Another month has rolled impossibly by. What happened to all those days?

It has been a lot of fun, though... We have been:

-- celebrating steam trains and bonfires and the Manx language;


-- doing an array of awesomely bird- and flower-filled railway walks;



-- visiting Port Erin again;
-- climbing Slieau Ruy and Greeba (a really cracking walk);
-- remembering a bit of history in the shape of an internment camp and a Victorian camera obscura;
-- taking in a TT practice and a rest home for horses;
-- and doing lots and lots of local circuits.



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The Velvet Cushion is still running behind. When will it ever not be?

But there was lots to enjoy:

-- I finally finished Cane, by Jean Toomer. I found it a struggle, but it's worth persisting for the insight you gain into Black America in the early years of the 20th century. Also part of the Harlem Renaissance, and not at all a struggle, was Nella Larsen's Passing: Short; gripping; brilliant.

-- In the company of Simon Haisell's Footnotes & Tangents online book group, I completed a re-read of Pat Barker's Regeneration. And there were so many offshoots from this that it inspired its own Book notes post.

-- Because I can't resist a list, there was also a Book notes response to that Guardian 100 best novels compilation (these things never fail to be controversial, but I'm always keen to know what I might be missing out on...)

-- I somehow didn't get on with Mrs Pargeter's Package by Simon Brett, but I think I've not seen the best of this author, so will persist.

-- I have become slightly ambivalent about Ali Smith. But I had to finish her Seasonal Quartet by reading Summer. And, ultimately, she is always worth it, and I always learn lots.




-- From the get-go, I loved Joseph O'Connor's Shadowplay, which offers an immensely entertaining glimpse into the larger-than-life world of Dracula-creator Bram Stoker. Ditto with Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a tension-filled account (with feminist overtones) of the lives of two rather scary sisters.

-- And my bit of Malaysia for this month was Tash Aw's The South. Perceptive, understated, and elegiac, this was a wonderful novel, and I'm looking forward to the other three in the planned quartet.

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Links I liked:

-- Brent and Michael, nomads for almost a decade, discuss the old conundrum: Where do we want to end up? Their conclusion (not surprisingly) is that all options come with a cost: "We're trying to balance two competing truths: that our immediate phase of life is still full of possibility and shouldn’t be wasted, but that the future version of ourselves will depend on us making choices now that keep them safe." The post generated a ton of discussion. It's obviously a topic that resonates with many, and we're all going to come up with our own individual, never-quite-squaring-the-circle solutions.

-- It was via Dense Discovery that I came across Discoveries That Changed my Worldview by Nate Hagens. It made a number of interesting points, but the section that really sparked with me was entitled: We Are All Made of Stars. I guess I knew this, but it never hurts to be reminded...: "We tend to think of life as something local, something that began here on Earth. It turns out that the raw material of our bodies was forged long before the Earth existed. The elements that make up us -- carbon, calcium, iron -- could only be created in the unimaginable heat and pressure of dying suns. Billions of years later those same elements cycle through us -- combining, flowing, dispersing, and eventually returning to the world when we die... We’re built from the ashes of ancient stars somewhere in the distant universe -- but we're also a living process powered by sunlight... So, we are quite literally the children of stars, composed of their remnants and animated by their light." Nothing like a bit of perspective...

-- Maria Popova makes a related point: "It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise." Her poem, The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet, is just lovely.





-- Writer Pam Mandel shares a conversation with a guy who uses AI to get him 70 per cent through his writing projects, while he looks after the remaining 30 per cent. He doesn't really understand her scepticism... Why, he wonders, would anyone NOT want to exploit this technology to the max? The conversation continues like this:

"I have a number of concerns, but mostly, I think machine generated content is boring. 'That stuff isn’t interesting to me,' I said.
"'So, you optimize on -- interesting?'
"'Uh, yes, exactly! Why would I spend my time any other way?'"

Later she elaborates on what this all means for the kind of creative person she is: "My work is based in my lived experience in the world, not the aggregation of others chewed up and spit on to the page in a facsimile of humanity. I was swimming laps recently, backstroke, and I could hear the muffled sound of the radio on the pool deck as I reached, reached, reached. One of the lifeguards is always tuned to the classic rock station, so I am pulling through the water as I hear the dulled sound of Bob Segar’s Against the Wind, for example. AI will not tell you what that feels like. We may share common experiences, we may have been to the same places, but my memoir is about me, it’s not a remix of what happened to 400 other gap year travelers, thrown in the blender and repaginated to make narrative sense."

We're cheering her on. But there's also a horrible reality: "I’ve been underemployed for a year now. I’ve seen what little work I’ve had made worse by the insertion of AI. I had hoped to work for another five years or so, but as AI has stolen the onramp for new workers, it’s built a bunch of exit ramps for older workers. My occupation -- technical writer -- shows up on all the lists as 'at risk' for elimination under AI..."

-- Grant David Crawford brings us a long essay entitled The End of Elsewhere: The Endangered Species of the Global Citizen. It's densely argued, and although I don't agree with all of it, I think there's something in what he says: "The 300-year Western search for elsewhere is ending. The yearning it expressed remains; the yearning was always real. But the cure it proposed, the cure Rousseau articulated and the Romantics aestheticized and the modernists abstracted and the hippies spiritualized and the backpackers commodified and the volunteer tourists moralized and Bourdain humanized, is no longer believed in by the people who were supposed to inherit it." The global-citizen lineage he traces is, he admits, specifically Western, and he hopes -- as do we, if he's correct -- that other traditions, elsewhere, are carrying forward "the human capacity for cross-cultural attention".

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OK, so that's all a teentsy bit depressing... Quick, wheel on some flowers...





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The remaining two months of summer we're planning to spend over here on the Island. Just before autumn begins (at the start of August, according to the Celtic calendar), we're hoping to head off to our neighbouring islands. It's a while since we've been able to plan any travel, so it has been fun to do that (even though I'm still regretting the postponement of the original plan, which was a return to Kuching).

We'll see...