"Euphoria", "Say Yes"

[fiefoe]

Lilly King's novel was swift and absorbing. It perfectly invokes its particular time and space. It's vicariously intoxicating to watch people fall in love doing work that they love. That those people are two anthropologists navigating through social conventions of their own while attempting to decode those of other tribes makes it more meta, naturally. The ending, with the heroine's buttons behind museum glass, is just poignant enough, and justifies the departure from the more prosaic reality the novel bases on.

• The tribe always looks greener on the other side of the river. You are always envious of other people's people.
• "You have to pay much more attention when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away...words aren't always he most reliable thing."
• "I find I am more interested in this question of subjectivity, and the limited lens of the anthropologist...Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation."
• "When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read their analysis?"
• (Andrew and Nell are typing up field notes side by side. He is factual, analytical: ) "In light of this conversation with Chanta, and the proximity of his native Pinlau to the Kiona, one concludes that there were other tribes in the vicinity who also practiced some sort of transvestite ritual." (Nell, however, pours out impressions in an unpunctuated stream of consciousness:) "Tavi sits still her eyes drooping nearly asleep body swaying and Mudama carefully pinching the lice flicking the bugs in the fire the zinging of her fingernails through the strands of hair, concentration tenderness love peace pieta."
• Even your boredom is material. Nothing is ever seen twice.
• He was a man of fire and came back a man of ash.

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Amy Poehler's autobiography was a harmless listen, but I still like her TV work better.
__ (When old,) I will be tended by gay men who will prune me like a bonsai tree.
__ A Lou Reed sighting was like the first robin in spring.