The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression. Sanora Babb grew up in rural poverty and was a good writer. She signed a contract to write a novel about the Dust Bowl, and to research it, she took a volunteer job resettling refugees and took hundreds of pages of notes. Her supervisor convinced her to turn the notes over to John Steinbeck, who used them to write The Grapes of Wrath, and then because that book already existed, nobody would publish her book.
Babb's work was largely antithetical to that of Steinbeck, and its "message" was a lot more complicated. While Steinbeck focused on the road trip carrying the Joads away from their already collapsed farmland, the entire first half of Babb's novel describes several years of the travails of the Dunne family, who struggle to grow broomcorn and wheat while their land grows increasingly parched, dust-storm-ridden and uninhabitable. In the second half of Babb's novel, the Dunnes don't simply submit to the California farm growers, or lose their temper, like Tom Joad, and flee, but bear down and become increasingly involved with labor organizers and strike actions.
Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula. It's probably made from toxic e-waste.
And more 2024 music, Des Demonas - The Duke Ellington Bridge. Their sound is hard to classify, but this particular song manages to sound like both The Velvet Underground and Camper Van Beethoven.
Just got back from Ireland. We picked it because it was cheap. Airfare and hotel for two weeks in Dublin was about the same as for five nights in Hawaii. A few notes.Dublin is a very walkable city. In a half mile radius there are more good bookstores than in the entire Seattle metropolitan area. We went to all of them, and found some great books, including Listen to the Land Speak by Manchan Magan. I'm always looking for books about weird stuff, and Magan does a great job of making premodern manifestations accessible to mainstream readers. My favorite chapter is about Hy Brasail, an island now considered completely mythical, but it once appeared on respectable maps, and reliable witnesses claimed to have landed there.
And in a bookstore heaped with unfiled books, Leigh Ann picked out a gem that's not even on AbeBooks, The Paranormal Explained by Sean O'Donnell. He explains it as "anti-memory", a framing of precognition that he claims is completely scientific. This is the kind of book I love. The guy is sort of a crackpot, but he's smart and curious, and has lots of tips for being more intuitive.
The best museum in Dublin, everyone agrees, is the Archaeology museum, which is free, and contains breathtaking prehistoric jewelry and some cool bog bodies. The best lesser known museum is 14 Henrietta Street, a fascinating guided tour through a building that started out as upper class and eventually became filthy tenements.
Everyone knows the Irish love Guinness, but I didn't know how much. If you go into a pub and see three Irishmen at a table with three drinks, it's more likely to be three pints of Guinness than all other possibilities combined. In America I drink red ale, but Irish red ale has not kept up and is pretty lame. But where American IPAs tend to hide mediocre beer behind loads of hops and alcohol, Irish IPAs are excellent, typically light and citrusy.
We tried a lot of restaurants, and the best was a Chinese small plates place called Bigfan. But it's expensive and hard to get into. The one we went back to was Forno 500, an Italian place with excellent pizzas and a perfect atmosphere. Also we spent three nights in the west of Ireland, and a great hidden gem in Galway is a Mayan tapas restaurant called Sangria.]]>
Quick note on AI. I'm traveling without my laptop, and drafting posts on my phone, which suggests the next word. Occasionally it's better than the word I had in mind, so I'll use it.
AI will never replace human creativity, because creativity is less about the product and more about the experience of making choices. But it can help by giving us more stuff to choose from.
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He also made an interesting point, that while no Trumpers would ever identify as Communist, they want something similar: for a centralized state to make sure there are lots of manufacturing jobs.]]>
Trump is on a different karmic level. I don't mean that metaphorically, nor do I mean the popular concept of karma as a metaphysical enforcer of our own ideas about reward and punishment. Karma is an alien amoral system loosely related to human morality, with levels we do not understand. I don't know how one person can play life on single player cheat mode, while other players have to share the same world, but that's what it looks like.
Trump is Voldemort, and there is no Harry Potter, only a wide variety of Muggles including two unfortunate categories: Muggles who don't know that magic is real, and Muggles who seek power over others by allying themselves with a powerful wizard who doesn't care about them.
Of all the weird things that Trump's followers believe, the weirdest is that he will keep them safe. Sure, now they're safe from nonexistent dog eating immigrants. But it's the Dems who are so desperately safe that they are fatally un-fun, while Trump is clearly bringing the Apocalypse.
I wouldn't take that myth too literally, but I expect something recognizably similar, and I keep thinking of the Neil Young line: Look around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.]]>