Har du hunnit kolla något på The Macaulay Library? Världens största arkiv över djurläten, nu på nätet, I kid you not! Valrossar under vatten t.ex. låter helt fantastiskt. Eller lyssna på en inspelning från 1966, där man hör en strutsunge kvittra inifrån ett ägg.

De 14 punkterna för hur vi lever nu i Tom Morris “No, I’m not going to download your bullshit app” tangerar min senaste krönika i Biblioteksbladet.

Punkt 11:

Not be able to share the story with your friends because it’s not a page on the web with a Uniform Resource Indicator. Because why do you need universal addressability when you’ve got shiny spinny touchy magical things to rub your sweaty greasy fingers all over?

Om man ska lita på filmkritikern Amanda Shuberts analys av den kommande Anna Karenina-filmen (vilket man nog ska), så är den ett regissörsmässigt haveri men innehållandes storslaget skådespeleri av Keira Knightley som Anna:

As Anna, a woman as impulsive as she is consummately elegant,she shows five different expressions flash across her face before she chooses the words she is going to say. Knightley thrives in these roles where the cerebral and the erotic are at cross-purposes, where intellect and wit meet sexual surrender, because she’s an actress whose own intelligence and intuition spar on screen. Her performance in Anna Karenina is so powerful that it commands around her the movie that isn’t there.

Om jag anstränger mig kommer jag ha hunnit läsa klart boken den innan den går upp på bio.

Dan Hills långa essä och uppgörelse med “smarta städer”-ideologin är briljant läsning:

[T]he city’s primary raison d’etre is to be found amidst its citizens. If we look there, we find that there is more, much more, to urban life than efficiency. In fact, many of those primary drivers are intrinsically inefficient, or at least at a tangent to the entire idea of efficiency. Can a city be “smart” and inefficient at the same time? Perhaps this is a fundamental questions, unasked by smart city advocates.

Jag tror inte SL ens har försökt ställa den frågan.

Om loopandets estetik – Chris Baraniuk, ““The Wheel of the Devil”: On Vine, gifs and the power of the loop“:

The hypnosis of the loop, combined with the idea that, devoid of true beginning and end, it is somehow meaningless and self-defeating, is what makes a loop seem so uncanny. Nonsensical yet enthralling, the loop of zoetrope or gif is like a broken record in that it captures a moment in which time has been made to maniacally repeat itself. This narrative dissonance, this psychotic imagery which implicitly begs to be halted or somehow set free is at odds with all other un-looped media.

Grizzly Bear – Gun-Shy, slitscannad.

Ett spännande jobb på Spotify:

We are looking for talented engineers to take part in the formation of a brand new team – Enhanced Metadata. The mission of this team is to provide the best and richest music metadata there is, enabling a superior user experience. The team will build and maintain tools and infrastructure for matching and curating data consisting of millions of entities. Automatic processing, quality and scalability are key requirements for this work.

[via: Henrik på Facebook]

I could easily tell you that Kendrick Lamar’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” is one of the best songs to come from hip-hop in the last few years, and since I like grand statements, I might even give him the decade. Lamar’s style is uncanny: at times when he raps it sounds like a Congo Square bamboula, fueled by inflated tears. His lyrics deal with his mortality, his fears, and the futility of street life, and his phrasing is such that he seems to both pause and dervish over his well-selected beats, but that is not what makes Kendrick Lamar’s work important. What makes him important is the way in which the autobiographical good kid m.A.A.d city is so novelistic and so eloquently anchored in the literary blues tradition of which Ellison wrote. Lamar is equal parts oral historian and authorial presence, and more than many authors writing today, he has captured all of the pathos and grief of gun violence, poverty, and the families who carve their lives out amidst all of that chaos.

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah skriver långt och intressant om Kendrick Lamar hos Los Angeles Review of Books.

Elever till den sedan 2001 bortgångne författaren W.G. “Max” Sebald har samlat några av hans aforismer som dök upp i hans lektioner vid University of East Anglia. Där finns flera guldkorn, bl.a. de här (som egentligen säger samma sak):

Om skrivande:

• It’s hard to write something original about Napoleon, but one of his minor aides is another matter.