Thoroughly enjoyed an absorbing Radio 6 mix by Autechre (the first of four!) which was almost all new to me and has provided a wealth of music and musicians to follow up – particularly the startling hip hop tracks. The show is described as:
Step into the genre-bending world of Autechre, the legendary duo whose sonic soundscapes have redefined electronic music for over three decades. In this BBC 6 Music Artist in Residence special, Autechre present 4 electrifying mixes that navigate through rhythm, texture, and emotion. Blending bold beats, futuristic sound design, and hypnotic atmospheres these extraordinary hour long programmes showcase why Autechre are one of electronic music’s most groundbreaking and influential duos.
Top of the news this week: Storm Darragh blew down our fence overnight. (The fence was old when we moved in 12 years ago and we’re lucky it’s survived this long but it’s a shock seeing it flattened into our garden.) It didn’t help that the the landlord of house next door – which is multiple-occupancy rented accommodation – has neglected the garden which has overgrown so much that the trees and shrubs assisted in the demolition of the fence. We’re responsible for the fence which means either our house insurance covers the damage or it’ll be down to us to make a (terrible) job of repair!
It was a week to sort out Christmassy tasks – through gritted teeth (have I mentioned that I REALLY have little time for this part of the year which seems to me to be little more than a consumer capitalist psy-op to encourage the slaves to spend! spend! spend!?). Making sure that the children had presents. Getting cards for the children to send to their classmates. Even assisting my youngest’s school by helping out taking Year One to the local church to hear the Christmas Story told with the help of pass-the-parcel and some nativity figures. Bah – bloomin’ – humbug! is all I can say.
It’s been a better week for me in terms of getting things done. I’ve returned to some personal projects and moved them on a little. Made what I think is a significant step forward with my writing. Nothing amazing, but certainly left me with a minor sense of accomplishment – something I’ve lacked for a while. What’s certainly helped has been weekly and daily planning so there’s a structure to what I’m doing.
I managed to complete a whole year streak of Duolingo. The reward? A new app icon. As much as I enjoy playing Duolingo each day, I don’t believe that it’s improved my knowledge of French very much. A few words and phrases here and there. Maybe if I spent more time using it each day… Not convinced. I keep thinking that I should immerse myself in French language movies and tv for a month to see if that helps.
After understanding how to manage Syncthing, I spent time UNSUCCESSFULLY working out how I could automatically upload assets from my Obsidian vaults so they are stored online. None of the existing Obsidian plugins appear to work (I tried them all) and attempts to write a plugin for Obsidian FAILED as, though I could upload an image to online storage, I just couldn’t work out how to write back the link and insert it in a note. Really, I guess I need to sort out how to set up a reverse proxy on my NAS that I can access without using Tailscale and properly host things myself. In the end I’ve ended up managing and uploading assets manually.
which has a number of great-quality shows (and links to downloadable audio versions of the videos).
FINALLY finished The Keys of Marinus, the First Doctor adventure from 1964 (although the Doctor is missing for half the episodes). It’s been a chore – especially after the chore of watching Marco Polo. I’m 6 months behind in watching the first season but next up is The Aztecs which I’ve not seen before and is, by many accounts, the best of the first season’s stories.
My reading is STILL unsettled and I haven’t managed to focus on anything in particular. I continue to jump around reading parts of books and short stories (Ursula Le Guin and M. John Harrison). I must be more self-disciplined about this. My tsundoku grows!
I’ve continued studying Herbert Read. He’s a quixotic writer. Broadly he’s a Romantic in the nineteenth century sense drawn to anarchism and improvement through education. Closer to someone like William Godwin than 20th century anarchists. I found Read’s The Philosophy of Anarchism (which I read this week) perplexing, especially his insistence that a future anarchist society would require a new religion (of anarchism, I think, what he calls a “mystical ethos”) – which, I supposed draws on the spiritual, idealist aspects of Romanticism. Read also seems to emphasise anarchism more as a political philosophy of individual liberation than collective action. Still, I have a great deal more of Read’s political writings to read before I get to his work on art and education. I’m also eager to find out his perspective on the Spanish Civil War.
