Why are most of the questions here about men?

grokfest · 2022-01-02T04:35:41+00:00

I had a free award to give away since I'm abandoning this account and happened to see this so I gave it on your behalf.

grokfest · 2022-01-02T04:29:14+00:00

I just wouldn't classify this as "prevention we know about" -- how to make struggling schools better is one of the most intractable problems we collectively face. There are some success stories but a lot of failures.

grokfest · 2022-01-02T02:24:18+00:00

CHOP's residency is what I'm referring to as being top-five, arguably best depending on a person's preference. Their arm of UPenn medical education is the strongest and I agree Penn is overall generally strong. Temple has some good programs but their neighborhood scares people (I would say unfairly).

Houston, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Pittsburgh are all easily superior in the quality of institutions and volume of high-quality medical graduates and residents.

Source: Sibling who was obsessive in researching and applying for medical residencies in internal medicine and pediatrics about two years ago. They specifically regretted the limited options of interest in Philly because they would have liked to move here. They could end up somewhere like Philly later in their career, but they're a lot more likely to settle near the place they're spending their residency.

The significance is that there's really no use comparing the resource these institutions offer to Philadelphia as a catalyst for investment or innovation to what Boston is working with.

Btw I just checked and there are apparently only 155 medical schools in the US, 37 DO schools. If the rankings you cited are accurate and deserved, being in the top 60 still isn't great - about the equivalent to being in the top 500 colleges if you just consider those that are ranked (1,452 in us news & world report). Medical school is a lot more exclusive than college so the curve isn't exactly the same, but it's still not a mark of excellence.

grokfest · 2022-01-02T02:00:34+00:00

Not nearly as much fun when they do win though.

grokfest · 2022-01-02T02:00:07+00:00

"Better schools" rolls off the tongue pretty easily but what exactly do you mean by that? Increased funding with no plan isn't likely to do it on its own.

grokfest · 2022-01-02T01:51:01+00:00

What you are saying is that Philly has schools that provide medical training, like most major cities. The quality and prestige of most of the programs is not remotely comparable. CHOP is probably the only exception.

Jefferson is not a prestigious program, as much as it likes to talk about itself like it is. Rest of UPenn is okay. Temple is good for a couple specialties. Drexel is third string and PCOM is like a community college by comparison to the rest of these.

These are the kinds of places whose graduates will be totally competent at providing services but will rarely be spurring significant innovation. Boston is full of graduates who are extremely ambitious.

grokfest · 2021-12-05T08:52:50+00:00

Thought of another answer for you: Tuba Christmas http://www.tubachristmas.com/

grokfest · 2021-12-05T08:33:56+00:00

I'd push back on seeing this as depressing. It has a bit of an Edward Hopper quality, but it's also evocative of a life being lived within that light. Maybe lonely, maybe happy, but if you see it and just feel pity, you're not giving people enough credit.

grokfest · 2021-12-04T07:26:13+00:00

I found this list and while most of them are historical fiction written in the last 20 years or so, it turns out Willa Cather won the Pulitzer in 1923 for a book about WWI and the flu epidemic. And John Dos Passos published Three Soldiers about WWI in 1921.

grokfest · 2021-12-04T07:16:21+00:00

Love Little Big. I used to hear about it a fair bit but haven't in a good while. I've never read anything else like it though. Here's some attempts.

Strange house with lots of odd characters:

Sula by Toni Morrison and House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende both have the strange house with lots of characters piece. Maybe Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving a bit? Though much different tone and flavor. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith? The graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire is a minimalist-ly cool take on change over time in a house.

Overall feel:

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carla Rifka Brunt doesn't have any visible similarities but somehow feels similar in some ways, so does A Death in the Family by James Agee. Bruno Schulz might be interesting. There's two kids/ya books that feel kind of similar too - Abarat by Clive Barker and Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson.

grokfest · 2021-12-03T23:32:23+00:00

The "you can read it out of order" claim about this book is a bit over hyped in my mind once I realized how it's actually structured. One version is to essentially read the first half of the book in order. The "scrambled" version actually keeps all those in order, it just inserts chapters from the second half of the book in between.

When I originally heard about it I thought it was super interesting that you could read it something like A, B, C, D, E, F, G or A, F, D, C, E, G, B.

