Holy crap, that's stunning. Thank you. This will make the next month and a half so much more palatable.

Yeah, I especially like the arrows that are way more "we're a design firm that's more about who you are rather than what you do. Click the arrows to learn more about our friends!" than speculative medieval fiction.

Talkin' Hard Dick with Hardwick after the show or GD,D,BA.*

BRB, changing my business cards from "Professional Dilettante" to "Doodling Robot (Extra Doodle)."

That "robot" hand is entirely analog, but it has circuitboard-printed assets. I'm affronted by this kind of false advertising.

Weird avatar-comment antisynergy.

Sometimes I come upon a sentence that wouldn't just be strange outside of the time during which it was composed, but incomprehensible. "…[M]an, that butt-hurt article by the guy who got owned by the dictionary on Twitter was hilarious" is cracking me up by imagining a time-traveler from 2006 trying to parse it.

Nope! Chabon book, Glover tune, and an actual street in Oakland. It's such a resonant name. And now I need to check out that track.

Yeah, there's the core of a story there, but it's larded down by really obnoxious hepcats and duolas and Chabon-writes-middle-aged-African-American-hipster characters and their middle-age malaise.

Ha, yeah—I bought it on Kindle, at least, so it was an easy disposal! Although I could have made that precious $.50 from Half-Price, probably.

Heartily cosigned. The only part that felt honest was some of the vinyl veneration and the relationship between the sons—which makes sense, per your thoughts. There's nothing wrong with having a comfort zone; it's great to stretch, but you make not just yourself, but often the reader, uncomfortable when you try to…

That rebuttal is pretty great and represents a ton of corrective effort. Thanks for sharing!

Moonglow sounds like it may be really good—I think Chabon always does better when he has some kind of distance from the topic at hand, whether it's folklore or time, and so having the bulk of the book take place as a recounting of his grandfather's experiences sounds ideal.

I'm suddenly very interested in hearing this, actually—thanks for the tip!

It's so clunky—Chabon's stuff always can veer into a kind of self-satisfied preciousness, but Telegraph Avenue seemed to want to drift into that sphere.

Ah, more of a kumquat than an etrog, I gotcha.

I also took umbrage with the description of Telegraph Avenue as "sublime," unless Gwen Ihnat meant "to bury under a layer of lime." That book killed my interest in anything Chabon's written since 2010 or so—which is fine! His early output is amazing.

Probably Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley, as it essentially necessitates a horrible shaving decision and putting on a kimono, but maybe a couple's costume, if we can come up with something.

Black iced coffee, same as ever. Trader Joe's has a surprisingly nice Tanzanian, but I'm a sucker for their coffee/cocoa blend. A local distiller also does a superb bourbon coffee that I wish could be my breakfast, cologne, interment-medium, and lover.

Been working my way through Brian Evenson's short stories (A Collapse of Horses and Altmann's Tongue), but it puts me in a bad headspace. It's both opaque and unpleasant and makes me feel feverish. So an enthusiastic recommendation, honestly—anything that can make you feel that way is worth reading.