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After spending my first few days at Selgars Mill, I have begun to notice a new small pleasure that brightens my days. Whenever I finish cooking and begin to serve a plate, thoughts pop into my head about adding a garnish here, perhaps, or layering some mushrooms there. I have gotten into the habit of spending a few minutes playing with the colors and textures of the food on the plate before sitting down to eat it.

As much as I have enjoyed cooking for many years now, beautiful plating has never felt as natural and pleasurable as it does now. In fact, I am relishing being able to cook for myself again after weeks of communal cooking. At the same time, however, working alongside some pretty amazing chefs at Feÿ has altered my relationship with cooking in a way that is reflected in my newfound instinct to plate with care.

I have started to catalogue my imperfectly pretty plates, and I think back fondly to chefs Elena and Giuseppe, and a few other talented cooks I met at the château.

- Andrea

It has been a while since I last read and wrote. Work has been overwhelming, and the time I had to spare went into exploring the fundamentals of Linux.

But today, I finally managed to read a bit again. When I was younger I used to hate Swedish literature, perhaps because of traumatic recall to school. However, reading in a language other than English–especially in a Swedish from a time when the world carried less universal cultural references–is interesting. And thus, I have discovered a newfound love for Swedish literature.

I have begun to read Willy Kyrklund's Solange. It kicks off with a poem and an intro I want to share:

Where does all song go, that becomes suffocated and trapped?
Where does all hope go, that reaches nothing?
Could be that it abounds in the earth and water.
Could be that it whistles in the wind all around.
– Karin Boye

Or in Swedish:

Vart går all sång, som blir kvävd och innestängd?
Vart går all längtan, som når ingenting?
Kanhända den i mullen och vattnet ligger mängd.
Kanhända den viner i vinden omkring.
– Karin Boye

Followed by this intro:

This story shall tell the tale of Solange and Hugo. It carries, thus, not both names–Solange and Hugo. It carries only the name of the loved one: Solange.

- Marc

After a week of sunny blue skies, the rain has returned and so have the clouds. As it should be, it is only early March after all.

But we had so much fun in the sun, and that is how I believe Marc and I will remember Château de Feÿ. The view over the valley, the white stone (blinding in the daylight), the soft grass, the smoke of the barbecue, the forest. Or will it be the perpetual fog of late January and the muddiness of the earth that remain?

There is a near perpetual extravagance to what goes on at Feÿ, at least at first glance. Themed parties, cyber-workshops, spontaneous art installations, ghosts and AI-oracles. And yet, the magic of the château has revealed itself to me, over time, in its quietest corners and most mundane minutes. Like sharing a cooking shift, a cup of coffee, a ride into town, a wagon on the train from Joigny. It is on that train that I have ultimately felt at home at Feÿ, leaving and returning in the company of others that have shared the experience of the château. It makes me look forward to a return, someday.

- Andrea

When the world appears to be pregnant with possibility, I take it as an invitation to embark upon a journey. Or, when I embark on a new journey, the world often appears to suddenly be pregnant with possibility, such as it appears to me now, after some recent day trips to Paris. But even after returning to the rolling muddy hills of the Yonne, I continue to be restless, yearning to visit and revisit as I have just done at the Palais-Royal, the courtyard of the Louvre, the narrow roads from Opera to Châtelet and the Centre Pompidou.

Wandering up and down the streets of a beloved city brings me a quiet but intense joy, akin to the feelings evoked by my favorite books, films, images, music. And so, I decided to embark on another journey, but this time through my memory, the internet, and some ink.

It has resulted in maps and constellations of those special works of art that move me and renew my gaze. Perhaps these are the transcendental feelings that others find in religion, ritual, patriotism, and/or mind-altering substances. I guess this could be a creative ritual of sorts, but I find the language around ritual and transcendence to have become so tired lately.

So, here is a brief inventory of my eclectic mental re-collections of sights, sounds, and feelings.

