You can have just as much fun at home sick by yourself as you can in NYC with your old friends and people who like your work! (no that’s a lie i have been such a grump) I hope those of you who are going to the incredible event tonight have a great, great time.
Jenny Diski, on her cancer diagnosis:
Two to three years. Will the battery on the TV remote run out first? How many inches will the weeping birch grow, the one planted by the Poet for my sixtieth birthday (soppy old radical versifier)? I suppose I won’t need another cashmere sweater to keep me warm come the planet’s apocalypse, the ones I’ve already got will survive the moths for a couple of years or even three should it come sooner than my own apocalypse. I very much regret the disappearance of a website I once bookmarked called Sensible Units. It took a scientific unit of quantity and resolved it into units that are much more easily or entertainingly imagined. Who knew that 1 cm of depth is equivalent to 29 human female fingernail thicknesses? Or that 80 gigabytes can be visualised as 110 CDs or 25 human genomes?
Laura Ortberg Turner on Los Angeles:
People who hate Los Angeles are legion. They’re the same kind of person who say they love all kinds of music except for country, which is to say they are happy to dismiss entire genres and places out of hand without ever paying it any attention.
Oh, wow, this heroin/Oxy situation on Staten Island (I do not love how the piece hits this “these are BLUE-COLLAR people like cops and firefighters falling prey to addiction” note sometimes, in which “blue-collar” obviously means “mainly white people who do not live in the projects,” but a lot of it is really great) :
The silent sniper fire of overdoses from pills and heroin that has been picking people off one at a time in increasing numbers all over the country for almost twenty years has hit Staten Island harder than anyplace else in the city. For a number of reasons, this borough of four hundred and seventy thousand-plus people offers unusually good entry routes for the opioid epidemic. In 2012, thirty-six people on Staten Island overdosed on heroin and thirty-seven on prescription opioid pills, for an average of almost exactly one overdose death every five days. Many of the dead have been young people in their late teens to early thirties. In this self-contained place, everybody seems to know everybody, and the grief as the deaths accumulate has been frantic and terrified.
Oh, honey, no. Stop. Back away. If you don’t like the review, do not engage with the reviewer in the comments. Not…like this.
Did you read the amazing profile of Lucinda Williams that Bill Buford did back in 2000?
’tis the season in which I get to feel a mild, unwarranted sense of superiority for just not particularly enjoying pumpkin-flavoured things, which turns into a strong, warranted sense of despair when I am presented with them at all turns
Ursula K Le Guin on the new David Mitchell:
Sketchy as it is, this has to me the quality of a true vision. For all the stuff and nonsense about escaping mortality by switching bodies and devouring souls, death is at the heart of this novel. And there lies its depth and darkness, bravely concealed with all the wit and sleight of hand and ventriloquistic verbiage and tale-telling bravura of which Mitchell is a master. Whatever prizes it wins or doesn’t, The Bone Clockswill be a great success, and it deserves to be, because a great many people will enjoy reading it very much. It’s a whopper of a story. And in it, under all the klaxons and saxophones and Irish fiddles, is that hidden, haunting silence at the centre. Behind the narrative fireworks is the shadow that, maybe, makes it true.
