Punk > Recent Status Updates

I love it when Murderbot talks about us like we're rats: "If there's a way for humans to get into anywhere, they'll get in there." 😂

LOL it's like Martha Wells saw me complaining that my least favorite thing in this series is all the descriptions of walking and was like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. Even Murderbot's complaining.

This is SO TENSE.

Lena!!!!!

"Somewhere along the way, Trey’s mates have filed Lena under Noncombatant Adult, meaning they don’t worry that she’ll squeal on them to the real adults for minor infringements like cursing."

"One mark of progress as a writer is reading something and knowing that you couldn’t have written it earlier than you did. I wrote this in 2021, right on time."

"The rhymes here are nothing special, but the story is my favorite kind of mystery: one where you can’t say exactly where the mystery is, but you sense its presence. Yes, I’m Catholic, why do you ask?"

John Darnielle's comments, in total, on To The Headless Horseman: "The original draft of this is more hopeful. That is why we revise."

From "Tidal Wave":

It’s not the mutiny that gets written down in the diary
it’s the manifest
forgotten cargo in obsolete measurements
anybody’s guess

I complained too soon! This recipe also calls for caramel. That's got dairy in it, lads. Not a word about how to make your own dairy-free caramel. This book is inexcusably lazy.

Many of these recipes call for dairy-free sweetened condensed milk, which isn't exactly easy to find in the store, and even harder to find if you need/want to avoid coconut. You can make it yourself, but she doesn't bother to include a recipe.

"That “OK” doesn’t sit with me right, on the page—my whole notion of some songs not really having an existence outside of the air in which they resound finds support there: but not elsewhere in the song, where rhymes like “cabinets” and “chemistry sets” practically cry out to Heaven for somebody to notice. Accordingly, we printed the lyrics in the liner notes in an almost completely illegible font."

Kind of suspicious about this lady's qualifications to publish a cookbook. She's already said you can't make yeasted doughs ahead and put them in the fridge—except you can, putting them in overnight to proof—and then she talks about cutting cold butter into quick breads. That's called a biscuit.

"Hence, in a broad sense: all this."

Cohen going full Murderbot.

I'm sorry I've been neglecting you in favor of Stranger Things fanfiction, Book, but my brains, they are no good, and you are doing a whole Israel/Palestine thing that is too real.

"I think of albums as usually having a single gravitational point, like a star, around which the other songs orbit like planets. The notional sun will rarely be the single, the big song everybody knows; the gravitational center of an album is the song that contains something of all the others."

On kireji, from the glossary:

Ya indicates an emphatic pause and divides the haiku into two parts (usually indicated in English by a colon, dash or exclamation point). Keri adds emotion to the preceding verb and marks a pause. Kana gives emphasis to the word preceding it, with an emotional effect like a soft sigh, usually marking the end of a haiku.

A renga link from Shisenjo:

a writing table
paper and the moon—
such richness

"On side one you bang the drum, and then on side two, as a reward, you get to complicate things. You know the phrase 'I don’t make the rules'? It doesn’t apply here, because I made this rule."

"Of all our albums, The Life of the World to Come comes closest to confessional folk, the very genre whose existence led me to call my act the Mountain Goats as a distancing tactic. Sonically it’s careful, curated; polite, even, for the most part; but lyrically it’s raw like uncooked meat. It was attached to a living creature just a little while before you saw it."

Patricia Donegan's essay on renga actually comes out and says that the rules were meant to ensure no continuity in the poem as a whole, that it was closer to an exercise in Buddhist meditation—of all times and seasons at once—than a cohesive piece of work. I don't enjoy renga as an art form, but I can appreciate it as a social activity, a kind of literary game, and Donegan's description makes me see that appeal more.

On THANK YOU MARIO BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE: It’s a simple song about how Toad must feel inside when Mario beats Bowser, which is to say, it’s a song about being surprised to see someone whose absence from your life has been a total catastrophe: personally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, practically, vertically, horizontally, Game Over.

This is one of Chiyo-ni's best known Buddhist haiku and is supposedly expressing the peace of detachment, but I just love how dismissive it is:

anyway
leave it to the wind—
dry pampas grass

Got this back from the library just in time to finish up the winter section:

falling down laughing
at others falling down—
snow viewing

"Every war has its hotel," Cohen opined. "Tom Friedman said that, though I can’t say he ever said anything else I agreed with."

Lines from "Family Happiness" that as Darnielle put it "look down the line toward “No Children":

I hope the stars don’t even bother to come out tonight.
I hope we both freeze to death.

"One reason I began performing under a collective name was to put distance between what I was doing and the confessional mode of songwriting. I prefer that my stories speak for themselves. They seem stronger to me when they do."

I still haven't heard any of these early songs out in the wild (i.e. without looking for them), and I haven't heard Horseradish Road at all, but on the page it very much sounds like a Mountain Goats song.

"Financial ruin is an almost irresistible theme for me; as soon as I feel tempted to drain a character’s bank account, I do it, whether owing to bank error or poor money management skills on their part, it does me no force, I must have their money, the better to flush it down the toilet for them."