Nostr notes by dimaberkut

I read R.F. Kuang's Yellowface with mixed feelings: the ...

2026-03-11T10:05:24Z

I read R.F. Kuang's Yellowface with mixed feelings: the writing is excellent, but there are noticeable weaknesses too.
The novel works remarkably well as a satire of the contemporary literary world. Kuang focuses less on literature itself than on the industry surrounding it — publishers, marketing, festivals, social media, and the moral debates that so easily collapse into public performance. She captures the texture of a world where success often depends not just on the work itself, but on the story attached to the author.
One of the novel's greatest strengths is the narrator's voice. She's a character who constantly rationalizes her own actions and can find justification for almost any decision she makes. Watching that internal machinery of self-justification at work is fascinating and at times genuinely unsettling.
That said, the second half loses some momentum. Certain situations start repeating themselves, and the plot begins to move along a familiar track. The satire stays sharp, but the tension the opening builds gradually dissipates.
There are also a few threads that feel underdeveloped. The episode involving Athena's mother and her diaries, for instance, is introduced as a potentially significant element — the diaries could have served as Athena's own voice, or as a document capable of reframing everything that has happened. Instead, the thread remains more of a hint and never develops into a fully realized dramatic knot.
Here lies the central paradox of the book: Kuang has conceived a remarkably strong premise — almost perfectly suited to a satirical novel about the literary industry. But the architecture of the story sometimes feels unfinished: certain elements are introduced as though they matter, then never fully paid off.
Even so, the novel is a compelling read. It's sharp, wry, and pretty merciless toward contemporary cultural life. Even where you push back against it, the book makes you think hard about how literature, authorship, and public reputation actually work today.
So despite its unevenness, it's still four out of five stars for me.

Porto, Portugal: Ponte Dom Luís I, the iron bridge that has ...

2026-02-25T11:24:34Z

Porto, Portugal: Ponte Dom Luís I, the iron bridge that has connected the two banks of the Douro since 1886 and remains central to the city’s daily movement.

Barcelos. Short story → ...

2026-02-22T14:07:03Z

Barcelos. Short story → https://open.substack.com/pub/dimaberkut/p/barcelos

Cabo da Roca, Portugal: The westernmost edge of mainland Europe, ...

2026-02-19T10:43:24Z

Cabo da Roca, Portugal: The westernmost edge of mainland Europe, where the Atlantic shapes both the land and the weather.

Merzouga, Morocco: A village on the edge of the Erg Chebbi dunes, ...

2026-02-15T10:16:29Z

Merzouga, Morocco: A village on the edge of the Erg Chebbi dunes, where camel caravans once moved along Saharan trade routes and today remain part of the local tourist economy.

Yesterday I watched the Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes, ...

2026-02-14T11:23:20Z

Yesterday I watched the Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes, Juan José Campanella’s 2009 detective drama.
It is a story about a past that does not dissolve with time and is not stored away in an archive, but lives on inside us and slowly seeps into everyday life. The protagonist returns to an old criminal case and begins to write about it, and between the lines what emerges is not so much the investigation as his own life — with all its pauses, doubts, and missed opportunities.

Love here is almost invisible. It exists in glances that linger a second longer than they should, in words that are never spoken. The feeling rests on restraint and respect for another person’s boundaries — and it runs parallel to the case, like another story left unresolved.

This is not simply a detective story; it is a cool-headed demonstration that justice is not a blind goddess with scales, but an instrument in the hands of politics. When politics needs it, it takes that instrument out and uses it not to weigh the truth, but to bury it for good.

And that is the core of the protagonist’s tragedy. He is not just a cop. He is a man who believes that words have force. That if everything is written down properly, if all the facts are gathered into a single narrative, then that narrative will prevail. He wants to create a text that cannot be overturned. That cannot be rewritten. For him, this is the only way to tell the truth in a world where justice has been sold.

The film does not rush, does not press, does not explain more than it needs to. It leaves an aftertaste and makes you reflect on how memory and unspoken words can accompany people throughout their lives.

Nostr event nevent1qqs83hq5m2542m9k2mhczkctxfajekx7qd9ckkze0drsg68jjx08k0czyqywxsyunfv88trczyzkjq8ve5edpan636wc4e4jcp6hzm46wvfvqx7rgxl

2026-02-06T12:37:25Z

Northern Russia

My short story Abandoned Things is published in Spillwords Press. ...

