Hello all! It’s been an ok covid-free week for me. I’ve done plenty of reading and writing. I am back on track with fiction writing. My current project has a few potential titles, but let’s just call it War Baby for now. It’s the story of Ray McKenzie, a young man who’s father helped usher in an age of revolution that led to the creation of a post-climate change socialist federation, and Ray’s efforts to come to terms with his life and his family’s legacy. Some of you might have read the long story that this is stemming from. Due to issues concerning publishing and copyright, I cannot serialize my progress, like I was thinking of doing. But if you want to informally read my progress at periodic intervals, feel free to get in touch.
The big piece in this installment of Melendy Avenue Review is an essay on J.K. Rowling’s latest crime novel. This was commissioned by a friend who very kindly subscribed to MAR at the Chieftain level. You, too, can commission a review from me if you become a Chieftain! Or, anyway, the next nine of you to sign up for that support level can- after that, the price goes up, so some oligarch can’t buy up my whole reading schedule. On top of fulfilling an obligation to a friend and funder, I think I say what needs to be said about J.K. Rowling, writer, at this moment in time. If you want to up your subscription, you should be able to do so here:
We also have an election, some reading notes, an Ed’s Corner, and you know what’s at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Election: Readings on the Right, Podhoretz vs Rushdoony vs Winckelmann
Reading Notes: Negarestani, Winslow, Morgan
Review Essay: J.K. Rowling, The Ink Black Heart
Ed’s Corner: The Small Joys of Small Talk & I Don’t Play Favorites
ELECTION: Readings on the Right, Podhoretz vs Rushdoony vs Winckelmann
Ok, here’s the part where people get to decide what I read! The idea here is people vote on which of the three readings sound most interesting to them. You can use the poll below, which closes 24 hours after this posts. I read the books in the order of votes received, and Roomie Ed breaks ties. Don’t feel unqualified to vote! You subscribe, that’s qualification enough!
This election is for my next books in the “readings on the right” slot. I like to read right-wing writing for a number of reasons: the “know your enemy” thing, occasional insights or enjoyment, an attempt at being more well-rounded culturally than I might otherwise be.
The Candidates-
Norman Podhoretz, Making It (1967) - Norman Podhoretz might or might not have considered himself a conservative when he wrote this memoirs, but reaction to it surely helped drive him firmly to the right. Regarded as an embarassing, back-biting but also self-owning mess — the kind of thing we might call “cringe” now — this is the story of how Podhoretz, in his own mind, came to be so great, smart, and rich. It stirred such a backlash among the New York sort-of-left intellectuals Podhoretz considered his cohort that Norman went on to become a neoconservative godfather (and father of extremely silly weak neoconservatives, like John Podhoretz).
R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) - I’m far from the only lefty who makes a habit of reading intellectual conservatives, but I don’t know many who try reading the really religious ones, even the intellectual religious ones. Rushdoony was a sinister Calvinist and, arguably, the intellectual godfather of efforts to instantiate theocracy, or theocratic creep anyway, into American politics. This Armenian-American minister also had the nerve to title his book after one of Calvin’s own works. What’s there? Who’s to say?
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1765) - Why would I put an early romantic German art historian in my readings on the right slot? Because the particular artistic predilictions and interpretations that Winckelmann helped install into serious, critical art history, and which spilled over into archaeology and many other fields, helped steer right-wing agendas from relatively harmless aesthetes to the Nazis. Spend a minute on the right-wing internet and you’ll see the gormless idiot version of Winckelmann’s fetishization of his idea of Greek art into an expression of universal beauty/truth expressed all over by kids who couldn’t find Greece on a map in three tries.
