Up in the holler, South Duxbury, VT

After a bunch of automotive adventures, some of which I may in the fullness of time recount, we find ourselves up a holler near the "town" of South Duxbury, Vermont in a little cabin. Maybe 450 square feet, all super-efficiently laid out. Really the stationary equivalent of a Winnebago/RV. As if to demonstrate this, we've already had one minor squabble about washing dishes. She was wrong, I was right.

Anyhoo, yesterday evening as we were sitting at the compact dinner table eating ravioli and an arugula salad with slivered almonds and strawberries when we heard a little bustling activity outside our window. Someone, it seemed, was trying to get into the shed in the back which holds the garbage cans and various other sundries. When I investigated it yesterday evening, the shed's doors were fasted by not one but three different latches, which clearly implied there were bears in the area.

And so, a bear. I thought I saw a black shape out there. We turned off all the lights so we could see better outside. The pathetic little flashlights on our phones were no help, but I did hear a growl.

A little chat with the AirBnb host confirmed that bears had been known the bustle about back there (hence the three locks) but that none had ever tried to get into the cabin.

Having spent a lot of time in Alaska, Mary has done an awful lot of internet research about bear attacks. She did some more. For my part, I got all traces of food out of the car out in the driveway, blasting first a little Hendrix and then (when I recalled the snacks in my tennis bag) Gang of Fours "Love like Anthrax" through our little portable speaker to keep the bears away. I returned safely.

Happening

In between mystery novels I just read through Annie Ernaux's Happening, a 2000 memoir of her 1963 abortion. 

One wouldn't think Ernaux would be as distinctive as she is. Maybe plenty of women have written unsparing narratives of their own abortions and I just haven't come across them because I'm a guy. Maybe there are others who are gimlet-eyed observers of the simple of time, changes in mores and how a storyteller can refract and embody it all.

But I don't know them. All too often the quest for distinctiveness forces authors and artists to reach for some kind of quirk instead of just being themselves on the page, canvas or whatever. Ernaux skips all that and just does what she has to do. She feels, thinks and remembers deeply and lays it out for the reader. I'll keep reading her.

If only her books were a little longer.  

Bye bye Neymar

Seeing Neymar shit-talking with the Norwegian goalkeeper before an absolutely meaningless penalty kick yesterday in the 100th minute as Brazil prepared to crash out of the World Cup was an appropriate coda to an ultimately undistinguished career. Yes he scored a lot of goals. Yes he was very talented and sometimes fun to watch. But ultimately Neymar will go down as a footnote to history, maybe the soccer version of Dominique Wilkins or Russell Westbrook: someone who was fun to watch but never really won anything.

What's worse, Neymar was the one who really popularized the weak-assed tippy toe stalling penalty kick. To my mind it's just wrong and emblematic of someone who lacks commitment. The penalty kick is for the most part an unfair contest between shooter and keeper. It should more or less always result in a goal or a sense of failure for the shooter. Neymar's PK is a net loss to the game.

His retirement from soccer is a net gain for the sport. Ponder last night. Why not let some young kid take the PK? Why not, for example, Endrick? Having a new face get the last goal would have been net prospective to Brazilian soccer. Neymar was retrospective, and going out like that tells us a lot about Brazilian soccer as a whole. They have a lot of talent -- plenty of the players out there were familiar -- but are a pale shadow of their glory days. It's a shame. But the great Brazilian teams of the 60s were kind of like the Celtics or UCLA Bruins of their day. The competition wasn't as great yet.

Blazing away, Belfast, Maine

We're at the tail end of this heat dome in Maine. We had come up here to beat the heat, which we'll be able to do starting tomorrow. It's 89 outside now and falling, but it was touching 100 as I hustled up here from Cambridge on Thursday to pick Mary up at Portland. Not so hot for NC, more than plenty hot for ME. Thankfully, our place has AC, a window unit just big enough to cool the 600 or so square feet here.

David and I played tennis in the park today. Hard courts. My feet and calves are killing me, my knee may follow suit.

Afterwards, we popped by the snack bar to survey its bill of fare, expecting hot dogs and the like. Instead, it turns out they feature such things as lobster empanadas. I had lunch for today, but we may well be back tomorrow or the next day.