Books

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Le Diable au corps by Raymond Radiguet
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
La muerte de Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück

Music

"The Wuthering Heights" by Sakamoto Ryuichi
"Amore" and "Solitude" by Sakamoto Ryuichi
"The Girl - Theme" by Trevor Duncan
"Yumeji's Theme" by Umebayashi Shigeru
"Romeo and Juliet" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
"Overture" and "Metempsychosis" by Zhao Jiping
"Blackstar" and "Station to Station" by David Bowie

Film

Les Quatre Cents Coups by François Truffaut
Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou
Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov
2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrik
La jetée by Chris Marker
In The Mood for Love by Wong Kar Wai
L'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud by Louis Malle
Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer
The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman

And More

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes by Simon Flesser & Simongo

- Andrea

« [...] nous nous sommes avisés à nouveau de la douceur et de la chaleur, que nous avons pour un temps oubliées, propres à cette substance qui a nom 'papier' [...] » – Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Éloge de l'ombre (p. 24)

After the first half of December, I have not sat down to write again. This is a lie, of course. I write all the time—for work, in my journal, agenda, out of obligation, obligations that I have engaged in voluntarily (as a form of self-torture). There is also a cloud of ideas and texts yet to be written that every so often haunts me. This entry, for instance, which I have been imagining for some time now.

And still, since December I have not sat down to write—

that which I want to write the most. Those texts that are like a pond or the rain, beautiful and completely lacking in any mission or argument (which is not to say disengaged, but that is a topic for another entry).

For much of last year, I have tweaked, re-written, and elongated pieces of flash fiction, satire, the possible first chapter of a longer story. I have reworked the same texts over and over, and I have gone back to old writing that I had given up on, only to re-discover its potential. And of the new writing that I did do, most came from ideas long present in my mind. Perhaps this was the result of having thought so long about writing without actually doing any writing (of this kind).

In any case, there came a moment in which I felt the urge to sit down and begin to write again. Really write. And while a part of me was excited to jump back in and take a look at last year's writing with fresh eyes, I also felt like starting off the year with something new. So I opened up my journal and my agenda (I have fresh pages in both) and I sat down to think about what to write about.

Nothing came to mind.

The white winter light glowed on the vaguely yellow textured paper. My mind felt as blank as the page, and I discovered that I liked that feeling. This was no writer's block. There was no anxiety, fear or frustration. Instead, I felt as illuminated as the blank page by the windowpane, which seemed to promise so much in all its emptiness. As if anything could happen now.

- Andrea

It snuck up on me, on both of us, as the days grew chillier and darker—in a way that had seemed unimaginable in the heat and brightness of September. We were, after all, in the very heart of the Mediterranean. White rock, bright sand, the big blue sea.

Now, it is the misty grey grounds and the muddy forest paths of the Château du Feÿ that surround us. How can it be?

But I know exactly how we got here. I did the bookings myself. All it took was a flight, too many trains to count, a few border crossings, a Swedish Christmas, a night in Germany, Paris.

And yet, returning to Comma Directory after two months of travels, holidays, and the flu (again), it feels as if I had just stepped away from my computer for a moment. Pistacho has run off, wagging his tail, to fetch a big stick, I have wrapped myself in a shawl, the water is boiling in a kitchen in Paramytha. And suddenly, I am in France and the grey day is quickly and quietly coming to an end behind the bare black branches of the forest. And then, it is as if Cyprus, Limassol, Paramytha had all just been part of some faraway dream.

- Andrea

Yesterday, we drove to Paphos to visit of the Tombs of the Kings, a major archaeological site and necropolis for the wealthy and powerful of the late BCs.

From the distance, we could see the white-washed city sprawling along the blue Mediterranean coast. Smaller than Limassol, but also hillier, I discovered Paphos as a place of contradictions.

Angular buildings from the 90s or early 2000s dot the long coastline. Here and there, there were some more contemporary structures mixed in. Elevators connect the lower part of the city, which we quickly discovered was all resorts and holiday rentals, with the old town that was constructed up on the hills.

A cross between charming and desolate, the old town managed to be a sort of lively ghost town. We stopped by a taverna that was full of people and live music, but the neighboring streets still felt hollow and empty, somehow. Freshly painted shops looked as if they were just about to open for the first time, while right next door the other buildings appeared to be crumbling. The minaret of a grey-stoned mosque nearby rose into the sky.

On the big roads, we witnessed cars fighting for space around rotundas, and it seemed suddenly like that’s where everyone was (if not in a taverna): in their cars, going somewhere.

