At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts serves, I’ve found, as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. Some items show up on disquiet.com before this post, in which case I don’t repeat them. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Could we get another album from the trio Mountain Man, or is that out of the question?
▰ Good morning music can mean something where the clink of a spoon inside a cereal bowl or the whistle of a tea kettle fit right in — and by those measures, Taylor Deupree makes for very good morning music, indeed.
▰ Hell is a book club in which for all eternity everyone around you, one after another, says nothing other than “the language,” drawn out for emphasis, while everyone else nods and murmurs approvingly
▰ Today in mysterious sounds: whining dogs, migrating geese, or creaking scaffolding at neighboring construction site?
Update: it was the construction site.
▰ There are 10 weeks between now and the 15th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto music community. That’ll be Thursday, January 7, 2027, when we’ll begin the 784th consecutive weekly music project.
▰ It’s 2026. If you’re a musician, you should at least have a web page* listing your upcoming performances and your recent and upcoming releases. Bonus points for a newsletter. Gold star for a blog with some ongoing insights into your activities.
*Sure also social media, but foremost your own page
▰ It’s not that I haven’t gotten out of the house the past few weeks, but I haven’t during the day, just been at my desk working, and so then today taking a walk for a late lunch was surreal, an out-of-body experience, or an out-of-house experience.
▰ I’m in the middle of two very long novels, so I extended that effort by reading something short-ish, the science fiction novel(la?) Scion by James Islington. This reprieve was more fitting than I knew until I came to the book’s closing acknowledgements, which open with him saying that writing the book was, as well, a break for him, from some other writing. I thought of Islington more as a fantasy writer, a reputation maintained when, toward the end of the book, commands to susceptible individuals are uttered in Latinate phrases — in essence, cyberpunk spells. I also this week read two graphic novels: the third volume of the Absolute Batman series, and the first volume of the Absolute Green Lantern series. There’s a moment in the latter where one character says to another, “They’re hoping an authority will swoop in,” all in caps, as comic book dialog often appears, and the word “authority” is in bold italics, which made me wonder if there will at some point be an Absolute Authority series (and yeah, I know there was an Absolute Authority that happened to have been the title of a collection of the original The Authority, but that’s not the same as an Authority supergroup under the new-ish Absolute banner).