2026-01-31T10:40:34Z

My short story Abandoned Things is published in Spillwords Press.
Read it here: https://spillwords.com/abandoned-things

Decided to start a blog. Texts and notes on literature, film, and ...

2026-01-30T20:28:18Z

Decided to start a blog. Texts and notes on literature, film, and other things I find interesting. Signed up on Substack. An ideal platform. https://substack.com/@dimaberkut

After reading The Smoke Tree by Denis Johnson, a novel less about ...

2026-01-30T10:48:38Z

After reading The Smoke Tree by Denis Johnson, a novel less about war than about how war destroys the possibility of coherent meaning, I found myself returning to Apocalypse Now.

The film remains deeply affecting, but it now reveals itself differently. What stands out most is how carefully ordered it is. The characters have a mission, a route, a clear objective. The journey upriver shapes not only the geography of the story but its narrative logic as well. Even chaos unfolds as a sequence, step by step.

In this sense, Apocalypse Now invites comparison with Dante’s descent into Hell. There is a path and there is a movement inward. Each episode functions like its own circle, defined by a particular form of madness. First comes spectacle, violence that borders on the theatrical. Then cruelty. Then ritual. Finally, all of it converges in the figure of Kurtz. Horror here does not simply escalate. It is arranged and distributed. It has structure.

What matters, too, is that the film allows evil to reach its extreme and still speak. Kurtz is mad, but he is articulate. He formulates his vision. The film does not dismiss the possibility that even in this hell there can be a final point where meaning, however warped, continues to exist.

After The Smoke Tree, this feels especially stark. Johnson’s war is built on different principles. There is no route and no center. No descent through circles. His characters live inside hell itself, without knowing where it begins or where it ends. No one is leading them, and nothing leads anywhere. Meaning is not distorted. It disintegrates.

That is why Apocalypse Now does not feel naive or dated. It belongs to a time when there was still faith that even the most extreme experience could be shaped into a journey and carried through to an ending.

And that is precisely why it now reads as the last great myth of war. Complete, terrifying, and no longer possible in that form.

Rereading Sealed Off by Eileen Chang, one is struck by how an ...

2026-01-28T18:15:00Z

Rereading Sealed Off by Eileen Chang, one is struck by how an ordinary urban scene, a stalled tramcar during a wartime blockade, gives birth to such a piercing story about loneliness and fleeting intimacy.
Eileen Chang does not idealize her characters, and in this lies her particular honesty. Lu Zongzhen begins flirting with a stranger simply to avoid his pestering nephew. Wu Cuiyuan accepts the attention of a married man partly out of spite toward her own proper family. Seemingly not the noblest of motives. But it is precisely this unvarnished truth that makes their encounter so touching: two tired, lonely people who, for a brief moment, stop playing their social roles and simply exist for each other.
Cuiyuan is especially pitiable. Educated and conscientious, she has dissolved so completely into others’ expectations that she has become a person without definite features. Even her mother cannot say what shape her face is. Her life is a “translation of a translation,” in which something is constantly lost. And here, in this stalled tramcar, she suddenly feels real, when a strange man looks at her simply as a woman, not as a position or a family disappointment.
Eileen Chang works masterfully with details: a newspaper stuck to a bun, white arms “like squeezed-out toothpaste,” an old man with a face like a walnut. These small touches create a sense of reality, stuffy and cramped, from which one so badly wants to escape.
But the bitterest part is the ending. When the blockade is lifted and the city comes alive, Zongzhen simply goes back to his seat. Without explanations, without goodbyes. He silently declares that everything that happened was unreal, a dream of the sealed-off city. And Cuiyuan understands that the brief encounter in which they could both be themselves has ended. Reality demands a return to roles: he is a respectable family man and an accountant, she a lonely teacher. The blockade paradoxically freed them, while freedom returned them to the prison of everyday life.
The beggar’s song, “Sad, sad, sad! No money do I have!”, runs through the entire story as a reminder that material circumstances, social conventions, and family obligations are stronger than feelings. Zongzhen cannot afford love. Cuiyuan has no right to choose. And the city goes on living, the tram moves forward, and two people remain in their cages.
Eileen Chang writes about occupied Shanghai in the 1940s, but she speaks of something eternal. About how difficult it is to remain alive in a world that reduces us to functions. About how rare moments of genuine closeness are. About how we ourselves refuse happiness because it is “unreasonable” or “doesn’t fit.”
This is a sad, intelligent, deeply human story. It offers no answers and no consolation. But it sees us: weary passengers in the tramcars of our lives, dreaming of becoming real, if only for a moment.

