Saturday, December 21, 2024
Friday, December 20, 2024
Joan Didion
I've now read most -- if not all -- of Joan Didion's major collections of essays. But having just finished The White Album, I feel that I've experienced another side of Didion, another angle into her thinking. The White Album is, in my reading, the most heavily focused on California: on what it means to be from the state, to live there, to experience it, to drive through it. And more: there are lively, moving essays on California's citizens and politicians and activists. What I most appreciated about The White Album, though, was less its range and more its honesty: Didion has a keen sense of smell, and anything contrived or stilted -- or both -- is subject to her immediate inquiry. Didion has some admiration for the later 1960s, but she's not entirely enthralled: so much of that idealism landed flat five years later: as if it never really had a chance -- because, according to Didion, it did not. But this does not make Didion a pessimist or a social conservative: instead, it makes her a realistic with a good sense of humor, and an even better appreciation for California: namely, its state as a dream, its state of dreaming. The White Album was a pleasure to read: in particular the parts about Nancy Reagan and the Reagan gubernatorial mansion in Sacramento. I won't say more about these: that's for you to read and enjoy!
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Q&A …
A Complete Unknown: Director James Mangold on Bob Dylan - Perfect Duluth Day (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Monday, December 16, 2024
Hmm …
(2) Catholics for Choice on X: "This holiday season, remember that Mary had a choice, and you should, too." / X
Yes. she was given a choice. And she made it. Stick to the facts.
Sunday, December 15, 2024
Hmm …
UPDATE 1-US Officials Say Most Northeast Drone Sightings Are Actually Manned Aircraft | Newsmax.com
Why not hop in a light aircraft and take a photo of one or another of them? A greater degree of certainty is altogether possible.
Saturday, December 14, 2024
Friday, December 13, 2024
Thursday, December 12, 2024
A poem …
There goes my delicious gingerbread man.
Can I nip you on your ginger-brown shoulder?
Can I lick you on your gum-drop buttons?
Hot from the oven, you seem to smolder.
Here's my delicious gingerbread man.
You can fit perfectly against my heart.
I won't let you go, you might run away.
You're the sweetest man ever to run, and be caught.
I love you my sweet gingerbread man.
Our ill-fated love may never grow stale.
I'll explore you all over with my tongue.
Just now you are my favorite male.
So is this the true love that then got away?
Or is this the one love that with love will stay?
Jennifer Knox
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
God help us …
Professors%20%u2018not%20sad%u2019%20about%20murder%20of%20health%20insurance%20CEO%20%7C%20The%20College%20Fix
When I was in college, professors were tole models, not assholes.
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Ted Hughes
I'm not much for poetry and I've never felt fully confident in my reading. But for whatever reason, I picked up Crow, the celebrated collection of Ted Hughes's poetry from the early 1970s. Again, I won't offer much by way of analysis here, but I will say that a few themes are clear: the world in this collection is a broken place, but not that emptiness is less the product of war than it is of isolation and decline. Several poems in Crow chart the this idea, taking idea of blackness as their guide. There's a memorable line about the "still-warm, stopped brain of a just-dead god." That sentiment seems to define much of the Hughes's collection, which reserves a special place, oddly, for whose have have never "been killed." The inevitability of death hangs over Crow: indeed, that sense of decline becomes pronounced that it functions as an unspoken assumption, as an entry into the poems. With that darkness comes moments when there is "no weeping left" -- when water, like people, "lay at the bottom of all things." Water, continues Hughes, was "utterly worn out" and yet, with a glimmer of hope, "utterly clear." In Hughes's world, that clarity seems the best we can hope for: and when we find it, we ought to channel its effects, lest we become -- as in a poem about Oedipus -- "the rag" of ourselves.
Why me want to think twice …
… before sending our kids to college …
Professors%20%u2018not%20sad%u2019%20about%20murder%20of%20health%20insurance%20CEO%20%7C%20The%20College%20Fix
college professors in my day were role models, not assholes.
Monday, December 09, 2024
Sunday, December 08, 2024
Searching for the real guy …
Finding the Historical Vergil | The Russell Kirk Center (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Not for the reason you might think …
We%20can%u2019t%20forget%20about%20Covid%20-%20The%20Spectator%20World
i was not vaccinated against Covid and i never caught it. But I was tested for it often, because I had to be if I wanted to visit Debbie. Result was always negative. i was never vaccinated against polio and i never got that.
Saturday, December 07, 2024
Interesting …
i've recieved lots of mail today about things that have taken place on this date. notably missing has been any mention of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Humble start …
Front Row Seat: When Bob Dylan was first noted in hometown paper - Duluth News Tribune | News, weather, and sports from Duluth, Minnesota (Hatip,
Dave Lull)
I first heard of a year later, when my classmate Phil Magitti played an early record of his for me.
Friday, December 06, 2024
Thursday, December 05, 2024
A poem …
Here I go singing sweet nothings to you
The tree-tops are waving in time to our tune
And all the grass waving, this glad afternoon,
As if we are royals passing by arm in arm.
Here I go singing sweet nothings to you
Our minds render passion, filling our sights
We dance through the passion, this is our time
To love and be loved more than ever, entwined.
Here I go singing sweet nothings to you.
To have and to hold I am yours, you are mine.
Until the small hands of night close our eyes
Then a crowd of small babies will carry us on.
Though we'll end, our love, immortal, goes on.
The apples of our eyes shine forever, live on.
—
Jennifer Knox
Jennifer Kno
Classic recommendations …
like%20squirrels%20in%20a%20wheelcage%20%u2013%20IWP%20BOOKS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
L P Hartley
I've just finished L P Hartley's The Go-Between -- and wow, this is an exceptional novel.
First, Hartley was a first-class stylist: this novel is perfectly crafted. Sentence by sentence, page by page: the book unfolds with enviable symmetry. The narration is steady, precise, and knowing. It would be hard to imagine a more fitting structure.
But more than that: this is novel that builds with emotional intensity; this is a book that thrives on plot, action, and character. This is not a novel lurking in the ether, focused only on ideas. Instead, it is one with ideas in mind, but which is fueled by the interactions between people: their dialogue, their sensitivities, their missteps.
For a book about a child (and a child of the British elite, at that), it is one which is terribly brutal in the end: what Leo Colston experiences that summer of 1900 would be traumatic under any lens; but to return to the site of the trauma decades later adds a further layer to the emotional quality of the novel.
I must say that I found The Go-Between to be refreshing in any number of ways: not least, its grounding in literary tradition. I enjoyed the slow gathering of forces, the confrontation, the culmination and decline. I found all of this to be as a novel should: this was not a book in search of philosophical concepts; nor was it one in which the narrator served as a foil for the author. No, this is just a great literary accomplishment full of pathos, tears, and recognition. Layer memory on top of that you have something truly lasting.
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