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2020

Exorcism in Politics or the Conspiracy of Imbeciles

I often think of this essay by Baudrillard, and always have a hard time finding it. It’s from Screene...

2019

Borges' Mother and Saroyan

In the 1978 edition of “The Aleph and Other Stories,” written by Jorge Luis Borges, edited and ...

Go doesn't care about you

There’s a theory called linguistic relativity which postulates that the language you speak modifies y...

2018

A Eulogy for The Chris Gethard Show

Jon Yu was the one who got me tuned into The Chris Gethard Show with a humble tweet: Heck, ...

Wireless SNES

On May 25, 2016, around 8am PST, tired and bored, I bought a Super Nintendo console from eBay, with the exp...

How sad was I?

By all accounts, 2016 was an absolute mess of a year. The deaths of David Bowie and Carrie Fisher bookended...

2017

A Nearly Complete List of Armenian Representation in Contemporary Film and Television

A few years ago, I noticed a trend in the ethnicities of characters that needed to be weird, vile, or both.

Wrapping Rust in Ruby to Parse GraphQL

I have been looking for an excuse to learn Rust for some time now. Although I had read several tutorials an...

Cartoons, and Kids These Days

I still regularly watch cartoons. Kids these days are so fortunate to have the cartoons that they do.

2016

Signing petitions

There’s a petition being passed around amongst people working in the tech industry, http://neveragain...

Who's to blame?

For as long as I’ve been able to vote, I’ve lived in the blue parts of California. Regardless o...

The first move

About a week ago, I moved to San Francisco ten years ago. I didn’t intend to make a big deal out of i...

London: 12 Years On

I can tell you with excruciatingly embarrassing details how I became interested in Japan as a teenager. But...

Back to writing

As part of an entire suite of 2016 changes, I’ve decided to give public blogging another try.

2010

New Book

Two years after I first heard about it during my Bolaño craze, I have finally started Javier Marías’ ...

2009

Scratch

It’s not a city of lost souls. It’s not a place where the hopeless end up. From its origins San...

I say this not to deny my debts to him

“I say this not to deny my debts to him, which are many, but to lead you back, and to lead myself bac...

Morelliana

“I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by lit...

2008

This is the religion they do not teach

Nicodemus the poet, the youngest of the elders in the Sanhedrim On fools and jugglers Many are the fools w...

2007

936

“For a while all I heard was the noise Arturo made as he drank his tea, muffled sounds from the stree...

935

“He was laughing at me, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked to see him laugh. Around that time ...

934

“At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends l...

2006

873

His last phrase, sour smelling as the smoke of charcoal and disheartening, excited Stephen’s brain, o...

2005

I guess, you know,

Hovagim Saroyan I remember staying overnight at your vineyard on the north side of Fresno, to which my bro...

And a combination of the previous two, I suppose

The Cabinetmaker On Ninth Avenue in San Francisco between Irving and Judah Streets there used to be a cabi...

836

Chance Meetings Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such a d...

public service announcement

Lucy Garoghlanian by William Saroyan My grandmother came into the room and stared bitterly at everything, ...

800

“And so I know that certain things which I have pained in words are true and imperishable, and what h...

Being in debt is not so bad

“If you could take a penny from your pocket and balance the books you would do so. But you are no lon...

2004

twink-le

Stephen’s mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at the corner of quiet Foster Place wh...

still counting down to complacency

Who wrote this? Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter Salanka to all true believers divulg...

some smarmy subject

7 [63] I went into the barber’s as I usually do, experiencing the pleasure I always get from being a...

2003

epiphany on epiphany

The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out strong, a car to tote us around, ...

Because

Because even office cubicles Still have windows

2001

All that we see or seem...

…is just a dream within a dream…