A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST (László Krasznahorkai, 2003 / 2022)

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Elegiac, confounding, beautiful, and occasionally, bracingly strange: all of the things that I love about Krasznahorkai's work delivered in a short, taut package, a perfect starting point for someone wanting to dip their toes in the waters of his oeuvre – though if you want to dive off the deep end, start with SATANTANGO, his debut.

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Looking forward to when I can again concentrate (what passes for) my mental energies on my creative stuff in the morning and not on all of the cat herding required for the grand emptying of my grandfather's house: little bit of progress on things creative leads to a notion of another thing I have to do in the emptying, another person to contact, another thing to find, to put aside, to sign. Hope to get things back to regularity and thinking out loud in public here sooner rather than later.

THE FRAUD (Zadie Smith, 2023)

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The first of Smith's work that I've finished and loved since her amazing debut, WHITE TEETH: while I've always adored her voice and made it a point to procure each of her releases, I, without fail, stopped caring about what happened to any of her characters around the halfway point and gave up; figured it wouldn't make much of a difference if I knew or not. Correctly or in–, Smith's brilliance and keen perspective always, to me, overshadowed character (indeed, many in previous works felt interchangeable); here, however, her shift to historical fiction brought a new life, a new electricity, that I hadn't felt since WHITE TEETH: like that classic, each voice in THE FRAUD rang true and etched themselves in memory alongside a potent, searing examination of our cultural and racial hypocrisy. Hope she continues to play in history's sandbox: THE FRAUD is something special.

experiment

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Second day of current experiment and I’m considering it a success: since my breakfast is now portable (a protein shake of frozen fruit, almond milk, vanilla ice cream-flavored protein powder, spinach, and greek yogurt) I assembled it midway through the morning's workblock and came back to work until +/- 0730. Not sure why I didn't try this before (other than long-engrained habit and heretofore non-portable breakfasts); seems, at least for now, that NuHerbie is amenable to this change.

Far better use of my time (and dwindling stores of willpower) to work and breakfast instead of falling prey to the insecurity of what's in my email (fuckall) or in the RSS feeds (yawn, mostly) or in the news (nothing good) and breakfast.