Ally > Recent Status Updates

These streets are crooked with memory, of rock-hard wooden chairs, and half-clean glasses, of music loud, and people, louder, and me, saying nothing at all. I was not so much a late bloomer as a late sprouter. I didn't know what it meant to be a child until I grew up and left home.

[this voice now is easy to love]

[The hedgehog] may have an abundance of pricks, but we're in no state to pass remarks.

[grooooooooan...

I love me a scholar but I think I'm going to get annoyed if this narrator's voice is humanities paper humor.]

...avocados and bisexuals weren't as cool as they are now...

[What is this scene standing in the alley between two bars doing in the last 20% of the book? This reads like the indulgent exposition of a short story, not a scene with a character we've spent most of a novel with, and the prose is so much less substantial than the pages we just came from, the voice so much less honest.]

Not that he was a bully. He was just an alpha born in the wrong body. He had what Greta called trans-breed dysmorphia of the soul, and believed himself to be a young wolf trapped in the body of a terrier with worn-down teeth.

[Ick, wtf? This book keeps veering between stunningly gorgeous, wildly hilarious, nightmare-inducingly harrowing, and trans / haha-feminine-men jokes from bad 1980s standup, I don't get it.]

Stacy went on at length about...

[OMG, even MA native actors screw up this accent - Rebecca Lowman's voice is a frickin trezhah.]

Chicken. Bone. Broth. Chicken. Chick. Hen. Egg. Hatch. Girl. Not a rooster. Not a cock. Bone. F***. D***. F***. D***. Broth. Brother. Juice. Medium. Liquor. Substrate. Reagent. A bone in a liquor, an egg f*** in a medium, a chick's d*** bone reagent, not c*** d*** substrate. I don't even know whether they still sell the Juggalo Chicken Drinks or not...

[this is amazing and also I cannot do this for 300 pages]

D. has no d*ck. Or rather, they have an array of them, various sizes and shapes. A wind blows across the parking lot. It is difficult to historicize.

[Genuinely can't tell if this is a parody of annoying-as-hell queer academic who thinks shagging is praxis? I'm pretty sure this is ridiculous on purpose but I also hope I don't have to spend too much time with a narrator in this register?]

[literal skeleton key. goofy.]

She pressed her mouth to the place where Harrow's nose met the bone of her frontal sinus...

[ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh going anatomical here is such a perfect choice? this book is stunningly good writing? it disarms me into thinking it's gooftown pulpville and then wham!]

"I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me you're sorry!"

[I thought this book was just gay in the horny way, but oof, this tumble of wounded souls and cascading pain. This book is so wild - is it a country house mystery, an enemies-to-lovers romance, an anime, a video game, a Hitchhiker's Guide spiritual successor, a Greek tragedy? It all works!]

"I didn't want them to put me out of sight. It's a horrible thing to fall out of sight."

[I understand there's no textual transness in this series, but I'm allllmost tempted to add my trans_subject tag for how much Dulcinea is Candy Darling.]

Its LED-covered screen ticked up: 15%, 26%, 80%, until it swung open with a soft click.

[Sometimes I'm annoyed by how video-gamey action sequences have become, but just straight up admitting that we're playing Dark Souls is delightful.]

And bodies, even at their best, even if they aspire to nothing else, are so delicate and dependent that they can't get by alone. I want to reckon with the twinned facts that our bodies are fragile and in need of constant care and support, but that we have built our world as if the opposite were true.

It's not a rhetorical question. I want to know whom and what it serves to tell ourselves that illness or disability mean but one or two things. To be alive on this earth is to live in the abundance of the body's peculiarities. And to have a body is to be determined by that body's ceaseless needs.

The first horror movie ever, 1917's The Black Stork, tells the eugenics-motivated story of a disabled baby being murdered in order to keep society safe from the nightmare the baby augurs.

[Maybe the timeline is earlier than I think and Neelay's computer kit is the earliest 1975 Altair? In that case, having Neelay's college games distributed via BBSes onto home computers is anachronistic; he should be making games for mainframes, following in the footsteps of Kelton Flinn (though even if Neelay is 9 in 1975, Flinn has already formed Kesmai by the end of this story) and probably not dropping out.]

[...Video games are cast as some kind of weird compensation for disability - both authors implicitly assume that the most powerful motivation for a disabled person must be to feel not-disabled. And both assume that alienation from the body is somehow helpful for creating a digital experience that mimics embodiment (while the reality is exactly the opposite).]

[End of Neelay Mehta chapter. This was slightly better than the stomach-turning _Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow_ - the depiction is better-researched - but it has many of the same problems. A solitary visionary genius invents the MMO and charts a path toward it (while mysteriously being unaware of the many examples that already exist by that point, including a number of commercial ventures). (cont.)]

His farewell to a species turning from animal into data. His effort to raise the dead and make them love him again. […] The seed his father plants in him will eat the world.

[The organic-ness of software engineering thought, & the image of technology growing on its own with humanity’s influence limiting to tending and pruning, are sharp frames. This is the first writing in the book I find beautiful & interesting.]

[…It is all events and the narrator’s ideas, and neither are terribly novel. The prose is frightfully clean and efficient, but the knife of it sits idly on the table. It isn’t put to a purpose.]

[End of the Douglas Pavlicek chapter. I think I have my finger on some of the reasons I both haven’t put this book down but also haven’t loved anything. It is extremely cold - this chapter is the first where a character has any detectable interiority beyond a few adjectives, and there isn’t that much in there but guilt, but he does some interesting things with the guilt. (Cont…)]

[Ray Brinkman & Dorothy Cazaly: this was a pretty boring setup for something else I guess? Reads like a romance written by a kid of the couple, icked out by the idea their parents might be complete and complicated people.]

[Okay, the end of the Adam Appich story is pretty great, I want to see this kid again. The novel is still on probation, the theme so far seems to be "people are astonishingly, hopelessly cruel" and that's not that interesting or surprising an idea to me. I'll reassess in a chapter.]

[A bit after the kidnapping & murder in the Adam Appich story: yep, not enough meat in here so far beyond grief porn for me. I'll give it to the end of this chapter; this character has more substance than the other two.]

[A pivotal death in the Mimi Ma story. I am not impressed by Powers' luxuriating in its details & I'm hoping the novel contains something more than terrible things happening to people who have some connection to trees. You're at two strikes, Richard.]

She even hated the color [of celery], as though it had tried for green and couldn’t get there.

[I adore how much character is communicated by seeing through Renita’s eyes throughout. It makes her so active even when her actual motion is so tightly restricted by so many forces, and intensifies the feeling of the confinements.]

I feel like I should be relatively forgiving of this in such a wide-ranging book, but by just 3% in we've had two science findings I know had been shown not to be replicable by the book's publication date in 2017: the Wellesley period-synchronization notion & the Williams & Bargh holding-warm-things-makes-you-think-others-have-warm-personalities notion. Gonna give Sapolsky's fact-checkers five strikes, let's say.

Baby doesn't care about your resume.

[The opening is sweet, advising not to view your own mothering through the book's information, and that you don't need to blame your mother to hurt. But so far the only material related to the present is self-reiki!?!? Blames every possible psych problem on mothers. Relentlessly dismisses the idea of women as something more than baby-making machines as "modern". ]