P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

I've been on a book buying binge, because my retail therapy is books. This was cheap, never read du Maurier, thought, "Why not?"

Whaaaat? It was cheap and the cover is high-larious. For what it's worth, so far it's kind of a sweet story.

It wasn't fair to canonise someone, he though alive or dead. To make them the keeper of you conscience or the apple of your eye or the guarantee that you'd actually lived. And it wasn't fair to hate them if they let you down.

"Oh, I am I am I really am. I'm going to kill you, you bastard."

Well, I certainly hope so. For a novel populated with criminals, there's been surprisingly little action.

This was shaping up to be a pretty cool lesbian romance, but then, before the couple could get to know each other, one woman is kidnapped and transformed into a Damsel in Distress. Actually, she's less than that. More like a McGuffin.

I'm getting sort of bored with this now.

Don Christenson's crew cut stands up about an inch and a half, like a brush. A three-hundred-pound bear could nest down in that hair for the night and in the morning, after the bear lumbered off, it would spring right back up.

To drive from east to west across the San Joaquin Valley, from a pretty little palm-colonnaded city such as Chowchilla, made prosperous by the Central Valley Project and surrounding small farms, to a shabby town such as Huron, surrounded by endless tracts of irrigated land farmed by distant corporate owners, is to fathom the sorry social impact agricultural monopoly can have.

In southern California, project water is allowing hundreds of acres to be subdivided, malled, and paved over each week, transforming what could have been a Mediterranean paradise into one of the twentieth century's urban nightmares.

zZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzZZZzzzzzzzz...

I sorta like this so far.

"But without the fabulous subsidies written into the Reclamation Act--the "ability to pay" clause, the exemption from interest, the hydropower profits shoveled right back to the farmers--few irrigation projects could be built anywhere."

"The phrase 'pork barrel' derives from a fondness on the part of some southern plantation owners for rolling out a big barrel of salted pork for their half-starved slaves on special occasions. The near riots that ensured as the slaves tried to make off with the choicest morsels of pork, were, apparently, a source of substantial amusement in the genteel old South."

"A jobs program in a grimly depressed city in the Middle West, where unemployment among minority youth is more than 50 percent, is an example of the discredited old welfare mentality; a $300 million irrigation project in Nebraska giving supplemental water to a few hundred farmers is an intelligent, farsighted investment in the nation's future."

"In the Congress, water projects are a kind of currency,...and water development is a kind of religion. Senators who voted for drastic cuts in the school lunch program in 1981 had no compunction about voting for $20 billion worth of new Corps of Engineers projects in 1984, the largest such authorization ever.

My Mexican self is amused by the appearance of "Lucha Libre" in the story, because this has become an otherwise excruciatingly tedious book, and little else is amusing.

How is this erotic? So far it's been hundreds of pages of Feyre's overcooked self-loathing along with dumps from the exposition fairy. Which is an understatement. It's more like the exposition fairy caught Montezuma's revenge and had explosive diarrhea all over the entire "story," if you can call it a story.
So bored. ZzzZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Only four chapters in and I'm bored. When's Rhys gonna arrive? At least he has a personality. If you call "abusive asshole" a personality. Nevertheless, he doth amuse. Tamlin is dull, and Feyre's back to maudlin martyr.

The story of powerful, blowhard Floyd Dominy, proves that assholes like tRump are a feature not a bug, of the right wing, screw-the-environment mindset.

Today Rainbow Bridge is visited mainly by overweight vacationers clambering out of houseboats and trudging up to stare briefly at the arch.

I'm sure sensitive souls will call it fat shaming, but this made me laugh.

[...] they [Alaskans] exhibited all the character traits of colonial people--which is to say that they wanted to exploit "their" resources for themselves, but expected the federal government to pay the cost.

Behind their fiercely independent stance, Alaskans, in the 1960s, were a people completely dependent on Washington D.C. Their major industry, after fishing, was the U.S military; their third major industry was the rest of the U. S government.

Basically, the takeaway from this book is this: it is a fallacy to say that farmers feed America. What is true is that thanks to the inordinate amount of subsidies and support (irrigation, dams, flood control, animal damage control) provided by public tax monies, ALL of America feeds America.

Taking another stab-stab, stabby stab-at this. The prose is gorgeous, and the first third(?) with Peter Lake and his La Boheme romance with Beverly is cool. Okay, so I mostly loved the white horse, but the rest of the narrative was okay too. Now, however, the story has wandered off into weird (un)related novellas which are only tangentially connected to the first. Contemplating bailing...

And the Paikans did not know that all throughout their lands women taught other women how to fight with an axe, or reload their arquebuses, and that those women taught others. For what men paid close attention to what women did together?

"You have no true beliefs like the Way to guide you. Just heapings of gods that take you long after you destroy everything in this life. As long as your afterlives are pleasant, what reason do you have to ever stop the bramble?"

'"You aren't what I expected--for a human," he said'"

And here we go... *Eye roll*