From a first glance, it would be impossible to guess that this all lies on top of porous limestone and monumental ancient ruins.

The huge stone cut niches and temples we visited at the Tombs of the Kings were once filled with precious Hellenistic or Ptolemaic sarcophagi and treasure. Now, they house pigeons, native to this region, along with the recently arrived Asian hornets. The empty tombs house a damp and dusty darkness too, it’s an emptiness that feels dense. Uncanny in its weight.

What fascinates me the most about visiting archaeological sites is how the experience deconstructs a sense of normalcy; something that can also happen with intellectual discoveries. I have experienced this first-hand in the classroom, while studying history, astronomy, or literature. But at a site, the deconstructiong of normalcy happens in a very physical way. Suddenly, I am standing at the edge of this hole in the ground, and I see doric columns below me, rising up as if holding up the rock and ground that I stand on.

To borrow a cliché, my perspective is shifted, literally. The usual rules of the game, on how to interact with a building or a space, are challenged. As much as the exposure to different narratives through books and film and conversations serves to challenge our preconceptions, there is something about movement—moving through a space and experiencing distances, heights, and depths differently—that hits home. It’s a very visceral reminder of the vastness of pretty much everything: the planet, history, culture, microbiology, outer space, which is fun to encounter on a “small” island like Cyprus.

Ever since I took a history class on Salsa music and dance a few years back, I’ve been noticing how the concept of “embodiment” pops up from time to time. And if I really think about it, I had already begun to think about "embodiment" after my undergraduate capstone course on Cervantes' short stories, which feature some interesting body-centered themes.

This has been significant to me because I grew up very "mind" centered. It's interesting to think very deliberatively about what it means to be "in" a body or to be a body, especially in thinking about how movement can be an act of knowledge-making or knowledge-sharing (something we usually associate exclusively with "the mind"). And what about storytelling? I also find it interesting how controlling movement can be a powerful tool in the hands of authorities, and how encouraging certain types of movements can also foster collective myths—thinking of Youth Groups in Nazi Germany or cults that have their members do physical labor or specific types of sport. And well, there is a reason that "movement" is also used to describe social, cultural, political changes like the labor or the feminist movements.

Moving around Cyprus has been very interesting (especially without owning a car). And this visit to Paphos has definitely been a highlight of my time here. It has given me a lot to think about.

We concluded our latest mini-trip, daylight fading fast, at a curving pebbly beach, which myths tell is the birthplace of Aphrodite.

- Andrea

There are now more birds in Paramytha than when we first arrived. They sing from a scenery that is now greener due to the rains that have arrived with them and with the end of summer. The days are still warm, but the nights are fresh—now populated by new scents, awakened by the humidity that has set in.

When it rains, it pours, and that’s exactly what has happened in Limassol. During a recent, sudden thunderstorm, a tornado was spotted near the city. All the while, the air has been heavy with dust and particles swept up from the Sahara. Coughing, cold, soaked, it has been hard to not feel like Cyprus is testing me. Every time I try to crawl out of sickness, weariness, stress, there is a new challenge to face.

But this post is not really about that. Not directly. It is about the day after the storm, when I headed out to the local taverna for a Halloumi wrap. Milos Taverna was a bit emptier than usual, the lights dimmer. The two men who seem to run the place were hard at work in back room. Something seemed off.

It turned out that the thunderstorm and wind had produced leaks, flooding parts of the taverna and shutting them down for the day. But even so, they insisted on making me something. There was a bit of dry charcoal leftover, after all!

That small act of kindness, despite the big headache they were dealing with, really touched me. I felt guilty too, after all, running a business is tough. I didn’t want to put them through more trouble, and I wondered how I could tip them as a thank you. But when it came time to pay, the owner handed me the pita and told me it was on the house.

It seems like these past few days after the rain, I notice glints and glimmers of this sort of kindness all around. A kind word from an old professor, genuine curiosity about my work from a stranger, a joke from the barista at the usual café.

In spite of winds, dust storms, viruses, and the weight of a day like today, glimmers of kindness persist and remind me of the things that are worth nurturing and protecting.

- Andrea

This is a celebratory log, despite the titular allusion to the Greek underworld. It has finally happened, I've officially been published.