A week of two halves. It started very productively and then on Wednesday I was knocked flat with some sort of illness which took about three days to get over (including one sleeping most of the day on Thursday). I find the hardest aspect of being unwell is the inability to do anything at all – not even read or listen to a podcast or radio. It reminded me of how I’ve felt in the aftermath of a migraine. Thankfully, it only laid me low for a few days.
Funnily enough feeling ill coincided with the arrival of some dismal, rainy weather which doubtlessly contributes to the sense of dejection at the moment. Even the Christmas lights and the “warmth” evoked by shops windows and festive music isn’t lifting the mood. (Bah humbug Chistmas! I have SO little time for this period of the year anyhow.) The children were VERY excited opening the first window of their advent calendars today.
My long-term project to have more control of my digital lfe – and remove myself from the gravitational pull of big tech – took a few more steps forward this week when I managed to FINALLY work out how to manage Syncthing across devices (so I can synchronise Obsidian vaults without relying on other services), FINALLY got CalDAV functioning properly, FINALLY worked out a way of synchronising the quick capture/fleeting notes (essentially using Nextcloud Notes; though, now I have Syncthing up and running properly it would be possible to do this with just plain text files in a synchronised folder, and FINALLY moved to LibreOffice (though I don’t have really have much use for Office apps these days). I’ve already moved 90% to linux and, when it comes to it, will move to a deGoogled Android phone and tablet – though, hopefully, I can keep my current devices running into 2026 and beyond.
We had issues with our children at school this week, too. A case of our aspirations and expectations for our children not coinciding with those of the teachers (or rather the school institutions). It’s VERY difficult to communicate a different approach to learning to teachers who see school only as a vehicle for preparing for examinations and providing “support” for SEN children meaning working out ways that they can assist the child to fit the very narrow conception of education they have. I’m sure I come across as a “difficult” parent. We want our children happy, stimulated by learning and develop into thoughtful, empathetic young people. Not factory-school educated on a never-ending constant conveyor belt of tests, assessments and exams.
I’m not writing creatively as much as I want to (the week, as I said, started productively and I more-or-less nailed down a section of the thing I’m writing…) or finding I can concentrate on any one book at the moment and jumping wildly between novels and poetry and essays by Herbert Read. Comics-wise, about all I’m really reading at the moment is Gillen’s The Power Fantasy and dragging through the dull X-Men relaunch comics (which I’m going to drop for sure; come back Age of Krakoa, all is forgiven!). Perez and Wolfman’s New Teen Titans caught my eye last night so I might read the first volume again – maybe for the frst time since the 1980s.
As always, I look back on the week and – despite the sense of being constantly busy and engaged (apart from when ill) – find myself wondering where did all those days and hours go and what have I to show for it?
THINGS haven’t been great with my blog over the last week or so. That’s an understatement. I’ve spent a great deal of time working out how to save all the content I’ve put up here for the last five years. I’ve maintained blogs of some sort or another since the late 1990s and more consistently from the mid-2005s. I moved from Blogspot to WordPress about 2012 and then learned how to use a hosting service and use domains. Every couple of years something or other would go wrong and I’d start fresh again. This blog, started in April 2019, is the longest I’ve maintained uninterrupted. I’ve tinkered with it from time to time and changed its appearance. It’s always been a bit of a muddle: neither completely personal or professional and some of the posts would have suited a quick tweet or toot. (I have a clearer methodology now: short posts get published on Mastodon and I import my Mastodon RSS feed as the “Microblog” section of the blog and the right-hand sidebar.)
Last weekend I noticed that I was using over half my hosting space and I set about removing and apps I’d installed and never used and deleting folders (I thought) were unnecessary. All was fine until I noticed that my blog wasn’t loading images. Initially, I thought it was a problem with the cache and, as I was trying to work out what was wrong, realised that WordPress had also update. So, I thought that it was an issue with either a plugin or the theme I used. So I went through the process of deactivating them and looking for the cause of the problem. (At this point, it seemed that the theme I use, SimpleMag, was not working well with the latest version of WordPress, but there were other issues.
