Yes, I enjoyed the new James S.A. Corey novel, The Mercy of Gods. The depiction of alien life, consciousness, socialization, and habits in the book was very enjoyable. The duo who write as Corey established, in their previous nine-volume Expanse series, a predilection for micro-interactions and interior motivations, and it was excellent to see that play out amid myriad fantastic lifeforms. The main downside to The Mercy of Gods is realizing how much CGI overkill might be required to adapt this to the screen.
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ A rich industrial drone performed live on an AE Modular setup by Belgium-based pt3r:
▰ Lovely live cello + synth performance by Brooklyn-based Serafim Smigelskiy:
▰ Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen performs works by a who’s who of largely post-classical and minimalist composers — among them Olivia Belli, Bryce Dessner, Ludovico Einaudi, Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Mário Laginha, Hania Rani, Max Richter and Steve Reich — on her album Life, out last month on Deutsche Grammophon. This is her Rani piece:
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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.
▰ The first peculiar sound of my week: I was sitting here working on something when I heard a weird noise, like a little conversation. It turned out that I’d received a text message, and my earbuds, placed on the desk next to my laptop, rather than in a case, were verbalizing — that is, speaking — the message aloud. It was part Horton Hears a Who!, part The Conversation.
▰ The sound of foghorn is as thick as the sky is clear. Long live the marine layer.
▰ Very sad to learn of the death of Steve Silberman: science journalist, Wired alum, Grateful Dead authority, Beat scholar, and mensch of the highest order. Last time we talked, he told me stories about helping Allen Ginsberg select a portable tape recorder.
▰ Thing I just said: “I was playing ambient music so loud I didn’t even hear the garage door”
▰ There was a time on Twitter, before it went to seed, when Steve Silberman, who died this week, would comment enthusiastically as I posted music recommendations, which in turn lead to enjoyable conversations. Recordings of Jon Hassell often earned his attention, so here’s a live Hassell set from 2013 in Steve’s honor. Per an old post of Steve’s, now widely shared post, there’s no better time to wake up to one’s own impermanence. On that note, have a great weekend. See you Tuesday.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, my 20th of the year so far: The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette (original title: La Position du tireur couché). I’m not sure if the issue is inherent in the translation or can be traced back to the original material, but while the lengthy descriptive passages are uniformly solid, a lot of the dialog is almost comically ridiculous. It’s got the quality of J.G. Ballard parodying urbanites. On the sound tip, the title character in The Prone Gunman can’t speak for most of the second half of the book, which leads to some interesting scenarios. I’m almost done reading two other novels, James S. A. Corey’s new one, The Mercy of Gods, which has been pretty great so far (even more than the alien elements, what I love about Corey’s work is the attention to what makes people tick, all the better when part of those people is a sentient alien parasite technology), and Charles Portis’ True Grit. I listened to an hour-long interview with the two authors who write together as Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank) and learned that they refer to this fictional third identity they created, James S. A. Corey, affectionally as “Jimmy” — as in “That doesn’t sound like Jimmy,” and “I think Jimmy would do this.”