77th and Amsterdam, 8:30 pm

On a blistering Tuesday evening in Manhattan Natalie and I enjoyed ice cream after a nice Omakase on Columbus. Sitting by a blacktop watching mixed gender 3X3 soccer, two other younger boys kicking ball through the older kids game. Everyone around, it seemed, had football on their mind, with France having just dispatched Sweden 3-0 in the Meadowlands earlier that evening. We were killing time while NJ Transit got done ferrying the hordes of spectators from the stadium back to Manhattan or wherever they were staying. 

Then there was an incident. An hispanic guy in his 20s(?) was laying on the ground leaning against the fence around the blacktop growling. We didn't know why. A silver-haired woman, whom I christed "the mayor" has been watching everything. She goes over and talks to him. He comes back and sits with her.

Slowly, some affluent white kids who were playing basketball or had some other incident with the hispanic guy trickle over and apologize to him. They praise his basketball skills. At last the tallest of them, a guy, also jeunesse doree, comes over and apologizes. They hug.

Amazing.

Natalie and I were primed for wonder at this moment of urban transcendence, having seen an amazing short documentary on the history of NYC, animated by Stanley Tucci, in the basement of the Museum of the City of New York. It made each of us proud to be present or past New Yorkers. Go and watch it. 

Just my luck

Headed into Manhattan on NJ Transit to see Natalie. Turns out today is one of maybe 8 days when a World Cup game is being played in the Meadowlands: France vs. Sweden in the Round of 32. NJ Transit is running a special service to get fans to and from the stadium which basically blacks out normal service before and after the match for a few hours -- or you have to pay an extra $100. To heck with that.

Thankfully Frank alerted me to this last night and I've been able to get on train before the blackout window starts. But I may have to stay out in the city for some extra time afterwards until normal service is resumed. Or take a PATH train to Newark and hope to be able to squeeze onto a train there to get back out to Princeton.

I am generally not a huge Mbappe supporter, not because he's not a great player but because he has a bad attitude and failed to carry himself well after France lost to Argentina in 2022. Moping when he should have been congratulating his teammate Messi for getting a monkey off his back, at long last.

But tonight I hope that Mbappe et al dispatch Sweden in regular time so that train service will be restored at a reasonable hour. Or that they go down in flames. But honestly France is fun to watch so I don't even mind if they win the whole thing. Great team.

Forgetting the tip

On Friday I had breakfast at the Carolina Coffee Shop with Brad. I grabbed the check since he paid it last time, but in the excitement of all the stuff we were discussing I forgot to sign it, which I realized when I was over by the Paul Green Theater because I realized I didn't have a mental image of what I had tipped. Fortunately, it being summer, I was able to pull a uey, go back and park in the middle of campus, and sidle in the back way to the Coffee Shop to fix my goof.

The server found the ticket and discovered that I had indeed not signed nor calculated a tip. I asked if it would have gone through without a signature and she said it would have, she just wouldn't have gotten a tip.* 

I have pontificated on the importance of tipping before, but the ever closer march of Our Robot Overlords (henceforth ORO) and the societal wealth dispersion they exacerbate only heightens the need for tipping.

This morning at my hotel in DC the sole server (all orders had to be placed at the bar) was momentarily terse with me and my hackles got raised for an instant. Then I recalibrated and realized there was just one of her, likely beset with many of me in the course of just about any morning. She was, moreover, a relative newcomer to our fair shores, working in a service role early in the morning. On the other side of the wealth divide. I tipped her 20% and moved on with my day.  

*As with physical checks, the signature protects the delivering financial institution against challenges.

Ode to Gioia

Right now I am making my way through Ted Gioia's piece on authenticity in music. A quick check reveals that last year at about this time I referenced him and accused him of writing the one-sentence paragraphs that litter LinkedIn and too much of Substack. That ain't happening in this piece, nor do I honestly recall why I levelled that critique of him at the time. Probably I'm just jealous.

Gioia has impressive range and has really dedicated himself to his project. I commend him for it, as if he gives a fuck. He portrays his father movingly in this piece and transitions from that into an earnest reflection on the topic of irony and authenticity, the Goofus and Gallant of contemporary discourse. I'll tell you more when I finish it.

Right now I'm gearing up to drive north for a few weeks. DC, Princeton, New York and an exurb thereof, Cambridge, Maine and Vermont. A little business on the way up, then Mary flies up for vacation. We don't even have a date fixed for our return. Really it's optimal empty-nested free wheeling. I will report from the road.

