Better Than Friday - 25 (Patreon)

Good morning Ya'll: DISCORD IS UP! 

Please follow the link to sign-up.https://discord.gg/MawsXH

Feel free to sign up, hop on and talk about books/music/whatever with other BTF fans. 

I'll be on there periodically to check-in. 

1. Book in the Pipeline - Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo

Looking forward to this, I haven't read any of her work yet. 

NYRB description:Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer “better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.” Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”

Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s most individual and finest.

And a quote from the brilliant author Cesar Aira: 

She lived a little in the shadow of her sister Victoria on the one hand and of her husband Bioy Casares and Borges on the other. She was an extravagant woman when writing her stories, short and crystalline, she was perfect.—Cesar Aira

2. Cash App

I've been using this to save $1 off any coffee shop. 

For a caffeine addict like myself, that's significant. 

If you sign up using this code, we both get $5 after you send $5. 

Then you can save all that money too if coffee's your thing. And use it for books, naturally.https://cash.app/app/JSFSXGN

Or use code: JSFSXGN

3 Merriam-Webster Time Traveler 

This is a tool where you can discover when a word was first used in print. 

You can search by year. For example, in 1989, the year of my birth, was very interesting. 

Some words that appeared in print for the first time that year would be: 

Generation X, 

Cyberporn, 

Caffeinate, 

and Puggle. 

I'm very entertained.

4. An amazing Memphis guitarist who was almost lost in music history.  About five years after Frierson's death in April 2010, his homemade cassettes were discovered in a Memphis thrift store by local music aficionado Jameson Sweiger, who brought them to the attention of reissue label Light in the Attic.

5. How the modern world is making us ill 

I like Alain de Botton, the fellow responsible for The School of Life. 

Here's a talk he gave on Pessimism. What a terrific intro. 

On my walk around the University of Austin, I looked up and was like 'hey is that the tower where the mass shooting occurred?'

 It was. It took place in 1966. 

A former Marine named Charles Whitman climbed to the top and began shooting people.

There's a documentary from 2016 on it that I haven't seen but looks interesting. 

Eerie. The tower is enormous.