READING NOTES
“Have you ever read any theory-fiction?” a friend asked once some time ago, which is how Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia wound up on my to-read list. It’s funny- it feels like theory used to mean Foucault, I guess with the online kids these days it usually means something off the Deleuze/Guattari evolutionary tree. In any event, Negarestani is a philosopher with some connections to the Cyberculture Research Unit, the semi-legendary English theory outfit that proved strangely viral, its postures and styles spreading to kids often born after the group itself shut its doors through the agency of writers like Mark Fisher, Nick Land, and assorted epigones. Negarestani takes the clotted, unfunny-punning language (“polytics” for politics is an especially unfortunate example), the intimations of doom, questionable borrowings of imagery from the sciences, etc of CCRU style theorizing to… well, not to tell a story. If I understand it right, the idea behind “theory-fiction” is that this sort of theorizing is often best expressed as fiction, and that all fictions express a theory, anyway, therefore… well, therefore, “Cyclonopedia” doesn’t work very well as a work of fiction, but has a built-in excuse. It does have some pretty fun ideas: mainly, that oil is the product of some dark intelligence welling up from the interior of the Earth to accelerate both capitalism and religious fundamentalism, with the goal of destroying life on Earth. He ties in old Zoroastrian and Islamic heresies, Deleuze/Guattari’s ideas about “war machines” as a form of organization, etc. That said, it’s more like an essay on an improbable idea with a framing story about an intellectual that was driven insane by these revelations slapped on than an actual story. This is in keeping with how online theory-heads in the Fisher/Land (non-fascist and fascist flavored, gotta diversify for market share!) mold operate. At the end of the day, if they can be a bit edgier, more out there, or simply more obscure, than our also-lame vulgar-empiricist fake-populist over-culture, then they usually stop there and don’t bother coming up with anything more interesting, or expressing themselves more clearly. This book isn’t actually all that mind-blowing (certainly not if you’re used to any other “literature of ideas,” including many candidates from scifi/fantasy), and also not that hard to understand, if you have the patience for it, even as it insists on its own abstruseness and esoteric quality. I feel like these theory people would blow more minds if they ditched the self-important dramatics and tried to tell good stories and/or explain themselves well, but, hell, why listen to me? They have their audience.
I gave a listen to The Power of the Dog, the first in the Border trilogy by Don Winslow. I noticed Don Winslow because of these giant subway ads they ran for one of his books in New York. Advertising! It works! In any event, friends of mine who like crime fiction said he was ok. He was! The Border trilogy follows the drug war in its Mexican phase, when the cartels of that land formed and came to dominate the drug export trade into the United States. The Power of the Dog covers the beginning of the story in the late seventies through the aughts. Viewpoint characters include an obsessed DEA agent, a high-end call girl, a conflicted Irish-American hitman, and the eventual leader of one of the major cartels. The action moves right along and is pretty fun, a bit like James Ellroy without the heights of inspired madness, either in prose or in vision, but fun. If you know the history of the drug wars a little, eventually, you start to be able to predict the plot. “Hmmm, I wonder if this plucky 1980s Mexican-American DEA officer, friends with the main DEA guy, is gonna wind up tortured and killed like Kiki Camarena??” Still and all, fun enough, and at least gets that the US is almost solely responsible for the blood farce of the drug wars, in every respect from providing most of the customer base to giving drug lords a pass if they were helpful during the Cold War.
My attempts to listen to “important” or zeitgeist-y contemporary literary fiction took me to A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan. Remy and Alicia are a millennial unmarried couple, unhappy, underachieving, obsessed with a former coworker of Remy’s named Jen, who has become a minor instagram star on the basis of the imagery she can post of a supposedly-perfect life. Alicia is vaguely unwell, mentally and physically, or maybe that’s just how a similar personality as Remy’s – sour, envious, devoid of any obvious virtues or talents but endlessly judgmental of all around him – manifests itself in the millennial woman-child, as opposed to Remy’s rudeness. Sometimes, novels “of the moment” – more or less any moment since consumer society became a thing – use references, to events, cultural phenomena, consumer items, to convey meaning. For an extreme example of this, see American Psycho. Beth Morgan doesn’t do this! There’s references to instagram, of course, and to some consumer products Jen uses. But the characters live in a conceptual desert, with no interests, little in the way of past, the New York they live in featureless, and it’s unclear what they want beyond their need to be seen and desired. After some strange interactions with Jen, encounters with a peculiar self-help book, and a ghastly accident, the book takes a genre turn involving monsters and martial arts. How much of the blankness here was deliberate choice and how much writing failure? I tend to think the former- it’s not like drowning a book in contemporary references is hard. Not a bad entry in the list of zeitgeist-y books but nothing worth writing home about, either.
