Don’t change for others. True friends will like you just the way you are, despite your faults. Be a good friend to them in return. Forgive shortcomings. No one is perfect. @googiemccabe #bookquote #DwieSiostry
A beautiful compendium of universal wisdom that’s simple, wise, soulful and timeless. I fell in love with this book as soon as I saw it. The illustrations and words are by my wise and kind friend Googie McCabe who wrote this book for her two beloved daughters, as a way of healing and dealing with her depression, and also as a manifestation of her artistry, imagination and love for her two girls. It features advice on life, death, love of self, love of others, finding your calling, and how to deal with life’s dark times.
This is the second and much awaited fictional novel by the Japanese author of Convenience Store Woman. A book I have also reviewed and absolutely adored in the past. Earthlings traverses familiar themes, just as in Convenience Store Woman there is a female social outcast as the main character in the book. Although that’s where the similarity ends.
Genre: Japanese fiction, fantasy, Magic realism.
Publisher: Granta
*No spoilers
Rating: This one is mindblowing, a solid 5/5 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
We are thrust into the world of a young teenage girl, Natsuki who is suffering terrible emotional abuse at the hands of her mother and sister. Natsuki idolises her cousin Yuu whom she only gets to see once per year. To cope with the chaos around her, she listens to the advice of her toy hedgehog named Piyyut.
I won’t go into the detail of what happens in this book, or else I may actually spoil it for you. However Natsuki must go through a lot of personal challenges. There’s an intense vulnerability to Natsuki that is palpable and pulls at your heartstrings, this is a character we would love to protect from the harsh world. There are supernatural themes and occurrences in this book that defy words and are completely mind-blowing. Think a cross between Chuck Palahnuik’s Fight Club and Murakami at the height of his surreal weirdness and you may have an idea of the vibe and energy.
A totally surreal and disturbing one-of-a-kind adventure that you will never forget.
Sayaka Murata manages to pull off another novel that is a strange mixture of heartfelt and emotional, darkly funny, satirical and scathingly critical of the ‘normies’ of modern Japanese society. This time though the kooky weirdness is on a completely new level and it’s absolutely delicious, shocking and amazing!
This week I deep-dive into the 80’s pop nostalgia, go to a 90’s street rave in Melbourne, and shopping at the second-hand markets in Berlin, caress a tortoise, learn the history of a rude word and journey into some imaginary immersive worlds. I hope you join me.
No matter where my journey has taken me I have always had a strong sense of where I belong – that’s my connection, that’s my culture. I wanted to express myself somehow, or teach myself about it, so I chose painting in order to do that
It was 1986, I was in my cousins car, protesting about the fact that I’ve been relegated to the backseat. Riding shotgun is one of his friends, who is at least six years my senior, who seems bemused by my predicament. In his attempts to shut me up, he mysteriously reveals a mix tape from his shirt pocket and forcefully inserts the cassette and cranks up the volume. I don’t know what to expect with the speakers inches from behind my head. The thump of piano keys startles me. It repeats a few more seconds before a really cool bass riffs gets my attention. Before long the blaring sounds of trumpets exasperates my hearing. This was my introduction to Janet Jackson and her song When I think of You.
I love the serendipity of flea markets. In this immersive post blogger Be Kitschig finds a David Hasselhoff album for 5 euros. Fantastic! I have been to this flea market in Berlin and remember setting out to buy an outfit for a fancy dress party, but then coming home with something completely different.
I have to admit I was not familiar with this artist before seeing this video. Now that I have though, I have to admit that her art is absolutely amazing, in a very creepy, magnetic and macabre way. I am now a fan! From the always compelling YT channel Cinema Cartography.
Click on the images to be transported to a bustling marketplace in another dimension featuring cute and kawaii characters strolling past and looking up at you with adoration. Via Kuula
I just love the Beatrix Potter vibes of this enchanted painting by Omar Rayyan so much!
