SOUNDTRACK:
[READ: October 31, 2025] “The Extremophile”
It has been six years since Ghost Box III came out….
After years of demand, the Ghost Box is back! Patton Oswalt’s much-beloved spooky-story anthology returns for a fourth edition, with the same trademark production details—magnetized box lid, anyone?—that Ghost Box fans have come to expect.
As always, working with Patton on Ghost Box IV was a dream, and we can’t wait to show you the nightmares that he’s wrangled and stuffed into the box this time around.
I don’t know very much about Christian Bök except that he wrote the poetry series Eunoia which is a remarkable piece of art and poetry:
Each poem uses only one vowel, creating sentences like: “Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal”
It’s worth checking out.
I didn’t know if he did anything since, but apparently he has been working on something called The Xenotext which Wikipedia says
Xenotext consists of a single sonnet (called “Orpheus”), which gets translated into a gene and then integrated into a cell, causing the cell to “read” this poem, and in reply, the cell builds a protein — one whose sequence of amino acids encodes yet another sonnet (called “Eurydice”). The cell becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem. The gene has so far worked properly in cultures of E. coli, but the intended symbiote is D. radiodurans (“the dire seed, immune to radiation”) — an extremophile, able to thrive in very inhospitable environments, deadly to most life on Earth.
I quoted that because it uses the word extremophile, which is the name of this story.
This story is quite short and it is, simply, a list of conditions that this entity can survive in. It’s fascinating but not terribly interesting and, indeed, not very scary. Especially since nothing happens in the story. I mean, the ending is “It awaits your experiments,” which I guess is an interesting setup and given some of that background above it does make it slightly more compelling, but as a story, well, meh.
A few years ago I was visiting my friend Roman. He asked me if I read 
SOUNDTRACK: ARCADE FIRE-Neon Bible (2007) [update].
I’ve decided my previous review was a little harsh. There are some tracks that do stand out. In fact, the first four tracks are really great. With “Intervention” being perhaps even better than “No Cars Go.” Then the ending is very solid. The middle tends to meander a bit, I’m afraid. And, I still stand by my comment that the highs and lows just aren’t here. The way to really notice this is to hear how great the highs and lows of “Intervention” and “No Cars Go” are. You really miss them on the rest of the album!
I Just Read About That... 