As an adult, she made her dream a reality. Sara joined the Navy, married, had four kids and, for more than two decades, built a life in Southern California.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with it the realization that the Golden State’s liberal politics didn’t align with hers.
Wanting to feel grounded during a tumultuous time, Sara and Johnny started going back to church. They picked Calvary Imperial Beach chapel, part of the sprawling Costa Mesa megachurch that was meeting in person — in defiance of state restrictions on large gatherings.
Sara, then a nurse at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women & Newborns, managed to get a medical exemption [for the COVID vaccination] because she said she’d experienced an anaphylactic shock with a previous vaccine. After three interviews, Johnny, a Navy vet turned firefighter, won a religious exemption.
Still, COVID-era California weighed on them. Sara worried that she might be living in the end times the Bible prophesied.
And as Sara and Johnny soon learned, their new church had an outpost in Iowa, stocked with people like them.
So Sara and her husband, Johnny, a Southland native with a sunny disposition to match, packed up and joined the droves of Californians leaving the state, some for political reasons.
The church attracts 30 to 40 attendees on any given Sunday, and members say about half are from the Golden State. In the Ames church, the newcomers found a community of like-minded folks. Together they worried about vaccines, prayed outside Planned Parenthood offices and said blessings at antiabortion clinics.
Johnny, she said, will more than likely vote for Trump, whose track record he trusts. Sara’s views are complicated. She blames Trump for the first pandemic lockdowns, and for funding vaccine research. Although Trump “was obnoxious to listen to,” Sara excuses his racist comments, such as characterizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists.”
The couple, who both served in the military after Sept. 11, 2001 — Sara in the Persian Gulf — now doubt that Al Qaeda carried out the attacks, a view that is unsupported by evidence.
“I think 9/11 was a CIA mission, and I think they blew up that building,” Johnny said. “There’s too much evidence. I’ve seen too many videos.”
the oldest two kids reminisced with their parents about one of the things they miss most about California: the state’s diversity.
At his Iowa high school, Johnathan still can’t believe how his friends at school casually use a derogatory slur as a nickname for the one Black student on the football team.
“Casual racism, I will say, that’s a real thing,” he said. “I didn’t think it was a real thing until I moved out here.”
[The Family] insisted that they’re still all in, despite their gripes about Iowa’s lack of diversity and limited understanding of Mexican food.
H.P. Lovecraft and Douglas Hofstadter are two very different authors with distinct styles and subject matters. Lovecraft is known for his horror fiction and cosmic horror, while Hofstadter is known for his work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and mathematical logic. However, there are some similarities that can be drawn between the two authors.
One similarity is their interest in exploring the limits of human knowledge and understanding. Lovecraft often wrote about the dangers of encountering knowledge that is beyond human comprehension, while Hofstadter has written extensively on the nature of consciousness, the limits of artificial intelligence, and the mysteries of the human mind.
Another similarity is their use of intricate and complex language. Lovecraft was known for his verbose and ornate prose, often using archaic language and obscure words to create an otherworldly atmosphere. Similarly, Hofstadter is known for his playful and witty writing style, often incorporating puns, paradoxes, and wordplay into his works.
Finally, both authors have been influential in their respective fields and have inspired others to explore similar themes and ideas. Lovecraft's horror fiction has inspired countless writers and filmmakers, while Hofstadter's work has influenced the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.
While Lovecraft and Hofstadter are very different in many ways, their work shares some common themes and ideas, making them both significant figures in their respective fields.
And here I am catching up with "Paper Dragons," which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 1986. Originally published in Imaginary Lands, I have the standalone version from Axolotl Press with the intro by Blaylock's pal Tim Powers.
The story has a lovely dream-y feel of Northern California with a lot of what makes Blaylock Blaylock. Animals behaving strangely. People behaving strangely. And the petty foibles of human society -- like tossing tomato worms into a neighbor's yard. Not much of a story, but more a prose poem on the possibility of the magical being just around the bend, or behind a passing cloud.
