Liam Sprod

It was the manuscript that was destroyed and reconstructed, not the camp...

I have a memory of reading about an author who wrote a novel in, I think, a prisoner of war camp, which was burnt by the guards and had to later be reconstructed through hypnosis. But I can't remember the author... does anyone have any idea who it might have been?

Rapport: Killed by Cardboard - Greenpeace Sweden I drygt ett års tid har Greenpeace Sverige granskat det svenska skogsbruket. Nu vill vi att de företag som får sitt material från svenska gammelskogar agerar för att skydda mer skog.

www.greenpeace.org/sweden/publi...

Full disclosure: I also occasionally purchase things online that arrive in cardboard boxes. I know I should do better, at least I haven't used that one particular place, the worst, in a long time...

This used to be a lovely spot of stillness amid the trees. We usually pick bucket loads of blueberries here in the summer... I doubt there will be any this year. Just a reminder that I don't really live in the forest, but rather a giant industrial farm for the production of cardboard boxes...

I also love this Mamma Andersson painting on the cover.

In 1986, of course, A Clockwork Orange was not available in the UK as Kubrick would not allow it. But perhaps a Norwegian would not have known that...

It sent me back to the Mann version. I would have loved to read the fictional Paul Becker, but there is always Georg Trakl or Stanisław Przybyszewski.

A moment I did find curious was when, at one point, Kristian suggests that they rent A Clockwork Orange on video.

He writes the pretentious nastiness of Kristian so well. Although I felt a little self conscious when he was called out for having Joy Division, Killing Joke, and Suicide in his record collection... But that is indicative of my familiarity with much of the subject matter: Marlowe, Faustus, et al.

Primarily because the form and language are relatively straightforward... even if there is a lot of discussion about the formal and material elements of photography.

The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgård.

I enjoyed this. Mainly for the the descriptions of London areas where I used to live -- Deptford, Greenwich, Blackheath --albeit in a different era. Despite the rather grim subject matter -- death, the devil, occultism, murder -- it felt like a light read.

Many thanks! I thought the title might have changed in translation, but from a collection makes sense. I see that Levande och Döda is itself only currently available in Volume III of her Samlade skrifter [Collected writings], of which my local library only has the first two volumes...

Wow, I'm very curious about this... do you happen to know the original Swedish title?

But reading it again, I find lots of familiar lines: 'the patient etherized in the table', 'a life measured in coffee spoons'...

Last night in a dream, I was debating a quote with someone. I was sure that it was from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', and they said something else that I didn't recognise and can't remember. Now awake, I can't remember the last time I read Prufrock either, and certainly can't quote it...

Vital words and actions. Thank you.

(And I would also wholeheartedly recommend it without quote marks!)

Oh, it is so wonderful, isn't it. I just read it myself last week. I wept a bit on finishing it, then immediately wanted to start over again. I have struggled a bit to find what to read next... there was just something so essential in it.

She's still a big deal here in Sweden...

Haha... Unlikely, I suspect. A rather different vibe.

I enjoyed the Frisch a lot, many thanks for the suggestion. I previously only knew of him via the Bachmann connection... I now also tracked down a copy of Montauk as well, and will keep looking further.

Good point. I wonder if there is a gendered reading here. The female protagonist in 1968 has less stake in salvaging anything... The afterword I have by Claire-Louise Bennett suggests an interesting conceptual connection between Haushofer and de Beauvoir.

They both have an added poignancy from reading now, in the so-called 'anthropocene', when the smallness of humanity stands in stark contrast to its hubris.

And an interesting companion to the Max Frisch that you recommended. Both have alpine settings and are concerned about the place of humanity and the possibility of meaning within the vastness of the natural world.

It reminded me of Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume (of which I've only as yet read Vol. 1). But whereas the limitation there is temporal, here it is spatial... But have a similar acceptance of the limitation and a contemplative interrogation rather than a struggle or plot.

A book, The Wall (1968) by Marlen Haushofer (translated by Shaun Whiteside, sitting on black wooden floorboards.

Wow... This was both devastating and tender in its stripped back simplicity, the simple possibility of a life. It is also perhaps one of the best contemplations of the place of meaning and meaningless in the world, the relation of human and non-human, and the reality is the event that I have read.

Not that mere biological life is the standard I would use to judge things (living is more or other than that mere process). But the thought experiment, the quantification of energy, makes evident how much I have benefited from the cheap energy of fossil fuels, and how frivolously I have expended it.

I often think about the amount of energy that has had to have been expended across my lifetime; considered directly in the simple quantification of joules. What is the difference between the number of joules necessary for the perpetuation of biological life and the number I have consumed?

In a way, this memory appalls me... That as a child, I was so taken by the crass kitschness of wrestling. It makes me think of those plastic toys I once coveted. The utter waste of it all, the sheer individual destruction that I, in my exceedingly privileged position, have wrought on the world...

Apparently, there was a professional wrestler called King Kong Bundy, but he died in 2019 from complications of diabetes... Obviously this is why the séance failed.