Nick > Recent Status Updates

"What strikes me as most in line with the American Experience when it comes to spades, though, is the shifting value of a card's worth. How the red twos can either be dispensable or invaluable, depending on who is holding it and what borders they are sitting within."

"I maybe do not love the moon as much as other poets, who seem to love the moon for what it is capable of doing to the waters, or how it seduces the best or worst out of an astrological sign. I don't know much about astrology, but I do like the idea of astrology for what it brings out in my most creative and magically inclined friends."

"Ellen Armstrong kept performing in smaller rooms, to crowds without as much money or social capital. The idea, it seemed, was about offering a sense of wonder to those who may otherwise have been denied it. To make something small spectacular. Magic relies on what a viewer is willing to see, and what a viewer is willing to see relies on what the world has afforded them to be witness to."

"In both the dance marathon and the Soul Train Line, I am in love with the performance of partnership, and the boundaries that performance is pushed to.... within their eyes remains the same frantic madness once in the eyes of Alma Cummings sitting with her feet in ice and her torn-through shoes. But also there is care, concern, fear. An affection born out of having to make a home out of the confines of dance..."

"The grass all around her is flattened, as if god had pressed his hand there, reserving a space for an eighth day. It's a beautiful country, she's been told, depending on who you are.
---
It's not a god -- of course not -- but a helicopter, a Huey, another lord whose wind's so heavy that, a few feet away, a lint-grey warbler trashes in the high grass, unable to correct herself."

"The ship-spotters are at least appropriately alive to some of the most astonishing aspects of our time. They know what it is about our world that would detain a Martian or a child. They take pleasure in sensing their smallness and ignorance next to the expansive intelligence of the modern collective mind... they enter into a state of silent, satisfied wonder, like pilgrims before the buttresses of Chartres."

Stories of love, community, and solidarity in the lake country of the Ontario shield. Some are a clever trifle, a couple others are quiet and powerful.

A unique and raw and powerful voice in every one of the individual poems so far. Perhaps the most striking is the meditation on anxieties, Wanda in Worryland:

"I go to sleep and have dreams about falling
and can't stand the suspense so I sweat it out
and land on my feet

I have gone after people
with poems

I get scared sometimes
and have to go look into the mirror to see if I'm
still here"

Just your average sort of far-fetched fantasy disclaimer:

"The fictional virus in this book... was informed by the author's extensive research into computer modelling of infectious disease spread, the SARS, Ebola, and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and such historical pandemics as the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920."

The stakes purport to get higher and higher, all the while the story goes by in more and more of a blur.

New dimension to the story, yet to be determined whether this hinders or helps it, in discovering elsewhere that Caroline and Shirley are stand-ins, after a fashion, for sisters Anne and Emily.

New dimension to the story, yet to be determined whether this hinders or helps it, in discovering elsewhere that Caroline and Shirley are stand-ins, after a fashion, for sisters Anne and Emily.

Religion and mythology and subterfuge and prophecy take a back seat in this first section to angel and bear-romping adventures. And still some of the goriest scenes I can remember from any purported "kids" book.

From the measured, wry and distanced narrative to the furtive characters that wouldn't be out of place in an Agatha Christie mystery, this seems to toy with everything about Jane Eyre that could conceivably establish itself as a formula. Jarring and still compelling in its own way.

The glowing press intrigued me, and then the author made a playlist with the same sort of dreamy, soppy electronic pop music I'd be listening to while prepping some salsa and a sour for a reading break in the evening. How could I say no.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/233...

Only Chapter 4, and the author already invokes Poe's Law...

One of the few science books I've read where MORE feelings than facts would be most welcome. It's overwhelming in its trite detail.

"Slobodchikoff had deciphered what the animals were saying to each other about us. When an assistant wore blue, the prairie dogs barked, 'Tall, think, human, blue,' and when just the color of the shirt changes, the prairie dogs said, "Tall, thin, human, green.'

Our bubble is the belief of human exceptionalism: that we are the only species aware enough to feel, think, and speak."

Not quite the Hemingway-esque venture into spare vulnerability that the jacket quotes suggested, definitely not the Carson-esque voyage into surfing I was secretly hoping for. Some moments of interest, others where it feels like one is dragged rather than guided through the story.

And now I'm wondering if I should have made an update here this early because now I see what the actual page count is...

"A journey, it telegraphs painstakingly, because the idea of travel is an emotion to them. Weighing of risk, fear (some specific interpretation of "reward" that has no exact human cognate), the satisfaction of accomplishment, triumph! And the chromatic flourish that the creature gives the sentiment justifies the exclamation mark..."

"Helena wonders if the octupuses have it better or worse. Except of course they wear their hearts on their skins, all the time. Perhaps there is simply no such thing as a private trauma, and hence no stigma to it. Perhaps they live their lives like operatic heroes and heroines, broadcasting the grandeur of their melancholies and their rages to all within eyeshot... that alternative sounds eminently healthy to her."

"A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped."

"But the changes in a butterfly's life are not always so dramatic. The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts - it remains a caterpillar, but no longer one in the same skin. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far."

"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go...

The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration - in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory..."

"Focusing on a large dynamic carnivore was old-style human thinking, the same idolatry that put lions and eagles on so many old flags."

"They stood around the depot , camped in fields on the edge of the road in clusters until shooed away for being the blight that had been visited upon them - for reflecting like still water the disconsolateness they certainly felt, and for reminding others about the wages sin paid out to the laborers."

"And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. Going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too... it's a condition, the range of what an artful City can do."