Ferrell, Gelman, Park: An Eternal Golden Braid

I. Come to my last New York reading (for a couple of months at least)! I'll be at the Asian American Writers' Workshop on Thursday 10/23 (7 p.m.), along with Monica Ferrell. Here's more info at Time Out, and at the AAWW site.

The space is vertiginously located on the 10th floor of 16 West 32nd Street. And 32nd Street, of course, means...Korean food????

II. I've been enjoying reading what things Andrew Gelman thought while reading PD...I especially liked the connection to Jonathan Coe, and to this bit in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

Hofstadter writes about how, when you read a book, you know you're coming to the end, which affects your expectations, unlike in real life stories or in a movie of indeterminate length, when the end can come as a surprise.

What's surprising is that I've been having all these ideas regarding surprise ("the aesthetics of surprise"), maybe Hofstadter will shed some light on this (or not, per Gelman!). Anyway—he finished my novel!