A RAGE IN HARLEM (Chester Himes, 1957)

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Last week being the week of better-late-than-never first exposures to late 50’s-on NYC luminaries: first, John Cassavetes and SHADOWS; and now, Chester Himes and A RAGE IN HARLEM. By the end of the first chapter, Himes made it to my "favorite authors" list: character, rhythm, fury, life, hope, horror, love, hate ripping from every page. Everything I hope for from crime fiction and then some, another body of work to be devoured.

TOO MANY SOULS – Avi C. Engel

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A most happy new discovery (thank you, Skyjelly): haunting, elegiac vocals over endlessly intriguing instrumental permutations. Releases in a couple of weeks but I’m presently taking a dive into their back catalog to sate me until then. So good.

not yet

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Every time I go into what used to be my office to put on clothing or punch a punching bag and see all the boxes on top of the closet door on saw horses and all the boxes on the shelves and all the boxes on the floor and across I tell myself that I've got to get on with cleaning this shit up. Even get notions of how, exactly to go about doing it. But I haven't brought myself to do it yet: I only finished emptying his house a month ago and I was able to do it only by not caring about the things I put in the boxes in the name of meeting a closing deadline. To embark upon this great cleaning and organizing means that I have to care about the things I put in those boxes. And I'm not ready yet, no matter how nice it'd be to take a full swing at a punching bag.

MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS, s1 (2023)

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A rare feat: a show that managed to bore me (in spite of having an excellent cast and characters that I, for the most part, enjoyed having in my life) for at least half of the far-too-long episode count and then excite me for a second season over the last few episodes, especially the last few seconds of episode ten (again: it didn't need to be that long; I forgot most of the first half of the show). But hey, Godzilla! And I love Godzilla – though my favorite part was seeing the mad Swede from HELL ON WHEELS as a straightlaced American general. Heyerdahl forever.

links/2024w06

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Experimenting with returning links to being their own weekly post (or perhaps twice-weekly, on Weds and Sat?), a hodgepodge of trailers and quotes and more. Plus it’s easier to update these at the last minute than it is trying to update the newsletter before it sends (and K said she enjoys clicking through them so there). Anyhow…

And if a prosthetic need not mimic the limb it is replacing, then perhaps prosthetics could be more than just replacements? Ms Clode is an expert in the design of robotic prostheses controlled by artificial tendons. She is keen to explore the possibility of augmenting existing bodies with new capabilities, making prosthetics “a technology that could be of use to everybody, not just amputees”. To that end she has designed the “Third Thumb”, a small and robust prosthetic digit that does exactly what it says on the tin. Controlled, like Ms Knox’s vine-arm, by pressure sensors in a pair of shoes, the thumb can be used to replace a missing one. But it can also be added to an intact hand on the opposite side from its existing, biological thumb.

GREEN MARS (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1993)

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Much as I adored RED I was simultaneously underwhelmed and over- here: Robinson's unparalleled worldbuilding is, as ever, on full display, but the sense of discovery that made RED so irresistible was lacking, both in characters and in reading (due in part, of course, to us, character and reader, having been on Robinson's Mars for decades; a general dulling of wonder is, unfailingly, human – though I'm not sure that employing a retread of the structure of RED was the best choice). Good as it was to reunite with Maya, Coyote, Hiroko, and, most of all Sax, it felt like we didn't have much to talk about this time. Perhaps BLUE will provide a rekindling of the spark.