Crowd averse

Watching the pictures of the Canes parade, it just occurred to me that one of the reasons I am a bit crowd averse (I've never gone to a stadium rock show, for instance, and don't really go far out of my way to see live sports though I watch sports highlights at home probably 350-360 nights a year) and am rubbed the wrong way by crowds (at UNC basketball games, all the choreographed crowd response stuff reminds me of Riefenstahl and Nuremberg) is that when we were boys I was all too often the focus of group aggression at the bus stop and around the neighborhood. I just distrust groups of people and the things we do as groups. 

Yeah I can get into it too, but it's hard to really let myself go if I'm not being ironic, since I'm never drunk anymore. Though my irony may not always be apparent to outside viewers.

Scofflaw in a Subaru

Out here on the porch this morning as I am most mornings, trying to enjoy the cool air while it remains and listen to the birds and whatnot. Somewhere in there I start to hear this weird droning noise, some kind of compressor. It keeps going.

Is it in our basement? Is it Caroline and Jamie's HVAC? After a while I have to investigate, so I go and change into outdoor flipflops and head out with my cup of coffee. It seems to be coming from the other side of the park, maybe Scott and Olga's, which would be problematic because they're in France for a  month or so. So I start walking that way. As I get out into the lake parking lot it seems to be coming from a little Subaru and as I come to the other side of it I discover that the culprit is a guy inflating a stand-up paddleboard. 

I'm sorry, but to my mind running a compressor for 15 minutes to inflate your little toy falls squarely within the broad prohibition on running small machines on Sunday morning: lawn mowers, leaf blowers, all of that. This is the South. It's not done. I like to had kicked the guy's ass but I was only in flip flops and carrying my coffee. Next time.

Nb. 10 minutes later someone else is doing the same thing down closer to the lake.

Atrophy

For a few years now biking has pretty much entirely replaced swimming as my non-impact summer exercise, partially because I just got into biking, partially because I kept having an allergic reaction (at least once a summer) to something in the lake water and would have at least one night of shitty sleep from being all stuffed up. And you know there's no way I'm swimming laps in a pool with this lake right here.

So I almost entirely neglected the lake. The other day I decided that enough was enough and went in. By the time I breast-stroked out to the second float, a mere 100 yards or so, I could feel it in my dorsal lats, or teres minor, something around there. Not just a little soreness, mind you, it felt like they were going to cramp up.

Another little surprise from the aging process. Obviously I need to reintegrate a little more swimming into my exercise routine before it gets too late to do so.

Scanning for Mary

The other day Mary needed something scanned, so I scanned it for her, filed it and sent it back to her as an attachment to an email. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Time was, it used to piss me off a bit that I was the person that had to do all of that kind of thing. Not only that, but handle all the finances and support all the devices and do a bunch of other shit. All while being guilt-tripped because I wasn't very helpful ideating about what we should have for dinner on Thursday.

I was listening to Derek Thompson's podcast this week as he talked to a woman who had written a book on "Dadbrain," ways in which guys' operating systems have been changed over time through more intensive parenting. Interesting stuff. As part of their discussion they talked about a game called "Fair Play," which is a deck of cards describing various household tasks that couples have to do. Couples pick them and allocate them out and discuss them, something like that.

One of the opening premises of the game is that "all time is created equal," one partner's time is equal in value to the other's. On the one hand, yes, in a transcendental sense this cannot be argued. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, none of it matters in the end anyway. On the other hand, in an economic sense, this is prima facie false. The primary breadwinner's time is more valuable. It's not a value judgment to state this. It just articulates what the market tells us and households are at some level economic units. The key thing is that couples and families need to develop an internal culture of how they value money, the extent to which they accept the market valuation of time, what they want, and how much risk they are willing to bear if they largely eschew market valuation and say something like "we value our time equally." 

Much was made in the podcast discussion of the concept of "mental load" (meal planning, Dr's appointment scheduling, getting kids to practice etc.) that is disproportionately born by women. I get that. Over short time scales this is true and much of that shit is a pretty boring and soul-deadening. I did not hear a lot about the mental load of planning over longer time scales (career development, complex skills building, network development, contingency planning) that allows a household to maintain and grow earnings capacity and finance things. I can't imagine it's not discussed in the book.

At any case, here at our house is that we are by now by now largely beyond all that, though Mary still does appreciate some help in meal planning and I get it. Generically, I'm not fully sure that on the liberal side of the spectrum contemporary discourse has really thought this through. Or maybe it's me that hasn't.

Some fine sources of friction

As so much of the world has moved inexorably in the direction of removing friction from commercial and social transactions (think 1-click purchasing from Amazon and/or the online purchase of all goods and services, delivered to your door), there's naturally a counter school of thought that lauds the benefits of friction and the slowing down of commerce and also social interactions. 

