Marchels

or, a missive

Hello,

It’s 6:25 am. Today. The same day that this will depart my screen. It’s been another of those weeks where I have written nothing. Not for lack of desire but for the crushing demands of other things. Work things, mainly. If you receive this and I normally read your posts and I haven’t read your posts… then this is why. I’m sorry. I don’t like to be The Late Reader. Know that I’m saving them and they will be read.

So anyway, you can consider this my morning pages, because I don’t know what I’m going to write and I’m just going to let it come out.

This looks cosy. Let’s pretend that this is how I read. Photo by Alisa Anton on Unsplash

It’s March. The end of March. Whilst half the world is birthed into spring and delighting in the emergence of greenery and colour, down here the signs of autumn rear their rusty head. There’s still some last gasps of summer and days of warmth, but the southerly chill has started to creep. The mornings are darker, the days noticeably shorter.

I’m fraying and I can feel it. The edges of me unfurl, are caught and loosened by the wind, and if it wasn’t for this public holiday and mid-semester break then there’s a high chance I’d reach burnout. I don’t want to reach burnout. I tried that back in 2021 and, although fun (I have fond memories of breaking down in front of Jo and crawling into the bath with a glass of pinot and a Murakami paperback), on the whole it wasn’t pretty.

My home desktop died. I loved that machine. I built it nearly a decade ago and it has been my trusty companion. I can no longer sit at my desk and write onto its screen. I can no longer find that morning ritual of writing. I can no longer slip into the easy means to chip away at words. I had no sense of how important that ritual was. I’m resorting—for now—to my work laptop. It feels wrong. It feels cluttered and unclean and doesn’t allow for the same morning process as my desktop. I miss it. A stupid thing to miss something so material, but it’s true.

There’s another reason I miss it, and it’s because I love games. My brother and I grew up with games as an intrinsic part of our lives and it’s never left us. If anything, it cemented our bond over the years and it is rare that a week (or even a day) goes by where we don’t fling a message halfway across the world about something related to the medium. I hate the term “gamer”, though. I hate that label. Oh, you’re a gamer. No one says that in that same italicised tone to someone who reads or likes films. Oh, you’re a reader. Oh, you’re a film-goer. It’s possible I fashion such a label entirely in my head—games are more mainstream now than ever—but my desire to slip away to some other world for a few hours each week is something I largely keep to myself. I love games for the same reason I love books: for their story and narrative and characters and immersion. They are an escape in the same way that books are. I can no more imagine my life without games than I can without books, good film, good food or good wine. The opportunity for rich and beautiful storytelling through the visual and auditory medium of games is, perhaps, unparalleled. I’m looking at you, Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m looking and listening to you, Astarion and Gale and Shadowheart and Lae’zel.

Maybe most people don’t need such an antidote to reality throughout their week.

I do.

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We’ve seen a few films lately. We watched Dune: Part Two and I’ve been remiss in not cross-posting the culmination of our Letters from Arrakis series. Four three of us watched the film and you can read the final instalment of our digestion of Dune and its adaptations over on

Alexander Ipfelkofer

’s post here:

Letters from Arrakis

In other things, Jo and I watched Tár, staring Cate Blanchet as a woman obsessed with American’s tar pits, intent on finding all the remaining dinosaur fossils Lydia Tár, conductor and composer extraordinaire whose abusive and power-hungry life begins to fall apart as she builds up to recording a symphony to further elevate her career. That’s my terrible attempt at a synopsis. It’s an incredible film. I know that because I’ve kept thinking about it in the weeks since we watched it. It’s the best thing I’ve seen all year. Not sure why we got to it so late.

We also, err, watched On the Silver Globe. Oh boy. How to write about this without Jo getting angry? I’d listened to a BBC podcast about this near-lost piece of Polish SciFi by Andrzej Żuławski, based on The Lunar Trilogy books written by his grand uncle. It just so happened to be showing at Melbourne’s The Astor theatre last weekend—what are the chances?—and so I purchased tickets. Two tickets. Two tickets when I should only have purchased one.

The plot is that there’s a planet and these humans land there and… and then this stuff happens and there’s a lot of shoreline, there’s a lot of people impaled on stakes, there’s a blue tint to everything and there are interminable shouty monologues that are some kind of ongoing philosophical rant. It’s impenetrable, is what I mean.

Jo walked out.

She’s never walked out of a film before.

Oops.

I stuck it out, quite fascinated by it all and just giving in to the frustrations of its theatrical soliloquies interspersed with segments of lost scenes where the director speaks over stock footage of 1980s Poland and narrates what would be happening on screen had it been able to be shot. I thought the first act was impressive with its take on diary-like bodycam footage allowing for time skips and an increasing sense of the no doubt incestuous populating of a new planet. (For some reason it gave me Hyperion vibes of Lenar Hoyt’s storyline, even though that isn’t even remotely the same plot.) It’s a strange bit of film history. I’m glad I saw it, but I’m sorry I put you through that, Jo. I’ll keep my niche SciFi to myself next time.

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I’ve nearly finished Stephen King’s Holly. It’s what one of my students would call “a palate cleanser” of a read. I’ve blazed through it. It’s a romp, an easy read. King’s ability to write what I can only think of as transparent prose—the kind where you forget you’re even reading—is always a marvel. It’s more crime fiction than his usual horror-filled storyline. Next off the rank is short piece of SciFi that I’m excited about: Ice, by Anna Kavan.

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I have a burning desire to return to Renn and Brae and that novella that remains incomplete. Finishing The Sernox has made me realise I can finish things. So Brae is next. For too long I have left her and Renn dangling. I just need to find wherever I put his diary…

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It’s 07:49 am now. Nearly an hour and a half of sleep-slitted eyes to scribble all that?

I’m going to hit send and go back to bed.