Favorite quote from the story:

“Life was like the Bible, translated from Hebrew into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into English, and from English into Mandarin Chinese. When Cuiyuan read it, she translated the Mandarin into Shanghainese. Some things did not come through.”

Merzouga, southeastern Morocco ...

2026-01-27T13:38:28Z

Merzouga, southeastern Morocco

Looking through family photos ...

2026-01-26T13:35:28Z

Looking through family photos

I finished Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson — a long and ...

2026-01-25T13:25:50Z

I finished Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson — a long and challenging novel about the Vietnam War. Not “about events” in the usual sense, but an attempt to understand how war exists in human experience.

What struck me most was how Johnson tells this war. He doesn’t present it linearly or try to assemble it into a coherent narrative. The war here emerges from short scenes, with gaps of months and years between them.

Against this backdrop, the Houston brothers’ storyline works particularly well. It lacks epic scale and conventional plot logic. Both brothers deteriorate, but along different paths. One — because he went through the war and could never return to a normal life afterward. The other — through naval service, from which he is expelled for disciplinary reasons. For him, this is not an exit or a form of liberation, but the beginning of disintegration. Their trajectory doesn’t break off — it simply moves downward: life narrows, orientation is lost, and any connection to normal reality disappears. Prison and asociality at the end look not like a breakdown or a punishment, but like something everything had been moving toward all along.

I like how Johnson writes. Every sentence is precise, without excess. This is a large novel, almost nine hundred pages, but it never feels bloated. Everything is necessary; nothing is superfluous. One detail instead of a page of description: a smell, a gesture, a casual remark — and through it you see the entire scene. The prose is constantly compressed, even when the scale seems epic.

The novel’s structure is jagged. Huge jumps in time, abrupt shifts in point of view. At first this is disorienting, but then it becomes clear that this material could not be presented any other way. This is how war feels — as a collection of fragments that refuse to form a whole. Nobody understands what’s happening: not the characters, not the reader. Any attempt to assemble everything into a clear picture would feel dishonest.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its reticence. Between chapters, events occur that can only be guessed at. Johnson deliberately refuses to fill these voids, and that refusal is precisely what makes them work. The gaps are felt almost physically — like lost pieces of life to which there is no longer any access.

Against this background, the epilogue, in my view, overloads the novel with articulation. It seems to spell out what the main text has already expressed through structure, breaks, and silence. Without the epilogue, the book would probably benefit, preserving the degree of incompleteness and fragmentation that feels organic to it.

It also matters that the novel has no heroes or villains. Everyone exists in a moral fog, making choices that cannot be judged unambiguously. This is not a story about right and wrong — it is a story about people inside chaos that no one controls and no one fully understands.

In the end, Tree of Smoke is not a novel I “liked” — it is a novel that stayed with me. It matters not only as a statement about war, but as a writerly experience. It shows that a large novel does not have to be verbose. You can build an epic canvas out of short, dense scenes and out of the gaps between them. The text lives not only in words, but in the space between them — and it seems that is where the most essential things happen.

Eckermann's Ears An Imagined Preface to Eckermann’s ...

2026-01-21T14:37:14Z

Eckermann's Ears
An Imagined Preface to Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8284775617

Aït Benhaddou, Morocco ...

2026-01-21T11:53:54Z

Aït Benhaddou, Morocco

The first known literary text — the Epic of Gilgamesh — was ...

2026-01-17T14:16:12Z

The first known literary text — the Epic of Gilgamesh — was written on clay. The world of this epic is literally made of clay: cities, walls, vessels, tablets. The material of writing was part of the same reality in which that writing emerged.

If the material of writing shapes the way of thinking, then digital writing is not neutral either: it transforms the very reality in which it arises. Perhaps, in a few thousand years, someone will read a surviving digital text and wonder — how could they conceive of reality as so unstable, multiple, lacking a center? Just as we today marvel at the totality of clay in the Mesopotamian imagination.

Ouarzazate, Morocco ...

2026-01-16T11:33:51Z

Ouarzazate, Morocco

When I started reading Dubliners, I was expecting something ...

2026-01-15T11:47:53Z

When I started reading Dubliners, I was expecting something closer to Carver — restrained, everyday stories where an inner fracture slowly emerges from an ordinary scene. Formally, there are similarities: minimalism, the absence of dramatic plots, attention to pauses. But it becomes clear fairly quickly that Joyce is interested in something else. Not a private fracture, but a condition in which fracture is no longer possible.

Dubliners does not age because Joyce is writing not about his own era, but about a condition in which it is easy to recognize yourself. These are stories about people who live properly, decently, by rules they never questioned — and yet do not understand how their lives have passed them by. Professions and settings change, but the same feeling of inner immobility remains: nothing catastrophic happens, and meaning slowly drains away. That is why this book feels not like a historical document, but like an accurate description of a familiar, contemporary experience.

Watched Train Dreams by Clint Bentley. An uncomfortable question ...

2026-01-11T11:02:20Z

Watched Train Dreams by Clint Bentley. An uncomfortable question arose.
Can a film that is an almost word-for-word adaptation of brilliant prose fiction be called a masterpiece? The director chooses a path of extreme restraint: voiceover narration, visuals serving as an illustration of the text, minimal directorial intervention. The camera does not challenge the literature or develop its own language. It follows it.

The result truly hits hard. But this power does not belong to cinema. It belongs to the book Train Dreams and to its author, Denis Johnson. The film becomes a conduit for someone else’s vision, a beautifully designed audiobook in which the imagery underscores an already existing rhythm rather than creating a new one.

Johnson’s prose is so flawless in its meditativeness, silence, and inner breathing that it perhaps never needed translation into the language of film. The director seems to have understood this, which explains the refusal of an authorial gesture. But caution in art rarely produces masterpieces.
The film is visually precise and leaves a strong aftertaste. But this is the aftertaste of the novel. And that difference matters.

I’ve just read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. It ...

2026-01-10T10:28:26Z

I’ve just read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. It starts almost like a detective story. Oedipa Maas is asked to sort through the estate of a deceased tycoon, her former lover, and soon begins to notice a strange symbol: a muted post horn, possibly linked to an underground postal system. But Pynchon never allows this mystery to settle into something solid. Every clue Oedipa finds could point to a hidden network — or could mean nothing at all.

The novel isn’t really about conspiracy. It’s about what happens when you can no longer be sure whether the world has meaning or whether you’re simply forcing patterns onto random facts. Oedipa gets stuck between two fears: that everything is connected, and that nothing is. The reader gets stuck there too.
There is a lot of humor in this short book, but it’s uneasy and absurd rather than comforting. The language shifts constantly, piling up details and changing tone, making the reading experience feel unstable. The text doesn’t aim to reassure or entertain so much as to disorient.

Read today, in a world shaped by conspiracy theories and post-truth, the novel feels strikingly current. We struggle to tell real conspiracies from imagined ones, to know whether we are discovering meaning or inventing it. With official explanations losing their authority, any alternative can look like either insight or madness. Pynchon’s muted post horn is not a symbol of resistance, but of uncertainty itself. And that uncertainty is more unsettling than any conspiracy.

Merzouga, Morocco ...

2026-01-09T10:51:07Z

Merzouga, Morocco

I just finished Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Five parts of ...

2026-01-04T15:21:25Z

I just finished Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Five parts of literature and violence.
Everyone talks about the fourth part — three hundred pages of horror. For me, it’s the best one. The most honest. If anything, parts two and three feel almost unnecessary; the novel would be stronger if it were made up only of the first, fourth, and fifth parts.

2666 sits somewhere between Cortázar and Pavić for me — literature as an existential experience rather than a story. The novel offers no catharsis and no answers. Evil here isn’t a puzzle to be solved, but the very structure of reality — its default setting.

Black humor and a constant undercurrent of mild absurdity make the book unexpectedly easy to read, even when it deals with things most people instinctively turn away from. Bolaño understands that you can’t stare into darkness for 1,000 pages straight. Absurdity is what gives you air.

This isn’t “required reading.”
But if you want to understand why literature exists in a world where it changes nothing — this is it.

Dades Gorge, Morocco ...

2025-12-31T11:48:11Z

Dades Gorge, Morocco

Short promo — the Clochard ebook is currently available for ...

