This is a micropost, sent using the MarsEdit 5 beta’s new ‘Micropost’ feature.
It’s good. Would be even better if it had a character count.
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Jennifer Croft (Books 2022, 29)
I am unreasonably happy about having finished this before the end of the year. I started reading it at the start of the year. In fact, possibly before the start of the year, since it was a Christmas present.
Of course, I’ve read 28 other books while intermittently dipping into this behemoth, something I alluded to once or twice.
It’s a historical novel set in the middle and end of the 18th century, telling the story of Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who led a cult, or alternative religious community if you prefer. He converted to Islam, then to Catholicism, taking his followers with him on the second of those changes. But they remained ’true believers’, treating Frank as the true Messiah.
It took me so long to read partly because it’s so long, and certainly not because it was uninteresting. In fact it’s surprisingly compelling, considering the subject matter. But it is complex. Not least because of all the Polish place names and names of people. The latter is compounded when they get baptised into the Catholic church. They take on new names, so now most characters have two sets of names.
I got a surprise when I first picked up the book to find that it’s numbered backwards. Chapter 1 of Book 1 starts on page 892. The story ends on page 27. (There are some notes and blank pages after that.) At first I thought I might have to read it ‘backwards’, but no: the story proceeds in the direction I’m used to. It’s just the numbering.
I wondered if this was a reference to the direction of Hebrew writing, and Tokarczuk’s note at the end confirms that it is,
as well as a reminder that every order, every system, is simply a matter of what you’ve got used to.
Which is fair enough. I quite liked knowing how many pages I still had to go, with having to subtract. Especially as I got near the end.
Coincidentally, in the last couple of weeks I read this in ‘Shift Happens’, a newsletter about a book about keyboards:
(in Poland and parts of Europe, books have their tables of contents at the end, and so will mine).
Which isn’t the case here, but I thought it was an interesting slightly-connected idea.
It’s a huge work, in more ways than one, and also an incredible example of the translator’s art.
This is disappointing: Apple have removed the delightful page-turn animation from the Books app: Apple’s taken the joy out of its Books app with iOS 16 - The Verge.
Bring it back! Joy! Whimsy!
Saddened to read of the death of Marcus Sedgwick. I don’t know much about him, but I read and enjoyed one of his books two years ago, and subscribed to his mailing list after that. He seemed like a decent guy.
So it goes, I guess.
If you use Stage Manager on Mac, it seems that Command-backtick (⌘+`) behaves differently.
Normally it switches between windows of the active app. With Stage Manager it appears to switch between windows that are active in the current Stage (if that’s the term). Even between apps.
My site is fully switched over to Micro.blog. Everything has changed. Not just the look — I plan to work on that and try to make it more the way I want — but the URL scheme.
There will be breakages. I’ll fix things over time, but let me know about any you see.
I plan to move my site to Micro.blog. I’ve had enough of running servers and juggling components to make Indieweb things work together. I’d also relish the simplicity of making short posts easily.
I have a feast of fiddling about ahead of me to get all my old posts imported.
Tax rises expected from the latest Tory PM. What I can’t figure out is why they have to ‘make up for a £50bn fiscal hole’ caused by Truss, when she was only in for 5 minutes. Her disastrous mini-budget hadn’t been enacted yet.
Next Songs, Elon Musk, and Joe Strummer
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been confirmed, there has been a lot of chatter about free speech. Musk, we are told, describes himself as a ‘free speech maximalist’, and there are fears that he’ll have Twitter reinstate the accounts of Trump and other white supremacists.
But I’ve been thinking about Joe Strummer.
More specifically, I’ve been wondering why his ‘The Road to Rock ’n’ Roll’ was popping into my head so often. It wasn’t a problem: getting an earworm of a song I like doesn’t bother me. But I wondered what was triggering it.
I can often work out why I get a song in my head. I knew, for example, why I often had The Clash’s ‘The Prisoner ’ in my head through the summer. The words ‘The Prisoner ’ are written on the whiteboard in our kitchen, along with the titles of the other serieses we’re watching.
And in fact I sing ‘The Prisoner’ every time I hang out the washing, owing to its line referring to ‘hanging out the washing and clipping coupons and generally being decent.’
It clicked today, though. You know how — if you’re an old-school album listener (or just old) like me — when you play an album, one track’s ending often triggers the expectation of the next? So that, when you hear a song in isolation, on a playlist or on the radio or something, and the wrong song plays next, it can be quite jarring?
The song before ‘The Road to Rock ’n’ Roll’ on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is ‘Techno D-Day’. Joe’s celebration of illegal raves ends with the line, ‘And this is about free speech!’
So it turns out my head was just playing the next song whenever the phrase came up.