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days 88 – 105: including the comeback of lockdown, ackl; or, papa goff gets a payoff

what kind of report to make, not a record of the days, and this music playing, with its dark intimations, which make you yearn for WAP feat. Megan Thee Stallion and its easy innuendos of something beyond both sex and death. For so it must be. It must be further

day 74 – day 87 of the world winding up business

“When times are hard, like they are now, what’s the use of knowing stuff?” — the end of Cixin Liu’s Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Trans. Elizabeth Hanlon, (London, UK: Head of Zeus, 2020), 248). OPERATION LEGEND: “a sustained, systematic and coordinated law enforcement initiative across all federal law enforcement

days 62-73 showing 60% at 17:17

There is nothing “most beautiful and most wonderful” about the coronavirus, to return to Darwin’s words, but it, too, is a thing of nature. We cannot wish away our connection to it. — from LA Review of Books We cannot wish away our connection to COVID-19. Darwin, Karl Kusserow writes,

days 51-61 Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 25 September 1964 – 19 June 2020, RIP, and the friends he didn’t know he had

Kundera’s description of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, ’68: “A system was born (with no advance planning, almost by chance) that was truly unprecedented: the economy 100 percent nationalized, agriculture in the hands of cooperatives, nobody too rich, nobody too poor, schools and medicine for free, but also: the

days 40-50 – or, walking in circles

Doug McEachern, says his bio, in the book I have in my hand, left school wanting to be a writer. The book I have in my hand evidence he succeeded. Having left school, he was caught up in the ’60s. The bio puts it that he was “led astray by

days 31-39

My copy of Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read in its white card cover blue inside embossed with the logo of Fitzcarraldo Press, having taken as long as it does to push a ferryboat over a mountain, has arrived. The day of our return from Rotorua. Its translator says about

days 23 – 30: the week since

Talk–always hard to know how cheap–how dear–usually, Oh Dear –there is talk of the coming recession–“like none in our lifetime” (whose? a strange shared lifetime?)–and of the autocracies evolving from draconian measures adopted under exceptional and unprecedented circumstances. I don’t think this is the