Link Salad, the Future as Female Edition
-- Chirlane McCray and the Limits of First-Ladyship - Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 9, 2016
"Standing near the head of a long, polished dining table, as a young white woman in a chef’s uniform recited the lunch menu, McCray repeated our choices to me and her chief of staff. But my attention kept drifting to the walls, where a Zuber wallpaper from the 1830s depicted a maiden, her complexion a flushed peaches and cream, trapped in an almost-embrace with a pale and severe-looking soldier in a red-and-blue military uniform. Before they moved into Gracie, McCray and de Blasio lived in a vinyl-sided townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and worked out at the local Y.M.C.A. Shortly after de Blasio became mayor, McCray said she would be a "voice for the forgotten voices," because, she said, "black women do not have as many positive images in the media as we should." How did it feel for that woman to regularly dine within this patrician fantasy?"
-- All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way - Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Los Angeles Review of Books, Feb. 24, 2016
"How long did you lose your memory for? people ask when I tell this story, but the answer is never straightforward. My memory loss looks like a barren rocky island shaped by an ocean that is no longer there. The horizon, once blue never-ending water, is a canyon. I trace the steep cliffs, the striations in the rocks, the slope down to the sea floor. The metronome of the beating ocean is gone. Without it, time is slow and viscous. After the accident, I immediately decide my ocean will return, so I keep my memory loss a secret. But I am also aware that I am hiding a dark desire even from myself: I never ever want to be taken away from that barren place. I like the scarcity of the black rocks, the clean feeling, the eeriness - I have so many questions I want to ask of the still-wet deserted ocean floor."
"Standing near the head of a long, polished dining table, as a young white woman in a chef’s uniform recited the lunch menu, McCray repeated our choices to me and her chief of staff. But my attention kept drifting to the walls, where a Zuber wallpaper from the 1830s depicted a maiden, her complexion a flushed peaches and cream, trapped in an almost-embrace with a pale and severe-looking soldier in a red-and-blue military uniform. Before they moved into Gracie, McCray and de Blasio lived in a vinyl-sided townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and worked out at the local Y.M.C.A. Shortly after de Blasio became mayor, McCray said she would be a "voice for the forgotten voices," because, she said, "black women do not have as many positive images in the media as we should." How did it feel for that woman to regularly dine within this patrician fantasy?"
-- All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way - Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Los Angeles Review of Books, Feb. 24, 2016
"How long did you lose your memory for? people ask when I tell this story, but the answer is never straightforward. My memory loss looks like a barren rocky island shaped by an ocean that is no longer there. The horizon, once blue never-ending water, is a canyon. I trace the steep cliffs, the striations in the rocks, the slope down to the sea floor. The metronome of the beating ocean is gone. Without it, time is slow and viscous. After the accident, I immediately decide my ocean will return, so I keep my memory loss a secret. But I am also aware that I am hiding a dark desire even from myself: I never ever want to be taken away from that barren place. I like the scarcity of the black rocks, the clean feeling, the eeriness - I have so many questions I want to ask of the still-wet deserted ocean floor."