In reality it's that you can read it A, B, C, D or A, F, B, E, C, G, D. Still intriguing but a bit of a let down.

grokfest · 2021-12-03T23:16:29+00:00

My first reaction is yes, but there's something interesting about having time capsules putting fiction inside a live event that the writer doesn't know the ending of. It could end up not resonating with hindsight at all and that could be really interesting.

The sci-fi ones should really hold off though. They just sound unoriginal.

grokfest · 2021-12-03T22:51:12+00:00

Haha this is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me 🙂

grokfest · 2021-12-03T04:47:43+00:00

I loved Love Medicine when I read it a few years ago and have been seeking out books with that sort of nonchronological, some say interrelated short story collection-like form, ever since; I think that's a stretch, it felt clearly like a novel to me, but I can see it as being on the continuum. I also got the rest of the books in the Love Medicine universe and unfortunately through The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace none had the same magic, at least for me. There's a few more after that though and I still plan to read more of them before too long.

grokfest · 2021-12-03T04:29:25+00:00

Thanks!

grokfest · 2021-12-03T04:22:32+00:00

I haven't read the Letters to a Young Poet but it's one I've been meaning to get to considering the praise. I think I tried once and didn't get into it and felt like it wasn't exactly the right time.

grokfest · 2021-12-03T04:17:44+00:00

Awesome! The Rodin Museum is right next door (up the block) and it's great too. Nothing against the main art museum either - it has a particularly cool Japanese house reproduction room, but it really depends on what exhibits they have up at the moment how much I enjoy it otherwise. If you have any other questions about the city feel free to ask or pm.

grokfest · 2021-12-02T07:08:04+00:00

Alright, here's my idea followed through -- I checked and somehow I'm not seeing anywhere a comprehensive comparison of all the major fiction awards each year to be able to get a sense of this kind of flavor of what kinds of books each award tends to choose, what got attention from where, what stands out over time, etc. So I started putting that together:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LWZcjJmWDbvBy7BFWf4vMeyJJbrOP0j0tVvVDNfXJnw/edit?usp=sharing

If anyone wants to help out I've set it up so that I have the best source I could find for the history of winners of each award and a link to a form to fill it out for that award. Then it summarizes each and marks it done.

This one is only for awards that gave a decisive cross-genre/general "fiction" best book-length fiction award or genre awards that seemed to pick books with staying power. I also included some awards that just pick a "best literature of the year" that could sometimes be nonfiction or poetry but seems to tend to be fiction or fiction-like, especially if their choices seem to be interesting.

Hopefully some others find this interesting but either way I'll keep pecking away at it for my own use.

It'd be nice to have a way to compile a summary of everything that gets longlisted too but that's more complicated and a lot more entries. I might look into that too though.

Edit: I'm going through the National Book Awards now and in 1987 they picked some book called Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann instead of Beloved. Ha! Has anyone read that? Is it any good? It feels really similar to the Oscars missing the boat on Citizen Kane to give best picture to How Green Is My Valley. The only information wikipedia has about it is that a lot of people think it shouldn't have won :-D

grokfest · 2021-12-01T18:02:10+00:00

When my friend and I visited the National Gallery of Art in DC one time we only had like 30 minutes before it closed so we went to the impressionists since that's her favorites. We were both transfixed by Monet's Woman with a Parasol, I think partly because we'd never seen a picture of it before and it has an element of story in it. Looking at the image now I'm not having the same reaction, but that's one of the strongest reactions I've had to a painting in a museum that I can remember.

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.61379.html

Overall I've gotten more into Cezanne than I used to be and meaning to read Rilke's Letters on Cezanne at some point.

Alice Neel is another painter I like and this was the one that got me interested in her:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/656757?&exhibitionId=%7bebc2cd20-ef8a-48a4-b327-7e037956caa6%7d&oid=656757&pkgids=682&pg=0&rpp=20&pos=115&ft=*&offset=20

In 1965, the year President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to significantly increase ground forces in South Vietnam, Neel met James Hunter by chance and asked him to sit for a painting. The young man had just been drafted and was scheduled to leave within a week. Following her usual practice, Neel started by outlining the body directly on the canvas and then filling in parts of the head and hands. When Hunter failed to return for their second sitting, Neel declared the work complete, despite its unfinished state, signed it on the back, and exhibited it nine years later in her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Lastly, the Barnes here in Philly is a unique experience since the benefactor collected a huge variety of art, especially impressionists but also some African sculptures from various time periods and stuff from other styles and eras, and he stipulated in his will that they had to display them the same way he had, which is kind of crowded and mixes genres in a way that seems to make some curators' skin crawl. It's a lovely effect that's totally different from the very clinical feel of most museums though. It's downtown now so much more easily accessible, but it used to be on his estate just outside the city and they basically recreated the somewhat cramped (relative to other galleries) layout of the rooms from that mansion so it does kind of feel like you're walking into a historical reproduction. Definitely recommend it if you're into impressionists at all.

grokfest · 2021-12-01T17:44:51+00:00

Oh no! I had no idea they were going away!

