soundtrack to a virgin airlines transatlantic flight from 2011
It happened again!
Well, sort of. This one is somewhat staged. I saw the toad in the grass and reached for the paperback in my totebag/toadbag and then I placed it next to it just before the little guy hopped away.
That book, Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome, and its gorgeous cover is part of the Vintage Futures series from 2016, reissues of dystopian literature with lenticular-inspired designs. I have and I have read most of the books in the series, so I can’t quite justifying snatching up the whole set, as much as I would like, but they are striking paperbacks.
The novel is really, really odd, and Warner clearly poured all his heart and subconscious in it. Not sure if I can recommend it, unless you’re in a particular mood. The story beats are absurd and soap opera-ish, but there’s also a compelling proto-The Prisoner vibe of a claustrophobic little English town.
About halfway in I realized; ah, this is a “the bitch cheated on me” novel. Haven’t read one of those in a while. The fascists are…pick-up artists. There’s this long monologue that sounds like Frank T. J. Mackey in Magnolia but it’s supposed to be a fascist giving a fascist speech. The author lacks the language and understanding of injustices like misogyny to properly categorize what’s distasteful about it. So it’s just altogether….odd.
The funniest thing to me is that Michael Moorcock in the introduction tries to make a case that this is the true great English novel about fascism —not the commercial bullocks of Orwell’s 1984. I’m going to be cracking up in supermarkets thinking of it and I did enjoy reading it, but...odd!
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My "to do" list for the past seven years has been just that, a simple text file with all the immediate items at the top, medium-urgent items in the middle, and random things like books to read, movies to watch, and long terms goals further down. Things end up in the middle for so long that I don't remember why I put them down, like the item that has been there for at least a year "read Ballard's The Gentle Assassin." The moment finally came when this seemed like the least arduous and most appealing item on the list, so I reached for the giant anthology of his stories and read it. It’s a good story!
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If I see another toad while I happen to have a book with me, I’ll take a photo and then I guess it will be a bit. I’m still not the sort of person who wild animals flock to, but Delia Derbyshire did start playing when I went to the physical therapist last week. (It was the Doctor Who theme. They were playing a CD soundtrack of famous movie and tv themes, John Williams’s Jurassic Park theme played next—much as I’d like to imagined the nice PT workers are all BBC Radiophonic Workshop-heads.)
Due to the piriformis strain or whatever that brought me to the office, I haven’t been able to run as much as I’d like. I’m going kind of slow, following this Guardian “eight-week podcast training programme”; which is really, really good. It is pleasant and I can zone out for the half hour while it plays. I have no interest in googling who the host is or what the music playing is—it sounds like an algo-blend of Happy Mondays and Primal Scream and, I don’t know, Sugababes —the sort of upbeat British music I'd expect to hear at the beginning of a Virgin Atlantic flight in 2011. That might sound horrible, but it’s zone-out-able music, good for timing three minute or five minute sprints, while thinking about other things.
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I also signed up for the Criterion Channel recently. I was worried it might feel like homework and it sort of does. Like, I've got enough problems and now I need to worry that if I don't watch The 400 Blows tonight than I'm throwing my ten dollars away each month? If you are like, 22 years old, and want to understand Art, well, sure, watch 400 Blows. Watch Ali: Fear Eats Soul and The Seventh Seal and The Phantom of Liberty and all the rest. That’s a good thing to do! However, I, personally, do not want to watch 400 Blows right now. But the selection is endless and a lot of it does not feel like homework. I watched Between the Lines, The Red Shoes, The Passionate Friends, and Losing Ground and recommend all of these.
But another reason I haven’t been watching as many movies lately is I find it painful to see representation of the pre-covid world. In a novel, the difference—from the painful weirdness of today—is not as immediate, but if I see a party on screen, I get wistful. I just….want all of this to stop.
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Thanks for reading.