2025-12-30T10:33:54Z

Short promo — the Clochard ebook is currently available for free on Amazon.
If you’ve been putting it off or are just curious, now’s the time to download:
👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQ8TWXFN

Nostr event nevent1qqsrggcz8s3px9ufgzn2txq940dz5sw509m62mc9v9y2433zp40vppqzyqywxsyunfv88trczyzkjq8ve5edpan636wc4e4jcp6hzm46wvfvqgccgp5

2025-12-28T10:48:20Z

Marrakech

Ira. Karelia, Russia. ...

2025-12-26T14:24:00Z

Ira. Karelia, Russia.

Watched Stars at Noon by Claire Denis. A film where a political ...

2025-12-26T12:18:56Z

Watched Stars at Noon by Claire Denis.
A film where a political thriller sinks into heat, pauses, and endless sex, as if that were the only reliable way to keep it moving. The rhythm is viscous, and the atmosphere dense, almost hypnotic.

The heat itself, however, feels decorative — too neat, lacking that exhausting, sleep-depriving, airless state the film clearly counts on.

Joe Alwyn is unconvincing, as if he never quite understands why he’s there at all (easy to see why Pattinson had more important things to do). Margaret Qualley works hard to hold attention, but the script too often reduces everything to the bedroom, treating intimacy as a universal dramatic solution.

In the end, there is plenty of atmosphere and much less meaning, and any genuine sense of place or inner necessity is missing.

Put together several playlists I usually work to into one. ...

2025-12-25T17:14:59Z

Put together several playlists I usually work to into one.
Writing, editing, thinking. Almost 60 hours of music.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ZWHkAktArWoMQCtYNUfcm?si=dd54093e878f4039

Short run — my Adult Life ebook is currently free on Amazon. If ...

2025-12-24T11:56:45Z

Short run — my Adult Life ebook is currently free on Amazon. If you’ve been putting it off or are just curious, now’s the time to download.
https://www.amazon.com/Adult-Life-Dmitry-Berkut-ebook/dp/B0DR8661SS

Nostr event nevent1qqsw2yrqwzh8kje2qgtwfqgjlr785n4p3pstxxysucgd4cnncqjr8ugzyqywxsyunfv88trczyzkjq8ve5edpan636wc4e4jcp6hzm46wvfvqkaq328

2025-12-23T09:39:38Z

Tânger

I watched One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson. ...

2025-12-22T16:09:26Z

I watched One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson. Overall, I liked it. PTA decided to make the most expensive film of his career and once again adapts Pynchon. It's a story about how the failed revolutionaries of past decades really just want to smoke some weed and forget everything — but the world, annoyingly, refuses to forget them.

DiCaprio plays a burned-out paranoiac living off the grid, which, frankly, feels like a natural continuation of the life trajectory of any American radical from the 1970s. Sean Penn appears as a deranged colonel, resembling an elderly Terminator. Jonny Greenwood spends the entire film hammering a single piano key — in short, classic PTA elements all around.

The most touching part is that hope is passed down by inheritance, right alongside trauma. Revolution is a family business.

Thanks for the optimism, Paul.

When you read Paul Bowles’s Midnight Mass, one recurring ...

2025-12-20T18:40:09Z

When you read Paul Bowles’s Midnight Mass, one recurring emotion keeps surfacing: in this world, almost everyone is a stranger. Bowles writes about Tangier and its surroundings in such a way that the dividing line does not run between “European” and “Muslim,” but between the individual and a space that fully accepts no one. In the stories about expatriates, you feel their confused attempts to gain a foothold in a country that does not belong to them. In the stories about Muslim families, there is the same sense of alienation, only from within: the characters lose their bearings inside their own homes, customs, and fears, as if reality itself were constantly slipping out from under their feet.

Parables like “The Hyena” add yet another layer: here it is the reader who becomes the outsider, because the rules of narration are different, non-Western, and Bowles makes no effort to explain them.

Taken together, these stories produce a strange sensation: no one in them is the master of the territory. People, traditions, houses, even animals—all seem to exist on a kind of borderland, where order exists, but not for you. And it is precisely this fundamental sense of non-belonging that gives the collection its coherence: Bowles depicts a world in which everyone navigates blindly, and this is the norm.

