I’m working but only half-days and the rest of the time, I’m just lashing out where chance and instinct take me. I watch the crazy brilliance of the German Kleo spy thriller series. I’m more than partway through the thoroughly creepy and tense series The Patient, with Steve Carell as therapist to a serial killer. Tim Goodman persuaded me to see Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is so wild in concepts and execution that no one else around me had any interest, and guess what? It’s brilliant, just what an existentialist needs in these troubled times. A cult folk-power-pop outfit, Robinson & Woltil, has a new album out, Shadow Play, and listen repeatedly to this wondrous track: “On the Way to My Appointment with Death,” another existential weepy. The Quiet Girl is a movie so plot-thin that I should hate it, but, hey, it’s brilliant and that leads me to Small Things Like These, the latest book from Irish author Claire Keegan, which should, I believe, win this year’s Booker Prize. I peer into the abyss with IPCC scientist Joëlle Gergis (her Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope is simply brilliant) and Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit by Assaad Razzouk. What about the acerbic, hilarious new comic book by Tom Gauld, Revenge of the Librarians, eh? And a genuinely strange book combines stuff I haven’t read about for decades with the meaning of life, that is, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions by Sabine Hossenfelder.
All of that in a whirlwind, unpremeditated rush of desk/cafe/lounge activity. That’s what you do, I reckon, when the anxiety yips come yodeling.
PS – the image is a Tingle tree in southwest Western Australia.