Sitting at home with the windows closed on the one and only summer day we will get in Sverige this year, bawling my eyes out watching an imaginary movie on the backs of my eyelids called Björkpollen II: Det kliande ögat av Sauron.
Netflix series request: ‘You’re Killing Me’
You’re Killing Me, a gritty, eight-part murder mystery based on the true story of US indie rock band Pavement, and the band’s deadly feud with Mark E. Smith of The Fall, is now streaming on Netflix, starring Kyle MachLachlan as Stephen Malkmus and D.J. Qualls as Mark E. Smith, with appearances by Matthew McConaughey as Gary Young and Dylan Baker as Thurston Moore.
By popular demand: my thoughts on Eurovision 2015
One of the strange but perhaps obvious beauties of the new social media confabulation is that platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be used by people across different timezones and locations in order to get together and share their thoughts on a particular issue. Like Eurovision.
Three literary devices that really cheese me off
If I had to write a complete list of all the things creative types do that really give me the jitches, I’d be here all day. So, in my own therapeutical interests, here’s three literary devices that cheese me off no end. What cheeses you off?
Thomas Mann on Lubeck, harems and marzipan
Now if anyone wishes to vent a little spite against me, or take a casual swipe at me, I can count on his bringing up my Lubeck origin and Lubeck marzipan. If some ill-wisher can think of nothing else, he invariably thinks of connecting me with comic marzipan and representing me as a marzipan baker. Such stuff goes by the name of literary satire. But it does not bother me . . . And I certainly do not feel in the least insulted about the marzipan. In the first place it is a very tasty confection, and in the second place it is anything but trivial; rather it is remarkable and, as I have said, mysterious. And if we examine this sweet more closely, this mixture of almonds, rosewater and sugar, the suspicion arises that it is originally oriental, a [Haremskonfekt] confection for the harem, and that in all probability the recipe for this barely digestible delicacy came to Lubeck from the Orient by way of Venice. And it turns out that those wits are not so wrong as they themselves think, that Death in Venice is really ‘marzipan’ although in a deeper sense than they ever meant it.
Thomas Mann, ‘LUBECK AS A WAY OF LIFE AND THOUGHT’ (1926)