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Baje, da prihaja Lucifer. Tako pravijo italijanski vremenoslovci. Tudi moj ponudnik za vreme trdi, da bo od jutri dalje cele tri dni 37 stopinj. Ni mi do tega, da bi hodila v to vročino, čeprav malo svežega zraka, ne glede na temperaturo, tudi ne škodi. Ne vem, trenutno zmaguje statičnost. Dopust se že čuti, le da so letos v službi vsi podivjali in bi radi vse in po možnosti takoj. Kam je šla poletna ležernost tudi ne vem.  14. avgusta grem v Novi Bečej na Tisko akademijo akvarelov. Zadnjič sem bila tam pred tremi leti, ko sem kot popoln outsider prijadrala na kolonijo, kjer se slika izključno čisti akvarel. Tokrat sem pripravljena. Tudi moj akvarelni guru S bo tam. Pa še poletna panonska vročina in gost cigaretni dim, ki spominja na zakotne kafane iz sedemdesetih let. Tako pravijo tisti, ki se jih spominjajo. S že vseskozi trdi, da sem najebala. Bolj ko se približuje 14. avgust, bolj se mi zdi, da ima prav.  Delam si utvare, da se bo Lucifer manj škodoželjno režal...

I don't know what I've done to this piece of paper. I must have damaged the sizing somehow, although I haven't done anything differently than I normally do. So, I can either throw it away or kill the moth ... or I might do both. There's nothing to lose really, so I went at it with watercolour pencils and Artbars (water soluble wax crayons). Too many colours make me nervous, but I knew that already. * Nekaj se je zgodilo s tem papirjem. Čeprav se mi zdi, da nisem nič naredila drugače, mi je verjetno uspelo poškodovati vrhnjo plast veziva. Sliko lahko vržem v smeti, lahko se izživljam nad njo, lahko pa naredim oboje, bom videla. Ni kaj izgubiti, zato sem se je lotila z akvarelnimi svinčniki in Artbar vodotopnimi voščenkami.  Preveč barv me dela živčno, vendar to ni nič novega.

A Quiet Life is a blend of fiction and memoir, written in a series of chapters which can be read as short stories. We follow Ma-chan, a young woman left at home to take care of her brothers, after her parents left for America, where her father was invited to be a writer in residence. Her father K has found himself in a "pinch", which requires his wife to accompany him. Ma-chan is suddenly left in a role of a head of the household and what we are reading is her "house journal", which she has promised her mother she would keep. Even though Ma-chan is the narrator, the novel revolves around Eeyore, her mentally handicapped older brother with a great musical talent. O-chan, her younger brother studies for university entrance exams and I perceived him as a side character stepping in when it’s necessary. The novel isn’t especially plot driven, I found it a rather peaceful read. I liked Ma-chan , her honesty and sense of observation while she is trying to come to...

Io moth lives in north America. You can see her in the first hours of the night. The span of her wings reaches 88 mm. It's predominantly red and red is a proprietorial, territorial colour. It's not something you can immerse yourself into, like blue. Red works in opposite way. It enters a person through their eyes, claims them, stays inside and causes all sorts of weird things to happen. It usually comes in the summer or late spring, when I start wearing red sneakers, red lipstick and nail polish. All of a sudden I find myself reading books with orange, red and crimson covers. Io drives Erebus and his blue void away, leaving me with layer after layer after layer of red, impenetrable in it's translucent illusion. Red is all about blood, passion, strong feelings, revolution and anger. According to Derek Jarman, painters should use red a spice. But do we? * Vešča Io živi v severni Ameriki. Največkrat jo lahko vidimo v prvih urah noči. Ni posebno velika, majhna tu...

Ghostwritten in one of those books I feel like were written for me and for my obsession about everything happening at the same time, as if time was an infinite number of superimposed layers, to paraphrase Brian O'Doherty.  The novel consists of nine chapters, each covering an event on a certain place on earth. There's a lawyer in Hong Kong involved in money laundering, whose wife recently left him, an old woman in The Holy Mountain running a tea shack, remembering various historical events she witnesed through her life, a physicist in The Clear Island running away from american governmental agents, a musician and ghostwriter in London, a noncorpum inhabiting various hosts in Mongolia, a member of the cult in Okinawa, a young saxophone player and jazz lover in Tokyo, a museum employee involved in an art heist in Saint Petersburg, a DJ talking to the Zookeeper in a late night radio show in The Night Train. The novel ends with Underground in which Quasar, the membe...

Or is it the other way around? A fictitious tough guy and a real public official. The second version seems scarier than the first one. But ... anything is possible ... as always. Before I started reading Murakami's Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World , I stumbled across the information about Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka influencing this particular novel. Farewell My Lovely and The Castle were mentioned specifically. I decided to give it a try, to sort of try a different approach to Murakami.  I used to read Chandler in my teens, I even watched the series on TV. I liked it back then, but it was thirty years ago, give or take a few years. Farewell My Lovely is a piece of hardboiled fiction, and it was published in 1940. The story features an antihero detective tough guy, organized crime, corrupt police officers, drugs and violence. There's also a femme fatalle, begging to be seduced rich woman and a good girl, who just isn't sinful enough (Marlowe...