Today, the second issue of The Madrid Review was released, which marks my poetry debut (in Spanish). Three little pages, three little poems. That's all it is, but it's a fulfillment of bookish childhood dreams. Books and printed media have always seemed like such authoritative items, and it did not seem possible that the words I wrote could actually be printed inside "official" books. All the while, I was constantly creating magazines and books from colored construction paper, notebook pages, Word Documents, and anything else I could get ahold of.

What makes October 2024 doubly special is that it was also my short fiction debut in English with The Good Life Review.

These milestones have been made possible by two teams of editors who recently started their own literary magazines (The Madrid Review was founded just a few months ago), who don't make a profit, and volunteer their time to foster the arts. It's inspiring to see them do this work, and it makes me think that one day I would like to do this too. For now, I will continue to write and do my best to support independent presses and magazines.

I've fulfilled a dream, and yet, I've really struggled to celebrate.

Just at the moment I thought I had settled into Cyprus, life hit me like a ton of bricks. I spent almost half of October with a nasty cold that left me feeling very behind. I became so focused on all the things I failed to do that little room was left for recognition of what I had worked so hard to accomplish. Two weeks of illness was followed by two weeks of mounting stress.

I don't want writing, creating, learning, reading, to just be a constant race, always reaching for something that I imagine to be better. I want to be anchored in the present and live where I am, rather than always focusing on that "next" destination. It's a privilege to be able to do so and ultimately, one day, there won't be a next destination.

Until then,

« Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux ».

- Andrea

Recently, I finished up Donald Norman's An Invisible Computer. It's a fantastic book, probably one of my favorite books, and it starts off with a powerful quote:

"The personal computer is perhaps the most frustrating technology ever. The computer should be thought of as infrastructure. It should be quiet, invisible, unobtrusive, but it is too visible, too demanding. It controls our destiny. Its complexities and frustrations are largely due to the attempt to cram far too many functions into a single box that sits on the desktop. The business model of the computer industry is structured in such a way that it must produce new products every six to twelve months, products that are faster, more powerful, and with more features than the current ones."

As much as I like the book, however, there is one important concept that I disagree with. Norman titles and concludes the book with this idea: that technology should be completely invisible. By invisible, he means that technology should blend so seamlessly into our everyday life that we do not notice it is there.

"[.. talking about the goal of technology] The end result, hiding the computer, hiding the technology, so that it disappears from sight, disappears from consciousness, letting us concentrate upon our activities, upon learning, doing our jobs, and enjoying ourselves."

Sounds great in theory, in practice of course what we find is that companies make something that is easy to use, and then do not necessarily act in the users' best interest, but the user is stuck with what the company provided and is neither empowered to seek out other options nor fix it. I think this is an anti-pattern, and I talk about this in depth in my essay, The Curse of Convenience.

However, there is also another section that I found particularly interesting and shines a light on the direction where I think technology should go, which is Norman's idea about what makes a good tool. Norman has this to say:

"Good tools are always pleasurable ones, ones that the owners take pride in owning, in caring for, and in using. In the good old days of mechanical devices, a craftperson's tools had these properties. They were crafted with care, owned and used with pride. Often, the tools were passed down from generation to generation. Each new tool benefited from a tradition of experience with the previous ones so, through the years, there was steady improvement."

I do not feel like modern phones and computers are like this kind of tool. A good retro camera is something we learn inside out, with its quirks and unique abilities, and becomes part of our craft and personality. This is not so much the case with a modern iPhone. Modern technology removes as much personalization as possible and makes it hard to repair for the sake of convenience, looks and ease-of-use. That means that you do not put effort into truly knowing your tool nor personalizing it, and so as a result, do not appreciate it as much. Instead of customizing and learning about your unique device, you buy a new one, that acts just like the old one. Devices become impersonal and invisible.

In a recent interview, Norman laments the fact that his all time best-seller, Design of Everyday Things, did not cover that tools should be designed to be repairable too. To me, repairability is in opposition to his idea of technology becoming invisible. At the same time, I think repairability and customization go hand in hand with his idea that you should feel pride in owning a tool, and that that is what makes a good tool. A device that you tweak and make truly your own, you will care for more and want to repair as well. As I replace parts of my Thinkpad and change the way it looks and feels, I find it becomes more personal to me.

- Marc