The traditional extravaganza of deep-frying known as my family's Hanukkah party went the way of every other communal gathering this year, but on Sunday we still managed to celebrate my niece's seventh birthday with latkes and cupcakes and candlelighting and presents. Months ago, I had found a beautiful print of a black cat looping the air with a pearl as green as its eyes between its paws like a Chinese dragon which I hoped she would like because of her feelings about dragons and because of the black cat she has known her entire life; she did. From my parents she got things like books and science kits. I gave ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch the memoir by Norman Lloyd whose existence I had been concealing from him ever since we caught Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) last month on TCM. I got some of the thickest socks I have ever seen and copies of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi (2020) and Sarah Monette's Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (2011); I still want a sequel volume to The Bone Key (2007/2011). My father continued his ongoing repairs of the dryer, my mother was actually persuaded to sit down and eat instead of living over the stove as she normally does for this holiday, and my niece and my godchild bonded virtually over dreidel towers, Zoom filters, and a lot of bouncy physical mirroring that selkie described as "yoga night at the asylum," but it seems to have gone sufficiently well that they both want to do it again. John le Carré died and it is unfair to think of it as the last falling of the Berlin Wall because one of the things that was so important about him as a writer was not just how he changed the rules of the game—his name became its own genre; it is impossible to write about spies without his shadow falling across the edge of the page, looking as often as not like some undistinguished retiree polishing his glasses with the fat end of his tie—but how he went on writing in the world after the Cold War, still engaged, still relevant, still furious about how the unknowable, undeniable realities of words, ideals, people could be sacrificed to the convenience of ideologies or simply self-interest. For someone who identified repeatedly as a liar, he cared visibly about the true things. I looked forward to each new one of his books and now I am afraid I have read the last. My mother was re-reading Smiley's People (1979) last night after my brother's family went home. I am tired of losing necessary voices, even as I know it's not a zero-sum chorus. The lenses of every age should be a kaleidoscope. I just heard that the results of the electoral college are coming in as their states voted they should. Tonight the candle we light is for justice.
spatch the memoir by Norman Lloyd whose existence I had been concealing from him ever since we caught Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) last month on TCM. I got some of the thickest socks I have ever seen and copies of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi (2020) and Sarah Monette's Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (2011); I still want a sequel volume to The Bone Key (2007/2011). My father continued his ongoing repairs of the dryer, my mother was actually persuaded to sit down and eat instead of living over the stove as she normally does for this holiday, and my niece and my godchild bonded virtually over dreidel towers, Zoom filters, and a lot of bouncy physical mirroring that selkie described as "yoga night at the asylum," but it seems to have gone sufficiently well that they both want to do it again. John le Carré died and it is unfair to think of it as the last falling of the Berlin Wall because one of the things that was so important about him as a writer was not just how he changed the rules of the game—his name became its own genre; it is impossible to write about spies without his shadow falling across the edge of the page, looking as often as not like some undistinguished retiree polishing his glasses with the fat end of his tie—but how he went on writing in the world after the Cold War, still engaged, still relevant, still furious about how the unknowable, undeniable realities of words, ideals, people could be sacrificed to the convenience of ideologies or simply self-interest. For someone who identified repeatedly as a liar, he cared visibly about the true things. I looked forward to each new one of his books and now I am afraid I have read the last. My mother was re-reading Smiley's People (1979) last night after my brother's family went home. I am tired of losing necessary voices, even as I know it's not a zero-sum chorus. The lenses of every age should be a kaleidoscope. I just heard that the results of the electoral college are coming in as their states voted they should. Tonight the candle we light is for justice.
