▰ Gimme Shelter:
“Always take spare socks,” the instructor advised. And you might want earplugs, he added. There are always lots of snorers in emergency shelters.
That is from an article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about Poland’s wGotowości (or “Readiness”) civilian defense training program.
. . .
▰ Time Warp
The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble’.
That is Joanna Biggs writing in the London Review of Books about Solvej Balle’s series of novels, On the Calculation of Volume. Tara, the main character in the books, wakes every day having to live the same day all over again — sort of like in Groundhog Day, but not exactly. A New York Times story by Hilary Leichter about Balle’s books reminds the reader of the “infraordinary,” the late George Perec’s term (l’infra-ordinaire in the original French) for “the perplexities of the habitual and the banal.” Seems as well like a good term for hyperawareness of the quotidian, including everyday sound.
. . .
▰ Dream Weaver
In the car, an oscillating whine I mistook for engine noise played over the stereo: bursts of light between long stretches of darkness, gentle rocking back and forth between frequencies, dissonant cries bubbling up as if from inside a well, more alien than any impressionism I was familiar with. My sister was the one playing, the instrument she had played from childhood unrecognizable. She sent these to him instead of letters.
That is from Daydreamers, the recent novel by my friend Alvin Lu. The book was published by FC2 last year. The narrator here is the brother of the musician in question. In a book steeped in matters of translation, gaps both generational and cultural looming large, the avant-garde music played by the sister provides a striking example.
This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.