REVIEW ESSAY
J.K. Rowling, The Ink Black Heart (2022) - Yeah, yeah, she wrote this under a nickname, but she of all people shouldn’t be offended if I don’t use it. Look. I don’t think I have much original to add to the discourse around the world’s richest and most famous author (or, anyway, richest person who got where they got through writing- I assume Bezos or Musk have written books?). The main impression I’ve gotten from post-Deathly Hallows Rowling is the same one most people my age with even roughly similar worldviews have: a gobsmacked incredulity at how much good will Rowling threw away in order to become the public face, and one of the funders, of a violent right-wing hate movement. Why she could not have taken her billion dollars, millions of fans, place in the cherished childhood memories of a generation, and her personal prejudices, and stayed in her castle, writing what she felt like and enjoying her money… but I guess that’s the thing. Unconditional adoration clearly became a drug for this person, and the easy version wasn’t enough. She had to have the same unconditional, complete adulation, even when she was being gratuitously awful. She gets it from fewer people, now- but still gets it, becoming the idol for hateful bigots the world over, and still retaining a substantial leftover fan base (and, of course, the middle of the Venn diagram, the Potter fans who were already bigots).
There’s been a fair amount of retrospective editing, by people about my age, of their attitudes towards the Harry Potter series. I am, frankly, unwilling to believe many of the people who have come out of the woodwork to say they never liked Harry Potter anyway, they always knew Rowling was full of shit. I read all seven books, I went to midnight release parties at Borders (RIP) for at least two, and more or less enjoyed the ride. I was never as enthusiastic for them as many members of my age cohort. But then, the internet taught me that even when I thought myself a true super-fan of something, there are people who are just more built for obsession than I am. I also think some of the retrospective discoveries of political themes in the Harry Potter series are pretty dubious. I think it’s clear that Rowling wasn’t trying to say that the enslavement of house elves, for instance, was a good thing- it seems to have been one of her desultory efforts to complicate her viewpoint characters by making them indifferent to the situation until the almost the very end. The antisemitism in the books, as represented by making a race of gross, hook-nosed, vaguely evil non-humans in charge of all the money, strikes me more as Rowling being a bit of a dum-dum about Jews than real hatred (though, frankly, the fact that developers of future properties didn’t allay any of that depiction at all tells me that maybe they rather liked it).
That being said, having been paid by a gracious Melendy Avenue Review chieftain to read and review Rowling’s latest detective novel, I am willing to stake a claim: J.K. Rowling is not an especially talented writer. I think she was lucky, she knew enough to keep it simple with those first few Harry Potter novels, and she had good editors. That last is crucial, and I think no one is editing her anymore, not in any meaningful, critical sense. Because holy shit, The Ink Black Heart is a self-indulgent, sloppy, ugly, brutally dull slog. It doesn’t even have enough bigotry to make it interesting on that score, I suppose because the Chieftain assigned me this one, and not the one with a trans villain.
I admit, it probably doesn’t help that I’m coming into the sixth book in a series. The Ink Black Heart is the latest of a series of crime novels whose main character is private detective Cormorant Strike. Six books in, Strike is less of a detective and more a manager of a private detective firm with a seemingly endless roster of employees, all of whom we need to be introduced to and keep track of for some reason. I assume all these random detectives, most of whom seem to be agreeable, if patronizing, stereotypes drawn from various parts of Britain (I always thought Rowling was more invested in the traditional little-English patronizing of the Celtic fringe, minorities, and the poor than to, say, anti-semitism, though of course now TERF shit has eaten what mind or soul she ever had), were side characters in previous installments of the Strike adventures. A half-way smart pulp detective writer, or one with a good editor, would have known/been told to ditch these characters. Have Strike lose all his money so it’s just him and the love interest working cases so we can get to the fucking point- any hack would know to do that. Detective fiction isn’t school stories. But no. No one gets to tell Jo Rowling to economize, not anymore.
After all, she made a cool billion off the over-stuffed, under-baked world of Hogwarts, with its hundreds of named characters, maybe twelve of whom really mattered. The contrast between what she did with the Potter books and what she’s doing here are instructive. It made a certain degree of sense to fill the Potter world with named people and other bearers of proper nouns- locations, businesses, spells, and so on. It’s a secondary world story (even if it occasionally cuts to our world), and immersiveness helps sell those, especially to kids. Rowling couldn’t have known this ahead of time – one of several ways in which luck is what has defined her career – but the internet, which came to something like its current state as she was writing and releasing the Potter series, makes the kind of fandom that obsesses over minor characters and encyclopedizes features of secondary worlds, much more accessible. The poor old Trekkies studied by the culture studies people of the late twentieth century had to do all their obsessing, their exegeses and their in-group kvetching, in zines! Now, there’s an actual encyclopedia-making protocol, the wiki, available for free to everybody, just the thing for obsessive fans. Moreover, everyone – good guys, bad guys, indifferent guys – were stuck together, in Potter-world. Wizarding society was small, no one seemed to ever leave, bringing those not born to it into it didn’t happen often and was so controversial as to occasion at least two civil wars in living memory, and it seems that somehow, the authorities would know every single time you did magic, anywhere, and could stop you from doing so if they decided they didn’t like it? And most of all, everyone in the British wizarding world went to the same high school, and most of the action took place there.