So, I started trying different things to get the site working properly. Everything I did seemed to make it worse. I then took the nuclear option of restoring the entire home folder on my web host (I meticulously keep a bi-monthly back-up). Which sort of worked and let me update other apps I use to their latest versions – which was a bonus. After more hours of trial and increasing error, I concluded that the issue was somewhere deep in the WordPress intallation (maybe some lines of code I’d added or altered that were no longer working) plus I’d somehow messed up the databases that ddrive WordPress, so I decided to backup what I had and then do a completely fresh install. My salvation came in the form of a plugin called Backup Migration. It exported everything and, after a fresh wordpress installation, retrieved everything back to 2019 in working order. (I now have evidence that it’s possible to backup and retrieve the site without issue.)
Next hurdle came when the issue with images reappeared – or rather the images disappeared again. It was obvious that the main problem was now the theme. So, I installed the new Twenty Twenty Five theme and have spent a day or so learning how to create templates and make the blog look as much as it used to as I can at this point. Making templates in WordPress isn’t straightforward and I’m still scratching my head about where widgets have gone and why some widgets can be used in certain “blocks” and not others. Getting pages to look how I want is incredibly difficult, though
Blimey! It’s over a month since I made any attempt to put together a “weeknotes”. Perhaps “month notes” would be more appropriate. It’s been a week of looking after my youngest as his primary school has different half-term holiday than other schools where we live. Clocks went back and the weather’s become gloomier. Our plans for days out with the kids have been messed up by illness (me for a week with Covid, I suspect) and rainy days. I can’t shake the time-absorbng ennui I’m feeling at the moment (which feels like being mentally scattered). But maybe it’s that time of the year. I’m starting to wear jumpers and look longingly at winter coats in my wardrobe.
My eldest son bought me a physical copy of Alan Wake 2 as an early Christmas present. He knows that, while I’m a fan of the original game and working my way through Control, I wasn’t going to buy the new release (£60+ for a video game is far more than I’m ever going to pay). Besides, I just started playing Red Dead Redemption 2 – which I’m enjoying. But, I’ve started Alan Wake 2 which seems to me to be deliberately slow to start. We’ll see how it goes.
The sudden closure of Omnivore, the read-it-later service that I’ve completely relied on for the last couple of years has precipitated some further digital reorganisation. Long-term, my aim is to move towards FOSS apps which are open-source and community driven (rather than ephemeral startup bids). Away from the big bad silos, algorithm-driven services, apps, walled-gardens and restrictive, overpriced hardware. (There’s also a desire to have control of my own attention…) I’ve shifted a little more actively towards the Fediverse and now using Mastodon (which now feeds the “microblog” entries on this site) and back to Lemmy and Pixelfed and signed up to use the new Loops app – though I’m too old to understand the attraction of Tik-Tok looping videos. I need to invest time in properly understanding how to use the indieweb and ActivityPub. These things are hard to get to grips with but, maybe, the friction is part of the point. Persisting and overcoming the friction requires agency and attention.
Omnivore’s closure means that I’m back to using self-hosted Wallabag. Wallabag is a perfectly good read-it-later app but doesn’t have the glossiness of Omnivore and it’s excellent highlighting and exporting of notes. Combining Wallabag with Hypothes.is’ Firefox online annotation plugin seems to work almost as well as Omnivore. I realised that I was using a version of Wallabag from 2020 so upgraded without much fuss.
Staying with techy things, I did my monthly backup of everything I use which is laborious but gives me the (foolish) feeling that should everything go wrong, I have everything backed up. And backed-backed up. And, for really important data backed-backed-backed up. If I had lots of money, I could just buy another NAS with large drives and automate everything. Having zero money means I rely on using old drives and working hard at making space work.
Three things absolutely delighted me this week. The first was dscovering a brand new episode of Pilgrim by Sebastian Baczkiewicz, Belle Meadow Fayre, on Radio 4. Pilgrim is a radio series I’ve enjoyed since 2008 and it looks like they’ll be more to come. The other was the release of The Cure’s new album, Songs of a Lost World and the live-stream of their performance at The Trixy on Friday. Amazing.
I’ve been watching the second season of Elementary, the modern-day Sherlock Holmes tv series set in New York. It’s not demanding in any way and I’m mesmerised by Jonny Lee Miller’s performance as Holmes. Recasting Moriarty as both Irene Adler and Holmes’ love-interest was an excellent decision – though I wonder if they used Moriarty too soon and would have done better to gradually introduce the character and even have Irene Adler working with Holmes before she’s revealed for a longer time. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t watch it when it was originally broadcast.
My comic reading this week has consisted in catching up with the current X-Men run (which isn’t grabbing my attention at all), the Absolute Batman and Absolute Wonder Woman first issues (better than expected) and re-reading Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy (fantastic).
I’ve got quite a few books on the go at the moment (reflects my unsettled mind)m currently reading:
Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron (his latest short story collection – I’ve read many of them before).
The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke (her new novella)
Another charity shop find! A mere £1 for the trilogy of Stephen Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenent, The Unbeliever. It’s a fantasy series started in the mid-1970s in that early wave of post-Toklien novels and I read the first volume way-way-back when I was in my middle-teens (recomended by the owner of Stargate One bookshop) but feel that a great deal went over my head at the time and I have the memory of it being something intriguing that I should return to later in life. At the time I was starting to read writers like Le Guin, Heinlein and Clake. It’s later in life and – bearing in my my current noticing of the little synchronicities in life – probably time to give the first novel at least another read.
I am looking nervously at my ever-increasing tsundoku…
A discussion about the merits of reading a physical book rather than a digital copy led to considerations about the way that books – like songs – are associated with a particular moment in time in memory. There’s some truth to this. I often recall the first copy of a selection of Thomas Hardy’s poetry fondly.
It must have been the summer of 1987. It was a bright summer’s day. One of those days that – in memory – capture the sunlight and glorious happiness of being a teenager. U2’s The Joshua Tree was the album of the moment. I was in a small bookshop across from Islington Green and was captivated by the cover of a selection of Hardy’s poems: a woman and child among flowers and grasses at the edge of what looks like a wild cornfield. Whenever I think about this book – and I do from time to time, especially when I’m up in the attic and looking at the piles of books there – it evokes intensely happy memories.
Back then in 1987, I didn’t realise how influential Hardy would turn out to be (which was only enhanced a few years later after I watched Alan Bennett’s Poetry in Motion series of television lectures [and even bought the accompaying book], which additionally opened up to me poets like Auden, MacNeice and – especially – Larkin). I think I first developed a sardonic, bitter humour from Hardy that I’ve sought to shake off ever since.
I don’t have the book any more: lost in a move at some point many years ago. Instead I have a massive volume of Hardy’s complete poems, bought in the early 1990s from a university bookshop on a grey, rainy day.
UPDATE: The artwork on the front cover is a detail from Picking Poppies in Flower-Fringed Fields by the painter Edward Wilkins Waite. Waite was a painter of landscapes from the 1870s to 1920s. There’s almost no trace of the painting online and the best reproduction (below) lacks the clarity of the image on the book cover – so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an imitation or preparatory sketch.
Another find at our local Oxfam bookshop, The Book of Alien. Published in 1979 to accompany the release of the movie, it’s a behind-the-scenes account of the production with lots of art (mainly by Ron Cobb but also by Moebius and Chris Foss) and photos. There are sections on spaceship design, sets and spacesuits, the alien planet and derelict spacecraft and, naturally, a final section on Giger and the xenomorph. I can remember seeing it advertised in something like Starlog or Starburst way back then and had a school friend who had a copy of the accompanying Alien storybook. (Bearing in mind that Alien was X-rated when it was first released, I’m not sure that a “storybook”, aimed at younger readers, was a great idea – but it must have sold). For a 45 year-old softcover that’s obviously been read many time, this secondhand copy is in very good condition. Reminds me to have an Alien rewatch.
Bought for £1 at the local hospital’s League of Friends bookshop. Onions is one of the great twentieth-century ghost story writers. This volume does include The Beckoning Fair One which Robert Aickmam described as “one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field”. There’s an intense, manic quality to Onions’ writing that is incredibly effective.
I’ve read about half the stories in this collection before and will undoubtedly take a look at the ones unfamiliar to me. (Regretfully, my reading has drifted away from ghost stories recently!)
