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unsocialmedium.bsky.social
Unsocial Medium
@unsocialmedium.bsky.social
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Lifelong Democrat
Secular Humanist
Feminist
Can't believe we have to face four more years of the Orange Menace.
Elon must go.
RESIST
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Reposted by Unsocial Medium
davekarpf.bsky.social
“I do not wish to be understood, which no one seems to understand.”

This is what’s missing from the book. It is a 300-page meandering navel-gaze. A Joan Didion impression from someone with nothing to say, vaguely offended that readers would *expect* her to have something to say.
In the news, the Politician offers a united front and a rewritten history. My vow of silence does not feel like enough. I wish to fall silent on my-self, too. I wish to sink into the sea. To flee behind the curve of the earth. To emerge a new shape, a stranger. To stop giving fake names in coffee shops. To never see myself, the character of myself imagined by others, viral allegory of hubris, female avatar of Icarus, stripped and left for dead in a pool of wax. I do not wish to be understood, which no one seems to understand. Birds of prey circle. It is inconceivable, it seems, that someone would choose to allow a crisis to go to waste, would not want to make of their attention more attention, would not want to reap some kind of short-term profit from the mess of their life.
December 8, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Unsocial Medium
davekarpf.bsky.social
Okay first of all.

You have to pull off a *very particular* kind of style to write a 303-page book with zero chapters.

And the unintentional subtext of this book is quite clearly, “Olivia, you are not pulling that off.”
On the steps of the Met, the Politician on the phone. "You didn't do anything wrong," he said. He did not understand how I could be in any kind of professional trouble over a personal relationship. "If we got married, it still wouldn't be wrong," he said. "My aunt married my uncle after she interviewed him." This was different, I said. For one thing, I was not Jacqueline Bouvier and he was not John F. Kennedy. For another, he was already married, and I had been engaged until several weeks earlier. Ilooked down at the granite. Cockroaches. Dozens and dozens of them. Crawling everywhere. A parade, a stampede, a rally, a rave. I eyed them curiously. I did not flinch. When your world is falling apart, you wak forward. The cockroach, six legs and six claws, understands this. Down Fith Ave, across Seventy-First Street, down Lex. Plastered on the glass door of the bodega, a magazine cover with my name on it. Advertising not my life, not disfigured public narratives about private matters, but my work. I walked past the place where I was born. It had been a blizzard,
December 8, 2025 at 2:04 PM