In my mind I was thinking, Yeah, OK, this old line. But I must have had a look on my face because he shook his head and laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ve got twin beds,” he said. With a grin he added, “And honestly, I don’t find you particularly attractive.” I was both insulted and relieved. And that’s how I became the potty-mouthed sidekick to a man eleven years older than me who was in the middle of a divorce.
I hadn’t realized Sonny was so much older than Cher, who was 16 when they met, which, uh, yeah. (via @georgehahn.bksy.social)
In 2015, the BBC & PBS adapted the first two books of Hilary Mantel’s excellent Wolf Hall trilogy into a six-episode miniseries called Wolf Hall, starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Now they’ve made a second miniseries that covers the events of the third book, The Mirror and the Light. Here’s a trailer and synopsis:
The TV sequel picks up in May 1536 after the beheading of Anne Boleyn and follows the last four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared and influential figure of his time. These are years when Henry’s regime is severely tested by religious rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion. Cromwell must deftly navigate the moral complexities that accompany the exercise of power in this bloody time; he’s caught between his desire to do what’s right and his instinct to survive. The question is: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s brutally mercurial gaze?
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light premieres in the UK on BBC One on Nov 10 but Americans have to wait until March 23, 2025 to watch it on PBS.
Over the past several months, I’ve settled into a routine that involves reading one book at a time on paper or on the Kindle and listening to one book on audiobook. This way, I can switch back and forth without feeling like I am abandoning one book for the other. Right now, I am most of the way through James by Percival Everett on audiobook and just (finally!) started Craig Mod’s fine-art edition of Things Become Other Things. (Both are about very different kinds of journeys.)
For the last three years, I’ve been been getting my audiobooks through Libro.fm. You can listen through their app or download DRM-free mp3 or m4b files to listen in the app of your choice. They are a social purpose corporation, 100% employee owned, and partner with local bookstores to offer audiobooks & share profits. They don’t have every title because of Audible’s strategy of locking up exclusives (like Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and the Odyssey), but they have most of what you’d want to read. They also make it easy to gift audiobooks to friends and family (and I suppose, enemies and strangers if you want?)
Just in the past few months, I’ve listened to:
All Fours by Miranda July. This is one of those books that’s better as an audiobook. July is an actress as well as an author and the audiobook is more like a performance than a reading.
James by Percival Everett. Already mentioned this one, but the narration by Dominic Hoffman is superb and emphasizes some of the vernacular differences that are key to the story that might be tougher to express in print. (Hoffman also narrated James McBride’s Deacon King Kong and Ted Chiang’s Exhalation.)
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. This is the definitive account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and a great companion to HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries.
You can purchase individual audiobooks through the site or sign up for a membership where you get one free credit a month and each credit to good for one audiobook, regardless of price.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
Well! In the Yale Review, Chris Ware (one of my favorite cartoonists) writes about Richard Scarry (one of my favorite children’s book authors) and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (one of my favorite books).
This year is the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that-well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)
Unlike those budget vehicles, however, the new deluxe Penguin Random House anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is lavishly well-made, attentively reprinted with sharp black lines and warm, rich, watercolors. It includes an especially lively afterword by Scarry’s son Huck, in which he explains, using language even a kid can understand, how his dad wrote and drew the book, as well as hinting at what it was like to grow up as the son of arguably the world’s most popular and successful children’s book author.
(Lowly was perhaps the first children’s book animal character with a real nod to the ADA and the myth of “dis”-ability, and cheerfully makes his linear form work in all sorts of inspiring and disarmingly moving ways.)
And:
But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s.
From the Atlantic in 1948, Death of a Pig by E.B. White is about the story that inspired the author to write Charlotte’s Web a few years later.
The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.
Once in a while something slips — one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts. My pig simply failed to show up for a meal. The alarm spread rapidly. The classic outline of the tragedy was lost. I found myself cast suddenly in the role of pig’s friend and physician — a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop. I had a presentiment, the very first afternoon, that the play would never regain its balance and that my sympathies were now wholly with the pig. This was slapstick - the sort of dramatic treatment which instantly appealed to my old dachshund, Fred, who joined the vigil, held the bag, and, when all was over, presided at the interment. When we slid the body into the grave, we both were shaken to the core. The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.
The producer later said that it took him 17 takes to read the death scene of Charlotte. And finally, they would walk outside, and E.B. White would go, this is ridiculous, a grown man crying over the death of an imaginary insect. And then, he would go in and start crying again when he got to that moment.
Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means — and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to — the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.
I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.
The hero of one of my favorite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.
There are a lot of honest people in Russia-tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.
The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.
There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.
In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?
The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.
Two years later, Navalny was dead, murdered by Russia’s leader, dictator Vladimir Putin. I do not think it is hyperbole to read Navalny’s words as a warning, a harbinger of what happens to a country and its people when they come under undemocratic leadership.
Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than ever before, and some of the amazing results obtained through its use.
Even with its unprecedented capabilities, JWST’s views of the universe are still finite and limited. The faintest, most distant objects in the cosmos — including the very first stars of all — remain invisible even in the longest-exposure JWST images acquired to date. The universe itself offers a natural enhancement, however, that can reveal features that would otherwise remain unobservable: gravitational lensing.
Whenever a large amount of mass gathers together in one location, it bends and distorts the fabric of the surrounding space-time, just as the theory of general relativity dictates. As light from background objects even farther away passes close to or through that region of the universe, it not only gets distorted but also gets magnified and potentially bent, either into multiple images or into a complete or partial ring. The foreground mass behaves as a gravitational lens. The amount of mass and how it’s distributed affect the light passing through it, amplifying the light coming from those background sources.
Separated is the newest documentary film from Errol Morris. Based on Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, the film probes the inhumane family separation and immigration policies of the Trump administration. From a review in The Guardian:
The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages. It was inhumane treatment, which was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and effectively write every parent’s worst fear into law. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said blithely. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s forensic, procedural documentary walks us through the bureaucratic backrooms to show how the policy was hatched and implemented. It explains how its principal authors — Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions — junked the pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) in favour of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass imprisonment. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that typifies much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that is entirely understandable. The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
“Harm to children was part of the point,” says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy that the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White isn’t exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.
And here’s an interview with Morris & Soboroff about the film:
For his second term, Trump and his team are planning a blockbuster sequel to these inhumane crimes entirely in the open: deporting up to 20 million people (undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and political opponents) with a minimum of due process, which will require a massive increase in the scale of the police state and concentration camps. That’s 6% of the US population. We don’t know if they will succeed but they will try. Those are the stakes.
I got a lot out of this interview with The Message author Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jon Stewart for The Daily Show.
Best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates sits down with Jon Stewart to talk about his latest book, “The Message,” and reconciling past and present vestiges of oppression. They discuss his visits to Senegal, South Carolina, and The West Bank, how past atrocities like slavery and the holocaust can create a zero-sum game of control, the need for safety and statehood despite morally problematic systems, his exposure to Palestinian stories that have been hidden in American media, understanding the physical traumas of the Black community, and the purpose in writing to shape the world around us.
On the way to the dental clinic they talk about going home for Christmas. It’s November and Marianne is having a wisdom tooth removed. Connell is driving her to the clinic because he’s her only friend with a car, and also the only person in whom she confides about distasteful medical conditions like impacted teeth. He sometimes drives her to the doctor’s office when she needs antibiotics for urinary tract infections, which is often. They are twenty-three.
Jack was home safe. He had survived his kidnapping. But the actual kidnapping is not what this story is about, if you can believe it. It’s about surviving what you survived, which is also known as the rest of your life.
It’s also about, spoiler alert, trauma.
Tolstoy tells us that all happy families are alike and that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. A few years ago, I wrote a different novel, my first novel, about divorce, which was inspired in part by the divorce stories of several people I know, and I came to the conclusion that, actually, all divorces are exactly alike. I tell you this because I’ve now come to understand the same thing about trauma: Happy, well-adjusted people are all different. The traumatized are exactly alike. I’m about to tell you a story that is nothing like a violent kidnapping — almost laughably so — but what I’ve learned over the years is that trauma is trauma. Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don’t matter as much as the state we’re thrown into. Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents’ divorce. It’s wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.
In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.
Working in the tradition of representing the petits métiers, Penn photographed fishmongers, firefighters, butchers, bakers, divers, baseball umpires, chefs, bike messengers, and sellers of goods of all kinds.
Penn continued photographing workers in New York and London, collecting the photos into a project called Small Trades.
Like everyone else who has recorded the look of tradesmen and workers, the author of this book was motivated by the fact that individuality and occupational pride seem on the wane. To a degree everyone has proved right, and since these photographs were made, London chimney sweeps have all but disappeared and in New York horseshoers — hard to find in 1950 — now scarcely exist.
I love My Brilliant Friend — it’s one of my all-time favorites and might be the best show you’re not watching. I agree completely with Clare Thorp’s description of it as “criminally underrated”.
As the trailer above shows, the previous two lead actors (who were excellent) have been replaced by older ones, a change I’m a little apprehensive about, but everything else about the show has been pitch perfect so I’m gonna trust the process. From an NPR piece on the new season:
“This child is you, when you were a child,” Maiorino recalled her friend Alessia saying about the novel’s titular protagonist and sometimes antagonist Lila. Like Lila and her friend Lenù, Maiorino is from Naples and stayed in the south, while her friend left to study in the north of the country, get married and have children.
Art has now truly imitated life for Maiorino, who plays Lila in the fourth season of the series.
