A quiet Saturday at my end. I’m writing this from my parents’ home, where I’m tending to dad while my mother has a day out. The cat is sitting on my lap as I write this – he hasn’t had this much alone time with me in a good while, and he’s very happy.
It’s a nice Saturday evening, K and I just got back from a long walk (like the proper old people we are), so I think it’s a good time to write this week’s update.
Here’s this week’s earworm, from the Killers of the Flower Moon trailer:
The Halluci Nation Ft. Black Bear – Stadium Pow Wow(more…)
Hello, the Internet! It’s Saturday afternoon, and K has forbidden me from humming “Voodoo Mama” from the Babylon soundtrack because it’ll inevitably get stuck in her head and she’ll keep wracking her brain about where it’s from. So instead, you can listen to it:
I’m writing this from my other favourite café – the one where I’m friends with the owners. One of them had just come back from a coffee conference, and gave me a packet of coffee to take home, and made me a delicious pourover of an as-yet-unlaunched coffee.
I’ve been reading more non-fiction these days, and I wanted to note a trend in the kind of books I’ve enjoyed most.
One is American Prometheus, the in-depth biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that formed the basis for Nolan’s recent film (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I’ve been listening to this one on audiobook on my evening walks.
The other one is Space Odyssey, a book by Michael Benson on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I finished reading last week in preparation for a rewatch of the movie.1 I expected this one to be 200-250 pages when I bought it on Kindle, and it turned out to be a hefty 600 pages – a good surprise.
I have a habit of thinking back on my life twice a year – towards the end of the year, and in July, around my birthday. These are both arbitrary times to do this – I suppose ideally one should be thinking deeply about one’s life all the time – but it’s good to have mile markers where you can check if you’re headed in the right direction and if you need to make any adjustments.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m on my second cup of coffee. I usually drink only two cups of coffee a day – at noon and 6 p.m. – because historically, my body has had a low tolerance for caffeine, but I just like coffee so much that I decided to experiment with adding one more cup at 3 p.m. Doing this might turn me into a jittery, overemotional mess, but we’ll get through it together, won’t we?
I’ve said many times over that I want to use my blog more, so I want to start doing that. All the stuff that I naturally post on Twitter? Let’s see if it can go here. I want to live here again, if I can.
Alan Moore is one of the three writers I feel have affected me and my writing the most, at least as an adult – the others being Nick Cave and David Milch. For all three, this is partly through their work, and partly through how they think and speak about their work. Each of these creators has a deliberateness about their work that comes through in interviews and talks, and I’m indebted to all of them for the way I think about my writing.
With Moore, Watchmen, From Hell and Providence are the comics I reread the most, but they’re a small fraction of all of his books that I love. If those three didn’t exist, then Miracleman, Top Ten, Tom Strong, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Halo Jones and Promethea would be enough for a writer to qualify as a favourite. And that’s not even counting Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, the latter of which is, for my money, one of the best novels of the 21st century thus far.
So you might say I have been waiting quite a long time for Illuminations to be published. Moore’s first prose short story collection – this is an event for me.
Rather than simply barreling through it, I thought I’d read one story at a time (in one day or longer, since some of these go on a bit – there’s a whole mid-length novel stuffed into this), and note down my thoughts as I get done with each one, starting with the first story on the day of release.
