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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!).
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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.
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This is a book with:
So.
Much.
Stuff.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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Pinkwater's got The Magic (whatever that is) and he keeps getting better at it.
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In other words, the world we're living in is the best possible world, and the fact that you got contact burns from collapsing on the scorching sidewalk outside of the grocery store where you couldn't afford your weekly shopping is unfortunate, but unavoidable.
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*Corporate Bullshit: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America* is @NickHanauer, @joanwalsh and @donaldrcohen12's 2023 book on the history of corporate apologetics; it's great:
I found out about this book last fall when @ddayen reviewed it for the @TheProspect; Dayen did a great job of breaking down its thesis, and I picked it up for my newsletter.
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Last weekend, I was at @Defcon 32, where I had the privilege of giving a talk: "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification."
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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:
This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):
Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you see it everywhere. Democrats - including elected officials - wanted Biden to step down, but no one wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.
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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:
Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked.
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Every performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross earnings, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on Earth. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it can steal a third of their wages:
Enshittification starts with companies being good to end users. In this case, Apple made a quality product - Iphones - and carefully tended its App Store.
Walmart didn't just *happen*. The rise of Walmart - and Amazon, its online successor - was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law.
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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: