This line…so simple…made me nod with recognition and feel a whimsy of nostalgia for the days of living and working there. Still a miracle that the NYC chapter even exists in my own life…
It’s New York, he thought. It’s New York that makes everything so easy.
…all thanks to the incredibly talented Derek James. Without his encouragement and inspiration I would have stayed South and never ended up above the Metropolitan gay bar on Lorimer in the Fall of 2015.
A whole group of Us are currently hooked on this here. I am re-experiencing the first two excellent seasons to experience the final two for the first time.
This show can’t help but bring to mind collaborative innovators like ReadUp and Meow Wolf in addition to Silicon Valley stories. As a guy interesting in penning a short story as a kind of business proposal this inspired and ignites more around the long incubating seed.
It traverses the early days of home computing through to the growth of the internet, at a time when life on the cutting edge meant explosive success or crushing failure. But it’s the characters, rather than the technological stakes, that keep you hooked. No one is perfect; every character is flawed, with their own strengths and failings. In other words, everyone feels real.
Halt and Catch Fire is as much about failure as it is success, about what losing can teach us and what we will always be too stubborn to learn. The series takes its name from a computing term: a machine code instruction that can generally only be resolved by restarting the computer. It’s appropriate for a series in which characters continually find themselves back at square one – in their work and in their personal lives.
Outstanding read about a super-talented artist! Have had the unexpected pleasure of meeting her in an empty antique store in El Prado, NM about two years ago and I can happily report she is kind and down-to-earth.
Really intriguing artist profile and this solo album is Legit!
“Brittany is an alien,” Tyler, the Creator, told me later. “Everything about her—from her music to her background to her energy in person—it’s so unique. She’s paving concrete for so many people, and I’m not sure she’s even aware of it.” He’s especially enamored of “Baby,” a spare, stretchy song about betrayal. “It makes my chest hurt it’s so good,” he said. Howard was in black pants, a black shirt, gold earrings, eyeglasses, and a long gold jacket. For her encore, she returned to the stage with just her drummer and keyboardist to play “Run to Me,” the final song on “Jaime.” “I wrote this for myself,” she said. “To say, ‘Hey, you got it.’ ”
At the beginning and end of every job, Ms. Malmberg asks the spirits in the area to protect her herd. She lights a ceremonial stick of tobacco and calls out to introduce herself, an intruder on the land, to the animals living there.
With 100 acres to cover, Ms. Malmberg and her team spent a day moving the goats from one parcel to another across a highway. The police halted traffic so the animals could cross.
The work can take longer because of on-the-ground conditions. The Carbondale mitigation project was pushed back three weeks because mudslides caused by last year’s wildfires had closed Interstate 70, the state’s main highway.
Reminds me of Sunday Justice, the courtroom cat, in Where The Crawdads Sing.
“Around 4:30, he's had a rough day,” said Trujillo. Because of the high stress environment he works in, despite all the affection he gets, Shane “absorbs a lot of that stress too, but he loves it.”
To unwind, he enjoys playing fetch in the empty hallways, getting head pats and scratches from all the dog-loving employees, and lounging in whichever office he pleases. “He also loves his toys,” added Trujillo.
To Gilliard, facial recognition software has no place in a free society, not just because it is often less accurate in identifying people of color, but because it means people in targeted neighborhoods can’t even walk down the street without being watched. “Facial recognition takes this kind of freedom that’s foundational to a free society and renders it obsolete.”
At times, Gilliard’s privacy advocacy has earned him unwanted attention from the companies he criticizes. The remote-proctoring company Proctorio has cited critical tweets from Gilliard in a lawsuit against another of its critics, whom it accuses of infringing its copyright. The company is seeking to have that critic’s private communications with Gilliard unsealed, Proctorio legal counsel Timothy Pinos confirmed. Gilliard argues that Proctorio’s products invade students’ privacy in their homes, and that its face-detection software risks flagging as “suspicious” those whose appearance or behavior strays from what it deems to be normal.