I had long wanted to stay in a place connected to Tangier’s ...

2025-12-20T12:54:18Z

I had long wanted to stay in a place connected to Tangier’s literary past. El Muniria interested me not as a hotel, but as a point on a personal map. Today, that history survives mostly in the form of portraits lining the corridors, and little else survives. But that hardly mattered. I knew why I was coming, and what I was — and was not — expecting.

The location is genuinely good. Gibraltar is just below, although not quite from the window. I only saw it from one very specific position: if I sat down to write and looked sideways, at the right angle. A few minutes uphill is the Grand Café de Paris, tied not to any single generation, but to the art bohemia of Tangier’s Interzone period — a reminder that the city’s myths were once lived, not curated.

In the evenings, loud music from the bar carries on until late, which can make rest difficult. The staff were moderately friendly — polite, efficient, without any particular warmth.

In the end, El Muniria is not about comfort. It is about context, about choosing a place for what it once meant, rather than what it currently offers. For me, that was enough.

Heading to Casablanca, to the buffer zone before the leap back ...

2025-12-16T12:36:30Z

Heading to Casablanca, to the buffer zone before the leap back into routine.
Where you look at someone else’s city while assembling your own in your head.
And you already feel yourself being pulled from afar — to Porto, to your home, to the one you love.
That’s what return really is. Internal. The most important kind.

There are things that belong on a “never again” list right ...

2025-12-13T09:15:03Z

There are things that belong on a “never again” list right from the start. And sitting on top of that list should be a camel.

First, this majestic lump of pride decides you’re unworthy of its back and looks at you as if you’ve insulted its entire centuries-old lineage. Then, with a deep, martyred sigh, it finally rises from the ground, performing a complex, multi-stage maneuver that feels like a small earthquake — happening simultaneously under your feet and in your backside.

And then the journey itself begins. Every step is a sway, and beneath you is the living embodiment of fatalism and discontent. You don’t feel like a traveler — you feel like part of the cargo, tolerated solely because someone’s paying in dates.

So yes — it’s an experience that’s unique, unpleasant, but somehow absolutely necessary. Moroccan.

Traveling through Morocco, I’ve been reading Paul Bowles in ...

2025-12-12T22:18:32Z

Traveling through Morocco, I’ve been reading Paul Bowles in parallel. Now we’re in the Sahara, and this is no longer just a trip — it’s a ritual. A Bowles reader in Morocco is like someone who deliberately goes to a cemetery at midnight to make sure the shadows really do move.

I lie under Berber blankets, and the pages of his stories become an extension of the tent, another wall — not of fabric, but of words and darkness. The howl of the wind beyond the canvas blends with his sentences, and I can no longer tell where the real cold of the desert ends and where that icy terror begins, the one he described in such an even, dispassionate voice. His characters lose themselves in this landscape, and I, without noticing, begin to listen inward, wondering whether something of my own is vanishing too in this silent, humming expanse.

It’s dangerous reading, like staring into a mirror in the dark for too long. You look to his texts for confirmation of what you’re feeling, and you find it. But the price of that confirmation is the sense that you yourself are becoming a character in one of his stories — a person on the edge, where reality is so thin you could pierce it with a fingernail, and behind it lies either nothingness, or something far more terrifying than any desert.

GM!

2025-11-30T15:37:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…nmg0
_________________________

GM!

It started raining in Rabat, and honestly, I’m a little ...

2025-11-30T12:52:13Z

It started raining in Rabat, and honestly, I’m a little relieved we don’t have to go anywhere outside the medina to look at architectural excesses. The truth is, I’m not really a tourist. I can easily fly to another country just to sit with a cup of mint tea and watch people go by.
Ticking off sights from a list doesn’t interest me.

We arrived in Rabat. The road made me a bit nauseous; my mom is ...

2025-11-28T17:00:32Z

We arrived in Rabat. The road made me a bit nauseous; my mom is holding up like a champ.
The atmosphere here is completely different — calmer, and you barely see any foreigners. The sun is out, the muezzin is calling, everything’s cheaper. After touristy Chefchaouen, the contrast is real.
I’m trying to get my mom into keeping a travel journal. It’s actually pretty therapeutic — writing things down while they’re still vivid. She seems willing so far; we’ll see how long that lasts.

And yet, when I look at the locals in their hooded robes up here ...

