Book, The Birth of African-American Culture: an Anthropological Perspective, Sidney W. Mints and Richard Price. Cover quote: "A classic. The most cogent and detailed attempt to think through what acculturation of Africans in the Americas was like." -Albert J. Raboteau.

Finished reading this

Paperback book. Glyph, a novel. Percival Everett, author of Erasure and I Am not Sidney Poitier.

Absolutely wolfed this one, with @stephenchase.bsky.social

Exlibris hardback, Race Men by Hazel Carby. No dust jacket.

I read this for the Du Bois commentary mainly, but writing on Robeson, Miles Davis, Danny Glover et al is interesting too. Using Samuel Delany as a counterpoint to Miles is undermined a bit, by the NAMBLA stuff. Maybe that came after this book, though.

NYRB classics paperback, Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq. Foreword by Richard Howard.

I hadn't read any JG before. This was very damp.

Paperback book in Peepal Tree's 'Caribbean Modern Classics' series, Edgar Mittelholzer, My Bones and My Flute, A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner

Spooky enough that it shaped my dreams last night! I'm not accustomed to reading ghost stories, and shouldn't have done so immediately before sleep.

Paperback book, Mohammed Mrabet, M'Hashish

Very short but diverting stories

Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon a novel, paperback book

Thrilling and knotty, about the knots, too.

Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, recent Faber paperback.

My evenings have been taken up with proposal-writing for the last week or so. I've not really been reading. But I have picked at this on bus journeys and in small nibbles here and there. Extraordinarily strange, moreso even than The Palm-Wine Drinkard, maybe.

The mastering plugins will have settings for vinyl, but if there's side-chaining earlier in the mix, it will still sound flatter. And side-chained compression is pretty much a compositional choice, the removal of which changes the whole vibe of the piece.

Yes! And this working better on music with less expensive production is the key to why independent music can sometimes survive the transition to vinyl more successfully.

When records were mono, the needle only had to track one waveform, up and down. With stereo records, it's more of a side-to-side thing, which is why lateral space, rather than depth of vinyl becomes the main issue.

individual tracks maximised, then the overall mix maximised. This means that there's no practical way to master it for vinyl when the music is mastered primarily to come out of a phone speaker. It's always going to sound flat compared to older music. 3/3

in the CD era, i.e. the difference between loudest and quietest was reduced. Where music is primarily mastered for streaming, this is further exaggerated, as it used to be on local radio adverts that would be compressed as anything to cut through. It's now a bit more sophisticated than that, with 2/

It's also to do with how the music is mastered. To fit the grooves on a record, the root mean squared value of the volume is used to guide how loud it will be pressed. The move to digital meant that the volume depended on the maximum volume. This meant that music tended to be more compressed 1/

Penguin Classic, Mary Butts, 'Armed with Madness'. Man Ray cover

Finished this one. Alternately mossy and vertiginous.

I am currently reading it, and can confirm.

Mary Butts? Growing up on the other side of the country, in Suffolk, it was common for people to use 'shew' as the past tense of 'show'.

Hardback book, 'My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours' by Nkem Nwankwo.

Finished reading this bitter, uproarious satire.

Penguin modern classics paperback, Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending.

Read another Selvon, Lonely Londoners sequel. Seems cruder, but there are layers to it.

Paperback book. Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse.

Borges' modesty and conservatism are occasionally tiresome, but they prevent him from falling into the trap of theorist-practitioner overreach. Strangely approaches, from quite a different angle, a point comparable to mid-Barthes in these lectures from '67/'68.

Paperback book, 'Histoire Extraordinaire' by Michel Butor. Cape Editions.

An odd extrapolation of an account by Charles Baudelaire of a dream into a 'life and works' exploration. Thankfully not psychoanalytical.

Paperback book, Édouard Glissant, The Fourth Century, a novel. Le Quatrième Siècle, translated by Betsy Wang. Picture of the African savannah on cover, while seeming odd, does make some sense even though the book is set in Martinique.

Felt good, taking my time with this. Glissant is so smart. Sort of want to run straight back to La Lezarde/The Ripening, which I read only about 18 months ago, and to which this holds an odd relationship.

Paperback book, Paul Beatty, Tuff. 'The funniest satire on US culture you'll ever read... Read Tuff for yourself and find out what's so funny' The Face.

Finished reading another Paul Beatty novel. Fun, like the others, somehow more optimistic?

Paperback book. Mikhail Bulgakov, Notes on a Cuff and Other Stories. New Translation.

Finished reading this. Bulgakov is always amusing and sometimes more.

Klee's drawing, Silver Moon-Mould Blossom 1921

Some of the drawings included exhibit a pleasing Malcy Duff-ishness.

Square paperback book. Paul Klee, On Modern Art. With an introduction by Herbert Read. Cover image is Klee's 'Migrating Fish's from 1926.

Nice little essay/lecture by Klee, particularly interesting on relationship between Romanticism and Modernism, and quite charming all in all.

Paperback book. Benjamín Labatut, 'When We Cease to Understand the World's. Pushkin Press. "A monstrous and brilliant book", Philip Pullman. "Mesmerising and revelatory", William Boyd. Winner English PEN Award. Shortlisted, The 2021 International Booker Prize.

Finished this strange book. Differing densities of fact and fiction throughout, indeterminate, like mass and wave in subatomic particles.

Paperback book, Joseph Roth, Flight Without End.

A curious variant on the flight from East to West traced in several of Roth's works. 'Do you think you could manage to tell me precisely what constitutes this culture which you claim to defend, even though it is in no way threatened from outside?'

Paperback book in the Dedalus European Classics series. The Red Laugh by Leonid Andreyev. Cover image is from Battleship Potemkin.

Grim depiction of war and the spread of madness. Not read Andreyev before, but easy to read in his expressionism a hinge between 19th and 20th century Russian literature.

Paperback book, Merle Hodge, Crick Crack Monkey.

I read this today. It's sharp, and sad.