In loving memory of Horace Henriques
I received the very sad news yesterday that one of my dear professors and mentors, Dr. Horace Henriques, passed away. I have so many fond memories of him from the many meetings of the Caribbean Studies Association that I attended throughout the late 1990s and the aughts. Originally from Guyana, he taught for many years at the University of Toronto and was one of the most thoughtful people I know. Horace threw me a softball question when I gave my very first academic paper presentation in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1997. He will be dearly missed.
2023 reading challenge
I’m not usually a big fan of new year’s resolutions, but this year I have one that I am really going to stick to. I’ve decided that I need my brain to focus on one thing for long periods of time, and so I am committing to reading 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction books in 2023. That’s about a book a week and I am very excited to delve into the ever growing pile on my nightstand. This week I finished Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, a dystopian vision of a possible near-future USA. This book was chosen for one of the two book clubs I’ve joined to help keep me on track with my reading.
The Adirondacks
A winter wonderland in upstate New York. A perfect day for a hike near Upper Saranac Lake.
So happy to be included in this end of year list of "Top Reads" →
A winter solstice newsletter →
Today is the official end of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.
The sun hangs low in the sky and casts long shadows across a nearby church parking lot. On these shortest of days and longest of nights around the winter solstice, the faithful seem to congregate more frequently. In their crisp suits and colorful dresses, the parishioners exchange smiles and call out greetings over the slamming of car doors and the bleeping of key fobs.
I survey the automobiles: the newest models of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, and Lexus sedans. This is an affluent community of believers. Soon, they will sit and stand and kneel together to celebrate the birth of a baby boy, a baby born among beasts over two thousand years ago, who would grow up to champion of the poor and downtrodden. His followers would live as communards, dwelling together and sharing their property. Continue reading…
Winter Reading: The Marriage Portrait
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted any of my reading recommendations, and it’s not because I have stopped reading. It’s because all of my previous book posts featured my old hound dog, Daisy, who died last year. I simply could not bring my self to take a photo of a book without her. Now I have a nice big stuffed animal Basset Hound and I’ve decided to let it be a very poor substitute for Daisy, but to honor her memory. This month I devoured Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait for one of my two book clubs. It was a lusciously-written page-turner, and although I guessed the ending halfway through the book, it was still a satisfyingly fun read.
More empirical evidence! →
Having way too much fun with the DALL-E image generator
I decided to create an account on the open AI website and play around with the DALL-E image generator. My first generation was “a Bassett hound in a Wonder Woman costume in a Classical Greek mosaic” and my second generation was prompted with “an impressionist painting of a Bassett hound writing on a typewriter on a tropical island.” Below are some of my results.
Just posted some of my newer acquisitions to my typewriter gallery
I’m not so good at cataloging my typewriters, but I finally decided to update my typewriter page with some of my newest acquisitions.
Profile in OMNIA magazine
Duyên Nguyen, “Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times.” OMNIA, November 22, 2022
Audio book of Red Valkyries is now available →
It’s available on Audible, Spotify, and wherever you get your audiobooks. I am extremely grateful to Tantor Media and to Esther Wane for their amazing work on the project.
The beautiful coast of Maine
Today was a beautiful day on the Maine coast and I was very sorry to be leaving the state.
A new newsletter posted
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, an annual American festival of absurd overindulgences and hyper-concentrated family time.
This late Autumn finds me back in Maine where I lived for fifteen years between 2002 and 2017. The crispness of the salty morning fog transports me back twenty years. I recall myself as a new mother and a freshly minted Ph.D. arriving on campus as a young assistant professor, suddenly transported from California to what seemed back then like the northernmost tundra of the contiguous United States.
I grew up in San Diego. Snow was only something you saw on TV or visited for a few hours around the winter holidays, either up in the nearby Julian mountains or at Sea World where they hauled it in refrigerated trucks and refreshed it with artificial precipitation machines. My parents, like the other locals with season passes, brought their kids to experience the sorry simulacra of sledding and snowball fights. I was one of those tweens wearing a bikini under my winter clothes so we could head straight to the beach after drinking our overpriced hot cocoa with little marshmallows in the faux Christmas village. Continue reading…
Tomorrow! Episode 1 of Season 5 of my podcast will drop →
Nice to see my Le Monde Diplo article translated into Kurdish →
New review of Red Valkyries in Red Pepper Magazine →
In Chicago!
I’m at the annual meetings for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. And it’s a beautiful day.
The Phillies are crushing it
I need to go to bed, but I think the Phillies have this one in the bag. Two down, two to go.
Fall scenes from around Philly
The leaves they are changing as we slide into November. Time for hot cups of tea and good books.
