Some stuff I’ve liked recently
Bringing back some 2000s ‘personal blog’ energy with a jumbled list connected by nothing more than the scattered beams of my positively-valenced attention.
A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker, a novel fictionalising Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s experiences amid the French WWII resistance. I remember enjoying Baker’s Longbourn some years back (Pride & Prejudice from the servants’ point of view), but this one is even better. I adore her writing voice, clear and active, with each scene and moment dressed with exactly the Goldilocks level of smartly chosen detail. Looking forward to gobbling up the rest of her oeuvre.
The Alien: Earth television series. I’m not especially into this franchise, but I found the middle of this – episodes 3 to 6 – especially entertaining, deft in its balance of intrigue, action, horror/suspense, pathos and dystopic political sting. The rest wasn’t as strong but absolutely none of it bored or annoyed me (which is rare in television). I was also struck by the (spoiler alert!) interesting outcome in Episode 8 which began with the five ‘hybrids’ in a cage, and ended with the five ‘grown ups’ most responsible for them in the cage – and only then did I realise how neatly they mapped onto each other: Boy Genius replaced by girl genius; the rival fixers/hitmen replaced by the two scared boys who’d been strongarmed into killing; the psychologist pseudomother replaced by the girl with delusions of pregnancy and a strong attachment to her cuddly toys; and the corporate toady synth replaced by the toadying striver girl. With the idealistic scientists of both generations (so to speak) dead offstage. It was clever, and more subtle than I’m making it sound. I’d like to watch more.
The Yah Lah But podcast featuring Teo You Yenn talking about her excellent new book Unease, which predictably has sat firmly atop the Straits Times bestseller list for weeks. (My own take on its themes is here.) In the past few years. I have done surprisingly well at shedding Singapore-linked FOMO, but this episode succeeded in bringing some of it back. I would have liked to have more conversations of this kind – involving build and challenge, give and take – when I was there.
Quippy reductive materialism from the cognitive anthropologist Chris Kavanagh on Decoding the Gurus. I greatly enjoyed his explanation for commonalities among human beings: “We are all long tubes with sense organs attached.” But this has recently been bested by the line, “Dog shit is made of atoms, a piece of chocolate cake is made of atoms, I don’t conclude from this that I might as well eat the dog shit.” Very wise.
Time in caves. I’ve taken up caving. I’ve long loved hiking, countryside rambles, looking out over hills and woodland and thinking of oneself in nature, although of course even national parks in the UK are the product of centuries of human intervention. It’s been interesting to go underground and find a vast parallel world which is truly very much more untouched. Although I have once been rickrolled: someone set up a music stand with a laminated piece of sheet music (“Never Gonna…”) in a chamber only accessible through over an hour of crawling, climbing and clambering over rock, water and ancient mud. That’s true dedication for ya.