--
The Sinking City is a Lovecraftian videogame. Lovecraft doesn't translate well to films or videogames, where most people just add tentacles to make it 'Lovecraftian'. But the Sinking City does a pretty fine job of capturing more of the spirit, so on that level it's successful. Your hard-boiled, ex-Navy diver investigator finds his way around a decrepit town beset by a flood (yes and the occasional tentacled monster). He's been told he can find the answers to his nightmares and visions, and various people around town are happy to pay him to solve their own particular problems.
Perhaps the most novel and 'Lovecraftian' gimmick is the Mind Palace, which provides a concrete game mechanic that corresponds to a mind 'correlating its contents'. Clues that you find on a case can be matched together two-by-two to form deductions that get you closer to the ultimate solution of the case.
Not very novel is a SAN meter that when it gets low results in additional visions and hallucinations. Sometimes, it's handled pretty ham-fistedly, but other times it creates some pretty vistas. I consciously avoided getting the sanity upgrades because I enjoyed the phantasmagoria.
Drawbacks are long load times and some glitchiness, and some extreme logic gates. You the player can have figured out where to go next, but unless your character has schlepped over to the newspaper morgue to confirm the location, the clues won't be there. They only magically appear once they've been unlocked by the schlepping. Sometimes you have to look at this clue before you look at that clue, or it won't give up all its secrets.
The combat system is not very good. If you're looking for combat as the point of a game, this is not it. But if you want some moody investigating, it has something going for it. Probably a C+/B- for a gamer, but an B+/A- for me.
"Rather than conceptualizing misogyny from the point of view of the accused, at least implicitly, we might move to think of it instead from the point of view of its targets or victims. In other words, when it comes to misogyny, we can focus on the hostility women face in navigating the social world, rather than the hostility men (in the first instance) may or may not feel in their encounters with certain women... Advantages of this approach would include that it 1.avoids psychologism … [and] makes misogyny more epistemologically tractable in the ways that matter here, by enabling us to invoke a “reasonable woman” standard … we can ask whether a girl or woman who the environment is meant to accommodate might reasonably interpret some encounter, aspect, or practice therein as hostile"
I don't see that substituting the psychology of the victim (indeed a hypothetical reasonable woman victim, whose reasonableness and perception of 'hostility' are no doubt predicated to some extent on our own psychologies) eliminates psychologism from the equation.
Manne quite rightly criticized some of Trump's statements, but let's keep her definition of misogyny in mind as we review her examples:
"Rosie O’Donnell (very funnily) questioned his moral authority to pardon Miss Universe for indulging in underage drinking: Trump called O’Donnell a “pig” and a “dog,” among other epithets. Carly Fiorina competed with Trump for the Republican nomination: he implied that her face was not presidential-level attractive. Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, pressed Trump about his history of insulting women: Trump fumed that she had blood coming out of her eyes and “wherever,”"
Are Trump's insults attempts to enforce the patriarchy? Or are they simply juvenile responses to perceived attacks on him personally (see also Sleepy Joe, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin' Ted, Cryin' Chuck, Conflicted Bob Mueller)? Perhaps a case could be made for Fiorina, since she was trying to usurp the presidency from men, but Rosie and Kelly were doing their jobs as TV people.
One could say that they were 'assaulting the patriarchy' by having the feminine gall to speak up on a national stage (the prerogative of men) and needed to be put in their place. But then we are left with the consequence that telling Ann Coulter to shut up is now automatically misogyny by definition.
Certainly the particular ways that Trump chose to express himself are gross and gendered. One might be tempted to call it misogynistic, but Manne's chosen definition prevents that.
I gave up when she constructed her own version of 'humanism' and then alternately agreed with it and tore it apart. From a certain perspective, I can see how that's necessary for her to develop her own ideas and contrast them with other possibilities, but... it was not necessary for me.
