'In 1934,' Hugo said harshly, 'I was arrested by the Gestapo. They tortured me for days. Then they released me.'
'For a homosexual offence, the policeman repeated, unmoved.
He was sweating. A distant pounding of surf sounded in his ears as the blood seemed to rush to his head with the force of an exploding sea. Congested with rage, he hammered his bunched fists on the desk....
The official remained cold, serious, and impassive.
Crime for grammar enthusiasts?
"It reminds me a little of that scene in Death on Gokumon Island where the great detective Kosuke Kindaichi is troubled by the matter of an apparently strange use of a preposition, although in this case it's a matter of a demonstrative pronoun and a slightly odd use of the past participle...."
I would go with them to wash clothes in the river, and ...I liked showing the children photos of my home in São Paulo and of my grandmother and my friends. We would go for short walks to collect açaí. Over this period, I learned my first phrase in Tsai: "Hi, how are you?"
Later, Zapira explained that actually what I'd learned meant "My fart can kill alligators".
The commercialisation and privatisation of cultural life that began in the late 1980s snaked seamlessly into the neoliberalism of the 1990s and 2000s. Indeed, despite subsequent changes in leadership and then government, consumerism and individualism continue to rule, exemplified by our current reality, whereby feminist thought is often co-opted by big businesses that appropriate and monetise it.
#Catalogue
...the Kavanaugh moment was different. In a way, Trump had already betrayed the judicial impartiality Kavanaugh was trying to project. The antiabortion movement...had a specific legal target and Trump had joined its mission. He said all the judges on the list had been selected because they were "pro-life." And when asked... whether he wanted to see Roe reversed by the justices he had picked, Trump said it would happen "automatically".
We also salute the incredible determination of the artists ....in their singular resolve to keep making art, over lifetimes, and in their solidarity with each other. Some of these artists worked alone; others formed groups or collectives to challenge the institutional indifference to their new art. They dared to speak out and back to the world, often challenging each other's selectivity as much as institutional racism and sexism.
#Catalogue
[T]he Office of Refugee Resettlement... was closely tracking the pregnancies of girls crossing the border....
Over the course of Trump's administration, Lloyd's agency kept a spreadsheet documenting hundreds...
listing their ages, the type of sex-consensual or assault-the likely gestational age of the fetus, and where they were being held. Many were sixteen or seventeen years old, a few were fourteen. At least one was eleven.
I learn that the world I belong to - educated, civilised -can throw me out at any moment, for the smallest reason. Bad news on an X-ray, a stupid little shadow on my father's heart, an unfortunate encounter. During those years, the serial killer Guy Georges lurks in the parking garages of Paris, he kills the cousin of a friend of mine. Death, which we never thought about much, is there, close at hand.
pickLovely read.
Can also rec the damson gin liqueur (Skye distillery)
pickI've been setting up my categories over on LT, using snapshots from graphic novels. This one is going to be most pleasing for the art / exhibition catalogue category.
Have been trying over the past few years to increase my reading of (mostly) fiction in translation. Pleased with the LT pie chart for 2025.
Go where?' .....
'I don't know. I was thinking of somewhere warmer. The French Riviera, When the war's over, I mean.'
'I don't think it will ever be over', William said without emotion. In truth, it made little difference to him. The anxiety he felt for his own safety and freedom had somehow been shared out across the whole country and this provided a queer sort of comfort.
so-soThe latest Rhona MacLeod opens with a revenge killing: but revenge for what? Set at Xmas but not at all festive!
We'd been playing for the best part of an hour....
Our private bet was that the loser would organise the funeral. Cormac had sent me a link the week before to an article from the Irish Times. 'Funeral Costs Survive Recession's Deflationary Grip'. The cost of funerals had gone up over three hundred percent in a decade. It might as well have read: 'Despair! But Don't Do Away With Yerselves. "Tis Dear!"
Sssh this is an inner monologue 🤣🤣
I too wanted to be a detective...
What're you doing?
You know the Zodiac Killer?
.............
More not-festive reading
pickNot sure what made me pick this up, police procedural based around cold cases. Will look to read the next one when it comes out.
More not-festive reading...
'Sorry. I didn't mean...' She took a breath. 'I just sometimes think you don't really get...' She glanced across at him. 'Look, you know the numbers, guv. Two women are killed every week in the UK by a current or an ex partner. Stuff like that makes you second-guess yourself. It makes you scared.'
