Jesse Raber

Thank you humans of Washington Island for documenting my efforts to make my own Half Dome and shove ice out 🌊🌊

Self-made real estate macher in NYC Chinatown; Harvard dropout kibbutznik. I'm also distantly related to Trotsky via a grandmother. These three mighty streams of the modern Jewish saga now meet in me, a guy who walks his dog a lot.

could add Zoom, possibly. bosses and commercial landlords have been eager to roll back remote work. but it's done wonders for many workers' quality of life.

I stand by my theory that they're vice-signaling in inverted Hollywood genres because they've "noticed" that Hollywood is Jewish. They think they're reclaiming a style of authority that (((they))) perfidiously repressed.

How I arrived on BlueSky

I dunno, teens downtown, sounds dangerous

I’ve seen enough. Not about the election. Just generally.

an unfired porcelain lamp with incised giraffe decoration

makin more lamp

that's called the Protestant Work Ethic

"AI refusal is classist," the greatest thread in the history of forums, etc etc

There's a Saul Bellow line about how Midwestern landscapes make you a "connoisseur of the near-nothing."

"With a clear eye I looked at a clear scene," it goes on; "I appreciated the red sumac, the white rocks, the rust of the weeds ..."

True prairie heads know this mood ...

She's like an old samurai whose great battles are behind her but every once in a while she kills a man with piece of paper just to prove a point

overheard at the convenience store:

"I'm on a really strict diet. Just until St. Patrick's Day."

i didn't know enough to see it growing up but honestly calvin's dad has a pretty sweet setup here

Wonder if there's some kind of deeper math about what size stars tend to have what size planets at what orbital distances, and what size satellites those planets tend to have, etc., such that this result could theoretically be somewhat common? But I don't even know how to properly ask this question.

a Chinese lion dancer does its thing in a toy store

Caught some New Year lion dancers in the Chinatown Square mall. Here seen doing their thing in a toy store.

A closeup photo of a dragon at Chicago's Lunar New Year parade. A blue sky with thin clouds is in the background

A photo of people walking at the Lunar New Year parade in Chicago. The person at the front is wearing a yellow coat and holding a large bladed weapon. Behind them are people in dragon costumes.

Things are really dark right now so it's important to find joy where you can. Chicago's Lunar New Year Parade was a really good choice today.

The Song of the Lush: CLHOF’s Annual Cocktail Party Fundraiser Chicago Literary Hall of Fame hosts its annual literary cocktail party! The theme of this year's cocktail fundraiser is a play on Willa Cather's great 1915 novel, The Song of the Lark, a title which i...

Chicago!

I'll be giving a little talk about Willa Cather's Chicago and *The Song of the Lark* at this party on Saturday:

www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticket...

It's a fundraiser for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, which does great events and runs a nice website. Come! (And HMU for a discount code.)

That's great, I will look forward to it! And I'm curious about that cutoff date of 1995 ...

Anyhow, I love science fiction and literary realism and especially SF writers like Gibson and Vandermeer and Robinson who take realism seriously and read indiscriminately across genre lines. No need for either side to flatten the other in order to define itself.

Maybe it's fair to say that in realism there are no superpowers. Social reality is sticky. But that doesn't mean powerlessness or passivity. Sometimes it means a closer, more microscopic examination of power than the rush and sweep of other genres affords.

If contemporary "lit fic" has swung toward "coming to terms" stories, which I can entertain for argument's sake, that would be a temporary trend within the more capacious space of literary realism. But there's nothing inherent in realism that requires it.

On the other hand, there is a history of "coming to terms" novels. Moretti writes about their origins in *The Way of the World*, as reactions to fears and disappointments re revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Goethe: "You must renounce! That is the eternal song." Or cf. Nancy Armstrong on tamed misfits.

The "contemporary" qualifier ("contemporary lit fic") sidesteps the larger history of literary realism, which is maybe SFF's most important Other. What's Dickens in this scheme? Tolstoy? Heck, Steinbeck? Ellison? These writers have their modern heirs too, of course. (Viet Thanh Nguyen, say.)

This essay's main point about SFF and theories of change is good, but it's so frustrating to read these descriptions of "lit fic" that flatten it into "people coming to terms with things." Happens all the time when "genre" people describe their Other, though oftener as "lit fic = sad sack stories."

Barstool Sports Spins Off New Literary Journal CHICAGO—Seeking to expand beyond sports coverage into radical new forms and expressions, Barstool Sports announced Monday that it would soon launch Confluences, a literary journal featuring book revie...

theonion.com/barstool-spo...

The Pixar Theory of Labor has never been more vindicated www.theawl.com/2015/07/the-...

unfortunately I think there's been a vibe shift and way too many people think that stop signs, and even red lights, are just optional

as a War on Cars guy, on the one hand, yes, self-driving cars will lock us into greater car dependence. but on the other hand, they might actually stop at stop signs, something for which a distressing proportion of human drivers seem to have become Too Cool

Another beautiful day in the watershed
🌊🌊 Nice photo Jim Ryerse