2025-11-27T23:52:06Z

And yet, when I look at the locals in their hooded robes up here in the Moroccan mountains, all the Bowles stories I’ve read come back to me. The inner world here is closed off, foreign to Western ways of thinking. If you were born into a different environment, you simply can’t understand it on its own terms.
You can only watch — and form your own, inevitably naive, impression.

Chefchaouen is a blue city in the Rif Mountains. The walls are ...

2025-11-27T07:15:19Z

Chefchaouen is a blue city in the Rif Mountains. The walls are painted in shades from light to nearly black indigo.
They say blue repels mosquitoes. In reality, the tradition came from Jewish refugees from Spain in the sixteenth century — they settled here and painted their houses the color of the sky as a reminder of God, who suddenly felt too distant.

My mom touches the walls and asks why there is still so much blue. I say: because it works — people come here to take photos.
Here, unlike in French-speaking Tangier, many people speak Spanish — the trace of those refugees remains not only on the walls.

On our first day, after getting off the bus, we headed up the road into the hills because Google had placed our riad not in the medina but somewhere in the slums among the clouds. We realized this too late — it turned into quite the quest.

That was my first impression — dragging my own bag and my mom’s suitcase up a forty-five-degree slope while the city lay below us, white and blue, compact. The air turned cold and damp. Then we literally walked into a cloud — it was hanging right over the slope. The houses dissolved into haze, the sounds became muffled. You walk, and around you is gray emptiness — only walls appearing out of the fog.

But soon we switched on critical thinking, turned around, and went back down into the medina. There we asked every shopkeeper, showing the photo on our phone. Eventually we found it and checked into a very traditional riad, under whose windows loud Arabic conversation doesn’t stop until late at night.

We’ll drink mint tea here for a couple of days and then move on — to Rabat.

We’re still in Tangier. Spent the day around the Cap Spartel ...

2025-11-24T21:03:41Z

We’re still in Tangier. Spent the day around the Cap Spartel lighthouse.
Lighthouses always inspire me. And Tangier itself is like a lighthouse — except it shines in all directions at once. A crack between worlds.

A place where the Atlantic argues with the Mediterranean, where Europe tiptoes into Africa, and time loses its rhythm, spilling in every direction.

Tangier is weathered not from poverty, but from freedom. Its walls have peeled from seeing too much: smugglers and spies traded stories here; poets gambled away manuscripts in poker games. The city is a misfit by nature — too Arab for the French, too French for the Arabs, ultimately belonging to no one, not even itself.

Tangier’s soul lives in that gap — in the smell of fresh mint battling the diesel fumes from the port, in the call from the minaret dissolving into rock ’n’ roll from an open window. Tangier doesn’t choose sides; it is the argument itself — that Atlantic wind carrying Sahara dust onto the tiled roofs of the medina, where it swirls, settles, and rises into the air again.

— This writer lived here? He’s everywhere. — You bet. ...

2025-11-22T21:33:51Z

— This writer lived here? He’s everywhere.
— You bet. Hiding from the American authorities.
— What did he do?
— Accidentally shot his wife in the head.
— How do you accidentally do that?!
— Playing William Tell. Aimed for the apple, missed.
— You really know how to find places.

We’ve checked into Burroughs’s old motel. The room looks like nothing’s changed since the fifties — his portrait on the wall, a wardrobe, a sink. Downstairs there’s the Tangerine bar, bass thumping up through the floor.

It’s one a.m. I’m lying here, looking at the moon through the window, thinking:
I always get what I want. One way or another.

Some families meet in the kitchen over tea. Ours has a slightly ...

2025-11-21T17:35:43Z

Some families meet in the kitchen over tea. Ours has a slightly different geography.
My mom and I live in different countries, and to see each other we have to pick a third place. Ideally — somewhere with as few triggers as possible and plenty of novelty.

Last time it was the Camino de Santiago. Two weeks of rain, wet boots, heavy backpacks. But we made it. Not without mishaps, but we got there.

This time it's Morocco. I'm flying from Porto, my mom from St. Petersburg. We're meeting in Tangier and figuring out the route as we go along.
We'll see how it unfolds. But the fact that we keep trying — that's already something.

upd: Right now I'm at the Tangier train station, waiting for her train from Casablanca.

Welcome ;)

2025-11-20T12:30:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…umjx
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Welcome ;)

I agree with that.

