1. As a fun thought experiment, every time I hear a car alarm going off in the city, I think to myself: Wow, our great Mayor, London Breed, who is a car, must really love San Francisco. There she is, living her best life, occupying a parking spot, honking her horn with devotion.

    Honk! Honk! Honk!

    So inspiring! 🤗🌁

  2. michael moritz is immune to spoonerism and thus an unstoppable foe

    look

    “michael moritz”

    see? doesn’t work

    christ, what an asshole

  3. twelfth book of '23 for me, "Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature” ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53080.Black_Water I started a Bookwyrm and posted there too but, alas no one there has reviewed it yet), edited by Alberto Manguel. 72 fantastic stories in a door stop of a paper back (at least that’s how I read it), each one with a contextual introduction, and organized into themes.

    Black Water: The Book of Fantastic LiteratureThis huge anthology offers a kaleidoscope of brilliant …Goodreads

    I’m now looking forward to starting the second one Manguel collected, Black Water 2.

    Previously: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/109372394967950916

    gravely (@gravely@mastodon.social)Attached: 2 images new to me used book, lovely inscriptionMastodon

    paperback cover of Black Water, the title in black over an illustration of three people in blue, green, and red tunics decreasingly obscured in waht look like doorways in a subway, part of a larger painting https://whitney.org/collection/works/3052

    The Subway is the best known of the figurative paintings George Tooker made in response to the social injustices and isolation of postwar urban society—paintings that find an analogue in the period’s existentialist philosophy. In The Subway, Tooker employed multiple vanishing points and sophisticated modeling to create an imagined world that is presented in a familiar urban setting. Whether closed off in tiled niches or walking down the long passageway, each androgynous, anxiety-ridden figure appears psychologically estranged, despite being physically close to others in the station. The central group of commuters is locked in a grid of the metal grating’s cast shadows, while the labyrinthine passages seem to lead nowhere, suspending the city’s inhabitants in a modern purgatory. As Tooker remarked, he chose the subway as the setting for this painting because it represented “a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself.” (https://whitney.org/collection/works/3052)

  4. gravely finished reading Black Water

    Cover of Black Water

  5. on the home stretch (about a dozen stories or 200 pages left) and then I added “Black Water 2” to the to-read pile

    One of the fun things about the older stories is that when you like them you can just find and share them:

    THE GREY ONES

    (1953)

    J. B. PRIESTLEY

    https://ia904606.us.archive.org/31/items/michael-collins-piper-on-the-grey-ones-by-j.-b.-priestley/The%20Grey%20Ones%20-%20JB%20Priestley.pdf

    I’ve only ever read one other collection of stories that was so well assembled I chased the editor before the various authors therein and that was Otto Penzler.

    So, if Black Water looks fun to you (it was for me!), I also recommend Penzler’s collections: “The Best American Mystery Stories of the Twentieth Century”, “The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century”, and “The Best American Noir of the Century” ( https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/12471.Otto_Penzler?utf8=✓&sort=popularity)

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