newsletter #64
This week’s newsletter is a collection of miscellanea. I like doing these little reflection round-ups roundups every few months, and have been slowly developing an unstructured-sort-of-structure for myself.
You’ll find enclosed: a reflection on the season, new illustrations, a recent favourite book, an album on repeat, and a look ahead.
I work in a university, and November tends to be the busiest, most chaotic time of the year. The last few weeks have gone by in a blur of meetings and readings and research. As the winter gets colder and darker, the world feels pretty grim and exhausting. Short days are very long. But lately, my friends and I have made an extra effort to find time to connect. We sit together out in the cold under the twinkling Christmas lights of Dublin, kept warm by mugs of posh hot chocolate or mulled wine and the feeling of being together, catching up and complaining about our weeks. I am so grateful for the little community I find myself in these days, and as much as I dread the winter and the dark parts of the year, these little moments make it all feel much lighter.
I’ve been trying to get back into making art, recently, and finding ways to practice and sketch and make things in my everyday life. Part of this has been relearning some old digital painting and drawing skills that I haven’t used in years. This week my subject has been local birds(my current favourite is the rook!). Assorted bits here:
a page of notes from class featuring a study of brick walls, sketches of irish corvids And my favourite project currently: these sketches and portraits of a few besties :-)
a set of digital sketchbook pages featuring three different cats(Posey, Harriet, and Baby Beatrice). I’ve become pretty entangled in my academic reading, but the best fiction work I’ve read recently has been The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. As part of Banks’ Culture series, this science fiction novel is incredibly inventive, clever, and well written. The novel follows a man who is an expert games player — a futuristic sort of chess grand master who can beat anyone in the Culture at just about any game—who, dissatisfied with his life, gets involved in a dangerous mission to learn a new game and enter a championship in a foreign empire. The games at play are not just the games of chance and logic he is used to, but language games, political games, intellectual games, and he find the stakes raised in unexpected ways that challenge everything he knows as the championship goes on and the novel unfolds. I loved the speculative setting of this story, its engagement with questions of ethics, technologies, and politics, both real and imagined.
I’ve been listening on repeat to a new-to-me album — Himiko Kikuchi’s Flying Beagle. This 1987 Japanese jazz-fusion classic is an absolute delight, from its silly album art to its charming, quirky track titles(“Ducky Ducky,” “Baby Talk”, “Look Your Back!”), but the music itself is what really makes it a stand out— groovy, smooth, and energetic, the sound of this album brings together many of the best elements of this genre and era of music. Kikuchi’s jazz piano and keyboard playing is a particular highlight. My current favourite track is “Seagull and Clouds”, which features a brass melody, soft guitar, keyboard, etc. and a perfect jazzy sound that I cannot stop listening to. Close runner up is “Sand Storm” which I think sounds like if one of Vince Guaraldi’s “Charlie Brown” soundtracks was turned into an action-adventure video game.
And up next: Cloudtopia publishes (most) fridays at 11:11
an update to my series “the strand”, where we read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories — this will be our “holiday special”, focusing on one of my favourites, “The Blue Carbuncle”. And looking even further ahead, we’ll be starting The Return of Sherlock Holmes in the new year!
how to recognise bad science and why AI research is full of scams
the 2024 Review(Cloudtopia wrapped)
and, as always, more to come…
until then,
isobel