a partially weird day

sunshine in the lap of bureaucracy

We watched the partial eclipse with a bunch of public servants in front of the New York State Capital (brutalism is very good for providing shadeless open spaces). S and J brought their cereal box pinhole viewers, and these were a huge hit with the bureaucrats, who all had the NY state-issue glasses but enjoyed using something more elaborate. A Graeberian eclipse task force had been convened in the leadup to the moon drifting by the sun, and the Red Room in the capital was set up for press conferences with a special-edition poster of Niagara Falls, which would turn out to be quite cloudy. 

Albany saw 97% totality, which I have learned is really only the halfway point to totality--I'd do the drive into the Adirondacks if I was to do it over so we could experience what S and J called "eternal darkness." 

As the moon slowly rode the berm of the sun, and the crescent moved from right to left, someone wearing cardboard glasses and a New York State Parks t-shirt over his work shirt said, “that’s it?”

The bureaucrats all headed back to their offices.

*

After we get home, I go for a short jog and when I make it back to the driveway my 80-year-old neighbor Rose is out on her porch, clutching her mail behind a veil of American flags and wind charms and a collapsing porch ceiling, the lining of which the birds have been fleecing. 

"Did you see the eclipse?" I ask her.

No, she was making pizza from scratch, she says, busy in her kitchen stretching the discs of dough when the moon flew over. 

She changes topic. "Did you hear about the man they caught for tying bricks to that girl’s hands and her head and throwing her in the Hudson? They got him."

"I did NOT hear about that," I say, holding my round blue recycling bin like a drum. 

"It was all over News6! I think I heard them arguing one night, it was right behind us!" she tells me, says she heard his accent. "A foreigner."

"Oh dear, like me!" I say.

"Illegal," she says. 

"Well," I squint at the sky, which has nothing much going on, "sounds like what’s always happening everywhere all around the world: men killing women."

She perks up. "That’s why we’ve got to get to them first! Ha ha!" Every Halloween, she has goodies for the kids and a gift baggie with a chardonnay split for me.

I Google the story later and can’t find anything about it.

*

Japhs, singing: Who let the dons out, who! who! who! who! who!

Me, joining in: Who let the *dogs* out, who! who! who! who! who!

Japhs: It’s dons.

So you want to be a foreign ambassador

caption...

Goodies

🐛I got to discuss Tully, the 2017 postpartum fever dream from Diablo Cody + Charlize Theron, for

The Mother Culture Podcast

with

Sarah Wheeler

and Miranda Rake—it was really fun to do, but I’ll be honest, I haven’t listened to the playback because I was feeling accent-insecure at the time ! It comes and it goes.

🐛Lauren Oyler discourse: I interviewed her for Lit Hub, and you do need to read some comedy into her. Here’s a pretty classic bit:

“I wouldn’t want my ill-informed opinion to shape other people’s: whereas if your primary goal of sharing an opinion is domination, and changing the minds of people just to have the power of of changing minds or because you really believe what you’re saying, even if you’re totally wrong, right, what you’re saying is, therefore you want to convince other people, though I find also people who want to convince other people are often quite insecure in their opinion.”

And yes, I subscribe to Bookforum along with 97 newsletters.

🐛“Was it naff when Seamus Heaney wrote, at the start of his elegy for Robert Lowell, “The way we are living,/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life”?” —I didn’t know we were having a Mary Oliver conversation, but I guess we were.

🐛I enjoyed the Hell Gate eclipse live-blog

🐛See you in Australia in 2028!

Is Kacey Musgraves doing a nod to Riitta Ikonen? Y/N?

the next Kafka’s is less vibes and more agenda, so get excited! <3 Did you have a good eclipse?!