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How hard is it to just listen to music these days?

Today I listened to ‘Cloudbusting’ by Kate Bush for the first time in a while. What a gloriously strange song it is. Best of all, it’s one of those songs that obscures what it is really about. It’s not a song about a change in the weather, but about Wilhelm Reich, the orgone accumulator, fluorescent yo-yos, and a son (rather than a sun) coming out.

I was due to have my second vaccination today, but like most people I rebooked to have it a bit earlier. No real side effects this time, save for a bit of malaise. Though that may have just been the thought of opening up the country when cases are still increasing quickly.

Outline is the first of a trilogy of novels by Rachel Cusk. In it, the narrator is travelling to Athens to help teach on a creative writing class. You could describe the rest of what happens in a couple of sentences. I won’t be doing so because first, that’s spoilers, and I don’t do spoilers; second, Outline is one of those novels where what happens doesn’t matter quite so much as how it all happens.

I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been in need of some music that:

I had my first Covid-19 vaccination on Friday. Leading up to it, I was borderline having a panic attack. From about lunchtime I was just all over the shop (the jab was at 7pm). I’m glad that the vaccination centres run with such exactitude, but also with a sense of cheeriness. By the time I’d had the jab, I was feeling much better just from the sheer relief of it.

Ingrid has joined an online drawing class. She sits there on Teams getting feedback on her drawings, while I sit there attempting to absorb everything. I’m also learning by doing, by making a line on the page. In some ways, it’s instructive to observe the difference in what we learn with and without the feedback.

“I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I’d been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves. How many times did I dream of catching a train at night?” Haruki Murakami || A Wild Sheep Chase

A non-exhaustive list of ideas for saving time:

Writing this post came about from frustration with blogging. Specifically the tools I am using. Often it feels like a new language or paradigm comes along that shifts one or two of the pain points of blogging. The biggest are:

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a short novella about two members of opposing factions (Red and Blue) engaged in a ’time war’: that is they travel in time and attempt to erase each other’s existence. Except that one day Red decides to taunt Blue with a letter, and a correspondence emerges.

Last year I started to write a review of Italo Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller”. I read it while we were in Germany for Christmas. We’d visited Bremen and also undergone the bizarreness of Christmas in another language - the same motifs played out in different words and different customs. I’d tried to write the review in a similar structure to the book but, in a testament to Calvino’s writing I couldn’t pull it off. Here’s the opening paragraph: