Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Media


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A Gentle Philosophy

A Gentle Philosophy (or A Kind Philosophy, or A Soft Philosophy, depending on the translation) is the title of a song I like a lot (maybe I’ll put the video below), and is something I thought about after my last post in which I mentioned the philosopher talking of “an alleged emergency” and basically treating the current state of affairs of our species as just another thought experiment.

Through a series of different connections, thinking about philosophy, I came to the usual – my own philosophical gurus, and their teachings. Because we are creatures of science and philosophy, and there’s always something to learn from the classics.

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Three bucks well spent

As I said, after spending a whole day writing, I have no energy for reading, and so I devote my attention to music or movies or TV to decompress after the long day.
But yesterday I blew 3 of my hard-earned euros for something different: a videogame, that hopefully will keep me amused during the quarantine.

As a Linux user, I spent most of the last fifteen years not playing on my PC – if we except playing Go on various online servers. But recently,m through the never-praised-enough Humble Bundle, I was able to restore my ages-old and never used Steam account, and buy a few games for real cheap.
Case in point, my latest purchase – 3 euro and change of Shadowrun Returns.

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Shoestring

These quarantine days are heavy – working on three projects (one good, one bad, and one weird) seemed like a good idea at the time, but after five days it’s starting to take its toll. My hands ache, my head aches, and I am absolutely sure I will never be able to write a single line of decent fiction for the rest of my life.

So to recharge my batteries and take my mind off the plotlines and what else, I’ve found a piece of my past as a TV viewer on Youtube, and I’m spending my lunch break going down memory lane.
because I was a very unhappy student in my first year of high school when I first saw Shoestring.

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A photo from 1939

On the joys and the pains of doing research: I am currently putting the finishing touches (hopefully) on a book about Piedmontese travelers around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. And one of the perks of this job – that for reasons long to explain I am doing part-time and under less-than-optimum conditions, is that I get to go back to the library and the web, doing a final pass of research.

When the book turns its gaze to China, it’s of course like coming again back home – how many stories I have set in the Middle Kingdom? Ah!
But while I was trying to decide what to quote from Peter Fleming’s book about the Boxer Rebellion, I chanced on a photo that got me off on a tangent for about half an hour.

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The Aeronauts (2019)

Last night I discovered I still suffer from vertigo, and I did so in the most baffling and yet safe way, by watching a movie – The Aeronauts, directed by Tom Harper, is streaming on Amazon Prime, and it’s a good, entertaining, suspenseful movie, and it gave me vertigo.
Which I guess it’s a sign of how well-crafted the movie is.

Inspired by true events with a fair share of fiction thrown in, the movie takes place in 1862, and follows the balloon ascent of scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) in the first expedition to explore the atmosphere. As the balloon climbs, Glaisher and his pilot, fairground aeronaut Amelia (Felicity Jones) face a number of unplanned for challenges.

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One evening with the Snake Woman

I know this will sound outrageous, but in the long run I rather like best “the other” Hammer movies rather than the classic Dracula & Frankenstein flicks. Maybe it’s because the Dracula and Frankenstein movies I have seen so often that in the long run I know them by heart, while the less-well-known Hammer films still bring an element of surprise.

So, I’m going through the Hammer catalog, checking out the less well known flicks. After 1962’s Captain Clegg, two nights ago I spent ninety minutes with The Reptile, from 1966 (that in Italy was distributed as “La Morte Arriva Strisciando” … Death Comes Crawling).

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