Few authors have had as much influence on my progress as a human being - to say nothing of my writing - as @DanielPinkwater. The course of my life was profoundly altered by reading Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars in middle school, and I have read dozens of his books since.
1/
I find that many distinctive authors circle themes and plots, like a cannoneer rangefinding with artillery, trying to bullseye some impossible-to-define perfect target. I county myself in that group, and I definitely count Pinkwater there.
2/
I can't tell you exactly what it is he's trying to hit, but every book seems to come closer to some irreducible Pinkwaterian ideal, and his latest, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, is the closest he's come yet.
First, let me attempt* to summarize the plot. Dwergs are basically a magical race inhabiting the Hudson Valley. They're something like Tolkien's dwarves, but not. Male dwergs are pretty odd-looking and rarely venture into the world.
*"Attempt" is doing a lot of work here.
4/
But female Dwergs, like protagonist Molly O'Malley, can pass for short-ish humans, albeit with very large feet and the ability to move with uncanny speed through the woods near Kingston, NY.
5/
Molly can't abide the sameness and dullness of life in the unchanging, eternal Dwergish village of her birth, so she moves to Kingston, NY, where she befriends Arnold Babatunji, a Naples-obsessed restaurateur who runs the Hudson Valley's greatest pizzeria, who hires Molly.
6/
For a time, life is good. Molly learns about pizza, pals around with a former boy-genius who runs the village radio station, and sleeps in a forest dwelling of her own devising, supplementing her income with the cash from the lumpy Dwergish gold coin she's pawned.
7/
But the pawn-broker is tied up with gangsters - some of them ghosts, some living - and then Molly befriends Leni, an indigenous girl whose people have lived in the Catskills since time immemorial.
8/
Leni tempts Molly to ride the Greyhound to NYC, where she rides the subway, and, more importantly, samples the indescribable wonderments of papaya juice and all-beef franks, which change her life.
9/
And of course, while in New York, Molly encounters Carlos Chatterjee, a Revolutionary War reenactor who runs a spectacular junk shoppe on the mezzanine of an uptown MTA station.
10/
Carlos turns out to be crucial to the resolution of Molly's main challenge, which is the transdimensional meat-robots in British redcoat uniforms who seem to be bent on reenacting the 1777 burning of Kingston (spoilers!).
11/
Averting this disaster is a big project for Molly, who enlists the Catskills Witch (who has moved to Manhattan) and the semi-mythical King of the Dwergs, who uses bee-style waggle-dancing to advise them.
12/
This is a book with:
So.
Much.
Stuff.
13/
My all-time favorite place to eat in NYC is Shopsins. Pinkwater novels are like expanded Shopsins menus. Motto: "nothing exceeds like excess." But this isn't mere kitchen-sinkery: it's skilled wunderkammering, a carefully curated study in contrasts.
I take him to mean that he's describing the world as he perceives it, not adding any weirdness. We live in a weird place. 2020 certainly proves that hypothesis.
15/
I think there's something to this - the thing that makes Pinkwater's work so great is his ability to describe the everyday absurdity in terms that make it clear how weird normalcy is (and vice-versa).
16/
That's definitely Dwergish Girl's charm. I read this to my 12 year old, who is way too cool to be getting bedtime stories of her old, irrelevant father's favorite weird writers.
17/
Every night, she insisted that she didn't want me to read from it. Every night, she begged for another chapter when I was done (and interrupted repeatedly to ask incisive questions about the Revolutionary war, papaya juice, ghosts, radio announcers, etc).
18/
Pinkwater's got The Magic (whatever that is) and he keeps getting better at it.
eof/
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The "Tragedy" hoax said that moving land from collective ownership "rescued" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who cared for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
But *unsubscribing* from Prime? That's a fucking *nightmare*. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave.
3/
Even Google admits - grudgingly - that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Today, results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):
Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" is manufactured far from the company's Seattle headquarters, in a non-union shop in Charleston, South Carolina. At that shop, there is a cage full of defective parts that have been pulled from production because they are not airworthy.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" is manufactured far from the company's Seattle headquarters, in a non-union shop in Charleston, South Carolina. At that shop, there is a cage full of defective parts that have been pulled from production because they are not airworthy.
3/
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Monopolies are intrinsically destabilizing and inevitably implode...eventually. Guessing *which* of the loathesome monopolies that make us all miserable will be the first domino is a hard call, but Ticketmaster is definitely high on my list.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It's not that event tickets are the most consequential aspect of our lives. The monopolies over pharma, fuel, finance, tech, and even beer are all more important to our day-to-day.
3/