Tuesday Toot
London: more from mystery artist Banksy. Photo by Banksy/PA, posted at the guardian.com:
Headline from a nypost.com editorial: “Stop giving migrant thugs endless chances — deport them or lock them up NOW.” Amen.
NYP headline: “Ex-CNN anchor and Dem congressional candidate evaded taxes, scored abatement on NYC condo — despite claiming LI residency.” Highly qualified to join that criminal class.
Another plus, from NYP: “AI model 98% accurate in detecting diseases — just by looking at your tongue.” The medical advances continue to be stunning. Will rogue AI be the death of us all? Again, I have no idea.
Headline from foxnews.com: “WaPo reporter suggests White House censor ‘misinformation’ from Trump-Musk interview at press briefing.” So much for free speech. The discussion on X started 40 minutes late due to technical issues that have sparked speculation about hacking. Estimates peg viewership at anywhere from 95 million to a billion. All the media headlines about it I spotted were negative except one — CNN, surprisingly. I didn’t watch any of it. I know where DT stands on issues.
Trivia from FN: “Halle Berry suffered 10 broken bones while filming action movies in Hollywood career: ‘Knocked out 3 times’.” Though I’d guess not trivial to the talented actress.
Julia Alvarez was born in 1950 in NYC. Three months later her well-to-do family moved to the Dominican Republic, where she lived until the age of ten. The family returned to NY in 1960, fleeing the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Her father, a doctor who worked secretly in opposition, feared for his life. Alvarez and her three sisters survived the cruel bigotry of her fellow Catholic school students. She attended boarding school. She spent two years at Connecticut College, winning a poetry prize, then transferred to Middlebury College, where she earned a Bachelor’s, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She received a Master’s from Syracuse University. She then led a sort of gypsy life as an educator, teaching in many states. Her first published work came in 1984, Homecoming, a volume of poetry. Literary success began in 1991 with the publication of her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. In all she has published seven works of fiction, eleven kids’ books, three volumes of poetry, and two works of non-fiction. I just finished one of the latter, Something to Declare, published in 1998. It contains more than 20 essays, divided in two parts. I enjoyed the first half, which deals largely with family, her amazing number of aunts, uncles and cousins. The second’s focus is the writing process, which I always find boring, perhaps because I live it myself, though I did like her account of the research she did about a Minnesota woman’s claim of religious visitations, which Alvarez seems to have abandoned. As usual I cherrypicked excerpts. “All that we write and achieve as individuals means finally very little compared to the great body of work — books, music, dance, art, inventions, ideas — that form the culture and context of our human family.” And: “Don’t all young writers need a spare tank of ego to get them far enough down the road of self-doubt so they can’t turn back anymore?” And on her life in Vermont: “Especially during those five or so months when the snowy fields blur into snowy air so that the world out there looks like a blank page I want to fill up with words.” And: “Today might be the day the writing life comes crashing to the floor, and I am shown up for the sham I am.” 50 users at Amazon have rated Something to Declare, forging to a consensus of 4.4 on a scale of five. I’ll go with three. It is still selling modestly. The writing is rock solid, the 300 pages of the large paperback edition reading like less, many blanks along the way. To my relief, the only politics is about the dictatorship. Alvarez is obsessed with her work, putting in an incredible amount of time, perhaps three times as much as yours truly. She is two months older than I, so we’ve seen much the same things, although her travel experiences dwarf my own. Her third marriage has lasted since 1989. She is childless, although her husband has two daughters from a previous union. Facts from Wiki, photo from Google Images:
Brisk business at the Anti-Inflation Book Shop on this third straight day of ideal weather. The outgoing dwarfed the incoming. My thanks to those who donated and bought. Here’s what sold: a CD in Russian, a CD by Bread and a Jazz collection; Clive Cussler Fire Strike by Mike Maden; Bloody Genius by John Sandford; Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir by Toni Braxton; Get Honest or Die Lying: Why Small Talk Sucks by Charlamagne Tha God; Truth about You by Arthur F. Miller and Ralph T. Mattson; If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You’ll Probably End Up Somewhere Else by David P. Campbell and Nicole Hollander; and a bunch more 3D art.
My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE
FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts
Read Vic’s Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza
