Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
Interestingly the author decides to go chill out for a while in Yunnan province, which is apparently known for having a laid back culture. This was also written about in Dan Wang's book Breakneck, which I just finished. A place I had never heard of!
a note about I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
This was interesting but not revelatory: stories from working in the last-mile logistics world in China, where you can get a LOT more stuff delivered to you quickly. The best parts were there, which I assume were the original blog posts that went viral in China. And then, because he got a book deal, there is a significant amount of padding to turn it into a whole book - notes on every job the author has ever had.
a note about I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
However! This did leave me with a specific idea that has been referenced over and over again between Erika and I. The titular Burntcoat in the book is a cheap, large warehouse that the artist acquires - it becomes a big studio space for her artwork, and the manager's upper offices in the warehouse become a bohemian apartment for her - barely heated, sparsely furnished, but obviously becomes home over time. This is honestly a kind of dream of ours now: a warehouse to make big ambitious art in, and a spot to crash in for extended periods. We looked very closely at buying a building a couple of years ago for this exact purpose, and it's still on the vision board.
So, in the way that William Gibson can capture a whole idea in a tight phrase (eg CPUs), we now talk about this future space as our Burntcoat.
a note about Burntcoat
Picked this up because Hall's previous book Burntcoat generated one of those core references between E and I. It's a series of interlinked(?) or overlapping (?) stories that all relate to Helm, England's only 'named wind'. I'm 1/4 in and it's great. Hall is obviously a great writer.
a note about Helm
And we certainly HAVE all seven books now, so I know we bought them to read at bedtimes with the kids. Looks like I just never entered the other ones!
a note about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
I also liked to stroll around the Lianhua Supermarket there, and I would while away my days off in IKEA, because it was nearby and had AC. I'd find a couch and curl up for a nap, which nobody seemed to mind at first, but eventually the capitalists removed their mask of kindness and sent security to move along anyone who was sleeping—because you can't wake up someone only pretending to be asleep, the only ones disturbed were those of us genuinely there to get some rest.
I didn't buy furniture in the store, but I often took advantage of the Absolut Vodka promotion in the first-floor food shop. A bottle of vodka cost around one hundred yuan on discount and came with a free bottle of juice. I'd then spend the evening sitting by my window drinking and looking out at the bustling streets. I felt especially serene in those moments. Though this might have just been the alcohol.an excerpt from I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
[raiding the pantry for a midnight adventure] Finally they seized an enormous box of chocolate biscuits. "They must be Miss Gozzling's," said Emma, giggling. "She never gives any to us. We'd better call her Miss Guzzling!" and these they removed without conscience or care, though before they had tried not to make their taking too obvious. But Charlotte had a faint twinge of shame about Miss Gozzling, thinking how kind she could be and how terrible to have so many chins.
an excerpt from The Summer Birds
The popular conception of the ancient architects as intellectual supermen has to be considerably modified when an unprejudiced study is made of their works. Amazing as it may seem, no advance was made in their mechanical methods from the IVth dynasty onwards, and it is difficult to determine what was the factor which enabled them to make their early pro-gress. The Egyptian mind was not, in matters unconnected with religion, speculative. His mathematics were so cumbersome as to be inadequate for any really refined calculation, and were rigidly practical. He could use primitive appliances with an almost incredible refinement and was a superb organizer of labour-therein lay his genius. The more, however, his constructional methods are studied, the more one is convinced that if any detail in a piece of work has to be explained by an apparatus of any com-plication, then that explanation is certainly wrong.
an excerpt from Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture
Sometimes, I think I’m merely a shadow. When I feel that way, I get this restless feeling, like I’m simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me.
an excerpt from The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Between Egypt and North Mesopotamia there were close, though not always amicable, relations from the fifteenth century B.c. onwards, and it is incredible that Assyria should have known the roller and not Egypt. A nation which moved blocks and which never deduced the value of a roller for reducing friction from such homely occurrences as slipping on a walking-stick left on the floor would be sub-human in intellect, which the Egyptians certainly were not.
an excerpt from Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture