Dead Battery

Partner picked me up from work. Her car battery died while she was parked up. We didn’t have any way to jump-start the thing, so I suggested we get ice cream and sit in the nearby park while we waited for breakdown to arrive.

Sitting on a bench in the sun, watching people pass by, the car issue seemed a happy inconvenience. Then breakdown arrived. Turned out the battery was “dead” dead and needed replacing. That took some of the joy away.

Later, I finished reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang. It was given to me by my sister as part of a semi-regular book swap we do. The Vegetarian is not a book about vegetarianism, but a savage thing about human impulses. It went some way to winning Han Kang the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature. I thought it was pretty good too.

Another good thing I read recently is The joy of being oneself by a blogger called sigkill, where they discussed the synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos.

Carlos has been a hero of mine for some time. To say that she’s an innovator in electronic music would be a significant understatement. She not only wrote the scores for films such as A Clockwork Orange and TRON, but played a role in developing the first commercially available Robert Moog synthesizer. Moreover, she did all this as a trans woman in the 1960s and 70s.

What I didn’t know about Wendy Carlos, though, is that she has a website - a delightful, DIY, smallweb-style website at that - where Wendy not only posts about instruments and music, but on an eclectic mix of her other interests too, including map making and solar eclipses.

I adore Wendy’s website and her approach to making art and following her interests. As sigkill writes, she remains someone who “refuses to pigeonhole herself into one thing,” always choosing instead to be unapologetically herself. And yeah, I think that’s something worth aspiring to.