I wrote about Daniel Alarcón and Daniel Orozco for Epiphany Literary Journal. This is part of a series of essays about Latino authors who happen to be named Daniel (I love the arbitrary nature of this organizing principle). Read the last two essays (about Daniel Olivas & Daniel Chacón) here.
For much of the 18th century, lamps ran on whale blubber, hence the commercial interests behind Moby Dick. In the 1920s, Scott Fitzgerald could write of Los Angeles: “The everlasting hazeless sunlight of LA” because there was relatively little pollution. 20 years later, that sentence was fanciful, and Raymond Chandler’s stories with their smog and flood lights more accurately reflected what LA became.
But my favorite paragraph (so far) has been about Thomas Edison. Specifically, after he improved telephone quality in 1877. With this new technology, people had to ask how they would greet someone on the other line. Some folks suggested that a loud bell should ring from the room of the caller, similar to how someone was “announced” when they entered a house.
As Edison was partially deaf at this point, he knew that the more recognizable sound was probably from a human. He thought of tradesmen shouting “ahoy-ahoy” would they wanted attention. He remembered how raftmen shouted “hello” when approaching another boat.
What a masterful paragraph.
Lipsky traces the before and after of hello across two centuries in ten sentences.
He never lets us forget how intimate this technology is to modern life: the Coke can on an empty beach, that the first switchboard operators were “Hello-girls,” that the first word on an Apple was hello. The paragraph begins with a telegram and ends with code. This paragraph gives an eerie sensation that what is natural is actually more fragile, unstable, and invented than we’d like to believe.
Unwinding Anxiety & Lily Tomlin
Since 2020, I’ve become a big audiobook boy.
I don’t want all my money going to Apple, Amazon, or Spotify, so I often buy audiobooks through Libro, which, like Bookshop, does a better job of supporting local bookstores.
You choose the bookstore you want to support, and every time you buy an audiobook, your local bookstore receives 15% commission. This is how I support my favorite bookstore back in Anchorage, The Writer’s Block.
Anywayz, I passed this an issue of Men’s Health that recommended Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind by the psychiatristJudson Brewer.
I’m usually wary of self-help books, but this sounded practical and I wanted to examine my increasing fear of flying. Overall, it was a useful overview of how anxiety is born and how to counteract its ill effects: recognize the discrepancy between the reptilian brain and the newer pre-frontal cortex that’s responsible for executive functioning; analyzing triggers, behaviors, and rewards; increasing awareness by deliberating opening your eyes wider or boosting your curiosity about anxiety hoops.
I did think parts were to much Think your way out of anxiety, but hell, his voice is gorgeous and listening to him chilled me out on the plane.
Does it melt like ice until it’s some kind of invisible something?
Lady Gaga
What did Pope.L think of Lady G?
Zero clue!
But I bet he’d love this transition ;)
I forgot just how this clip found me, but I stand in awe of this artist who, at just 23, dropped some serious wisdom.
When you do something great and somebody says ‘I like that,’ you should look at them and say thank you, I worked very hard on it and I know it’s great. Because it’s the only you really get that shareable sense of value in your life and that fame that has nothing to do with the cameras and being a celebrity. I couldn’t give a damn about celebrities.
But truthfully, if you don’t honor your own work, you’re nothing.
Coriolanus
I’ve never read Coriolanus by Shakespeare, one of his last tragedies. I’ve only finished Act I, but holy hell, the protagonist Caius Marcius (named Coriolanus after a victory in the ancient city of Corioli) is a classist dick.
Nonetheless, he has some great lines.
Here he is speaking to some poors who are cautious about going to war:
Who deserves greatness
deserves your hate; and your affections are
a sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
which would increase his evil. He that depends
Upon your favors swims with fins of lead
and hews down oaks with rushes.
In other words, you poors are destined to hate anyone who is truly great.
Instead of supporting war, you support ‘evil.’
Anyone who depends on you will be dragged down with lead flippers and mow their yard with twigs.
Could this be used in a Glassdoor review?
“Advice to management: stop swimming with fins of lead.”
I’ve been not a little obsessed with the show Industry, which may be why I’m reading more Shakespeare.
Season 3 just wrapped up, and while its characters and dialogue have always been phenomenal, it’s plot is now inescapable and propulsive; I imagine the Bard would favor Industry on IMBd.
One of the more detestable (yet delectable?) characters was Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), a shadowy billionaire and landed gentry who’s always ready for some white collar crime that will never be traced.
Every time the dude enters a room, he quoting Shakespeare, like this line from King Lear:
Fortune goodnight; smile once more; turn they wheel.
And that is what I’ve been saying to myself before bed for the past two weeks…