Los Angeles has a multimillion-dollar fish-processing industry and one of the largest produce depots in the country, so there were huge freezers in town. Someone suggested contacting a few of those fish and produce companies. Though their freezers were full, the companies agreed to clear some space for the books. The volunteers were sent home with instructions to come back at dawn.
IBM gave its employees time off to volunteer. The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library. Overnight, the city managed to procure thousands of cardboard boxes, fifteen hundred hard hats, a few thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical engineer and former popcorn distributor who had reinvented himself as an expert in drying out wet things
The wet and smoke-damaged books were taken in refrigerated trucks to the food warehouses, where they were stored on racks between frozen shrimp and broccoli florets at an average temperature of 70 below 0. No one really knew when the wrecked books would be thawed out or how many of them could be saved. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.
A look into Harry Peak's life, as the author interviews his sister: "[mother] Annabell Peak worked as a cashier at a supermarket in what would be considered the wrong direction—the store was on the edge of Los Angeles. I told [sister] Debra that I lived in Los Angeles, and she thought I might be familiar with the supermarket. “It’s the one near L.A., you know, that’s owned by the Jew,” she said. “You know that one, don’t you?”"
Librarians as heroes:
A battery recycling plant in the neighborhood had contaminated soil with toxic levels of lead, necessitating the largest lead cleanup in California history. Exide Technologies, which operated the plant, had just agreed to fund blood tests for the twenty-one thousand households in the neighborhood. The tests would be conducted at the Boyle Heights Branch Library. In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries. They become town squares and community centers—even blood-draw locations. In Los Angeles, there have been plenty of disasters requiring libraries to fill that role. In 2016, for instance, a gas storage facility in the Porter Ranch neighborhood sprang a leak, and methane whooshed out, giving residents headaches, nosebleeds, stomachaches, and breathing problems. Eventually, the entire area had to be evacuated. With the help of industrial-strength air purifiers, the library managed to stay open. It became a clearinghouse for information about the crisis, as well as a place where residents could gather while exiled from home. The head of the branch noticed how anxious patrons seemed, so she set up yoga and meditation classes to help people relieve stress. Staff librarians learned how to fill out the expense forms from Southern California Gas so they could assist people applying to get reimbursed for housing and medical costs. American Libraries Magazine applauded the library’s response, noting, “Amid a devastating gas leak, Porter Ranch library remains a constant.”
Speaking of other fires I hadn't heard of, she mentions the Proud Bird Fire.
"When he finished writing the book, Bradbury tried to come up with a better title than “The Fireman.” He couldn’t think of a title he liked, so one day, on an impulse, he called the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department and asked him the temperature at which paper burned. The chief’s answer became Bradbury’s title: Fahrenheit 451. When Central Library burned in 1986, everything in the Fiction section from A through L was destroyed, including all of the books by Ray Bradbury."
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The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge, makes for a strange read. I guess ultimately, it's a story about a monster. La Farge certainly soaked in Lovecraftiana and one of the major counterfactual elements of the story is the idea that Lovecraft was gay and left behind a sexual diary of his exploits that was uncovered in the 1950s, causing a furore in fandom (and HUAC). The bits of its text reproduced in the novel are (while completely unbelievable) strangely believable. La Farge has some of the feel of Lovecraft's letters down quite well. The diary is soon exposed as a hoax, and then the actual story of the novel is a modern investigation of the hoaxer and who he really was or is. Could he be Robert Barlow, Lovecraft's friend and literary executor, reputed to have committed suicide in Mexico?
Sadly, this is one of those books where, when you get close to the end, you can tell that there aren't enough pages left for a GREAT ending. So while I didn't ultimately love the book, I appreciate the way it embodies a counterfactual world like that of Lovecraft - a world like our own apart from the existence of a particular book or other particular facts. Another topic it subtly bumps up against is Lovecraft's legacy... how would things be different if he was a 'pervert' instead of a racist? Or both a pervert and a racist.
Although it's a broad wink at the initiated, I also adore the name of the protagonist, Dr. Marina Willett.
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timeasmymeasure
