future.
As a result I’ve gotten back into books; that’s right I’m back baby, I’ve put Dhalgren behind me and I’m reading for pleasure again. I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell this week and I’ve moved on to Michael Schur’s How to be Perfect, which has been… middling. Maybe a bit less rigorous than I’d like it to be. Oh and Sam and I are reading Hamlet, which is a lot more dramatic and a little bit more funny than I remember it being. Anyway the point is that without the distraction of rapid-fire content about two-handed greatsword technique I’m back to staring at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.
Also found a hole in the bothy roof, but it's over the byre and it's Officially Springtime so not horrible -
Now: 6 - 12 January 2025
It was pretty cold this week, so we took advantage of everything being frozen over to spend a bunch of time outside. The Met Office says that the weather is going to turn this next week, reaching balmy highs of like 14 degrees and turning the country into a massive mud pit.
Reading
I liked Sam Valenti IV’s review of pop music in 2024, where he basically argues that modern pop music is so multimedia that musicians no longer get anywhere without a big social media campaign and tie-ins with e.g. presidential candidates, even if the music on its own is critically acclaimed. Also some navel gazing about quite how much new music there is to listen to. Which, yep.
Also got back into reading Scott Galloway, whom I broadly agree with and who writes things that make me feel like a real smart guy for reading them. Typical of a Brand Guy to have a good brand.
Finished Yuzuki’s Butter as well, but I haven’t written that book review yet. I’ll probably give it
Listening
- MK.gee - ROCKMAN | I really like this sort of hearkening pop music. I can’t exactly put my finger on who it sounds like (probably because it doesn’t sound quite like anyone else), but it almost feels like it inherits some of the conventions of Yacht Rock in just the catchiest way.
- MIZU - 4 | 2 | 3 | Speaking of heavy music, this feels like the heavy music that I’m allowed to listen to: headphone-oriented, vaguely intellectual, extremely crushing.
- Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk - Plain fun. It feels like they’re never going to run out of ways to make fun synth pop. I especially like the way that singer Mica Tenenbaum takes like three or four syllables to say the word much on “Vampire in the Corner”.
At home
The “check engine” light came on early in the week but seems to have sorted itself out. The car continues to get pretty miserable mileage compared to what it should do, but started without trouble on even the coldest mornings.
Inside, some combination of grease and shoe mud plugged up the sink in the kitchen, so I got the plunger out and plunged the heck out of the pipes. After two or three good plunges the whole house made a noise like a dog throwing up and everything instantly got sucked down the drain with the explosive force of an airplane toilet. So uh I think I’d call that Problem Solved.
I also spent a couple of hours finishing off the grout in the office downstairs. Next up: washing it, sealing it, washing it again, installing skirting boards. Probably washing it again when Ghyll comes in from the garden with dirty paws and an eye to eat the cat's poo. Projects continue anon.
Outside
Back on a running plan, but not taking it too seriously. My Garmin is getting whiplash from my Training Load going up so precipitously. It’s like “please lay off for a day Charles” so I’m going to take Monday off.
Lots of lemonade made from the lemons of this cold weather we’ve had for the last week: Sam and I took Ghyll out for a walk to the nearby fishing pond, which had frozen over and which we were able to walk out onto; we headed down to Yorkshire to visit the Piercebridge Roman Bridge (much more impressive in person than in pictures) and for a good old-fashioned pub meal; I ran the Commondale Clart fell race on Sunday.
Watching
Started watching Small Brained American on YouTube; judging by his follower count I’m the last one to the party. I like his approach to experiences in foreign countries, which is basically “say yes to everything and don’t worry about it too much”. I think that there’s probably a little bit of international-friction-smoothing-over that happens off-camera, and I’m prepared to discover that he (along with probably like 95% of Travel YouTube) is Problematic. Oh well, it’s fun to fall asleep to.
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Now
Twenty twenty-five is the year I get my blogging groove back.
Listening
- Hell - Live at Roadburn, 2018, Dopesmoker - Sleep | Both of these are pretty “heavy” albums that I appreciate from an aesthetic point of view but which also I feel like I haven’t quite “earned” in that I’m listening to them on wired iPod earbuds from 2019 while at my remote deskwork job. Via The Verge.
- Inverse Field Vol. 1 - Inishowen | Airy ambient music from Ireland, apparently recorded on location in the Great Outdoors. Listened to this one with Ghyll on Saturday evening; the recording conceit probably comes across better when listening on headphones. Via Simon Collison.
Watching
Finished Wolf Hall. I feel a great sense of superiority at having read the books before I was even aware of the television programme, but not so great a sense of superiority that I forget that I read them after the first two were awarded the Booker Prize. So it’s not like I’m a champion of obscure literature or whatever. Anyway, the television series was terrific, elevating Mark Rylance to National Treasure status, perhaps.
Reading
Still working through Butter. It’s enjoyable but it’s not propulsive. It gives the impression of one of those video games with episodic quests. The characters all pop off the page, which is fun—except for the main character, who feels weirdly flat. Maybe it’s a reader-projection thing.
Catching up on end-of-year review posts from Simon Collison and Phil Gyford, the latter of which linked me to this interesting YouTube video about splitting a year into quarters to make life/work goals more manageable.
Outside
Ran a 5k in 19:57 on Tuesday, the culmination of a long process of training. Now I guess I need to figure out how to do this for 10k straight. Then I didn't run again until Sunday, nor felt any desire to: which is maybe a sign of something or maybe not a sign.
Spent a lovely night with Sam and Ghyll in Kielder at Flittingford bothy. On the plus side we brought in plenty of fuel for a toasty fire and we got to see an aurora, plus a skyful of stars; on the negative side Ghyll did eat human poo. I left a stern word in the overflowing bothy book.
On Saturday night it snowed heaps but was started melting before we even got up. Pottered about doing errands for most of the day, getting thoroughly cold and wet in some persistent sleet that fell all day. It's 9pm on Sunday now and my trousers are only just starting to dry out. A smarter man would have just changed trousers.
Inside
Trying to continue wrapping up projects from last year: installing a lattice above the garage door for storing e.g. plywood; finishing up the last of the grout in the back office. We will get there someday ok!
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Norwegian literature
I like this article about the impact of Norwegian literature on the international stage over the past decade or so—culminating maybe with Jon Fosse's Nobel Prize in Literature this past year.
My experience with Norwegian literature extends pretty much as far as Ibsen and no further. But articles like this—and Fosse's Nobel Prize!—have prompted me to line up some modern Norwegian writers for the long evenings going into this year's quiet holidays.
I also particularly like this description of Norwegian literature:
Norwegian literature as a whole, on the other hand, could be reduced to a very different kind of caricature, one that might help explain some of its relative success abroad. Norwegian novels are toned down, rarely noticeably conceptual, rarely in direct conversation with theory or tradition. Here, you find page after page of plot driven middle-class angst, minimalism and melancholy, closeness to nature, mellowness, humility, and what presents itself as stripped-down honesty. Here and there a funny novel does appear, but when it does, it’s usually funny in a purely observational and demonstratively folksy way.
Now that's the kind of book I want to curl up with!
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