For example, when I asked the guy at Circle City Books in Pittsboro if he listed books for purchase online and he said, "Why would I want to do that? The whole purpose of having the store is to get out and see people." 

For the same reason, I almost never order food for delivery. I would much prefer to go out and see the merchants and patrons in restaurants. This was particularly acute during the pandemic. I wanted the human contact and also to offer it to them. Same with groceries. Though I understand why people with young kids and two jobs would not want to waste time with supermarkets (and I kind of remember that from when my kids were young), I love going to the store and seeing the people. You never know who you're going to run into. Admittedly I only really formally realized the fruits of this when my career took on a sales dimension around 2003, but as I think back to growing up what were the malls to us but the places where a lot of our social lives (outside of schools and sports) happened. You went to the mall not so much to buy stuff as to see who was there. 

At the office, I now park in a garage where I have to come down to the ground floor, walk across to the office building, then ascend again to the 3rd floor where my co-working space is. This all adds friction or transaction costs to leaving for lunch, creating a strong incentive to bring lunch and eat in the common space. So now we have a stable BYO lunch klatsch with a rotating cast of characters.

In residential neighborhoods, there's a clear recognition that the absence of friction combined with people's incessant hurry and poor time management (I am as guilty as anyone) creates a need for artificial friction in the form of low speed limits, speed bumps, children at play signs, etc. On much of the East Coast, the absence of predators has created an abundance of the greatest natural and variable source of friction, the flocks of hungry and entitled deer that clog our streets, nature's wandering speed bumps.

A thing of beauty

Last night I was amongst a select few Tigers of certain vintage to attend a show of tap dancing by one of our very own, the only Josh that matters, Josh Hilberman. Josh has been doing tap pretty much his whole life and is the impresario of his own school of tap in Liege, Belgium.

Somehow I was unable to bolster the audience with members of my household by referring to the show as "avant-garde tap," which turned out to have been an erroneous characterization, though it was fuelled by Josh's own Facebook promotion of the bit of the show in which he tapped bare-footed on an amplified clogging box in nothing but his underwear and some chain mail and other metal accessories, so at least it was not I who was at fault.

In fact, the show was nothing if not traditional. It was, indeed, a history of tap and Josh's relationship to it, with pictures of the greats of tap history hung on the wall and Josh telling their tales and how he had been blessed to work with and/or learn from them.

A highlight of the show was his performance of "Cappella Josh," a piece which he proudly informed us had entered the vernacular of Barcelona tap and had more or less displaced some other piece as the core of the local canon. How many of us can say the same? He was joined for this by Michelle Dorrance, who is the Michael Jordan of Chapel Hill tap (seems like Gene Medler is the Dean Smith so I think we have to call Josh, who also taught Michelle some in her youth, the Phil Ford). It was beautiful to see them up there. I was glad for the dark of the theater, for your scribe could scarce restrain a wee tear.

Elsewhere, the Canes beat the Golden Knights (who thinks of these names) to even the Stanley Cup Final, while Michael Whatley furiously scribbled notes in preparation for a press conference.

The perils of routine

By this point in my evolution, many, many aspects of my day have become highly routinized. Mornings are particularly so. I know I have written about them before so I will spare you the most excruciating recapitulation of it all. In the telling it bores even me.

There comes a point in my morning cycle where I take my one a.m. pill. The problem is, of course, that the whole thing is so systematic that a few minutes later I may not recall whether my memory of taking it is from today or yesterday.

Similar things happen in tennis. Particularly when playing against Adam, after a changeover (in tennis one switches ends of the court after each two games) I often can't recall whether he just served or I did. Thankfully, Adam also gets confused now and again. 

Aging is not for the faint of heart, but it beats the alternative.

Willing vs willful

At my AA meeting this morning the topic was willingness, which in the context of AA mostly implies willingness to accept: that one is an alcoholic, that one controls very little, that one needs help, etc. In essence, willingness signifies surrender, acquiescence, really, a lack of will. 

By contrast think of the Nietzschean concept of the Will to Power, ultimately apotheosized in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will about the 1934 Nuremburg Rally. It's not like this concept is ever far from the surface in the English concept of will. We often speak of willpower or willfulness.

Indeed, the opposite of willingness, unwillingness, signifies really less an absence than a surfeit of will. So we find ourselves squarely in the presence of another instance of what Freud identified in his essay on the uncanny as the identity of primordial opposites, the space where the heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (uncanny) merge. 

