#Spooktober 30 – Grieve no More

October 30, 2023

I really liked season 1 of Carnival Row, starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevigne, and this is the music that plays in the end credits. The artist calls herself Patty Gurdy and plays the hurdy-gurdy, a weird hand-crank string instrument with a keyboard that sounds a bit like a cornemuse and is typical of Galician folk music, and she also composed the lullaby that plays such a central part in the weird, fantasy-gothic investigative story of the tv series.

This song is no less intimate, and is sung by a mother to her child or by a lover to their sleeping darling. It tells of resistance and loss, displacement and exile, all themes of this incredibly powerful series.

Now rest you there, in spite of the storm that is raging
Faith goes and comes, as long as the seasons are changing
I am sure there is a safe valley for you and for me
Where we would fly, in joy we’d cry
For our blessed land
For what we strive, would come alive
And you would grieve no more

books and literature

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

August 8, 2026 9:00 am

Summertime

The Path You Have to Sing

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

August 8, 2026 6:00 am

movies and tv

But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge

I’m sure you’ve read enough analysis of Nolan’s Odyssey to last a lifetime, and you don’t need another European ranting that he changed stuff, so I’m not going to. Instead, I’d like to talk about the movie in itself, as an independent work, granting the

August 7, 2026 1:48 pm