On the Line: wGotowości, Balle, Daydreamers

▰ Gimme Shelter: “Always take spare socks,” the instructor advised. And you might want earplugs, he added. There are always lots of snorers in emergency shelters. That is from an article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about Poland’s wGotowości (or “Readiness”) civilian defense training program. . . . ▰ Time Warp The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble’. That is Joanna Biggs writing in the London Review of Books about Solvej Balle’s series of novels, On the Calculation of Volume. Tara, the main character in the books, wakes every day having to live the same day all over again — sort of like in Groundhog Day, but not exactly. A New York Times story by Hilary Leichter about Balle’s books reminds the reader of the “infraordinary,” the late George Perec’s term (l’infra-ordinaire in the original…