Not only does Rowling introduce us to a wide world of more or less identical ex-cops, ex-soldiers, ex-whatever in Strike’s orbit, but she also expects us to know and care about a broad confederacy of online obsessives, which constitutes her field of victims, suspects, clue-holders, etc. The idea here is that someone, or a group of someones, involved with the fan community of a cartoon called, you guessed it, “The Ink Black Heart,” is stalking and eventually killing people involved with the show, including its put-upon creator. Way more of the novel than you might expect is actually written as text exchanges between people in said fan community. We’re expected to get to know them, try to figure out who they are behind their screen names, figure out the tangled webs, etc etc etc.
Well, A. Rowling isn’t a good enough writer to sell this and B. unlike with the Potter series, she doesn’t make it easy on herself, or play to what strengths she has, or let an editor try to make some sense of what is going on. In Hogwarts, you need the Slytherin baddies and the Gryffindor goodies (and, you know, the other half a school worth of extras and occasional love interests) to be all in a location with each other. Rowling – or her editor – understood that paying as much attention to the inner dynamics of the baddies as she did to Harry and friends would try the reader’s patience, as evidenced by the latter books. But here, Rowling is trying to play with the real world, and to seem gritty and realistic. Also, she has some vested in interest in depicting online fan communities who come to despise the creators of the works that brought them together as uniquely awful, so, had motivation to spend a lot of time with them.
Look: crime fiction is unique in terms of the balancing act it needs to perfect between action and characterization. Crime fiction should move quickly, but it should also provide interesting characters and fun color to the world. It’s a hard balance, because the more you characterize, the slower the action becomes. You need to economize- look for ways to advance the action while characterizing and describing. Ray Chandler was, arguably, the all time master of this, and he didn’t always get it perfect. I wrote a crime novel of sorts once, and fucked the balance up pretty bad. You don’t need to have Chandler’s grace to get it right. Think about any cop show, and how they manage to make the medical examiner a bit of a character. We don’t need to learn about the ME’s med school background, marriage, etc., though those might come up. Just a few details to make the world feel more populated, give it some flavor, without weighing the story down. For my gamer nerds, I think of creating a good beatdown deck in Magic: the Gathering as being a bit like this- it’s an engine, efficiently hitting your opponent and removing obstacles to hitting him further. Same with a crime story. There is such a thing as a crime epic- James Ellroy and the aforementioned Don Winslow do those. Those are good too, but those aren’t detective stories, whodunits, and anyway, their economy may be looser, but it still exists. It’s possible to lard the story down, make it too slow, even in an epic.
Well, this is a whodunit, but it sprawls like an epic, despite it possessing all the scale and scope of, well… a twitter spat with a TERF celebrity. All kinds of creeps come out of the woodwork, saying unpleasant things, someone’s likely getting hurt somewhere and the social fabric frays just that tiny bit more, but it’s not exactly Heat. Hell, it’s not Michael Mann’s recent prequel/sequel novel, Heat 2. It doesn’t even have the real self-indulgence of a true artistic bomb, because Rowling isn’t an artist. Her ego, massive and demanding though it is, isn’t the artist’s ego, it’s the ego of an entitled customer at a chain coffee shop demanding you make the off-menu concoction she saw online more quickly.
You’d figure she’d really have something to say about online fan communities, right? That she’d really stick the knife in? Especially given how she went after trans people in one of the previous volumes? Well, Rowling did manage to conjure a feeling of nausea and dread in this book, but this feeling was just as apparent around the chosen-family (natch) of shitty detectives as it was with the shitty fans. Yeah, her evil fans are unpleasant, to outsiders and to each other, which contributed to the nausea-smog of Ink Black Heart, but the depiction was just a small part of the stew of unpleasantness that was the book’s writing and tone and, unavoidably, what I know about the author.
