20 Sep 2023
Note: This book review has no spoilers!
I ordered the paperback edition on Amazon, translated by Constance Garnett. After a few days I noticed it would take a couple of weeks to arrive, so I got the digital version in the meantime, as I didn’t want to be late for our monthly book club.
The introduction was a bit overly complex, too much information about the stories which you haven’t even read. I feel like it should have been an afterword as opposed to a foreword or introduction.
I feel like it was a hard book to get into at first, some chapters are easy but some felt very complicated, the writing style felt a bit heavy sometimes. If words could wear a trenchcoat on a hot humid day, some of the chapters felt that way.
Yet after reading about 100 pages of the digital version (which had around 500) I received the actual book… and I hadn’t noticed it was translated by Constance Garnett, while the ebook was translated by Richard Freeborn!
They were translated and written in such different styles that when I started reading the physical book I found it unreadable. It was such a shock as the style and expression were too different; I was finding the writing style of the digital edition slightly humorous in some ways, which felt lacking in the version by Constance Garnett, the tone is that of a very serious work, with more complicated sentence structures and grammar.
So for the rest of the book I alternated between the digital version and the physical book, depending on where I was. It was a rather interesting experience, as it felt like the author had split personalities… a quite novel way to digesting a book!
I found this paragraph utterly stunning, with a vivid visual quality that I find lacking in most modern literature:
Imagine to yourself a man of about forty-five, tall and lean, with a
long delicate nose, a narrow forehead, little grey eyes, dishevelled
hair and wide, scornful lips. This man used to go about winter and
summer in a yellowish nankeen coat of German cut, but belted with
a sash; he wore wide blue trousers and a cap edged with astrakhan
which had been given him, on a jovial occasion, by a bankrupt
landowner
I feel like a lot of modern literature attempts to embelish the visual qualities of a character by overly utilising adjectives, when sometimes you need to think outside the box a bit. Or it could just be the complexity of the character dictates how one should describe them. Maybe I’m overthinking this.
The biggest 4 takeaways I got from the book:
- The treatment of women and children in general, and the class structure and discrimination are horrible
- It gives a very intense recollection of scenes and moments in a period of time, and from the perspective of hunters which is something that would have never crossed my mind before to research or listen about… the lifestyle, sometimes ending up here or there, without much thought about time or place, is just so different from modern times with 9 to 5 jobs
- English has such a vast vocabulary, and given that there are such incredibly massive ways of arranging them to construct beautiful depictions of scenes saddens me, as the author obviously has a knack for creating such visual descriptions which I can only admire and wish I had but a tenth of their ability
- The literary style and complexity, but also the constant references to wealth versus poverty, and french popping up everywhere, reminded me so much of War and Peace, which I never fully read unfortunately
I find this review / article to be much more fulfilling and better researched than my own subjective opinion, so if you’d like a broader context of the book and environment in which it was written, I’d recommend having a read through that brief article - 7.5/10
19 Sep 2023
I watch from the end of the hallway the window panes in the kitchen, the glowing light like an orange candle at play, or a bronze saucepan in the glistening sun of a hot noon in May.
The colours, warm with all sorts of shades, from bronze, to gold, to rust, to clay.
As I got up from bed, on the other side of the house, I couldn’t yet see the light, yet as I walked out into the hallway it mesmerised me, what a captivating sight.
I paused to contemplate, to think about the day that would promptly begin: The meetings to come, the mornings and goodbyes, the notifications, the coming and going, the emails and questions, the half-truths and lies.
The flow of questions and 1-on-1s, the emails, clicks, and calls. Yet in this moment, standing here, I gaze, this is but mine.
The mental haze, it dissipates, and right now all is fine. I make my way to the kitchen, all around, pure silence, I listen.
Past the door, to the coffee maker, I look outside, finally, as I waver.
In this moment, I hate her! The sun… the sky… the day baiter! All along it was but the street lights!
Dawn will come around, a bit later.
08 Sep 2023
Both physically and on the internet.
Physically I went to Ireland for 6 months which was quite an interesting experience. I lived in the beautiful little town of Carrick-on-Shannon, about 2/3 of the way between Dublin and Sligo.
The thing that will stay with me the most was the absolute lack of running infrastructure when leaving any town, the roads are built for cars, not for bikes nor for runners. I’ll discuss this soon in a video on YouTube however, as I’d like to dive a bit deeper on the matter of goals, curiosity, and long-term health benefits.
Other than that, it was really nice to disconnect for a while from being in a larger city. Living next to a river, with beautiful
green rolling hills nearby, gives you a sense of freedom, and each breath feels cleaner, more fulfilling.
That said, I moved back to Belgium a few months ago, new place, new mindset. It is weird moving from a house to an apartment; you lose the sense of “I can yell at any time and it’s all going to be fine” and replace it with “I should probably lower my voice, the neighbors might get mad”; yet at times you are surprised with another fierce sensation of “Will you stop it with the noise already?” as well as the every-so-slightly-infuriating “where is that smell coming from?!?”.
Challenges, everywhere we go.
Incidentally, on the internet I also moved. After having this blog hosted for nearly 2 decades on Startlogic; they tried to bump the price yet again after being acquired by web.com, in the past few years it went from around 120 USD/year, to 220, and now about 300 after taxes. In a world where you can host static websites for free, it makes no sense. Thus I foray into the world of Jekyll on Github Pages.
In any case, I plan on posting here every now and then; I’ve been very lax with keeping this blog up to date. But as it is now in Markdown, and a git push away, it makes things slightly easier to maintain.
24 Jul 2020
The walls of your eyelids, painted dreams, colours, textures, moving pictures, except when you return, you see red pulsating structures… in this in-between state, you let go, you dream, you come back, red, what’s the difference? where do you dream? what is an image? where’s the seam? the border between imagination and what we perceive. If we can dream asleep, can we dream awake? not as in daydreaming, but as in visions, what can I believe? Our mind’s a thief, when we let it, in consciousness we bend it, twist it to our needs, but sometimes doubt and questions seep through, and you stand in disbelief, is this real, or are these words and sights not really what they seem? I dream, I live, I dream, I live. I dream.
15 Nov 2019
Antimony is out now! You can check it out here:
Thank you so much for all the support, I love it when I receive comments about my tracks, or when you share my music with other people. If often look at the stats in Spotify and find people streaming it from all sorts of places… Super cool!
Story
Setting: Earth, 2010s.
Concept: An album about computers, politics and people.
Mission: To dive into the not-so-subtle ways technology and politics are shaping (or misshaping) modern society, and the thunderous impact these cause on our minds and personalities.
Reason: I was working on remastering my older albums which I always disliked as they had no compression, no EQing, no proper vocals nor thoughtful lyrics. Karaf was born in the same way, from another album.
This project was supposed to be a week-long remaster + re-release of Methane Dreams, but the longer I worked on it, the more I realised I could re-work, re-write, re-imagine. I wanted to bring to life ideas and thought of how I imagined it sounding when I originally wrote it, but was incapable of doing back then (technically and knowledge-wise).
Inspiration: Muse, Grace Kelly & Adam Neely, Tears for Fears, Lakey Inspired
Special thanks: PsicoactivaTV, Jaime Roeland, K., PJ3, and everyone else who helped with ideas, contributions, lyrics, stories, vocals, etc.