Ari Santillanes > Recent Status Updates

Feels like Rosemary’s Baby all of a sudden.

I don’t know why I’ve dragged my heels with this book. Possibly because it is set during the early days of the pandemic, which are not days I am eager to revisit.

But today, Erdrich worked a James McBride book recommendation in to the plot, and the book changed Dissatisfaction’s life (so nicknamed because he is impossible to recommend books to). As a McBride super fan myself, I appreciated this moment.

Something I’m noticing about myself as a reader: I’m picturing the characters Black.

Octavia Butler does not describe them thus way. She writes science fiction and some characters are actual aliens (as with the title short story). With the human characters, she is cautious not to mention skin color, perhaps to make it universal. Characters have beards, scars, thin effeminate features, but skin color is absent.

That prologue! So much reorienting in 11 pages.

“The thing about being black is that just being can bring bloodshed.”

“The racists were right there with right hooks and uppercuts to the face of freedom.”

“Garrison believed in abolishing slavery, not sneakers.” Great analogy.

Zeugma? He has blue eyes and fine sandy hair and a mischievous wit.

Both ‘squeeze’ and ‘pull’ are exaggerations of the motion applied to this trigger. It’s a trivial, tiny movement, the twitch of a dreaming child. So quick and so effortless is it that it’s hard for me to associate it with any but the most inconsequential of acts. Flipping a page. Typing an M. Scratching an itch. Ending a life wants a little more muscle.

‘A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.’ —Mignon McLaughlin

Feels particularly timely. I am falling in love with Mat all over again by watching him be a father to our son, Sam.

‘Making the decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.’ — Elizabeth Stone

Yep.

They nodded vigorously, wanting to be brave, knowing there was nothing greater than being brave. Josie knew, then, that better than searching for a person of courage - she'd been on this search for years, dear god - better and possibly easier than searching for such people in the extant world was to create them.She didn't need to find humans of integrity and courage. She needed to make them.

She did not want to scar her son this way, with the knowledge of her frailty, her aptitude to be abandoned by her pseudo-sister and to get hit by Homeric delivery trucks, sent into a ditch. But the introduction of frailty in a parent - is this so terrible? It should, perhaps, be introduced right away, so the shock is not so great later. We are better when we expect tragedy, calamity, chaos.