Part of me is slightly tempted to ask an AI do a historical-etymological analysis of how this happened, but what I'd really be interested in is finding an article by some nerd who actually did the work the AI would be stealing. But I don't really care enough to do that.

Wearing old stuff

Sometime in recent months Mary noted that: "people with grey hair shouldn't always be wearing old, faded stuff. We need to look crisp." I will confess that her words have stuck with me a little bit since then and have even haunted me at moments. One of those moments was this morning when I headed out for my normal Saturday morning meeting wearing some shorts that have been in my wardrobe, I'm pretty sure, since the late 80s and were purchased at a vintage store then. They were held up by a brown leather belt I had bought from a hobo (apologies, it still seems like the right word for the guy) on the side of the road heading down to Pittsboro in 1990 for the kingly sum of $1.

No doubt, there's some substance to what she says. But I hate shopping. What am I going to do about this, get in my car and go to the store? Not bloody likely.

Are our angels less better in a more connected world?

The Economist opened its first leader article this week by noting that about 750,000 people died in wars in the period from 2021-2024, marking a significant acceleration from the 1990s-2010s (note that the 1994 spike reflects the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu in Rwanda).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-type?time=earliest..2024

Excluding Rwanda, the world experienced a period of great calm between the fall of the Iron Curtain and the accession of the era of global populist strongmen, first Putin then all of his imitators, including most obviously Trump. Hegseth's fetishistic embrace of war and lethality does not prophesy anything better. This marks a retreat from the key metric proposed by Stephen Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, that the decline in the incidence of death at the hands of another (he looped in homicide rates -- also improved over long time scales) was a core marker of societal progress. 

The rise in battle deaths and also coincides with the rise in power of the new strategic powers, the megatech companies within whose platforms (Blogspot for instance is part of Google) we live so much of our lives. It's probably worth reflecting on the extent to which the rise in arm conflict is facilitated by, correlated with and -- dare I suggest it -- marginally caused by the rise of these new strategic powers centers of what Ian Bremmer has termed our Technopolar world. Certainly since they have no dog in intra- and inter-state armed conflicts, they don't harm the hyperscalers. 

It's too late in the day for me to draw this line of thinking out too far. Ponder it.

Processing speed

Sunday has evolved into doubles day for our merry little clan, where Adam, Patrick and I host a rotating cast of neerdowells for our yuckfest of on-court fuckupery. Yesterday we got Seth, who along with Patrick made me and Adam look slightly silly.

Many years ago Graham got a neuropsych evaluation through TEACH, the pioneering autism research and treatment organization of which Victor Zinn had been a founder. Graham's results came back high and very high in a bunch of categories, but on the low end for "processing speed." As with many of his traits, I'm pretty sure this came from me. I've never been good at certain things. I remember having a hard time at Phillips when guys would stand around in circles telling circles and trading witticisms. Chris George and Crabill were on fire, but I'd be on the edge and something would come to me but I wouldn't be able to get it in. Or I'd wait and jam it in somewhere when there was a nanosecond of free air but the whole flow had moved on and the guys would look at me funny. Organized basketball, especially with a ref, was the same thing: the patterns would emerge too quickly and I could never really consistently anticipate what was going to happen next. Doubles feels the same. It happens so fast sometimes I can't get get my arms around it.

Soccer and singles are different. For the most part fewer things can happen, and the rhythms that emerge are pretty rule-bound. They suit me better than basketball and doubles.

No doubt I could overcome this with more practice and/or with going to clinics or even watching more YouTube videos about doubles strategy. But there are problems with all of those things, mostly related to efficiency and the limitations of the whole 24/7 thing. Who has time for all that when a hungry blog cries out in hunger?

A continuation

Just as I was firing up the old blog, I heard voices inside. Graham came home to sleep last night, after he and his housemates moved from last year's rental to this year's one, which is about a half a mile closer in to campus from last year's as the crow flies. It's actually quite close to where David Hall and I lived in 1989-90, when Marvin actually took up residence on the enclosed sun porch for a little while. That was fun.

In thinking about yesterday's theme of altering one's look for pragmatic reasons, having one's ego/presentation blunted as it were by the demands of others, it occurred to me that part of such pragmatic thinking and practice is that it is a component of thinking quite of quite specific others: one's family. Which is to say spouse and children. I wore a suit and tie for years to maximize my ability to earn money and I still kind of do. If I go to a wedding, funeral, church service, fundraiser, meeting with a prospect or client, whatever it is, I actively dial back ego and fall into compliance with broader norms, and partially it's to optimize my chances of getting revenue somewhere down the line or perhaps of calling up and asking someone if they might do an informational interview with one child or another. I've been doing a lot of that recently for Graham.

