Tim Combes > Recent Status Updates

I've seen the documentary Man on Wire and I don't recall if they mentioned that Nixon resigned the next day but that's a pretty crazy historical confluence

The switch between the first two narrators was a tough transition and I almost gave up. Glad I didn't.

"She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs—she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry."

"It pleased me a little to think that he had a flaw and that it went so deep that he couldn’t deal with it. Corrigan wanted other people’s pain. He didn’t want to deal with his own. I felt a pulse of shame too, for thinking that way."

“That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.”

“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties.”

A reference to the town of Inuvik, NWT reminded me that that town is also a plot point in Dan Chaon's "Await Your Reply"

Authors love obscure, remote towns

"There was an idea he’d been thinking about for years now but especially lately, which was that everything he saw contained a flicker of divinity, and this lent the city a halo of brightness. Fallen, maybe, but beauty in the decrepitude, and it still seemed plausible in those days that everything might somehow fall back into place"

“Because I really love her,” he told his friend Gary, in response to a question.

Genuinely a little unsettled after chapter 1. Didn't know Lerner had that in him.

"So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, Take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware—when you get back to your empty room, you’ll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food."

"Since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the people [of Middlemarch] inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if only they could be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measure of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees."

Evergreen

The book has multiple banger lines per page. Mary Anne Evans I was not familiar with your game.

Tucker’s game show not getting picked up is his not getting into art school

“The nannies [Dick Carlson] hired were usually men, including a former Korean intelligence officer whom Tucker and Buckley addressed as ‘Colonel Kwan’ and who instructed the boys on how to disembowel someone.”

"When ChatGPT strings together its tokens in the form of syntax, it is not wrestling with an idea. It is arranging language. There is no intention behind the expression. . . It is a technical marvel that this process produces text that seems to be the product of thought, but we shouldn’t confuse that process for the kind of thinking humans do."

"We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less. . . Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.

"A fiend had come in the night to take an ice-cream scoop to my brain and made off with my darkest emotional flavours, fury, humiliation, self-pity, desolation. If they all came back at once, they would wreck me."

They do come back. And they do wreck you.

“The essays were semi-literate but adequate by the low standards imposed from above”

Ian… if you only knew

"Matteo Wong sees all this 'AI doomerism' as a 'decoy' that serves two purposes. One is to indeed distract us from the more immediate harms by focusing on some indefinite future unknown that is impossible to constructively argue in the present and which seems to require highly specialized knowledge to even get into that game . . . The other reason. . . is 'it makes the product seem more powerful.'"