New episodes of My Brilliant Friend started airing on HBO last night and will drop every Monday for the next 10 weeks. Go check it out!
This month, Powers will publish his fourteenth novel, “Playground,” a book that initially seems like a way for him to add “ocean guy” to his C.V. It essentially comprises three story lines. The first is about Todd Keane, an all-conquering tech giant. The onset of dementia has compelled him to revisit his happiest memories, which involve Rafi Young, a close friend of his teens and twenties from whom he is now estranged. A second story line concerns a close-knit, dwindling community on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, that must decide how to respond to an offer from wealthy American investors who want to launch a libertarian seasteading enclave nearby. The third follows Evelyne Beaulieu, a famous oceanographer, as she reflects on her life’s work and all the destruction she has witnessed: the collapse of fisheries and the disappearance of various species; the acidification of the seas; the dredging, in a single afternoon, of entire “coral cities that had taken ten thousand years to grow.” There’s also a Silicon Valley-inspired twist, involving Todd’s investments in social networking and artificial intelligence, that brings these narrative threads together.
Powers was a participant in the personal-computing revolution of the seventies and the rise of the Internet in the nineties, and he is deeply attuned to the potential cataclysms that technological innovation could invite. “I had this sense that we were living through this ethical moment again,” he said, of the inspiration for the new book.
Sometimes the word “neurodiversity” is framed as if it’s merely a political stance or a political conviction. It’s not. It’s a living fact, like biodiversity in rain forests. We clearly have people with many different kinds of minds. There are people with dyslexia, there are people with ADHD, there are people with autism, there are people at all points of the spectrum. And all of these labels are the names of “disorders,” but if you look at them another way, they’re just different kinds of human operating systems.
We have to get beyond the fact that these conditions were discovered by people looking for forms of illness, basically, and recognize that they’re just there. They’re part of the human fabric. They always have been. People with these conditions have been making contributions to the evolution of science, art and technology for centuries — invisibly, mostly. You know, most of the labels were invented in the 20th century. We have to start looking at those labels, instead of the checklist of modern disorders, as human resources that we have not learned to tap fully because we’ve been so busy treating those people like carriers of disorder.
Amazon’s series The Rings of Power hasn’t gotten great reviews and Evan Puschak hypothesizes that, unlike movies, TV is not the right medium to tell Tolkien’s stories.
I’m skeptical that the Lord of the Rings, or any other story from Tolkien’s mythology, can really work as a TV series. It’s a square peg round hole situation. TV as a form just doesn’t play to the strengths of Tolkien’s vision.
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodo routes — the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula — took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. While passing the peninsula’s shrinking villages, Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan as a student at age nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. As the days passed, he considered why he has walked so rigorously and religiously during his twenty-five years as an immigrant in Japan, contemplating the power of walking itself. For Mod, solo walks are a tool to change the very structure of his mind, to better himself, and to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”
The way Craig has gone about writing and publishing this book is unique. In November 2023, he published an exquisitely designed fine art edition with color photography, limited to 2500 copies (of which ~900 remain), and priced at $100. The mass market version, published by Random House, is an expanded version of the fine art edition retailing for $31 ($15 on Kindle). Craig explains:
Wait? Didn’t you already publish this book in November 2023? Yes! Yes we did! (Where we = me, Craig.) That was the fine art edition. Limited in quantity. Printed and bound in Japan, in full color on Heidelberg presses with a silk screened and foil stamped cover. Retailing for $100. This Random House edition is a significant expansion of that fine art edition — more than double the length in text with a dozen additional photographs. There is so much more context about me and my relationship to Japan, and more Japanese historical context as well. The Random House edition is printed and bound as a standard trade hardcover (and retails for $31 USD), with images printed in black and white. I’m tempted — almost! — to call them different books that emerged from the same source material.
Artist and illustrator Andrew DeGraff makes maps that show where the characters travel during movies — imagine Billy’s trail maps from Family Circus but for films like Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Pulp Fiction, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
I’ll start. I finished the superb Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham and Miranda July’s excellent All Fours within the last few weeks. I’m about halfway through Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I could not finish Frankenstein — I was so excited and the book was so not my thing.
A friend recommended that I read North Woods by Daniel Mason next but I’ve also got my eye on There There by Tommy Orange and The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn (which I posted about this morning). It’s just over a month until Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo drops…the excerpt piqued my already excited interest.
What’s everyone else reading these days? Or are looking forward to reading?
The way the Fields sisters see it, and I think they’re right: race is a fiction, it doesn’t exist biologically, it’s a social construction, it’s designed to categorize, and it often obscures far more than it explains. But racism is real, right? Racism, the action, is real, it’s material, it affects people’s lives, it has life or death stakes, it structures the way that we engage in, and are received by, the society in which we live.
The example they give in the beginning of the book is: imagine a Black police officer is killed by one of his white colleagues. He’s undercover and he’s shot and killed. The news would say that this police officer was killed because he was Black. But the Fields sisters would say, wait a sec. Did the white officer shoot because he was white? That the Blackness caused the death, that the whiteness caused the shooting? No, of course not. What happened was that a white officer relied on racist assumptions about people of African descent to come to a set of conclusions, then acted on those conclusions.
I came into the house my usual way, like a thief. I turned the lock slowly and shut the door with the handle all the way to the left to avoid the click of the lock. Took off my shoes. Rolled my feet from heel to toe, which is how ninjas walk so silently. I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours. But how could it be any shorter, given that it was my one chance a week to be myself? My heart was pounding as I tiptoed through the living room. I know the quietest way to wash up, too: picking up and putting down the cup and face wash with this technique where you pretend each thing is heavier than it is. Imagine the cup is made of brick, so that as you put it down you’re also lifting it up, resisting its weight — the opposite of this would be just dropping it, letting gravity put it down. When I walk past Harris’s bedroom I think glide, glide, glide.
Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski wrote an illustrated a new book called All About U.S. (Bookshop), which features a look into the lives of 50 kids from the US, one from each state. From the website:
All About U.S. is a non-fiction children’s book, featuring 50 real kids from each state in the United States. The goal of this book is to create an authentic portrait of the country, showcasing the diversity of its people and the vastness of its natural landscapes.
We conducted over 100 hours of interviews, received 20 hours of home tour footage and hundreds of photographs, to create the illustrations and short stories about each family.
It sounds like they worked hard at finding kids from all kinds of different backgrounds (especially with just 50 slots to fill):
- Families who live in a variety of dwellings, from houseboats and yurts to farms, Native reservations, and Air Force bases
- Children with adoptive families, stepfamilies, single-parent families, two moms or dads, and those who live with their grandparents
- Children living with health conditions such as leukemia and muscular dystrophy
- Families from a range of social, religious, and economic backgrounds
Shadow Network is the best book I’ve read that explains the Republicans’ strategy over the last 50 years. You will come to hate Paul Weyrich, and rightfully so.
Anthea Butler is the chair of religion at University of Pennsylvania. [White Evangelical Racism] ties together the connection among Rs, evangelicals and the racism it tries to hide.
And her top documentary pick:
[Bad Faith] is *the* best documentary on the topic and if you don’t do anything else, watch this. It’s free on Tubi and 99 cents on other outlets.
Since Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016, I’ve experienced countless people claiming to now “understand” where I come from and what Appalachian people are like. But they don’t think of my childhood watching my dad lose himself while arranging music on his piano or my grandfather tenderly nurturing plants in his ridiculously large garden. Instead, they imagine the stereotypes of J.D. Vance’s version of Appalachia, where the entire region is made up of poor rural white people consumed with violence who have no one to blame but themselves for their life circumstances.
Winchester goes on to recommend fifteen books about Appalachia that will provide a clearer view of the region and the people who live there. They include:
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte. “If you’re still wondering why Hillbilly Elegy is so problematic, I’d suggest starting with What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia.”
Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place by bell hooks. “In this poetry collection, she laments how Black Appalachians are all too often left out of narratives about Appalachia.”
Any Other Place by Michael Croley. “Croley’s perspective as a Korean American informs his writing as his stories deal with many topics around race, identity, and belonging.”
When These Mountains Burn by David Joy. “When These Mountains Burn features two men deeply impacted by the opioid crisis in Appalachia.”
I just found out over the weekend about my pal Emily Witt’s new book, Health and Safety, and lo, there’s an excerpt of it in the fiction issue of the New Yorker. I didn’t know what to include here, so I just took the opening paragraphs…the rest of it is pretty intense.
On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory. A couple of days before, I had met a friend at the movie theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to see “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It was the first time I saw someone trying to open a door with his elbows. My friend and I ordered separate popcorns as a hygienic precaution. I remember someone behind us coughing, and being aware of it.
On Friday night, before the party, I put a single drop of LSD into a glass of water. I drank half, and Andrew drank the other half. For the next couple of hours, while he made beats in his studio, I lay in bed with my eyes closed, listening to one of the final mixes made by Andrew Weatherall, a British d.j. who had got his start in the nineteen-eighties club scene and had recently died. The tracks had titles like “Jagged Mountain Melts at Dawn” and “The Descending Moonshine Dervishes.”
I sat up in bed, and, as the waves of acid broke over me, I wrote down some thoughts. I was a magazine writer, but I was thinking of going to Brazil to write a book about the Amazon rain forest. The problem with trying to write a book about the Amazon rain forest was that it was a place that was much better left alone, like Everest, or the moon. I looked over at the cat, who was sitting on an ottoman, her eyes two glowing lamps of annoyance. It was time to go out.
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