Vance Maverick

Who needs to sleep when your nightmares come to you unbidden in the feed

Not mocking, to be clear. I get intellectually that there are events that wedge in our memories obtrusively, that become constitutive of us

I don’t think there’s any event I absorbed in quite this way. I was 35 on 9/11, humors grown phlegmatic, and while it was a shock, I have understood without difficulty e.g. that those born later would not themselves experience it

My impression is that some Cubans are indeed of European extraction, and some Cubans indeed care about that

Would it be better if they said it was a “difficult decision“?

(I always read that as “This may be suboptimal for you, but we have done the emotional work to process that.”)

At work we were talking about hamburgers, and whether they’re distinctive. One colleague says there’s something vaguely similar in Egypt. I asked, of course, if it was spiced, and he said yes. I think food that’s pointedly unspiced, for better or worse, is pretty American

The ad hominem is a *kind* of argument

"Well, that's a hell of an act–what do you call it?"

"THE AMBASSADORS!"

That some may have found Obama “divisive” not because of what he did but because of who he is….

“But just look at him!” /s

(a) "mother of two" would already be odd
(b) "mother twice over" is so pointedly different that it sounds like she's a grandmother, or gave birth to the same person twice

"as westless as a wailer in a wainsto'm"

YouTube video by Gustavo B. L. Stan Getz e Astrud Gilberto - It Might as Well Be Spring

youtu.be/eHbR1ixiyto?...

What you're avoiding must be worse

Claude Monet. Water Lilies. 1914-26 | MoMA Claude Monet. Water Lilies. 1914-26. Oil on canvas, three panels. Each 6' 6 3/4" x 13' 11 1/4" (200 x 424.8 cm), overall 6' 6 3/4" x 41' 10 3/8" (200 x 1276 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. 666.1959.a...

... but in comparison to postwar micropolyphony and pattern music, Sibelius's "background" is more tunelike. It's as though he turns the knob of tuneness from 30% to 50%, making an effect of primus inter pares.

www.moma.org/collection/w...

... and one difficult lesson there is the extreme care S takes to shade the tunefulness vs. pattern quality of the material. In comparison to something like the opening of the last movement of Beethoven's 5th, the tune is amorphous, unemphatic, its punch nearly pulled. ...

There's a move I've heard in many contemporary pieces (Thorvaldsdottir comes to mind but is not the only one), where out of a cloud of complexity, a diatonic tune takes shape. It just now struck me that a model for this may be Sibelius, e.g. the big trombone tune in the 7th. ...

Is there a way to set this up reciprocally, with a research buddy with whom you trade editorial services?

The only way this doesn’t make sense is if doing away with the office is an option

Neither promise nor threat but tragic love that never was

I think I qualify in this way too —a great-grandfather James Davidson, also Scottish by background, from the Maritimes to Marin County. It’s worth pursuing.

Not sure what brought this across the feed just now, but in fact there is coffee connoisseurship in classic detective fiction. From Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely", 1946:

Fair point

I’m pretty sure I know it only from fiction, where it seems to carry a freight of meaning ill captured by lexicography

Reverse image search tells me this movie is called “Twins of Evil”

Thanks for prodding me to watch this, “Sandy Passage” is great

I can see that (the swamp monster rises from behind the second mangrove).

Obvs meant “admittedly” above

My bugbear is movie summaries, which recount the entire movie scene by scene without perspective, like Borges’s map of the empire at 1:1 scale. Admitta different sort of unreadability

If

MOA
NIN’

why not

BLA
KEY

?

Are you talking about the slanted slogan? Clearly it continues into the ceiling with the word “thinking”, ending flush with the right-hand wall