Andrei Rusu

Front cover of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Picked up this earlier edition of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, translated by M. Jull Costa. I have the Richard Zenith edition too, but it’s different in organizing and tone.

“I want your reading of this book to leave you with the sense of having lived through some voluptuous nightmare”.

#BookSky

The Freak Zone is an exceptional programme, and I'd say that the jazz involved is on the occasional, and always of a high quality.

Listen last week's for some astonishing '82 ambiental from Hiroshi Yoshimura. And as far as I can tell, no noticeable jazz at all.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

BBC Radio 3 - Unclassified Elizabeth Alker with music by a new generation of composers who defy classification.

Even made it to Radio 3 on @elizabethalker.bsky.social Unclassified!

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

See You Around, by Truthpaste 1 track album

The new Truthpaste ensemble @truthpaste.bsky.social released such an excellent debut single, then frankly it would be hard to keep up with.

Played by @stevelamacq.bsky.social -- on his 6 Music show yesterday. Also by @marcrileydj.bsky.social

memorialsofdistinction.bandcamp.com/album/see-yo...

The Offensive Department.

Supermarkets in Norway keep wood burning fireplace products well stocked up during summer to remind you that this won’t last and winter is just around the corner.

That's a good strategy. I think I would need to give up my day job completely in order to achieve even 80-90 books a year. Which I did consider.

Well, this year I'll be lucky if I bank 10, because I started to re-read/listen Ulysses and Pessoa's biography by Richard Zenith.

I would really like to get my hands on a copy of the Orpheu Portuguese modernist literary magazine.

Step 1, which is learning Portuguese, is already in progress.

#booksky

No way, and the year is only half way. What is your recipe? I can barely do 20-30 a year.

"very excellent" :facepalm

I'm on my 4th Steinbeck book: "The Wayward Bus", borrowed from the Oslo Library, of course.

So far is very excellent, enjoyable, and insightful. There's a lot of everyday simplicity and no fuss, characters are well designed.

I also have the audio book to listen on my bike runs. #booksky

Photo from the 5th floor with a view over Oslo central station and beyond.

Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon, at the Oslo Public Library.

Of all the ways to cut a cake, this one surely takes the knife.

Don’t forget about the reply guys.

For Google, the term musician means "male" musician. I had a moment today when I couldn't remember Laurie's Anderson first name (I know...) and I tried to use Google to remember it, but this list of nobodys came up.

I had to search for "anderson experimental musician" until her name appeared.

The British government are always very concerned with people entering their country but I don’t understand why they don’t care at all about all the people that leave.

If I were a British MP I would really try to make it difficult for people to leave the UK, not the other way around.

Screenshot of the cover of The Wave in the Mind (2004) by Ursula K. Le Guin.

"when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, 'If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,' or 'A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on'.” – Ursula Le Guin.

AI Overview from Google describing the expression "cometh the hour, cometh the main", as a way of saying that an appropriate leader or heore will emerge in a moment of crisis. Then at the end providing a innacurate explanation that the term "man" is not limited to male figures.

Another instance where the AI generated summary which no-one asked for is bullshit. It's some kind of man-apologist.

The term "man" was always used to refer to an actual male figure, because as Ursula Le Guin pointed out, "women are a very recent invention".

Of all the most ludicrous and meaningless crap I heard so far from the AI crowd, this must be right at the top. Anthropic has clearly gone off their rocker.

Besides, anyone who would have read anything by Merleau-Ponty or other phenomenologists would know that this is just pure idiotic nonsense.

“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”

www.aitrainingstatement.org

Not only that, but also this:

www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...

When it comes to the future of generative AI and LLMs I am quite reassured.

ChatGPT cannot even pronounce Decartes (as in René Descartes) correctly.

What about crab rights? moondog.bandcamp.com/track/enough...

Sometimes you just have to use words like "ensure", "leverage", "foster" in a conversation.

(if you're speaking with a blunt machine).

If Musk would have had any more semblance of a sense of humour, he would have named his department Ministry of Truth, rather than that ridiculous name. But he doesn’t, he’s soon to be on par with his boss.

Riley & Coe - 06/02/2025 - BBC Sounds Gideon Coe plays the music he loves from every era and genre.

All this week, the good people of the Riley & Coe consortium at BBC 6 Music, lead by @marcrileydj.bsky.social and @gidcoe.bsky.social, have played one archive song from the Tim Buckley's Radio 1 live session from '68.

Here's "Once I Was" in all its exceptional beauty:
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

excerpt from Pessoa (Liveright Publishing, 2021), by Richard Zenith

excerpt from Pessoa (Liveright Publishing, 2021), by Richard Zenith

And when the Italian consulate tried to clarify that there was no Angioletti in Portugal at that time, he doubled down and published a made up letter from Angioletti himself to the newspaper in which he congratulated them for their accurate reporting on anti-fascism.

Fernando Pessoa's approach to anti-fascism:

In 1926, he published an imaginary interview with an Italian literary critic who was supposedly exiled in Lisbon and who was bashing Mussolini and his regime.

[excerpts from Pessoa, by Richard Zenith 💙📚]

Who stirs?

Now I’m trying to find the section where Haines ends his sentences with “don’t you know” in his classic annoying manner.