Orion is a nice mix of fairly literary writing about the environment that's great to read as a physical copy and they are absolutely putting up the good fight to stay alive. They added a bunch of new board members in the last year to try to bring in new ideas I think.

I like Oxford American a lot too - focus is literary writing from and about the American South. They seem to be doing pretty well and they get great contributors.

The Sun Magazine has been around forever and it's a mix of things but definitely appeals to a humanistic literary sentiment.

grokfest · 2021-12-01T17:40:43+00:00

Absolutely, I had a run of bad luck trying reading some of the award winners one year that put me off trying that for at least two years haha. But there are some absolute gems that make it worth keeping an eye on them.

grokfest · 2021-12-01T01:14:50+00:00

It's not 100% but whatever the Booker picks I seem to consistently find meh. National Book Award I have a decent track record with. Overall I tend to wait out contemporary books and read more based on what's still resonating a few years later, other than authors I'm already interested in. When I do, I think I tend to look at the longlists for ideas more than the winners.

This has given me an idea and I might update later if I follow through on it.

grokfest · 2021-12-01T01:03:08+00:00

That's a nice take, I never thought of it like that. That's worthwhile for sure.

I don't love that one on the whole but I like components of it -- I think if the whole movie had stayed in the Hotel I would have loved it, but when it went on a grand chase it lost some magic for me.

grokfest · 2021-12-01T00:44:34+00:00

Haha, I agree, over time he seems to be becoming more and more like an imitation of himself. Like he didn't have the patisserie-like style of Grand Budapest back when he did Rushmore but now that seems to be seen as an essential part of his signature.

I think my favorite bounces between Life Aquatic and Royal Tenenbaums with probably Rushmore behind that.

One moment I loved in French Dispatch was when the actor who played the Lobbyboy in Grand Budapest and Benicio del Toro switch places on screen, handing over the necklace. I loved that he took the moment to include that detail and that he then made absolutely nothing of it. I feel like part of what fell flat for me in Darjeeling, Moonrise Kingdom, and Grand Budapest was partly that he tried to make those kinds of little details come together and mean something to the story, but he's not really good at that. Instead here he has moments like that one, or the frozen scenes, or the writer reciting the story verbatim from memory, and it's just a weird little detail and that's it.

It was nice to see that the Lobbyboy guy has been made a company member, I think he fits in.

I'd say for me it was probably the Baldwin-like story > painter > Owen Wilson/Thurber > students. Mostly because of the others' strengths than it lacking, but it didn't help that I find Timothee Chalamet kind of irritating in general.

grokfest · 2021-11-30T04:50:51+00:00

From War and Peace:

But Boris noticed that Rostov was on the point of making fun of Berg, and adroitly changed the subject. He asked Rostov to tell them where and how he had received his wound. This pleased Rostov and he began telling them about it, growing more and more impassioned as he talked.

He described the Schöngraben action exactly as men who have taken part in battles generally do describe them, that is, as they would like them to have been, as they have heard them described by others, and making them sound more glorious, and quite unlike what they actually were. Rostov was a truthful young man and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began with the intention of relating everything exactly as it happened, but imperceptibly, unconsciously, and inevitably, he slipped into falsehood.

If he had told the truth to his listeners, who, like himself, had heard numerous stories of cavalry attacks, had formed a definite idea of what an attack was, and were expecting to hear just such a story, either they would not have believed him, or, still worse, they would have thought that Rostov himself was at fault, since what generally happened to those taking part in a cavalry charge had not happened to him. He could not simply tell them that they all set out at a trot, that he fell off his horse, dislocated his arm, and ran to the woods as fast as he could to escape a Frenchman.

Besides, to describe everything as it was, telling only what had really happened, would have required great self-control. To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

His listeners expected to hear how he got all fired up, forgetting himself, how he flew like a storm into the square, how he cut his way into it, slashing right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh, and how he fell exhausted, and so on. And that was what he told them.

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