Mr. Davies > Recent Status Updates

Her Irish accent was a fake Irish accent, which turne into a symbolic Irish accent and then, in time, to one tha sounded almost ordinary. I actually find it hard to remembe what she sounded like - I mean to place her socially, or put her on some map. Even in private - especially in private
- her voice was gorgeous. Like something you could eat.

What a terrifyingly affective and effective paragraph —
What she didn’t know then … he was so withdrawn from her.

One sentence, commas, colon, hyphens — and an evocation of wretchedness.

Khady-/ Cinderella

She was so terrified she felt sick.

She closed her eyes and tried to call to mind those chalky, shimmering dreams that protected her from intolerable contact with a reality that her anxious, grief-stricken heart full of remorse and doubt had made her a part of, tried desperately to detach herself from the feeble, timorous person she was, but that night her dreams weren't up to battling life's…

It made him [Djibril, Rudy’s son] look so much like Fanta whenever she dropped er mask of indifference and revealed what she commonly elt-anxiety and incomprehension—-about her husband and their ife in France…

Is the buzzard real?

Turning his head gingerly he looked at the calm, watchful buzzard perched at the top of one of the trees.

Frozen with terror he forgot to embrace Djibril. His arms hung stiffly and awkwardly down his sides.

He simply didn't wish to be good at the job.

It had seemed to him that his stubbornness was a bulwark against the complete disintegration of the erudition acquired in his former life: those arcane, those subtle bits of knowledge that he'd not had the strength, courage, or desire to cultivate and sustain and that were gradually losing their preciseness and substance.

Oh, dear, forsaken Rudy Descas — somehow reminds me of a contemporary Meursault …

It was at that point, perhaps, as he was offering Madame Menotti reassurances in the middle of the night, that he, for the first time-certainly never before so acutely and painfullythat he got the full measure of his world's collapse.

Carl Rogers, Esalen Institute — and now I remember that I discovered this book via Radiolab podcast episode “you and me and Mr. Self esteem”

Lulu Lamartine vs. council — over evicting her and appropriating the Lamartine land for “a factory that made equipment of false value. Keepsake things like bangle beads and plastic clubs. Dreamstuff.”

Lipsha's chapter really gets to me.

Gerry — justice vs. laws

Audiobook. Chapters 3-5 on agriculture, husbandry, and aquaculture evoke my PETA notes from the early 2000’s. Hahren might say she’s not taking sides, but damn she’s persuasive.

My favorite line of poetry is “Bare.” From Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.”

This book may have my favorite ending to a book:
“Done.”

I was getting more and more nervous. What if I had the chance of having the prefect father and blew it because I forgot the mass numbers of the three most abundant isotopes of hafnium?

No one was going to take me galloping across the Mongolian steppes. No one was going to take me to the North Pole any time soon.

One day I went with Sibylla to Tesco’s.

Sibylla out her head in her hand. She seemed tired of the words in her own mouth. At last she went on.
[in a book of languages, amid the story of “HC”]

I’ve had to learn five major trade languages and eight nomadic languages just in case. It’s insane.

Red Devlin, reporter: “Oh go on” and “sure you can”

Something about those clicking sounds woke me up for a second, and I understood that nothing had ever been wrong with Trip. Or with anything.

1990’s Kamel Ted cigarettes joke!

And I just searched up, following "Union of emptiness and clarity -- or luminosity -- is just so important," the movie "the Kurosawa Dreams thing where the little boy stole the cherries?"

“We can’t all be Tom Buchanan.”
I’m nervous about Anthony, but that’s a great insult.

Colonialism economics (mercantilism) explained

Religion was the sole font of morality …
Vs. “schoolteachers and educated people” — don’t be dogs

Canned pears over fresh -/ postwar industrialization and consumer culture

Ch. 8 Lowering Defenses — another AI feedback chapter, and this might be the one to include in my AI syllabus this semester

Anecdote about 2006, future husband, and first text messages — brilliant

Fascinating narration about struggle to cede tech writing and pursue fiction — 92 “information” vs “convey feelings”

… it's interesting to consider the first big internet companies through Bourdieu's lens. If it could be said that Amazon, with its infinite catalog of cheap products, appealed to our desire for economic capital, and Google, with its infinite provision of information, to our desire for cultural capital, then Facebook was about social capital.

Anyone can be a singer-songwriter wielding a guitar, she reminded herself, but exceptional bass players and percussionists are nearly impossible to find in any economy.