The coins that most spark my imagination are the worn silver ones that have been bent into a crude 'S' shape... They became fashionable around the end of the seventeenth century. The sixpence... was bent by the young man in front of his intended.... If she liked him, she would keep it. If she didn't, she would throw it away. Many must have been thrown into the river, because I have found a good handful of them on the foreshore.
I wasn't expecting quite so much detail about classic cars....
For me, the audiobook % asleep is much higher...(it's how I get to sleep, so not a reflection on the authors!)
In the shallow water where Cannon Street Bridge is today, there is a man with what looks like a hoe and two packhorses or donkeys. I don't know what he's doing, perhaps he's watering his beasts, or maybe he's searching the mud. Whatever he's doing, I've mudlarked his spot on many occasions...
('Agas' Map from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm )
I did not dare tell him that the secularists and the communists are all out to get at Islam with this intellectual assault on the minds of young people, and that Islam has come to be a stranger in the world, as it was in the beginning...
All those ideas were hanging on banners around the university for him to see and could be heard everywhere on the tapes and cassettes the Islamic bookstalls were playing.
In 1872 the wonderfully named Hiram Codd patented his solution to the problem of sealing fizzy-drink bottles. The marble in his bottle sat on a glass 'shelf' within a specially designed pinched neck...
To pour the drink the marble was pushed back into the bottle using a little plunger or by giving it a swift bash on something, which is said to have given rise to the term 'codswallop'.
Went to See It's a Wonderful Life at the cinema. Of course, as powerful as ever.
This scene made me laugh though: instead of marrying George, "poor" Mary became a librarian... ?? So she gets to read all day instead of bringing up four kids whilst G is stuck at the Saving & Loan?
#Unpopular opinion. Finding this a bit trite.
The camp's sandy alleyways have so far only led her round in circles, like a maze, always back to where she started. The only route that didn't feel like it was a trick was the one to school each morning. She strode towards it, proudly, rebelliously, convinced it would lead her out of there, in the end, to finish her studies elsewhere.
She cannot hear the chaos of her five sisters running around her....
She is too engrossed in her books.
I went to do some Xmas shopping, and somehow also came home with some books for me...
The letter writer suggests some New Year's Resolutions...
Not exactly "festive" reading!
[It's] Les Misérables, it was taken off the market, I managed to get a few copies before they shredded them...
What's it about?"
"A man who, out of starvation, steals a loaf of bread and is hounded by the police for the rest of his life. SAVAK thinks the book might miror some things in our society."
I put it in my scholbag and headed home....
How strange that in our culture books were considered dangerous...
Visit to a beautiful bookshop in #Chorley
Bonus: a 3 piece band playing Xmas songs. Upstairs there was a wreath making class. Got started on the Xmas presents.
https://www.ebbandflobookshop.co.uk/
Even in the seemingly endless terror of middle school...
When the final report of the Commission of investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was published in 2020 it caused an outcry, because of its assessment that those who bore the greatest responsibility for the horror and cruelty experienced by so many women and their children were not officials of the Catholic Church and the state, but the women's families instead.
She [Clair's mother] has built her sense of herself through these stories and at this stage - she's over ninety... questions aren't helpful. I ask them anyway, my sceptical, disenchanting questions. I go further and I actually check facts... Sometimes I come back to her with evidence that proves that what she remembers or what she heard can't have happened that way. She is never pleased about this. Yet she keeps feeding me stories.
pickHonest account of breast cancer treatment on the NHS, with humour but still pretty brutal. The author was 37 when diagnosed.
They used to meet here outside the Konsum when they came home from work, from the cooperative or the fields. They used to drink beer and talk, sometimes they drank beer and didn't talk, before they went back to their farms and into their houses. Fred, Wee Henry, Walfried, Jochen Schuster and Jochen Meyer - all long gone now or dead.
He wants to remember their faces and their voices...
"Yeah, that's how to do it, Duffy," I said to myself. Maybe my last case, like Poirot's would be the one where the bloody detective did it.
"What are you thinking, Sean?" Crabbie asked.
"Heat death of the universe, entropy, decay, the utter pointlessness of police work."
"The usual then?"
"Aye."
Before I discard my past I'll write it down...
We couldn't provide any services, since there was hardly any social housing left and a million people were on the waiting list, but we could increase the paper trail...
It had been the logic of bureaucracy since time immemorial...The Pharaohs... only undertook vast, pointless construction projects like the Pyramids of Giza in order to keep the populace busy during flood season....
to make sure they didn't start asking existential questions
