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Since last year my playlists have been obituaries. David Bowie. Prince, goddammnit. George Michael. Chris Cornell. Steely Dan (half of them). So when I was reminded that R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People was released exactly 25 years ago, I had to celebrate the fact that everyone in the band is alive!!! They’ve disbanded, but they’re alive!! They’ve had medical emergencies, rumors of impending death, and hysterical success, but they’re alive!

And Automatic For The People is still gorgeous and moving—an extended meditation on mortality that makes you want to live. The title of this post is from “Sweetness Follows”. (Turns out I didn’t misremember it after all.)

It’s these little things, they can pull you under
Live your life filled with joy and thunder

I loved Automatic so much that I wore out two cassettes from listening to it constantly, and I bestirred myself to get a passport so I could watch R.E.M. in concert. The first time I ever went abroad was specifically to see R.E.M. There’s a life-changing decision.

I first heard R.E.M. on bootlegs of bootlegs borrowed from my classmate. The ringing guitars, the odd vocals, the baffling lyrics and the sudden sweet melodic turns really got to me. I still know the lyrics to “It’s The End of The World As We Know It”, Leonard Bernstein. (This sounds prophetic now: “Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered.”) Out Of Time was their big breakout: “Losing My Religion” was suddenly playing in supermarkets. But their masterpiece, I think, is Automatic For The People.

A dying person says, “I have lived a full life/And these are the eyes that I want you to remember.” Someone thinks about his youth and “The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago/Turned around backwards so the windshield shows…” It’s beautiful.

Photo of Aedes aegypti mosquito from CNN. Just looking at it makes my skin itch.

Now that my eldest niece is 11, we can have actual conversations. Our common interests are tennis, notebooks, and Greek mythology. Last week she had a persistent fever that turned out to be dengue. Aargh, will we never be rid of this pestilence. (She’s okay. The taua taua tea was a big help.)

I’m fortunate never to have gotten dengue even if mosquitoes adore me. If there is one mosquito in a large room full of people, it will choose me to snack on. During nighttime garden parties, a halo of mosquitoes forms over my head. And then I discovered that they prefer my friend Juan’s blood to mine, so if he’s within five meters I am safe.

I don’t use insecticide at home because strong smells give me congestion, and my nose does not distinguish between stink and floral perfume. (The first thing I do when I get into an Uber or Grab car is to ask the driver to put the air freshener away, those things are lethal. I also avoid shampoos whose fragrance is masangsang, and ask the laundry to hold off on the fabric conditioner.) Also, the feline overlords don’t like it. I’ve tried different kinds of natural/organic insect repellent and candles, most of them citronella-based—sometimes they work, more often they don’t.

Friends recommend those UV mosquito zappers that fry the flying pestilence carriers. Dorski tells me there’s a dengue vaccine now. Lali, who’s had the more excruciating mosquito-borne infection called chikungunya, says there are four varieties of dengue so even if you’ve had dengue you could still catch the three other kinds. Load up on taua taua tea. Be careful out there.

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Another anti-dengue measure: Boysen plans to sell a mosquito-killing paint that doesn’t harm humans. (Note: The people who run Boysen are my friends, and they have supported my projects over the years.) This video from their partner explains how it works:

Unfortunately the Food and Drug Administration has turned down their application.

The first Ishiguro novel I ever read was The Remains of the Day. It was subtle and shattering, two adjectives I’ve found myself using regularly to describe his work. (Full disclosure: I hated The Buried Giant.)

Fiction readers tend to have huge backlogs, but to celebrate Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize, why don’t we toss Never Let Me Go on top of the stack? It’s subtle, shattering, and short. Then let us know why you love (or don’t love) Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, and who was your bet for the prize. (Mine was Ursula K. LeGuin.)

Next: Less by Andrew Sean Greer.

The Twisted books are out of print so it’s time to make new ones. I just finished writing a long account of my trip to the Czech Republic, which reminded me that I have over a decade’s worth of travel notebooks, most of them unpublished. There’s enough of them to fill a large bag.

Chuvaness gave me this shopping bag last year, which is how I learned of the existence of Opening Ceremony haha.

Everything is in longhand so now I have to type it all up and edit it. That, or find a really good OCR app.

Interested publishers, email saffron.safin@gmail.com.