The closing statements/paragraphs are legit, also.
Creatively funny and sad and brilliant and liberating.
Currently, Nora is dating an amateur acupuncturist. They met at a bar, where he told her a bad joke about why acupuncturists shouldn’t be trusted, something something something because they are a bunch of backstabbers.
He turns out to be neither of these things: a backstabber or an acupuncturist, professionally speaking. He is sincere and loyal, and he performs acupuncture only at the hobbyist level, though he hopes to get an apprenticeship soon. For now, he practices on himself often, on her less often, and most frequently on the bumpy, porous skin of grapefruits.
When Nora becomes this time, she is reclining on his living-room sectional, the amateur acupuncturist focused on the cap of her knee.
“Do you feel anything?” he asks, inserting a fourth needle experimentally. “More relaxed, maybe?”
“Sure,” she responds, feeling nothing, though maybe a slightly less dulled version of the nothing she usually feels.
Suddenly, a patch of rough, faintly green skin blooms in the space between the needles. It is thicker than the surrounding skin, and when she pokes it, it has a bit of give.
She looks up at the amateur acupuncturist. “Is that supposed to happen?”
He examines the patch thoughtfully. He doesn’t think so, but also, maybe. Which is to say, he hasn’t seen this before, but there’s a lot he hasn’t seen before. After all, he isn’t an expert.
“Hm,” he says, and brings a cold compress.
“Hm,” she says, and tries over-the-counter eczema cream.
Nora has a strong reaction. Over the next few days, the odd patchiness spreads until she is rough and green on her arms, legs, and chest, and on the small of her back, and in the divots of her hips. The patches aren’t itchy or painful, but the amateur acupuncturist avoids them all the same when his hands roam across her under the covers in the dark.
The pale green grows more vibrant, tinged with yellow in some places and with blue in others. Nora loses her appetite. She is cold all the time. She feels so thirsty she might die, but bloats if she drinks more than a swig of water.
This is exceptional! The second to last paragraph is the cherry on top.
Captures the paradoxical psychology of romanticism versus realism of new love in the wake of heartbreak. Captures the conflict of benefits of being alone versus the craving for intimacy. Captures our psychological manipulations and motivations.
There are a lot of moments here (and I am noticing in One Hundred Years of Solitude) where the wackiness of love states lead characters to do what they don’t want to do or not do what they want to do.
Little details like her lips always dry and chapped stand out as foreshadowing.
There is a humor and whimsy here especially in the first 50% or more of the read that reminds me of the quirk that makes the novel Less such a joy to read.
Highly recommended. Once I began I could not stop and the 50 minutes flew by.
This was Griff’s first term on the boxing team. He’d arrived at Nickel in February, right after the previous champ, Axel Parks, turned eighteen and was released back into the free world. Griff’s emergence as the baddest brother on campus had made him Axel’s natural successor. He was a giant, broad-chested and hunched like a big brown bear; his daddy, it was said, was on a chain gang in Alabama for murdering his mother, making Griff’s meanness a handed-down thing. Outside the ring, he made a hobby of terrorizing the weaker boys, the boys without friends, the weepy ones. Inside the ring, his prey stepped right up, so he didn’t have to waste time hunting. Like an electric toaster or an automated washing machine, boxing was a modern convenience that made his life easier.
The coach for the colored team was a Mississippian named Max David, who worked in the school garage. He got an envelope at the end of the year for imparting what he’d learned during his welterweight stint. Max David made his pitch to Griff early in the summer. “My first fight made me cockeyed,” he said. “And my farewell fight set my eyes right again, so trust me when I say this sport will break you down to make you better, and that’s a fact.” Griff smiled. He pulverized and unmanned his opponents with cruel inevitability through autumn. He was not graceful. He was not a scientist. He was a powerful instrument of violence, and that sufficed.
The final sentence of the first paragraph above is so damn effective.
Excellent interview read. Adding CW novels to library queue.