And in some sense even in our adolescence we were doing that when seeking out mates. Again, we were in training. Marxists would say that we were "reproducing the social means of production," or something like that. And they would not be wrong.

When I was at Yale it was the second or third inning of broad social acceptance of gay people and lots of people were out or experimenting with same-sex relationships. Straight people were sometimes referred to as breeders. I began to semi-ironically refer to myself as a "breeder" when talking to gay people. It was a good line.

Dressing for others

As Graham transitions from studenthood towards straight up adulting, I ponder what is the right cadence and pressure level at which to deliver messages to him about the transition. At times I am tempted to suggest that he think of every time he leaves the house to be a potential job interview. Not that he should put on a oxford shirt and khakis and real shoes, but maybe to dial back on the old t-shirts and gym shorts in favor of cargo shorts and short sleeve shirt just in case he runs into somebody who might be a potential employer. 

I know I had to think like that for a while in my career. Not really dress up but not wear my absolute worst shorts to the grocery store in case I ran into a client or prospect. I am past that now but it took a while.

Then there's the issue of the ladies. What if you're at the library or a cafe or wherever you want to look not bad because... In some ways the fact that we were almost always seeking mates when we weren't in couples back in the day prepared us for later in life, when we had to figure out where to array ourselves vis-a-vis corporate norms to earn a living.  

A precious few rock and rollers and other artist types got to say fuck it all and just do whatever and we always idolized them for their freedom.

Does this do violence to our individuality and self-expression, as has been a theme of lots of cultural production down through the years? Yeah, maybe. But then again, that's life.

How it should work

I am still very much in the adjustment phase of getting up and getting to the office by 9, or 9ish, technically. And, frankly, to having someone in my office when I get there. The former is largely a burden though I see the benefits, the latter almost entirely a joy, though some facets of my productivity suffer a little. For instance, my blog.

A few weeks before at the spring musical extravaganza of the Prime Time Players, my mom's theater troupe, at intermission time a guy came up to me. It was Henry (not his actual name), a Chinese friend of one of our former partners who is a biotech entrepreneur but also an avid ping pong player (though he might prefer I call it table tennis). There's a lot of this sport played at the Seymour Center by people of a wide variety of ethnicities. In the my first summer of work for Red Reef Advisors, the partner informed my that we were going to bring in Henry's son Ted (a Duke student) as an intern. Not being used to having interns, I wasn't altogether delighted by this but what was I gonna do?

So Ted came in most days and sat with me at the office, and as I was doing stuff I explained to him what I was doing, and in the course of so doing he got a solid basic grounding in a lot of principles of finance. Asset allocation and location. The difference between capital gains and ordinary income tax. The logic of tax deferral in a person's lifetime earning's arc. These are the kinds of things that come up quickly. Turned out the kid learned a lot and found the internship valuable.

Flash back to the Seymour Center. Henry, who was playing ping pong, comes up to me and says hello and tells me he has some financial questions. "I have a financial advisor, but I'd like to call you to discuss some issues." I gave him my card.

This is how things are supposed to work. Maybe he'll be a client soon.

The Lack of Light

On my birthday a month and change back this 2022 novel (English translation 2025) by Nino Haratischwili arrived wrapped under my birthday tree. Apparently it had been on my Amazon list, where it likely landed after being on the Economist list of best books of the year or something like that. Honestly I don't remember. 

Clocking in at 700 pages and change, one of its many cover blurbs likens it to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series. Honestly that may be a stretch, but it was still quite solid. 

The Lack of Light chronicles the trajectory of post-Soviet Georgia and Tbilisi through the prism of four female friends who grew up around one apartment building and its courtyard. In my mind's eye it's a Stalinka, a sturdy building from around WWII but before the dawn of the shoddy neo-modernist buildings which sprouted all over Eastern Europe like shitty quadrangular mushrooms from the 60s forward.

There's a lot of drama around civil war, love, internecine gang wars in which the four protagonists' brothers are engaged, art etc. It's solid and worth reading, if ultimately as much Oprah as Ferrante. Sadly, there are no really compelling description of khachapuri or other delicious Georgian foods. Good enough that I may check out the author's other books, but I won't sprint out and grab them.