Category: People

We got a dog and his name is Max

November 6, 2024 /

Hello, friend. My opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer, but over the summer we got to meet the best dog in the world. Our friends were fostering him from a local shelter, so we had a few opportunities to get to know him, and each time we loved him more. When we bought a house (oh, also we bought a house) and moved out of our apartment, we adopted him as soon as we had a place to put his bed.

Max is a small chihuahua derivation of uncertain age, probably around 10 or 11, and shortly before we took him in he was relieved of most of his teeth. He is friendly, quiet, sleepy and calm. He is not a lap dog, but he loves to take the center seat on our couch and place his small warm flank against a person’s thigh. Then he will nudge his little head under that person’s hand and insist on having his scalp massaged.

I am relying on Max quite a bit for mental health support of late. He did not apply for this job but he bears it with grace. Here are some photos of him.

August 9, 2024

“When you’re young, you think there are probably not that many people privately beating themselves up, but actually, there are tons of us. We walk every kind of life path, united by the sheer brutality of our self-deprecation. The most confident-seeming people are often screaming at themselves inside their own heads! This might be you. Or maybe you’re a lobster. Lobsters are so zen.”

I used to type things into my little blog imagining that somehow, in some small way, they would run like rivulets down into the great tide of attention and draw some stranger’s gaze toward something they might not otherwise have seen.

June 4, 2024 /

I don’t really believe that anymore! And maybe that’s why I have not felt moved to post anything here for a while. But I really liked my old friend PH Lee’s story “Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows,” and maybe you, reader, will too.

Figure traced in light

March 2, 2024 /

I’m so sad to learn that Dr. David Bordwell died at the end of February. Kristin Thompson’s posts to the blog they both maintained had made it clear that his health was in decline, but without knowing the specifics I admit to holding out some hope for his recovery. I didn’t know Bordwell personally myself, and was a relative latecomer to his work; both he and Thompson have been held in high regard by scholars and lovers of film for decades. But even in these few years since coming to it, their work has come to mean a lot to me.

By all accounts Bordwell was as generous with his time, attention, and goodwill as he was with his writing and knowledge. I consider the aforementioned blog the gold standard for this medium, and whenever one of his books went out of print he’d just upload a copy to his site and offer it up for free. He didn’t write to critique or pass judgment on his subject matter. Instead, he clarified, contextualized, reverse-engineered, and recommended, all out of love for the work and in pursuit of sharing it with others.

I could read Bordwell’s writing forever, and it’s a sorrowful thing to know that I won’t see him post anything new again. But there are thousands of pages in his back catalog I can still look forward to reading and learning from. I think I’ll feel grateful that he left that work to this world for the rest of my life.

Linked Onlist

February 5, 2024 /

Oh right! Another thing that has been slowly changing about the actual HTML markup of xorph dot com slash nfd is the “My Town” and “My Neighborhood” menus that appear at the bottom of any given archive page. The latter is a good old-fashioned friend blogroll; the former is the roll of links for friends who have nice internet sites that are not blogs. If you, like me, are avoiding tasks at the moment, you could do a lot worse than picking one of them to click on! You can even use this special magic link to do the picking for you.

December 3, 2023

“Before we try to uncover more information about the untimely death of Harry Lemaster, let’s see what else we can ‘dig up’ about him.”

Two Books

November 10, 2023 /

I became a fan of actor and writer Jo Firestone because of her role on someone else’s perfect television show, and when Kat made me watch her documentary Good Timing I became… uh, even more of a fan! Also, last month Kat and I went to the Grand Canyon. We saw this bird.

A bird perched on top of a tree in front of a vista.

We also got up early to see the sunrise and looked sleepy, which was accurate.

Brendan on the left, Kat in the middle, Grand Canyon sunrise on the right.

But to the point of this entry, on the drive to and from the canyon, we listened to almost all of an audiobook, and specifically an audiobook written and read by Jo Firestone. It’s called Murder on Sex Island and it lives up to its title. Also, it’s free to listen to! You can just put it in your podcast app and get the whole thing right now! And then you should pay for a copy also, because it is very good.

In news about books I have not read, but have purchased nonetheless, my longtime and dear friend Holly has her debut novel coming out next spring! It is called The Husbands and I am really excited to obtain and review it. It will be a positive review, so don’t expect me to be objective or anything, but it will be an accurate review too. Accuracy is the surprise emergent theme of this blog post.

March 29, 2023

“The stars that night were glinting, and the bonfire on the shore waited like a beacon, but the brightest shimmer was running down my forearms, spiraling behind my palms.”

The NFD Annual Blog Post of the Year Award 2022

December 30, 2022 /

If you’ve been heeding my exhortations then you have long since already subscribed to The Roof is on Phire and no doubt caught this months ago, when it went up. But I’ve been trying to figure out how to do something more emphatic than simply quote from “labour of love” ever since I read it (and read it again), so here it is: the extremely legitimate and hallowed NFDABPOTYA for this very long year, presented to my friend Jenny, for extraordinary work.

“Loving this planet enough to fight against the man-made systems that harm us all, instead of retreating, is the hardest work there is.”