I moved around a lot growing up in the city. There’s always a better apartment waiting for you. If you just get it together, maybe you can get a two-bedroom or move to a better block for more sunlight. Whenever I moved to a new place, I’d get there, and I’d be the same person, wanting another apartment down the block. It’s a New York novel, and people here invest so much of their psychology in real estate. I wanted that to be a feature of the book.
Is jumping around genres something you do to challenge yourself?
I think partially. Then I don’t get bored. Also, I like these different stories. I like fantastic novels that deal with history, like One Hundred Years of Solitude. How can I investigate that for my own purposes? I like heist movies. I like zombie stories. I like detective novels. And there’s no rule what I have to do. And life’s pretty short, so if I like these things, I should do them while I have the chance.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer*****
This book! Wow! Loved every moment and am already promising to myself to read it again at 50 year mark and every ten year bday after that. Remarkably funny and the way the author uses words so effortlessly to seamlessly edit visuals of time shifts from present to flashback left me in awe and feeling hypnotized by a vernacular wizard. I completed the final 100 pages poolside at a local spa and was oscillating between laughing out loud and crying; happily. This book is so full of life and perspective that aging readers may especially appreciate. A book I would gift to anyone and everyone as i have done with other favorite reads in the past. Highest praise.
Scent, so neurologically intertwined with memory, is an emotional catapult, and I found that even the clumsiest molecular facsimile of lilac would get the job done.
Elsewhere in the world, foraging is second nature—Sweden’s constitution actually enshrines the right of every citizen to pick wild berries. But in the United States it remains a fringe activity. In Nelson’s TikToks, between delivering giddy identification guides and recipes in song, she discusses America’s history of anti-foraging laws and regulations, many of which target Black and indigenous people. “Race affects every act of foraging I commit,” Nelson told me, including her technicolor onscreen persona. “If I’m in a part of the city where the rules are ambiguous, I have to make sure that I seem very approachable, and look like I’m in a good mood, and have makeup on my face. A lot of that translates, on the Internet, as just a happy, fun time—no one’s going to call the cops on a person in some rainbow-chiffon dress. At least, I hope not.”
Kostas and Defne’s love story is foreshadowed by the equally dangerous fate of Yusuf and Yiorgos, a gay couple on the island who ran the tavern where the fig tree once lived. The beauty of their love story and resilience is further enhanced by the frailty and pain suffered by those left behind.
The self-possession that Shafak’s women characters come to embody slowly unravels under the burden of trauma. Defne’s defiance and motivation to love Kostas despite opposition and to continue living and working in the island in the aftermath of the civil war is neither unconventional nor unarticulated. However, the tragic wounds of the war and her subsequent choices leave an indelible mark both on her life and Ada’s psyche, as well as on her sister Meryem’s life.
There is a Turkish saying, mentioned in the book, which says that if you weep for all the sorrows in the world, in the end you will have no eyes. The Island of Missing Trees is the story of an island whose people are missing, erased by the horrors of war. To honour their lives and stories, we may want to read this novel even if it means having no eyes in the end.
Adding to read list. Still dreaming of the day I finally meet a Turkish Loverboy. 😘. For a hot sec was chatting with a seemingly wonderful one on Grindr; one whom never materialized into 3D. 🤔
In the last few years, García, who is a film director, has been working on transforming his father’s books into movies: he is the executive producer of News of a Kidnapping (which is being produced by Amazon Prime and is currently being filmed in Colombia) and a Netflix-produced version of One Hundred Years of Solitude (which is in the pre-production stage). But the family has always been very careful not to reveal too much about their private life. “We are not public figures,” his mother, who was very protective of their privacy, used to say. In this way, the new book is a small window into the pain his parents suffered when García Márquez –who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 – was at the end of his life. “I know that I couldn’t publish these memories while she was able to read them,” says García. If his parents could read them now, “I would like to think they would be happy and proud, but I’m sure my mother would tell me, ‘what a gossip you are’,” he adds.
Currently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time.