“I think it’s clear that his intent was to live for his full Biblical span of
eight hundred years and to write a volume about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin
every year. He’d have slowly worked his way through the nineteenth century and
into the twentieth, we’d have read about their adventures in sailing ships in
the Great War, and rescuing people at Dunkirk.”
posted 9/19/2022 8:00pm ∞
“The afterlife of a dead mall is interesting. Schools are moving into malls;
some students are completing high school in a converted Macy’s in Vermont. A
Dillard’s in Texas is now a radio station. Malls are becoming home to community
colleges and libraries and offices.”
Lili Loofbourow ,
Everything Must Go
(Slate December 7, 2021 )
posted 8/28/2022 8:00pm ∞
“This all still sits there, now well after the celebration — a world built for
one purpose, temporarily filled and now waiting indefinitely to be stumbled on
again. Which makes it just like the vast majority of the billions of Roblox
places.”
Everest Pipkin ,
I Know a Place
(Pioneer Works July 19, 2021 )
“Tolkien had his beloved wife Edith. Sam had his Rose. But there is room, I
think, for another kind of love, specific to both the real and invented worlds
that Tolkien inhabited. A love that grew in extraordinary hardship, and
ultimately could not survive outside of it; but that was deeply meaningful all
the same.”
“Not a single century passed in which this spot was not being used and
transformed, and every transformation is still here. And all that time, from
the first sacred spring, to the Mithraism, to today’s Irish Dominicans, this
spot has been sacred.”
Ada Palmer ,
The Shape of Rome
(August 15, 2013 )
posted 4/10/2021 9:22pm ∞