Dog surgery update: it went OK, she is recovering nicely and we are very relieved! Thank you to people who sent notes of encouragement and well wishes for her.
My mom broke her ankle in a bad fall and it requires surgery*, so I'll be going down to help her out this week. This will either mean a decent amount of reading time or another paltry week, sentences-wise. It mostly depends on my mom's willingness to follow her doctor's orders to rest.
*I worry that it sounds like I am making up the cascade of Bad News of the last...six months, just about? I am increasingly convinced someone has been poking a little voodoo doll of me or something. Hoping that the extra evil eyes I've put up around the apartment provide some cover.
Again, the sentences refuse to cluster into particular forms, and I am longing for poets.
"Notes Toward", K'eguro Macharia's newsletter Imagining Freedom
But who grieves the passing of the caterpillar when it pupates in readiness for emergence as the butterfly?
A Rough Ride to the Future, James Lovelock
Submitted by Kelly.
Maybe putting money into a low-lying place like Sweetwater will just seem foolish, and people with cash will buy up homes for pennies on the dollar and rent them out to poor people who can’t afford to live anywhere else and just let the houses fall into the water, returning the land to the alligators and mosquitoes that lived here before the Russian midgets arrived.
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, Jeff Goodell
Submitted by George with the comment "It's nothing flashy, but I think it sums up the book it came from and to some extent, the entirety of American capitalism."
His neighbors called him "little Sax, the ghost."
Wikipedia entry for Adolphe Sax
Did you know the inventor of the saxophone invented a bunch of other weird horn instruments? The saxophone was the only one that really took off. Also, he survived having lip cancer, which seems like a really bad cancer to have when you are a horn instruments guy! The sentence above is the last sentence of a paragraph early in the Wikipedia entry, but it would be a terrific opening sentence for a cute spooky story.
And while there’s a lot of things you can do to keep from being eaten, once you’re inside a frog, your options are severely limited.
Ursula Vernon's acceptance speech for the Hugo Award for Best Novel
Sci-fi writers will often create fictional AI that gets mad and kills us, but hardly any of them are brave enough to ask “what if it was also really horny?”
Review and recap of season 2, episode 3 of Loki, Kirsten Howard for Den of Geek
Reading recaps of TV shows is one of my favorite self-soothing activities. I became a fan of the TV recap as a genre because of the gone-but-not-forgotten blog Television Without Pity, where I often found reading about the shows more entertaining than watching the actual shows. I think that was also my first introduction to voice-y online writing, which honestly was really important to embracing and leaning into my own writing voice.
Now that the recap format has been normalized and media has been made such a shitty work environment that TV recappers are mostly in a race to post first rather than engage with the source material (TwoP would sometimes take a whole week to post a recap of a show! And we accepted this because it was worth it!), I find that TV recap media often lacks the bite and fun of its early years. This decrease in quality makes the self-soothe reads more about dissociation than delight—something more in the vein of reading the Wikipedia summary than reading a well-written piece of criticism, simply taking in a rote description of a plot for the sake of focusing on something else rather than enjoying a piece of writing. I appreciated this sentence because I definitely decided to read the recap for a dissociative break and instead read something reminiscent of that earlier era of recap writing and TV criticism that felt less like content to fill the void and more like, well, actual criticism and writers having a good time with it.
I am, however, still not entirely persuaded to take the time to watch Loki, horny AI notwithstanding. (Is this a perfect sentence? I don't really think it's fair to include my own sentences in this newsletter. But like, it's at least pretty good.)