a danger to my person

"When I moved to open it again, I saw light and movement near the overhead lamp fastened to the center of the ceiling in the other room. And I heard a flapping noise. Golden feathers glistened against the light of the lamp. I was scared. A bird had flown through the window when I was in the shower, and it was trapped in my tiny apartment and a danger to my person!"

Last Days of Pompeii: Volume I

 

Ignatius J. Reilly

"On a book tour, [Susan] Fuentes will call Ignatius J. Reilly a 'Proto-Troll, the Mitochondrial Adam of Incels,' mention his love for Batman serials and penny arcades, his hatred for Doris Day's beauty. She will never know that [Blake] Mesman hadn't actually read the book."

~~ from Jeff Chon's Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun

the same zoo

"Friends of his had advised him that if he wanted to make it as a creative writer, he should stop savaging other people's work, but you might as well ask a bird not to fly or a cat not to hunt; and besides, what would his poetry be worth if he wrote it while living in the same zoo as all the other denatured animals, safe but not free? And that was without even mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct  the tendency of culture likewise to err toward safety and mediocrity,  a responsibility you couldn't measure in dinner invitations."

~~ from Kudos by Rachel Cusk

Stephen Wolfram and maths

 

Letter from Istanbul

"The Spies Next Door" by John Beck is about ethnic-minority exiles in Turkey.

No one was in my life

"Adjunct survival led me to a bird that flew into my apartment only this past year while teaching abroad in Suzhou, China. Not dead yet and employed overseas again, I’d chased contract work to “the Venice of the Far East”—a mainland city of man-made lakes and narrow canals—but I was alone. I had no friends. Gardens bloomed throughout the city, but there was no housing bulletin board at an American church. I had people in the program—teachers, students, staff—that I would exchange pleasantries with or occasional chitchat, but there was no one I was close to. I wasn’t going to stay up all night discussing politics, literature, or anything else. No one was in my life, and talking all about it no longer appealed to me."

not the best I could do

"He was assessing me now. Was I using too many paper products? Yes. Did I really need a full shower when a washcloth rinse would do? I supposed not. Walk whenever possible; drive only if you must. Of course. Avoid elevators; take the stairs. From now on, I would. Change would be good for me. Moving more would be good for me. Stationary bike or lap lane? Sure. Finishing this cheeseburger and cola was not the best I could do, and ordering a hot fudge sundae would work against my interests."

a primitive way

"My strength was nearly depleted when Avi stopped pressing hard against me; at last, I could see he was no threat to attack. I didn’t see anything we could win by furthering this contest, and I recognized that Avi’s theft was the initiation of the physical encounter, if not the first act of aggression. In hindsight, it’s hard to remember another time when anything I was involved with was settled in such a primitive way."