So, no, the fan community of Ink Black Heart is not compellingly drawn. Neither are the show’s creators. In what might have been an exercise in artistic restraint on her part, Rowling chose to make the hounded creators of the cult TV show weird, artsy Millennials, and not, say, plucky middle-aged single ladies who made shit tons of money writing anodyne fantasy fables. Clearly, Jo Rowling had a look at some millennial animated favorites, and her brain took what it processed and threw up a kind of melange of various Adult Swim properties, Steven Universe, the My Little Pony reboot, and gothy favorites like Invader Zim. An anthropomorphic heart of, I guess, an evil guy, or something, comes out of his chest in a graveyard and has whimsical adventures with other creepy cartoon friends? Including a kind of devil figure who in turn gets appropriated as a Pepe-style meme by Nazis? Nazis are in this, as bad guys, to make clear, not the kind that Rowling supports when they go after trans and queer people.
I focus on Rowling’s characterization of a popular cult show and the fandom dynamics around it because it demonstrates Rowling’s utter ignorance of the world around her, including – especially– the parts of it that made her rich and famous (which in turn would allow her to disregard editing as she so clearly has). Rowling proves herself utterly incapable of getting across any aspect of what would make her cult show successful with anyone. That she gets fandom culture wrong – the fans don’t act or talk like fans, and I say this as someone who doesn’t like fandom as a concept – is one thing, even if she should know it pretty well by now. The fact that the creator of the largest literary cult in human history is utterly incapable of getting across what would actually draw someone in to even a small, obscure fan cult, just cannot convey what might appeal about a given secondary-world fiction about oddballs and found family when having done so is the foundation of her grotesque personal wealth and ability to publish her crappy crime fiction at all… that gets to the heart of my thesis, here. I don’t think we need to say the Harry Potter books were entirely without merit. But I think, having been given enough rope, Rowling will hang herself, every time, because she can’t help herself, because she is a fool and a cypher. Of course, our times being what she is, she can play that string all the way to the bank, as she won’t hesitate to tell randos on twitter, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.
On top of all this, the action does not deliver. Even an artist of the crime epic ala James Ellroy or John Woo would have a hard time extracting the action from the morass of dull, inept world and characterization Rowling lards this novel with- she hasn’t got a chance, even if she wanted to, which she clearly did not. Rowling wasn’t the worst action writer in the Potter series, but she wasn’t the best either, and here, again, I don’t think anyone’s editing her. The investigation stuff is boring and distended. Action scenes lag. The will-they-won’t-they between Strike and his girl Friday bores because the characters are bores, extended backgrounds with no foreground, no character beyond irritability and a bad leg on Strike’s part, and nothing at all for the woman. This is the worst book I’ve read all year. My Chieftain got his money’s worth, I hope! Nd I say this as someone who reads and enjoys writers who, arguably, have done worse things for the world than Rowling- actual Nazis, murderers, rapists. But none of that rogue’s gallery decided to become morally wretched quite so gratuitously as Rowling, with as many options to just not make themselves awful, and with as little to give in return to the world as Rowling has proven she has to give.
Ed’s Corner: The Small Joys of Small Talk & I Don’t Play Favorites
I had an interesting conversation recently where a friend of mine shared that they never really got the common complaint that no one likes small talk. She loves small talk and thinks it gets a bad wrap, and I couldn’t help but agree. There’s a lot to get out of a conversation about the weather, or what route you took to get somewhere. Both of these subjects have built in depth. If you’re the kind of person who has serious opinions about the water table like I am, even a brief mention from a fellow New Englander about how this winter had been pretty mild invites interesting tangents along the lines of “yes, and while I appreciate not having to shovel, I’m worried there won’t be enough snow melt in the spring which will lead to an early summer drought.” Or I can tell any number of stories of my fortunately finding my way into the position of a snow shoveler in the winter of 2015, which delivered a bumper crop of snow, the overtime from which paid off nearly a quarter of my student loans over the course of four months. “Wow, the traffic was bad on the way in,” is the beginning of many a serious conversation about transportation infrastructure. Any given small talk topic can naturally lead to complex discussions that you’d be surprised how often people are willing to engage with. Even if they aren’t, they have the perfect graceful exit by just saying “yeah, that’s wild. Anyways, I gotta get to it,” and then they head off to do whatever business had them work up the thirst that drove them to the proverbial water cooler. There’s no pressure. Both you and your fellow conversant have an easy out if you just can’t bear up to the mental demands of the conversation, but if you want stimulating conversation, you can likely find some way to have it.