Upon graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design many years ago, Omar Rayyan settled on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. The bucolic surroundings compliment and help inspire his “old world” aesthetic toward painting. He enjoys looking to the past for inspiration and guidance from the great oil painters of the Northern Renaissance and the Romantic and Symbolist painters of the 19th century.
A few familiar faces here include Smile Police- the fuzzy wuzzy party starter and various others from that time. It makes me nostalgic and sad to know that today’s youth simply can’t have the same experience as this because of the pandemic. Via Jason Midro on Youtube
Why is the word that is considered very rude also a slang word for a part of a woman’s anatomy? Should we women reclaim the C word for ourselves as a furry badge of strength and elastic muscular power? I think so! I found this talk by Kate Lister hilarious, enlightening, rebellious and empowering. Via Ted
What did you think of this journey into little known worlds, words, music and subcultures? I hope you enjoyed this temporal vacation for your mind. Stay cool, stay cosy. Let me know what you think below…
Anxiety is not optional in life.. It’s a part of life. We come into life through anxiety. We look at it and we remember it and say to ourselves: We made it. We got through it. In fact, the worst anxieties and the worst tight spots in our life, often, years later, when we look back on them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new….And that can give us courage…in looking forward and saying: Yes: this is a tight spot. It’s about as tight a spot as the world has ever been in, or at least humankind. But if we go with it…it will be a new birth. And that is trust in life. And this going with it means that you look, and ask, what is the opportunity?
Tulip Fever is one of the most captivating historical fiction reads I have had the pleasure of enjoying in recent years. Tulip Fever takes place in Amsterdam in the 1630’s during a time of immense wealth that is brought into the country by merchants and tulip sellers.
Although this takes the long-suffering and stifled lust of a Girl with a Pearl Earring and instead turns up about ten notches for dramatic effect. Although this is not done in a cliched way. The encounters between a lonely young wife (Sophia) who is reluctantly betrothed to wealthy much older man (Cornelis) are believable and written in a rich, compelling and riveting way. The couple pose for a vanity portrait, engaging the help of a handsome young artist (Jan). You can just about guess the rest. Or so you think. However there are many surprising twists and turns in this novel, with a very clever final denouement that can’t be anticipated.
The tulip, a much coveted and fleetingly beautiful commodity in Holland during the Dutch Golden Age comes to symbolise the greedy, lustful and out of control parts of the relationship between Sophia and her lover Jan and how money, greed and lust can drive people over the edge and into depravity.
Tulips in a Vase by Hans Gillisz. Bollongier, 1639 Rijksmuseum.
This novel is short and fast-paced, with lots of vibrant, vivid depictions of life under painters skies. The female characters evoke a feeling of mischief, energy, idealism hopes and dreams. I found this book to be thoroughly enjoyable as an escape hatch from the world for an afternoon or a weekend. Lush settings, a compelling plot, believable and vivid characters and evocative, earthy and sensual depictions of 17th Century Holland turn book this into an epic and theatrical affair to relish and enjoy. I give it 5*
In the 63rd edition of 10 Interesting things, we peer into a Russian spaceship, bear witness to interspecies tenderness, mysterious creatures, the sad closing of a Sydney shop with a whimper, and enjoy a surreal rendition of the Chinese zodiac in one epic painting. Hope you will stick around, with a click-bait intro like that, why wouldn’t you!…
A blue sea dragon Glaucus atlanticus, looking like something out of a medieval beastiary feeds on a blue button AKA Porpita. There are poisonous barbs on the blue button but this doesn’t deter the blue sea dragon, once they ingest the blue buttons they store the poison in the ends of their own feather-like fingers called papillae. This poison won’t hurt humans too much, but may cause skin irritation. Found via Reddit.
A blue seadragon feasts on the tentacles of a blue button
Iconic shop in Sydney Jizz closes down with a climax of double-entendres
James Jean is a Taiwanese-American visual artist who works primarily in painting and drawing. He lives and works in LA and in the past has worked with fashion label Prada and on poster art for three films in 2017: Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049.
The Hunting Party depicts all the animals in the Chinese Zodiac and is teeming with rich and lush details and flowing surreal movement, James created it over 24 hours.
Lani does amazing and inspiring newsletters featuring beautiful insights like this one:
On my commute, there’s a hidden sign that says “ordinary is special“. It’s a rather un-American idea that intrigued me, so much so I knew I wanted to share it with you.
At the same time, we’re told how unique we are, I do remember being taught at school how important everyone’s job is, and that stuck with me. Since I was raised by folks who do society’s “under-educated dirty work”, I suppose that influenced me, too.
Strangely, I was never ashamed that Tim did construction or that Mom cleaned hotel rooms. She taught me to be kind to workers who came to the house to fix this or that by offering them something to drink. And Tim taught me how to drive a forklift, change a tire, and cut metal pipes (pain in the ass).
Of course, they taught me so much more, but I can’t help but wonder if I’ve been living “ordinary is special” all my life?
In the early 20th Century in Russia, popular science magazines began to fantasise and project what the future held for Russian space travel. This coincided with galvanising the public around the Soviet Space programme in the middle of the century. These vivid, idyllic cutouts of rockets and moonlanders are absolutely beautiful!
These exquisitely carved Viking animal heads were found on the Oseberg ship burial of two women and date from circa AD 834. The Viking ship burial contained five of these unique and mysterious carved wooden posts, their exact function remains unclear. The burial mound was excavated in 1904-5 in Norway.
I love how these bugs are like cutesy renditions you would see in a commercial for cough drops. I fully support the cutification of pandemic bugs and other germs…give them some love.
I hope you enjoyed yet another psychadelic magic carpet ride into the macabre wilderness of the wild web. Let me know what you think of these things below, have a great week and stay cosy…
“We all live in patterns we do not see. We are all following magic ravens, even when we are lost. Otherwise there would be no story.” ~ Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone.
Sarah Moss is now my favourite writer. She seems to be a occupied with the lives of women. However in this novel her protagonist is a man. Adam Goldschmidt is a stay-at-home dad and is an underemployed art history PhD who is not quite on the faculty payroll.
His wife is the high flying and overworked GP and together they have two beautiful and bubbly girls and live in a posh English commuter town. Adam is therefore (happily) the primary care giver for his two daughters.
In the novel’s opening chapters his 15 year old daughter Miriam has an unexplained accident at school where her heart suddenly stops beating and she stops breathing. Nobody knows why it happened or if/when it will happen again.
So begins the premise of The Tidal Zone. As Adam as the doting, domesticated primary care-giver for his girls tries to shield and protect Mimi from the randomness of how and when a heart may spontaneously stop beating (not possible) along with his own feelings of paralyzing fear about it all.
This is another darkly intriguiing book about the big themes: parenthood, love, the transience of life, youth, mortality, marriage and death.
This book is quietly horrifying and endlessly fascinating because it shows you what it would feel like to not know how or when your loved ones might die. Which essentially is still a relevant message for all of us, even if we try hard to not think about that devastating possibility.
The novel is unique in that it lets us peer into the world of domestication and gender roles without the baggage of this caregiving being done by a woman. It’s because the shoe is on the other foot and the ‘mothering’ is being done by Adam – a man, that we can see with clarity the painful and beautiful everyday moments of this invisible and underappreciated labour that is (mostly) still women’s work. Another unique and devastatingly brilliant novel by Sarah Moss. 5*/5
“Stories have endings, that’s why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth. Begin with brokenness, begin again. We are not all, not only, the characters written by our ancestors. I have told my stories now, and we are still here, and the day has hardly begun. ” ~ Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone.
A beautiful compendium of universal wisdom that’s simple, wise, soulful and timeless. I fell in love with this book as soon as I saw it. The illustrations and words are by my wise and kind friend Googie McCabe who wrote this book for her two beloved daughters, as a way of healing and dealing with her depression, and also as a manifestation of her artistry, imagination and love for her two girls. It features advice on life, death, love of self, love of others, finding your calling, and how to deal with life’s dark times.
