๐ Weather Report / October
- October skipped the negotiations and clicked straight into winter mode. The air has gone crisp, and the days are noticeably shorter: the light now packs up before dinner is over. The one upside is that sunrise has slowed down to a civilised hour, so I get to watch it with coffee in hand. The geese are gone. A robin has moved into the garden for the season and behaves like it holds the lease. The bird feeders are back up. A fat ball lasts about a day and a half, and I have accepted my role as unpaid catering staff. It rains mostly in the evenings, against the windows, which is the one weather service I never complain about.
๐ Reading
- Nothing. In September I wrote that six hundred years of tarot history didn't need to be finished by October, and I have honoured that with unusual discipline. I did not read a single page. The book is still on the table, looking patient.
๐ฎ Playing
- Also nothing. Every free hour went into my journal and into making my own stickers, which turns out to be a game with no save points and a terrible economy. The farm in Stardew Valley already knew I had a job. Now it knows about the stickers too.
๐จ Looking at
- Renรฉ Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1929). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A carefully painted pipe, and under it, in neat schoolroom handwriting: Ceci n'est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. I found this hilarious all month. He's right, obviously. You can't fill it and you can't smoke it, and Magritte reportedly said that if he had written "this is a pipe" he would have been lying. It is the most famous "this is not" sentence in art history, and it is nearly a hundred years old. I spend a lot of time around machines that produce very convincing pictures of things, so the joke has aged suspiciously well.
๐๏ธ Blogroll
๐ Weather Report / September
- September in Norway runs all four seasons before lunch. You leave the house in a winter jacket, take it off by ten, look for a t-shirt at noon, and by three you're back in the jacket wondering what you did to deserve this. Nothing about it is reliable. Rain with real commitment, then sunshine, then a wind that seems personally offended, then rain again, all inside one afternoon. The forecast has given up pretending and just lists every icon it owns. The geese are getting organised for departure. I am not.
๐ Reading
- Still The Library of Esoterica: Tarot. Slowly, as promised. Six hundred years doesn't need to be finished by October.
๐ฎ Playing
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, properly this time. It was here in February and March, and I am back for the full run. Stardew Valley continues on the side at the pace of a farm that knows I have a job.
๐จ Looking at
- Henri Rousseau, Eiffel Tower at Sunset. I was missing Paris and went looking for art events, the way you check on someone you can't visit, and found this instead. I'm not an artsy person, but the technique did something to me โ flat, warm, a little wrong in the way that's obviously on purpose. I thought I could see Picasso in it, Delaunay, maybe Sisley. Then I read the bio. Rousseau was a toll collector with no training at all, who painted jungles he'd never seen from a bench in a botanical garden. I hadn't spotted his influences. I'd spotted the people he influenced. I stayed a lot longer than I meant to. There may be a print in this cottage soon.
๐๏ธ Blogroll
โ๏ธ Weather Report / August
- The light started leaving. Nobody announces it, there's no notification, you just look up one evening and the sky has committed to darkness before you agreed to it. August is when you first feel the slope: four minutes a day, compounding, quietly repossessing the midnight sky that felt permanent three weeks ago. The weather has settled into its late-summer register, 15ยฐC and rain, thunder scheduled for breakfast. The midges have not left. The seagulls are done with mating season and have moved on to their true calling, which is standing on things and screaming. The forest is paying out, though. Blueberries and raspberries, both ready, both free, both requiring you to accept that you will be eaten while eating. School starts on the 17th, so the holiday is in its final act and everyone in this house can feel it without anyone saying so.
๐ Reading
- The Library of Esoterica: Tarot, ed. Jessica Hundley. Taschen. A gift, and the founding volume of the series. Six hundred years of people trying to explain themselves to themselves with pictures. I am reading it slowly, which for me is a form of respect.
๐ฎ Playing
- Fields of Mistria. Casually, and mostly to see how it's built. Another farm, another small town, another set of villagers whose birthdays I will absolutely forget.
๐จ Looking at
- The Moon, by MelazergArt. Digital, and the most cheerful version of this card I have ever seen. A koi curls around a crescent moon, gold and magenta, a single star suspended between them like a held breath. The artist calls it a dormant crescent, which is the right word: the moon has its eyes closed, and it reads as rest rather than menace. What gets me is the fish. In the Rider-Waite Moon a crayfish hauls itself out of dark water while two dogs howl, and the whole card is about what surfaces when the light is unreliable. Here the water creature is a koi, luminous, at the top of the frame. Same card, same illusions, and someone decided the unconscious could be tender.
Prints: artpal.com/melazerg
๐๏ธ Blogroll
โ๏ธ Weather Report / July
- June happened at full speed and never filed its paperwork. Consider this a double issue.
The bugs arrived, exactly as February-me prophesied. I wrote that I'd long for the frozen hellscape again and I am typing this with antihistamines in my blood, because Norwegian biting midges treat my skin as an all-you-can-eat buffet with no reservation required. We got one arrogant week of 25ยฐC and then summer remembered where it lives: 17ยฐC, rain with intent, thunder scheduled for tonight like a licensed public service. The sun refuses to set at a reasonable hour, so the sky dims politely around midnight and calls it a day. The town, meanwhile, has been seized by seagulls in mating season. One of them built her nest on the ground, photo below, which in this economy is either a bold real estate decision or a warning.
๐ Reading
- Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence. A reread. My horoscope said "Don't: Scandal" so I picked up the book that got dragged into an obscenity trial. Balance.
๐ฎ Playing
- Stardew Valley. The farm doesn't care about model releases, export controls, or discourse. The parsnips grow. This is the whole review.
๐ผ๏ธ Looking at
- Salvador Dalรญ, Apotheosis (1961). A watercolor he painted as a set design for an opera so chaotic that Dalรญ ended up throwing paint at the audience dressed as a gondolier, and then sued the producer. Melting clocks, of course. It was one of five. Four hang in a museum in Indianapolis. The fifth is missing, and nobody knows where it went. I think about the fifth one a lot.
๐๏ธ Blogroll
๐ค๏ธ Weather Report / May
- Spring finally stopped lying. It's real this time โ 15ยฐC, actual sun, actual warmth, actual reason to leave the house. The terrace is back in commission and the Weber Q has reclaimed its throne in the grill shelter like a small charcoal pope. The days are getting obscenely long. The sun sets at like 22:00 and rises before you've finished regretting last night's screen time. Norwegians are outside in shorts the moment it hits 12ยฐC like recently thawed mammals who forgot how legs work. The geese are still here. Still loud.
๐ Reading
- Eleven Minutes / Paulo Coelho I went from a brutally honest fairytale about war and magic to a brutally honest story about a woman navigating desire, loneliness, and self-discovery through experiences most people are too polite to talk about at dinner. My reading list is basically emotional whiplash as a hobby.
๐ฎ Playing
- Blue Prince
๐๏ธ Blogroll
๐จ Looking at
- Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1910. Munch Museum, Oslo. The most Norwegian painting in existence and it's just a person on a bridge having the exact reaction I have when my calendar sends me a Monday morning notification. Everyone talks about the scream but nobody talks about the two figures in the background who kept walking. Sometimes you're the scream. Sometimes you're the people who didn't stop. Munch painted this four different times because apparently once wasn't enough to get the existential dread out of his system. I respect the commitment.
๐ง๏ธ Weather Report / April
- The days wake up colorful and end in rain and misery. Norwegian April is a con artist in a sundress, she shows up at 7 AM with blue skies and birdsong and by 2 PM she's throwing horizontal rain at you like a personal grudge. The snow is mostly gone, replaced by mud and a kind of aggressive optimism from people who should know better by now. Everything is technically growing. Nothing is warm. The jackets come off and go back on four times a day. I have trust issues and they are all weather-related.
๐ Reading
- Freud and Beyond I went from reading romantasy under peer pressure to reading psychoanalytic theory voluntarily. I don't know what that says about me but Freud probably would.
๐ฎ Playing
- Blue Prince
๐๏ธ Blogroll
๐จ Looking at
Stanislav Sidorov, Rain in the City. All that chaos, all that color, everyone just pushing through it. I don't live in a city. I live in a tiny coastal town where April mornings lie to your face and afternoons drown you. But this painting gets it. The umbrella is not optimism. It's stubbornness.
๐ค๏ธ Weather Report / March
- The sun is back but it's a liar. Norway enters its annual "fake spring" arc where the light says April but the wind says February and the snow melts into sad, muddy sorbet that nobody ordered. You can see the sun now. You can also get frostbite if you stand still for four minutes. The geese are back, thousands of them, honking with the confidence of creatures who didn't spend three months questioning their vitamin D levels. Days are longer. Morale is cautiously, suspiciously higher. I don't trust it. Neither should you.
๐ Reading
- A Court of Thorns and Roses Yes, THAT one. I was bullied into this by someone whose literary judgment I otherwise respect. The jury is still out and currently leaning toward a mistrial. But I said I'd give it a chance, so here I am. Giving it a chance. Aggressively.
๐ฎ Playing
- Clair Obscure: Expedition 33
๐๏ธ Blogroll
๐จ Looking at
Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1831. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. I've seen this image a thousand times and it still makes my chest tight. The mountain sits there, small and still, while everything around it loses its mind. I relate to both the mountain and the wave depending on the hour.
โ๏ธ Weather Report / February
- There is never enough coffee and always too much snow. Winter is beautiful if you're watching it from behind glass with a hot cup. Step outside and it's just frozen suffering with aesthetics. But I won't complain too loudly because in five months the bugs arrive and I'll be longing for this frozen hellscape again. Thermodynamics says energy can't be created or destroyed and yet every Norwegian winter seems to destroy mine entirely. Send caffeine.*
๐ Reading
- The Elegant Universe
๐ฎ Playing
- Clair Obscure: Expedition 33
๐๏ธ Blogroll
๐จ Looking at
I sat in front of this for six hours and forgot I had legs. Claude Monet, Reflets d'arbres, 1920โ1926. Musรฉe de l'Orangerie, Paris.