A WEEK OF SMALL VICTORIES, none of which I can really talk about yet—but some projects pushed forward and some assignments came together that I’m excited about. There were some frustrations, too, mainly about trusting my instincts. On a personal front, things have gone very quiet: we’re holding it together, just about, but the summers in San Francisco are the greyest time of the year. In the meantime, reading list ticked up another two. Finished […]
THIS LAST MONTH feels like things have been closing in. The limits haven’t changed, just my ambition to challenge them. Not leaving the house isn’t a temporary situation any more; it’s now the normal state—things could be happening a block or two away without me ever realizing. (In fact, they are happening without me realizing: I hit up the local news websites to discover that a new bar is opening on Haight, just a stone’s […]
GROWING THINGS HAS NEVER been my forte. I’m great at starting out, and get very excited about beginnings. I can even handle endings pretty well, although that’s more from experience than desire. But I am somewhat less good at maintenance—the fuzzy middle of projects and ideas. But this weekend, as I picked my way through our lemon tree and grabbed another haul (our third or fourth this year) I realized that maybe I was looking […]
JUST BOOKS THIS WEEK, otherwise I was offline more or less, no work. Two more Maigrets—The Carter of La Providence and The Hanged Man of St Pholien—along with A Burning by Megha Majumdar and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Chatter, his 2006 book on the NSA and Echelon. A lot’s changed in the years since that one came out, I can tell you.
BLESSED RELIEF came as I prepared to take a week offline to get my head back But coming on the back of two short weeks, it was a headache to get everything done that I could—so that week is this week, if you follow. Still, I managed to finish a short novel: based on John Lanchester’s recent praise of the entirety of Georges Simenon’s Maigret series, I started at the beginning to see what he […]
A REMARKABLE WEEK! I finished a book, as in properly-finished-closely-reading-for-fun, for the first time in three months. And then I finished another one! Things are pretty wild up in here. (Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson and A Man by Keiichiro Hirano, if you’re interested. Only books with “man” in the title, apparently.) The odd thing is that I’ve been totally blocked writing BRB, even though I don’t need to read new books in order to write […]
MONDAY WAS OUR 103RD DAY IN LOCKDOWN, but the century itself passed unremarked. There are fireworks at strange hours of the day and night, which paint a hallucinatory sheen on the days. There’s a man who screeches around the neighborhood at high speed in stolen cars, the photos. But whether these noises are evidence of life outside or not, I really I don’t know: I’ve become even more reclusive than usual—something I didn’t think was […]
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