LYSINE (You Bred Raptors?, 2023)

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In the interest of full disclosure, the trio's cellist and co-composer is a good friend of mine but I'd extoll the virtues of this regardless: harkening back to the glory days of The Dirty Three and infused with just the right amount of that something something (metal funk? glockenspiel metal?) that elevates it beyond and unapologetically into its own character. A hell of an album – congrats, all.

THE WORLD GOES ON (Krasznahorkai, 2013/2017)

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There is an addictive and hypnotic quality to all of Krasznahorkai's work and this collection throws his gift for long, rambly sentences (ahem) into widescreen – sometimes for the best, sometimes not. Fortunately, the former outweighs the latter: particularly fond of how he switches characters and points of view and time and place within a single sentence (sometimes of 22 pages or more, but hey) and makes it work. As a former musician myself, I dig Krasznahorkai's approach to writing, but I do have something of a gripe with his use of commas when they don't make rhythmic sense (to me, a comma is a brief rest, an eighth or sixteenth): in his usage in some - not all- cases here, they feel instead like quarter or half rests, stand-ins for a period for lack of any other way to prolong the trip (in all senses of the word) through his sentence-world.

Favorite tale is the title story, by far, though the hallucinatory The Bankers, is a close second and, while I can't say that I would recommend Krasznahorkai to everyone, if you're looking for something different and outside your normal wheelhouse, pick up this collection and if it speaks to you, go for his best novel, SATANTANGO; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.

mycelial sarcophagi

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With life having made several attempts on my life over the last few years, I’m always fascinated by new ways that my disused husk can be disposed of responsibly. This is intriguing, though not enough to get me give up cremation / hydro cremation (or my dream of said husk being used as a prop for the wood chipper scene in a dinner theatre rendition of FARGO):

For those seeking to live in the most sustainable way, there now is an afterlife too.

A Dutch intrepid inventor is now “growing” coffins by putting mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, together with hemp fiber in a special mold that, in a week, turns into what could basically be compared to the looks of an unpainted Egyptian sarcophagus. 

And while traditional wooden coffins come from trees that can take decades to grow and years to break down in the soil, the mushroom versions biodegrades and delivers the remains to nature in barely a month and a half.