Feldman's Faves: May 21, 2024

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I hope you all had a wonderful long weekend.

My youngest daughter just finished her high school exams and I am very proud of her (she had 12). But it is bittersweet knowing I am about to become an empty nester.  One of my “good friends” sent me this video of the song “Next Thing You Know” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c909oqLfao - and dared me not to cry. How do you think I did????

Today is Owen’s birthday – please join me in wishing him all the very best. I finally convinced Neill to jump out of a cake but it turns out that Owen is out of town today. Opportunity lost I suppose.

Finally, I want to congratulate PJ on a very successful articling year that he is finishing up on Friday. We look forward to seeing you when you are back and hearing all about the epic summer we expect you will be having.

This week’s theme is very interesting people.

ALICE MUNRO’S BEST – SELECTED STORIES By: Alice Munro  – I remember when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in literature.  She won the award and well deserved recognition for her mastery of the form of the short story.  It was a great day for her (of course) and a great day for Canada.  Munro who passed away last week at the age of 92 was a unique talent and storyteller who, better than anyone I have ever read, captured the essence of small town Canada and the struggles, conflicts and joys that people have experienced in our country. And she did it with fewer words than most but words that were carefully chosen and highly impactful.  Losing Munro is sad for Canada but her amazing legacy of short stories is here forever and really worth a read. As one reviewer notes, “It surprises me that I can’t remember the first time that I read Alice Munro, who died on Monday at 92.  As a writer who prefers the short story to all other forms, I have vivid memories of most of my first encounters with the masters and mavericks of the story, the ones who did it better than anyone while also radically expanding the parameters of what “it” could be: Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Flannery O’Connor, James Alan McPherson, William Trevor, Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore. I can tell you where I was, which story it was and whom I have to thank for bringing each of them into my life. But Munro felt like she’d just always been there. It’s like how on a clear day in Portland, Ore., where I live, you can see Mount Hood from downtown. You never notice the moment that it appears; you just look up and there it is, and has been all along, even when you can’t see it. The body of Munro’s work is expansive, almost overwhelming. This is a quality she shares with her fellow Nobel laureate Bob Dylan. There are enough hits to fill two volumes of “Selected Stories” that together run to nearly 1,500 pages, and enough left out of those to justify seeking out the 14 collections published between 1968 and 2012. (One or two have been billed at times as novels, but come on.) Some of these books are stronger than others, but there is no minor work. (And with apologies, Bob, she’s got you there.) Ask 10 Munro devotees to list their top 10 stories, and you won’t read the same list twice. If you’re looking for a place to start, you could do worse than to pick up “The Progress of Love” (1986) or “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001), both of which boast a disproportionate number of her greatest hits, alongside deep cuts that may leave you wondering why they weren’t hits themselves.

Upon the announcement of Munro’s passing, tweets poured in from across the literary world. Laura van den Berg, a novelist and story writer, wrote: “I’ve learned an endless amount from Munro’s refusal of clean resolution and her embrace of unfurling possibility. The quiet art of wrestling with the big questions.” Novelist Rumaan Alam wrote, “The truth is that Alice Munro is immortal, an absolute genius.” Curtis Sittenfeld, a best-selling author several times over, and Elliott Holt, a story writer and an editor at the Yale Review, both described Munro as “my favorite writer.” A young writer named Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, whose fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, wrote, “Her work has an off the charts emotional IQ — no one comes close.” HolyWhiteMountain, who lives in rural Montana, also described Munro as “secretly the great defender of rural people and small town life. The writer who pushes back on urbanity and the city but never stupidly.”

Upon the announcement of Munro’s Nobel win in 2013, critic James Wood, who had long despaired of her chances of winning, wrote in the New Yorker: “Everyone gets called ‘our Chekhov.’ All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are ‘our Chekhov.’ But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov — which is to say, the English language’s Chekhov.” I think that’s right, but it may not go far enough. Like Chekhov, Munro found the deep meaning in the small moments that might define or derail a life. But her stories, despite their dogged realism and homely subject matter, are boldly experimental in their structures and approaches to narrative. A Munro story may run upward of 40 or 50 pages, be as densely plotted as a novel, and cover years or decades, though rarely in linear fashion. The stories are intricately layered marvels of both excess and economy. If she had written Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Dog,” it would still start and end where it does, but it would be narrated by Gurov’s daughter on her deathbed, piecing together the story of her father’s life-altering affair between memories of her own love affairs, her mother’s broken heart and the disturbing ease with which she can imagine it all from Anna’s point of view.

