Lisa Eckstein > Recent Status Updates

Glad I'm rereading, since I'd forgotten many specifics, and since it's a delightful read. Once again loving how the magic is based on words and wordplay: the world includes "worsegers--like badgers, but worse" and "ne'er-do-wolves"!

I don't remember the story that well, so I'm going to reread before starting the sequel, which comes out next week!

All pretty exciting!

I'm especially excited that we're getting a look at the rise and operations of Gilead, and that's it's all chillingly plausible.

This book occupies a strange space in relation to the TV show, but when I'm able to set that aside, I'm enjoying the stories it's telling and am eager to read on.

Pace is picking up with a lot of tense situations coming to a head.

So far, what I'm liking is that Atwood is still a fantastic writer, great at narrative voice.

What I'm skeptical about is that developments from the TV series are being folded into the book canon, making this perhaps a sequel to both the original novel and the increasingly irritating later seasons of the show. Not loving that, but we'll see where it goes.

Still enjoying the characters, but story is dragging somewhat. Curious to see where events will lead.

Enjoying spending time with the two families in this story!

I'm delighted by the characters I've met so far and am eager for these families to meet!

Just finished a section called "In Praise of Sex and Violence", in which Nussbaum presents nuanced appreciations of shows that do interesting things with these difficult subjects, such as Hannibal and The Americans.

On "The Leftovers", a weird TV series I dearly loved: "At its eeriest moments, the show manages to feel both intimate and world-historical: It's a fable about a social catastrophe that is also threaded into the story of a lacerating midlife divorce."

In the middle of a long and interesting essay in which Nussbaum grapples with the question of good art by terrible people, particularly men who commit sexual abuse.

"Because such stories [by women] exposed the private lives of male intellectuals, they got critiqued as icky, sticky memoir--score-settling, not art. (In contrast, young men seeking revenge on their exes are generally called 'comedians' or 'novelists' or 'Philip Roth.')"

"So why is the show [Sex and the City] so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It's a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicitly about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior."

I love television, and I love criticism, so I'm digging these essays!

A brutal story that's rough to take in, but wonderfully written. Curious to see where the final section will go.

"...this boy bobbed in his own pocket of calm. Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek--it doesn't belong and then it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current."

I have so much dread for what's coming in this story. Great writing and details as always from Whitehead.

I was finding some of this dragging on a bit, but things perked up at opening night.

"Men looked at Celia Ray like she was a box of Cracker Jack and they couldn't wait to start digging for the toy.
In return, she looked at them like they were the wooden paneling on the wall."

The chapter on How Conversations Change is continuing the great observations and comparisons between online and offline modes of communication: "When I've tried to articulate the appeal of Linguist Twitter to linguists who aren't on it, I've talked in terms of hallways: You know how the best part of a conference is the hallway? Imagine if you could have that hallway available at any time of the day or night!"

The chapter on emoji was 🤩👍‼️

Most recent fascinating insight into online language: The origin of "the exclamation!compound used to refer to different versions of a particular person, such as past!me or CAPSLOCK!Harry" is the bang paths required in email addresses before there was a single unified internet: "Alex in the math department at Princeton might be princeton!math!alex".

Enjoying Vivian's narration and remembering how much I love Gilbert's sly humor!

Excited about the current chapter, "Internet People", looking at groups with different experiences of the internet based on when and how thoroughly they came online, and how this relates to patterns of language use.

"You never truly step into the same English twice. When future historians look back on this era, they'll find our changes just as fascinating as we now find innovative words from Shakespeare or Latin or Norman French. So let's adopt the perspective of those future historians now, and explore the revolutionary period in linguistic history that we're living through from a place of excitement and curiosity."

"Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate hers; there was no grammar between them."

Really enjoying how the different families are starting to come back together in this generation.

The characters are all so unique, and it's been fascinating to realize that some of them are real characters from history!