absolute winner. nieces ftw (i have none - i have to make my own mistakes on the route to wisdom)

(this the mince scene) and while i remember the love responded to with indifference of being a parent.

i just remember sitting in the cinema being absolutely mesmerised. how does she communicate such intense boredom and anger - spiritual in its intensity - *while also* communicating a purely mundane “this is every housewife’s lot”.

saw this this year and by god i loved it. i’m not quite sure how you manage to create such tension and dynamism from such quotidiana even *within* scenes. (potato peeling the obvious one). extraordinary film really.

the vital point there that tangible changes downstream of the new technology required new forms, new audiences.

a lot has changed in terms of distribution obviously, which has had a visible impact on media and culture, but the impact will only be fully realised through to 2034, not too distance from that 30 year time frame there.

also, they are actually, you know, *doing* things. i may not like all or many of their policy choices, but the Tories had a series of budgets where they rolled back on key elements immediately after and by the end were visibly drifting with no sense of governing or policy.

he said he thought this showed orang-utans have a sense of sarcasm. i mean i don’t know. but it’s certainly v fucking funny.

he left to get some more equipment, came back, same two orang-utans, sitting on the same branch, with their arms folded, still looking at him. they had swapped positions.

i mean i know they’re extremely advanced but one of my favourite stories is a friend who was zookeeper and was working in the orang-utan enclosure. two orang-utans were sitting on a branch with their arms folded, looking at him.

I imagine you already know this but just in case - Wilhelm Kayser’s book is v good

www.amazon.co.uk/Grotesque-Ar...

Ah!

iirr same place is literally the birth of the grotesque.

and that for magic (and art, and belief, and freedom) to be real it comes with constraint and cost. and that this gives real power to the various evils that appear in Earthsea.

beautifully written ofc - words with heft, spare sentences with rich detail, balanced paragraphs. a sense of space and the magic of the natural world. but i had forgotten that the first book is among many other things about the importance of the word, naming things carefully, painstaking writing.

poorly reviewed as in missing out crucial words like “people” in a post.

but i have no idea if this is true!

i realised i’d constructed in my head an image of low paid, possibly not v experienced (qualified?) churning out barely reviewed copy for the most important written news source in the UK, interspersed with pieces journalists from the tv news subject to more rigorous scrutiny.