Time is both her subject and her medium,” Lorrie Moore wrote in a 2002 review of “Hateship, Friendship” for the New York Review of Books. “Her narratives leap and U-turn through time, and the actual subject and emotion of a story may be deferred in such gymnastic travel, or may be multiple or latent.” Emily Adrian, a novelist who has taught classes on Munro, gave me her favorite example of such a leap: “In ‘Miles City, Montana,’ at the end of the first act, the narrator jumps forward in time and reveals that she has not spoken to her then-husband in decades and no longer knows anything about him. The story is otherwise focused on the period of time where the couple are together, but every line is informed by the shock of that revelation and its looming inevitability.”  Miles City, Montana” (from “The Progress of Love”) is among my own favorite Munro stories. If I had to pick nine more, let’s see: the title story of “Friend of My Youth” (1990) as well as “Meneseteung,” from that same volume; “White Dump,” also from “The Progress of Love”; “Cortes Island” and “Rich as Stink,” from “The Love of a Good Woman” (1998); “Tricks,” from “Runaway” (2004); “Queenie,” from “Hateship, Friendship”; “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” from “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968); “The Albanian Virgin,” from “Open Secrets” (1994). I’ve listed them in the order that I thought of them. Ask me again another day and I might switch out some or all of the back seven. The first three will never be unseated.

In the introduction to her first “Selected Stories” (1996), Munro wrote: “A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. … It also has a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” You’ll likely see all or part of that quote in many of the richly deserved eulogies, retrospectives and tributes that Munro is going to get over the coming days. It says something fundamental and important about what it means to choose this life, to be — and to keep being — the person who finds self-evident necessity in building bizarre shelters nobody asked for, and then waiting to see if anyone will be tempted to enter them and then beguiled enough to stay.  I’m reminded of the last lines of “Family Furnishings,” a story I didn’t put in my top 10 but now am already regretting — but in place of what? Here’s how the narrator winds up her story, and with her words I wind up mine as well: “I did not think of the story I would make … but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation. This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.’”  Ask ten people what their favourite Munro story is and you will likely get at least nine different answers…..Munro will be missed by all but her stories and the truths she tells will endure forever. Here’s a good review of her best stories from The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/14/alice-munro-best-short-stories

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - In conversation with Sam Altman – As many of you know,  I am always trying to figure out who is the most interesting person in the world. And while we all know the answer to that question is impossible to find, there are a number of excellent candidates for the title, one of them without doubt, being Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI.  The impact that Altman will have on every aspect of our lives is not fully understood. But what is clear is that it will be massive. In this conversation with the boys from All In we get a really good and in depth understanding of where AI, CHAT GPT and our futures may be headed. Here is a road map of the discussion from the PODCAST itself, “Welcoming Sam Altman to the show! (2:28) What's next for OpenAI: GPT-5, open-source, reasoning, what an AI-powered iPhone competitor could look like, and more (21:56) How advanced agents will change the way we interface with apps (33:01) Fair use, creator rights, why OpenAI has stayed away from the music industry (42:02) AI regulation, UBI in a post-AI world (52:23) Sam breaks down how he was fired and re-hired, why he has no equity, dealmaking on behalf of OpenAI, and how he organizes the company (1:05:33) Post-interview recap (1:10:38) All-In Summit announcements, college protests (1:19:06) Signs of innovation dying at Apple: iPad ad, Buffett sells 100M+ shares, what's next? (1:29:41) Google unveils AlphaFold 3.0 “https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/all-in-with-chamath-jason-sacks-friedberg/id1502871393?i=1000655220554

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon