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rain
It used to be, people in Seattle didn't carry umbrellas, and often didn't go in for waterproof gear so much as something heavy enough to protect them from the constant drizzle. You had to get used to feeling damp and cold-ish when outdoors, from November on, but you seldom got completely soaked ( Read more... ) -
tarkovsky's polaroids
http://riowang.blogspot.com/2010/06/tarkovskys-polaroids.html
they've been around on the internet; I saw them on Wood s lot. -
(Untitled)
There must be a tvtropes.com trope for this: the underground free society of good people, often robe-clad. It's like a combination of the French resistance and the communism of the early Christians. The beige-clothed people in Mad Max, or is that in one of the later movies in the franchise? The robed people in that Matrix sequel I didn't see. They' ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
The word of the day is cauchemardesque.
Otherwise, it's a day like any other; nothing especially nightmarish about it. I just like that word. -
Volodine and his heteronyms take the Proust questionnaire
From the Éditions Verdier web site, where you can read it in full.
Tour à tour, Antoine Volodine, Lutz Bassmann et Manuela Draeger se sont prêtés au jeu du questionnaire de Proust. Trois auteurs, trois fois quatorze réponses.
- Votre principal trait de votre caractère.Antoine Volodine : L’obstination ( Read more... ) -
a psj: a standartenfuehrer stier joke
From the Wikipedia page on Russian jokes. I got there via a reference to "Tchapaiev" in a French novel.
Standartenführer Stierlitz
Stierlitz is a fictional Soviet intelligence officer, portrayed by Vyacheslav Tikhonov in the popular Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring. In the jokes, Stierlitz interacts with various characters, most ( Read more... ) -
Rima, bird-girl
I remember in the 90s I was fascinated with the notion that any and every used book store I entered would contain a copy of W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions. This was kind of a fake fascination, of course, an attempt to kit myself out with unusual and discerning observations, which, not having read Proust yet, not having lived all that much, even, I ( Read more... ) -
web log: Hammett's mapbacks (thank you, wikipedia)
These Continental Op maps are kind of neat. This one takes the too-easy way out (really, for "Blood Money," a closed picture of that one house?) but this one seems to make up for it. If only that last image were bigger.
Apparently Dell had a line of paperbacks called mapbacks, mostly mysteries, with back covers featuring maps of the fictional ( Read more... ) -
New Volodine translation
Lutz Bassmann's Avec les moines-soldats is being translated into English, due out September 1.
http://amzn.com/0803239912
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winter and road-work
There are three construction projects going on just outside my window. Something at the supermarket across the street, which involves four or five trucks backing up and beeping, plus a sound like sheets of metal being dropped from a great height. And a deck is being built behind a nearby house; the air compressor for that job starts at 7 am. And ( Read more... )
