Three books, Three Rooms, Three heists, Three links
Adam's Notes for January 16, 2025
A bunch of short stuff this week. I think I mentioned my Project Lunatic back in August. It’s something I’m working on that I’ve been really passionate about. I got really deep into it only to realize I’d been attacking it from the wrong angle and gave up for about a month. Then I drew up a new plan and outline over the Fall and I’ve just been going at it like a madman since the beginning of the year. So I’ve been really productive writing-wise but I haven’t left much time for the newsletter, hence me rushing to put this thing together at the last minute. Still, I think I’ve found some interesting stuff to write about.
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya
Follows the protagonist across three rooms: student accommodations at Oxford, a living room where she rents a couch in London, and finally a gallery at the Tate, where she’s able to kill time in public while waiting for a train to take her back to her parents’, as she’s finally relented and accepted she has move home again.
The prose was maybe a little too detached, with people stating their problems more than I ever felt them. Still, it’s a nice issue novel, even if the Brexit stuff is already a bit dated. I liked it but I think I appreciated Three Rooms more for its potential than for itself, as I’ve been waiting a long time for something like this, the English boarding room novel updated for the age of couchsurfing and core housing need. Think Patrick Hamilton or Jean Rhys for the Millennial precariat. I really think that as a genre it should be thriving, but there’s not much out there.
Professor Andersen’s Night by Dag Soldstad
This was a good one to read just after the Christmas festivities had ended, as it begins by following the eponymous professor through a comfortable but lonesome Christmas Eve, sitting by himself around a fire and a Christmas tree, but then looking out his window to see if his neighbours are enjoying their Christmases only to witness a murder taking place in a neighbour’s apartment.
He can’t bring himself to call the police, and though he shows up early to a dinner party the next day hoping to ask a friend for advice, he can’t make himself bring it up. Slowly, he gets on with his life. He visits a colleague in Oslo and realizes he has begun to doubt his faith in literature, and by the time he runs into some students of his and jokes with them on their way to a bartending gig, he seems to have internalized and accepted the murder.
I’ve seen a lot of reviews of this book that talk about his failure to report the murder as a moral question, but for me it read as more of a question of etiquette. Not so much Camus by way of Nordic Noir but rather Mark Corrigan from Peep Show meeting Thomas Bernhardt-style paragraphs.
These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy
This one was really short, I think like forty ebook pages, offering three biographical essays, on the lives of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. I didn’t know Schwob at all, and I’m not really a Keats guy but she made his life interesting. De Quincey, who you probably know as Mr. Confessions of an Opium Eater, is the standout—in fact I think the reason I picked this up is because I was reading about the publication of some minor De Quincey works by Sublunary Editions in their Empyrean series and downloaded Jaeggy’s book so I could have some background on his life, but then forgot about it until I was looking for something quick to read on my kindle over Christmas. Jaeggy’s book is fine and I want to read more of her writing, but this by itself felt kind of insubstantial.
So note to self to check out De Quincey’s Joan of Arc and Jaeggy’s I am the Brother of XX.
Links
Apparently one of my favourite directors, Christian Petzold (check out Afire and Transit) has been trying (and so far failing) to adapt one of my favourite Simenon novels, Dirty Snow, one of his ‘romans durs’ (literally ‘hard novel’, one of the 117 he wrote that didn’t feature his famous detective, Maigret, but rather examine a crime through an intensely psychological lens). Story here.
The Financial Times had a great piece recently about snow clearance in Montreal, of all things. Apparently, as of last year, a Montreal snow depot was still trying to melt snow that had fallen fifteen years prior. That’s wild. Bid-rigging and firebombing, too, of course.
Isabella d’Este is a person I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’ve slowly been reading through a book of her letters1—she received something like 28,000 letters over the course of her life, and she and her secretaries probably wrote as many as 16,000 outgoing letters. One of her letters happens to include the first documented reference to Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which is why she’s important to me. Ariosto’s employer, Cardinal Ippolito, had sent Ariosto to Mantua to congratulate Isabella (Ippolito’s sister) on the birth of a son, and for two days Ariosto entertained her by reading from an early draft of the Orlando Furioso. Her letter to Ippolito is a thank you note commending Ariosto. She was also an avid art collector, and desperately wanted her portrait done by Leonardo da Vinci, who kept putting her off. For a long time, a preparatory sketch was thought to be all that existed of his commission. But then in 2013 a full, coloured portrait surfaced in a private vault in Switzerland. Scholars are divided on whether it’s really a Da Vinci painting.
has a fascinating look at its background and troubled legal history, which includes a raid by Swiss police on a vault in Lugarno. (Hat tip to for bringing my attention to this story.)#HeistWatch
The £10m house burglary in London had me fascinated for a few days at the beginning of the year.
There’s not a whole lot of #HeistWatch stories out of Newfoundland, as far as I know, and this one barely counts because they just fucking demolished the bank with a backhoe, but apparently this is part of a brazen slew of heists by the ‘backhoe bandits,’ their fourth so far, all using stolen construction equipment.
I haven’t finished read the sports memorabilia theft ring story from The Atlantic, but I’m looking forward to it.
Bonus heist: I don’t consider cybercrime as real heist material, but apparently FACTOR, which provides grants for Canadian recording artists (I always thought was a government body but apparently is a private non-profit) had nearly ten million dollars stolen from its bank account last year. “A massive chunk of 2024 funding was allegedly taken on June 12, about a week after the Department of Canadian Heritage deposited $14.3-million” into its Scotiabank account. “filings allege that the sole shareholder of the numbered company was a Quebec man named James Campagna, and that just minutes after the transfer to his Scotiabank account, he transferred $9.4-million to an ATB Financial account belonging to the cryptocurrency platform VirgoCX Direct. The funds were then converted into the USDC cryptocurrency and shifted between various wallets.”
More from the CBC: “The court filings state that FACTOR's accountant, Marna Aianova, was the only person with official access to log in to the organization's bank account. But in January, someone outside of FACTOR gained access using a third-party email address with the name of a part-time FACTOR chief financial officer. The filings allege Scotiabank did not alert FACTOR about the new user, despite the user having an "outlook.com" email address rather than a "factor.ca" address and accessing the account multiple times.”
Doesn’t sound good. Hope you weren’t expecting a grimes album this year.
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I think you used to be able to read some of her letters online, but now you can’t.
Loved this! I especially liked the segue to Isabella d'Este :)
This was enjoyable. Really hope Christian Petzold raises the money - he's so good.