This is an electrifying book about the history of surgery from the point of view of one of its pioneers, Joseph Lister. A humble and unassuming Quaker, Lister managed to rise up through the ranks of Edinburgh’s medical community and gained a reputation along the way for his serious dedication to experimentation and the empathetic and personalised care he offered to his patients.
Genre: Non-fiction, medical history, medicine.
Publisher: Allen Lane, Penguin
Rating: 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
* No Spoilers
In the era before the discovery of germs and bacteria, hospitals were crawling with infestations of pestilence and disease. Doctors, nurses and the tools of their trade were bloody, disgusting cesspools of filth, where people came for help and most likely they never walked out alive again. Hospitals were disease factories in those days.
Lister had a tireless energy and determination to discover the cause of infection in patients. At the time, infection was thought to be caused by bad and smelly vapours in the air, rather than by contact with microscopic bacteria. The act of cutting someone open in surgery often resulted in death, not on the operating table, but from post-operative infection.
Joseph Lister was a pioneer whose endless experimentation and makeshift inventions he gradually honed and perfected into a new way of doing surgery. Transforming it from a ‘butchering art’ into a proper medical profession. His struggles, set-backs and humiliations along the way help to raise the stakes in this book and make it even more compelling.
If this book sounds a bit boring, you will be pleasantly surprised by the pace, and the colourful and engaging prose. Fitzharris is a delightful writer and she viscerally captures the pungent, rotting and bloody hospitals of the time, in all of their glorious gore with shocking immediacy. She brings to life Lister and his extended family in vivid and loving detail. This is a real treasure of a book and I loved every second of it!
Welcome to edition number 62 of unleashed oddities from the far reaches of the internet. I hope you enjoy these, let me know your thoughts on them below….
Perhaps she lived happily ever after? This is creepy as hell and I want to know more about the story of this vintage drawing, so I did an image search and found that it was an illustration on the front cover of an obscure vintage science fiction magazine called Infinity…how amazing! Via EV on Twitter and Haute Forte
“As soon as it saw her, it stood straight and leaned on both hands. She called her companion, who being armed with a dart, pushed it into the heart of the beast, which made a moan similar to that of a person. Both girls cut off its hands, which had well-formed fingers and nails with fins between the fingers. The island’s doctor was called and he reported that this sea monster was the size of the biggest man we can imagine; that its skin was white, of a colour like the flesh of a drowned man; it had a very well formed female breast, a flattened nose, a large mouth whose chin was adorned with a species of beard formed of delicate scales and that it had similar scattered clumps all over. Its tail was that of a fish and at the end there were a kind of feet.”
Life is difficult, its competitive, we die, there’s a lot of pain and trauma dealing with other people – that is reality. When you face reality on a daily basis it forces you to develop strength, resolve.
Whoever had this idea of inserting images of memories and past traumas into the red veins of the eyes – this is genius, simple, powerful and amazing! Via Adeeve and by Advertising Agency: DDB in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Always in my Heart by Bent
A classic chill-out and cruisy house track from the early 00’s, this really floats my boat and brings back nice memories for me, I hope you like it.
The Ocular Audio Experiment – The Witch’s Whispering Tomes (Part 1)
A trippy psychadelic album that will put you into a trance-like state. The cover here actually matches the sound of the music, which was a pleasant discovery.
There is something seriously creepy, eerie and wrong about the colour palette of this art, the floating ghostly figures also lend this art a psychological horror vibe. Although I searched long and hard for it….I couldn’t find who the original artist is who created this, which lends even more of a mysterious vibe of it!
Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be resurrected from its ancient grave and grown from 32,000 year old seeds. This plant was regenerated from tissue of fossil fruits by a team of Hungarian, American and Russian scientists.
I hope you enjoyed looking deeply into the consciousness of a blue whale, will salivate over the dumplings and doughy dragons and I hope you liked the music. Take care of yourselves and say hi if you want down below.
Content Catnip 
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