I do, however, understand this apprehension towards small talk. I just think it’s a little misplaced. While I genuinely enjoy small talk, it’s what comes after that sets my teeth on edge, the “getting to know you,” style of questions, specifically of the genre of “what’s your favorite...?” I never know what to say to questions about what my favorite anything is, and not because I’m indecisive or undiscerning. I’m perfectly capable of determining which out of a range of things I like the best. For example, in terms of what my “favorite” food is, I’d say a good toasted meatball sub sandwich. I’m fine saying it here in the context of a published article, but if we’re having a conversation, I’d dissemble on the matter: “oh, I’m not picky,” “I like a lot of different things,” or “you know, I never really thought too much about that.” I’d do this because all too often people take your favorite anything, and proceed to use it as a mental shorthand. “Yeah, that’s Ed, he’s the meatball sub guy.” Then such people make a mental note to talk to me about whatever I said was my favorite thing. This becomes the thing they talk about when they know me well enough to dispense with the small talk, but they don’t quite know me well enough to have a fix on my whole vibe. Honestly, that’s a pretty wide trench of time, before most people can move past that phase.
I wonder if somehow this whole scenario is why people don’t like small talk: that it’s only looked upon with suspicion because it’s a necessary first step towards, “hey, it’s Ed, the Meatball Man!” It invites a shallow familiarity based on broad abstractions, like your favorite band or whatnot. In fact I’d draw an equivalence between the “getting to know you” phase of social relations to the Uncanny Valley phenomenon of visual recognition in humans. Basically, much as abstracted and stylized representations of human faces or forms are found more comforting relative to the actively unnerving human faces or forms that very closely, but don’t quite, simulate human features, I would wager the abstracted relationship of small talk is far more gratifying than the offputting quasi-relationship of folks just getting to know you. At least, that’s how I experience it.
It’s also frustrating, because conversations in the “getting to know you” phase lose a lot of breadth. This makes sense: from the other person’s perspective they think you’re worth having a more in depth social relationship with going forward, so they try to play it safe and stick to topics they think are safe and engaging to the person they’re talking to. But there’s only so much that I can stand to talk about one band or food, even my most favorite of all time in any given category, before I get bored with the conversation. Entirely within the realm of small talk conversations of “got any plans for this weekend?” I’ve had discussions about how to build high capacity diesel engines, or how to launch your own weather balloon, and that’s stuff more interesting than even the most trenchant insight into a topic that I’m already interested in. I’ve liked my favorite things for a very long time, I already know a lot about it. There are times when folks having these “getting to know you” conversations with me do bring up something I haven’t heard about before, or recommend a good place to get a meatball sub that I’ll have to check out. That’s all good and useful information that I’m gratified to know, but there’s only so much that can be said on any one topic.
I fancy myself as the kind of person who can have an intelligent conversation on just about any topic, even specialized topics. I’m not an expert, nobody is inviting me to symposiums or anything, but I at least know enough to ask intelligent questions about the subject. I like having those kinds of conversations because I can learn something new, generally discussions of my favorite subjects is a conversation about something that I knew already. That is by design, I think: again the people trying to get to know you are trying to make things easy and appealing for you, by asking about your favorite things. I think they’re trying to make you comfortable with your part of the dialogue. No need to think too hard about what you should say, just say the same thing you say to everyone you talk to this subject about. But what I want is exactly that interplay, which you can get through small talk.
I also don’t really care much for the concept of a favorite anyways. While a toasted meatball sub might be my favorite food, you don’t see me eating one every day. A toasted meatball sub is a special treat I have on rare occasions. It would probably tarnish the appeal of the sandwich in my mind if I was eating them once a week. I can also never really be satisfied with any one thing as my favorite. There’s a lot of stuff out there in this world, how can I be sure I won’t find something better out there if I keep trying new things? Also, just because something ticks all of my subjective aesthetic boxes, it might not be the most interesting. Most things I regard as favorites are simple pleasures, and as such they don’t necessarily have a lot of complexity to them. So, while I know I like meatball subs, and I actively dislike eating fish, but recently I was trying several different kinds of fish recipes, just because I was interested in the variety of ways in which seafood dishes could be prepared. I think I’ve eaten far more tilapia filets in the past six months than I’ve had meatball subs, and although I didn’t enjoy eating the fish very much, it was still engaging to find new ways to cook it even knowing I wasn’t going to come close to the taste I’d get by just ordering a sub at a sandwich shop. I guess my real favorite thing is figuring things out. I just wish there was more to talk about as we figure each other out.
Well! Mithra is a lady of few words. She finds other ways to communicate.
"The Power of the Dog" was cited by Oswaldo Zavala as a book that portrays the drug trade honestly and beyond what Mexican literati are supposedly capable of. I'm kinda curious!