Schrödinger's Strudels
‘A strudel once closed should never be opened.’
In the last week I’ve discovered that this is a maxim unlikely to gain traction, although the pastry has. Googling apple strudel’s popularity, I found the Apple Strudel Consumption Trends, Analysis and Statistics Report 2023 which relAIbly informed me that ‘Social conversations about apple strudel have increased by 41.88%.’
“Increased since when?” I hear you ask.
Unclear.
The source of this invaluable knowledge was an AI generated platform for the food and beverage industry. GPT’s sticky toffee mitts were all over it—'the dominating diet for Seafood is Vegan.’ A message popped up: ‘Feeling overwhelmed? We get it, you just want easy-to-understand seafood insights.’ Yes. My heart’s desire, once wavering, is now certain.
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AS IF BY MAGIC
Yesterday I went to a magic show. I’m not entirely sure I have ever seen live magic before. As a small child I remember watching Paul Daniels, in tux and toupée, dismember Debbie McGee on TV, sawing her in half and putting her back together. I don’t know that I was much impressed by it. I suppose that I must also have seen close-up magic performed at birthday parties by children’s entertainers, specialists in retrieving coins from unlikely places. I don’t know that I was much impressed by that either. We tend to assume that children are dazzled by magic. But magic, of both the big-box and the close-up variety, depends for its effect on the audience having a solid understanding of where the line between the possible and the impossible is drawn, and as a child I think I lacked such an understanding. After all, almost every day something happened that I had never known to happen before, and so the realm of the possible grew and that of the impossible shrank.
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AT GUNNERSBURY CEMETERY
Gunnersbury Cemetery, in the west London borough of Hounslow, is a perfectly pleasant spot to spend eternity. Not a quiet spot, certainly, since it’s wedged between the A406 and the Chiswick Flyover (part of the M4), and the rumble of traffic is unstinting day and night, accompanied during the day by clanging and banging from the sempiternal construction works around the motorway. No quiet country churchyard, this, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. Nor does it have the grandeur or eccentricity of some of London’s other cemeteries—Brompton, say, or Highgate—with their weeping angels, winged Sphinxes and dilapidated mausolea, raised by whiskered patriarchs to honour their pallid, tubercular wives. The word municipal always comes to mind when I visit, which is often these days.
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FORKS IN THE ROAD
I’m 8 years old, in the front seat of my mum’s car. She’s driving us over to pick my older brother up from school. Little Creatures, the mid-80s album by Talking Heads, is on the cassette player. I’ve never heard music in this way before. This music is perfect. It fulfils a need I didn’t even know I had, for the very first time. I remember my elbow involuntarily sort of twitching as I was sat there in the car. Something’s hitting deep, some synapses waking up. And staring at the album cover, with its bright, crude sunny painting of the band surrounded by leaning towers of Babel, David Byrne in his underwear with the world on his back. In all this, I was taught some of the most important lessons I had as a kid - that art doesn’t need to tell you anything, doesn’t need to be technically adept. That the good stuff isn’t sensible. It just has to … resonate.
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THOUGHTS ON BOOKS
This is a series of essays about books.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin was published in 1956.
Giovanni’s Room is arguably a study of human passion, but the words ‘humane’ and ‘compassion’ more readily spring to mind when thinking about it. It is suffused with a tenderness which makes it profoundly moving, and which is why, in my view, the suffering of the narrator, David, has such an effect upon the reader.
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LUCIFER
Darkly I shine, in the wind, I, God’s fire
A star shrieking, descending, through the deafness of night
At the sombre-most summit I mourn thwarted desire,
And with the sparks of my pain, red aurora, ignite.
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NED KELLY'S DYBBUK, OR THOUGHTS ON EMPATHY IN ART
At the end of The True History of the Kelly Gang, Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s magnificent novel of the same name, Thomas Curnow, a hostage who survives the gang’s chaotic last stand at the Glenrowan Inn, gives a speech to a fancy crowd in a fancy room. His audience wear the uniform of power – grey beards and starched collars, bejewelled consorts, diplomatic sashes and medals pinned to frock coats. Distinguished looking gentlemen all. Curnow himself is a distinguished looking gentleman (the actor, Jacob Collins-Levy, has the sort of looks that make him convincing as a Tudor king or underworld kingpin). His speech begins with a rebuke: Australia, he says, has no George Washington, no Thomas Jefferson; the closest thing it has to a national icon is a horse thief turned cop killer. Unless Australia can find other, more edifying stories to tell about itself, it will, he cautions, remain beyond the pale of respectability.
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THOUGHTS ON BOOKS
This is a series of essays about books.
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir) was first published in 1915.
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
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ON BELONGING
Maybe it’s why we do it all, what’s deeply underneath the choices we make, the ways we make the decisions we do, take the paths we take, even when it ends up creating the opposite of our intentions, even when we accidentally push away what we really wanted to attract…everybody wants to belong. So many of our daily struggles, our yearly quests and the wide sweeps of our character arcs are about chasing the glow of belonging, of being part of something, a community, a crew, a family of whatever kind (including those crews made up specifically of those rejecting other crews).
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IT JUST IS.
There’s a video on the internet that is, I would say, a perfect piece of art. It’s a recording of the final song of the final gig by the experimental band COIL, performed in Dublin in October 2004.
The song is called ‘Going Up’, which was a phrase that the couple at the centre of COIL — John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson — used as a joking euphemism for death. In what turned out to be his and COIL’s final live performance, Balance adlibs some lyrics that seem to shade into a statement of a readiness for, and resignation to, death — ‘are you ready to go now?’ And then, finally: ‘It just is.’
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LIKE A DREAM I CAN’T STOP DREAMING
This is a piece about watching birds. Years ago I used to write zines about music, about local punk bands. But now I don't want to write about music so much anymore, so I thought instead I'd like to write about something else which can easily take over waking thoughts, and dreams, and be a point of weird obsession if you're inclined that way. But it's also about how being into watching birds is different, special, and in some ways unique.
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ON CORPSES, MAINLY ANIMAL
The Franco-Bulgarian psychoanalyst and (here I beg your indulgence, anticipating rolling eyes) critical theorist, Julia Kristeva, describes the corpse as the paradigmatic abject object: ‘The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. […] The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection.’
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