2025-11-19T18:12:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…0gel
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I agree with that.

Bold strategy. Did it pay off?

2025-11-19T18:09:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…pyyq
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Bold strategy. Did it pay off?

There’s a mode where everything is about achievements and ...

2025-11-19T16:00:27Z

There’s a mode where everything is about achievements and goals. And there’s another one — let’s call it the “Portuguese way” — where you simply let go. Not giving up, just releasing the need to hold on.
That’s where I am now — as if I’ve dropped a backpack full of stones I’d been carrying for no real reason.
In this mode there’s no “must”, only “want”. You read, watch films, dive into whatever sparks curiosity, write music for the first time, learn a language simply because it’s interesting. You map out trips you’ll take light.
The world stops being a ladder to climb and becomes an open field — you walk, and under your feet there’s grass, stones, dust. You’re not rushing anywhere, yet you still end up somewhere.
Because the important part isn’t the end point — it’s the journey itself. No strain, no perpetual race against time. Everything is already here.

Upon returning to Portugal, even after a short time away, I ...

2025-11-19T10:16:38Z

Upon returning to Portugal, even after a short time away, I immediately notice how my view of the place I live in has shifted. The same river, the same streets, the same coffee, the same ocean — yet everything feels different. As if something had shifted within me in those few days. It’s a reminder, every time, that we never see the world as it is — we see it as we are. And the “I” is anything but constant.

As we get older, it’s not that we become wiser; we simply change our lens. At twenty-one, it feels like you finally understand things as they truly are. At twenty-eight, you realize that was only one of many temporary insights. Those fabled seven-year cycles aren’t a straight line of growing up but a spiral: you move forward, yet each turn reveals a new layer of illusion. Someone who thinks at thirty-five, “now I really see it all,” simply hasn’t reached the next bend. And when you finally grasp the depth of your former blindness, that’s the surest sign that you’re still blind — just to other things. You always look from a single vantage point and mistake it for the only truth.

#Porto #Portugal

Nostr event nevent1qqsxkrpq6zvca4t74sh5gl6yffuguu67q0wvv3fryn63w3zufflmzcgzyqywxsyunfv88trczyzkjq8ve5edpan636wc4e4jcp6hzm46wvfvqefyq6j

2025-11-18T23:05:55Z

https://open.spotify.com/track/25hPoqtODEhAuQzLhEb9Kh?si=28e28c4a160b4c5a A trip-hop track I wrote to the poetry of Alexander Vvedensky, a Russian poet of the Silver Age who was killed by the Soviet authorities.

Туманный Порту похож на призрак. ...

2025-11-17T10:51:11Z

Туманный Порту похож на призрак. Улочки спускаются к Дору, и в молочном свете выцветшие стены выглядят словно акварель. Кажется, дождь смоет её в любую минуту.
Идёшь по мостовой так, будто шагами пересекаешь слои времени. Никаких туристов — только местная жизнь, проступающая сквозь туман: дед, скручивающий самокрутку на крыльце, запах влажного камня, одинокий трамвай, возникающий из ниоткуда и тут же исчезающий.
Такое блуждание похоже на медитацию. Туман убирает всё лишнее, оставляя детали: изгиб лестницы, отсвет в луже, тень за шторой. В эти минуты город говорит не словами, а намёками — запахом, влажным воздухом, мелкими жестами. И ты понимаешь, что Порту открывается только тем, кто готов немного потеряться в его утре.

Thank you!

2025-11-14T21:54:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…zyul
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Thank you!

мой новый трек ...

2025-11-14T20:24:31Z

мой новый трек https://open.spotify.com/album/748uLG0fzGsPNAVSGprD7E?si=E4ogN92cS5KkfQVEnmO51Q

Просто утро. Не хорошее, не плохое. ...

2025-11-14T01:16:53Z

Просто утро. Не хорошее, не плохое. Обычный день. Такие, без лишнего смысла — самые настоящие. Они не пытаются быть чем-то. Просто дождь, просто чашка кофе, просто португальская речь фоном. Иногда календарь выдаёт нейтральный сюжет. День без эпитетов, без оценки. Пространство, которое можно заполнить чем угодно — или ничем. Такие дни напоминают, что жизнь — не только события, но и паузы между ними.
В этих паузах и начинаешь слышать самого себя.