While wandering around Scotland this past week, I read a chunk of Ken MacLeod’s novel Beyond the Reach of Earth, which contains this reminder about the limits of sound as a representation of place.
MacLeod’s Correction
See you in Cloud City
Category: field notes
News, essays, reviews, surveillance
Last Full Day
Push a button, any button
Last full day in the UK, where they do doorbells well.
Current Status
Just chilling
Scratch Pad: Macleod, Suzuki
From the past week
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
And another especially light week on social media. Been busy.
▰ I planned to read Ken Macleod’s Beyond the Reach of Earth, but hadn’t read the prior novel, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, in quite a while, so to prepare I read reviews of Hallowed Sky, and then I opened Reach of Earth only to find that Macleod begins it with a concise, five-page summary of Hallowed Sky.
▰ I read the third volume of Yuto Suzuki’s ongoing manga Sakamoto Days.
Noise Terrorism
Open and closed
From Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, in which young Italian artists explore sound’s potential as a weapon:
The little gang played amplified noises on these evenings at the café, sounds that had been recorded at Lonzi’s apartment by hitting sledgehammers on anvils, or snipping giant hedge shears attached to pickup microphones, SNIP SNIP, open and closed, which they announced to the audience were the sounds of the pope’s feet being severed at the ankle. The king’s fingers sawed off at the knuckle. The optic nerve of God’s one big eye cut.