Living on borrowed time now in the United States puts writer Brett McNeil in the mood for listening to the Stooges.
The nagging rasp of electric guitars suits my mood too, as I'm reading Black Earth, a Timothy Snyder book about the intentional experimental disassembling of nations and public order in eastern Europe, carried out by the Soviets and the Nazis in preparation for the worst things people were able to imagine for the lawless place that they had now created.
Also, I'm dipping into A World Apart, an account of two years in the Gulag, where author Gustav Herling says, "I became convinced that a man can be human only under human conditions." It's a stunningly straightforward standard for judging times and places where people have had to endure, isn't it? Choose, say, this section of that big city today and take a close look, I find myself thinking.
Also trying to stay in the habit of linking to indie bookstores rather than to empires when I link to a book.