Updates on the End

While I was on vacation, my Mazel Together post on wedding registries (!?!?! I know!!!) went live. Then, lest I feel too cozy in such lighthearted reflections on bourgious comforts, I read a terrifying and plausible reported tweet chain about how literal my “Trumpocalypse” language is w.r.t climate change and the high likelihood that my grandchildren will live on a planet that is too hot for organized human society. So I’m postponing reading this on same and instead reading this on post-apocalyptic religious terror. And dwelling on the possibility that my grandchildren will be living in isolated, iron-age multifamily settlements far, far north. Or underground. Cuz, realistically, Earth hollows are more likely than Mars.

So, you know, happy summer.

Book Reviewlets: How the Dead Dream

When I was in college, a young punk complained, about One Hundred Years of Solitude, “Why do we have to talk about politics? It’s ruining the aesthetics of the novel!”

And my professor–still perhaps my favorite professor of all–responded, “How come no one ever complains that the aesthetics are ruining a good political novel?”

You put your politics in my novel, Lydia Millet.

I know that the apocalypse is happening at every minute all the time. But is that any reason to ruin a perfectly lovely reverse roman-a-clef?