Kisani

“At a brown door at the end of the basement corridor she knocked to the beat of an Umar Dimayev song.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“He starts whistling something else. It’s the Abba song about I have a dream. He doesn’t look the Abba type. He sings the lines about how if you see the wonder of a fairytale you’ll be fine in the future. He has a quite good voice. He’s singing quite loud, loud enough for her to be able to hear him clearly. In fact it’s almost as if he’s singing for her. Then, next, does he really sing this? I believe in Engels. That’s unbelievably witty, if that’s what he’s just sung and she hasn’t misheard. That’s the kind of thing only a really good friend of hers would have known to do to get her attention. Then the boy speaks, and it is to her. Come on, he says. He seems to want her to sing. She gives him her most withering look. You’re joking, she says. I only joke about really serious things, he says. Come on. Something good in everything you see. Don’t know it, she says. You do, he says. I don’t, actually, she says. You do, actually, he says, because Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them. In twenty years’ time Abba songs will still be being sung, probably even more than they’re being sung now.”
― Ali Smith, There But For The

“the country life. Like in Miyazaki’s film My Neighbor Totoro, do you know it?”
― Hiro Arikawa, The Travelling Cat Chronicles

“Anyway, I have a new theory. Would you like to hear it? Ignore this paragraph if not. My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence. You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976. I know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way. One thing a government could do with my approval (and there aren’t many) would be to prohibit the production of each and every form of plastic not urgently necessary for the maintenance of human life. What do you think?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You