June 2009
38 posts
What Would Obama Do If Obama Was Mad At Obama...
My 12/28/08 HuffPost re-posted here in light of President Obama’s White House speech to gays and lesbians on Monday. Andrew Sullivan has the full text. Obama’s crucial phrase in the speech was “It’s not for me to tell you to be patient …” This post of mine was a reflection on how to be impatient and victorious. It got better response than just about anything...
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“I have to smile at this, because it’s a Juliet Schwarz joke. Dr. Schwarz...”
– the latest of innumerable reasons why Netherland by Joseph O’Neill is proving to be such a joy. This book has so many moods. This quick burst of humor took me by surprise just now. If you know of a more entertaining use of the word “plinth” in literature, movies, finger-puppetry,...
(today's at-least-one-photo-a-day evidence) x 2
Explained (a bit) here yesterday.
Unpremeditated hack poetry, Sunday 1:19 a.m.
There are,
I am sure,
people who can walk
past a lit-up window
late at night and
resist
glancing into it.
There are,
I would guess,
even those who don’t need to resist
the urge, who simply
register
the window,
register
the reality of the glowing screen,
register
its potential for a 3D extravaganza with no need
for 3D glasses.
Such people,
if they do exist,
do not need
to do what I am doing,
do not...
5 tags
WatchThe first time I happened upon an extremely low tide here in Seattle was a couple of years ago. Luckily, I had my camera with me and some free time to shoot. The photos here were all shot at Carkeek Park.
I’m struggling for a word less empty-headed than “magical.” But nothing’s coming to me. So I’ll just say it. There’s something frankly magical about having...
“(In the same chapter, he wrote of the men, “Their lives were too human for...”
– a passage from “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the June issue of The Atlantic.
The article focuses on a seven-decade study of the physical health, mental health, and success of 268 students who entered Harvard in the late 1930s. There’s such humanity in...
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"the colossal vitality of his illusion"
I posted a couple of days ago about my longstanding perplexity over people who make a point of re-reading The Great Gatsby every year or two. After learning last week that Ian Frazier is one of these repeat customers, I finally decided to go back and read the book again myself. What I’m finding — all these years after reading Gatsby in tenth grade or whatever — is that Fitzgerald...
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Solidarity and Skepticism
Having decided not to write this post, I was getting into bed just now when I made the mistake of checking Twitter one last time. In doing so, I saw this, which led me to a blog post titled “Monsters in Iran.“ The writer, who is “literally getting my news from people Twittering from Iran,” wrote the following passage:
I sit here, in my safe little dorm room in New...
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Free Refills
This is not meant to be the sort of blog with two consecutive posts about the same cup of coffee. And yet here we are.
Sunday morning’s coffee was, as I wrote, the best I’ve had in some time. I also wrote how I made it, where the beans came from, and what blend of beans I brewed. I also rashly suggested that I might come back later and write more about this same cup of coffee.
The...
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Iran Election Protests: Berlin Wall or May 1968?
Amid the heady news coming out of Iran today, one of my favorite bloggers — Andrew Sullivan — wrote, “The last time a news event gave me chills like this was the Soviet coup. It ended the regime.”
I do not mean to imply that those two sentences sum up Sullivan’s thinking on the subject. He blogged exhaustively and intelligently about Iran, its elections, and the...
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“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden...”
– Now that is a sentence. Especially the bit about “casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot.” I’ve been to that party. I’ve slung the innuendo. I’ve forgotten introductions on the spot. But I wouldn’t have dreamed of capturing all that in ten words...
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SOUND OF A THREE-BLOCK WALK
9:49 P.M. 6/12/09
...
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Let’s call this what it is. I am...
Nazis Sentenced to Less Hard Labor Than Ling and...
I already had the phrase “hard labor” in my mind when North Korea sentenced journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling to 12 years of hard labor. Earlier on Sunday, I’d been reading Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” So this passage, on page 15, was my immediate basis for comparison when I learned of the dozen years that Ling and Lee face for their supposed...
“There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens in Bangkok. This isn’t L.A. or...”
– part of a quote from a David Carradine rep, commenting for an at-best premature story headlined “Did David Carradine Die From Sex Act?”
Netanyahu v. Obama (Judge Judy Presiding)
(I published this on Huffington Post yesterday. If you already read it there, click one of the next two links to skip this and move on to something else — such as 1) my earlier post about a General Motors ad that seemed to be illustrated with a fake police mugshot of President Obama; or 2) access to a Nathan Englander story about living in Jerusalem at a time when peace seemed certain.)
...
“I wouldn’t run you guys over. Not today. Maybe Monday.”
– from the jovial motorist who just approached a stop sign and crosswalk at a semi-unnerving speed
I’m about to get my first Nathan Englander...
THINKING about Sotomayor →
Julian Sanchez documents the mix of intellectual laziness and intellectual dishonesty at the heart of some of the attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. His takedown of Michael Goldfarb is particularly satisfying. Goldfarb is the same fair-minded commentator who waited all of 22 minutes into the Obama administration to declare ”Obama has inherited victory in Iraq. … The...
today's parenting and tomorrow's soldiering
My reading tonight produced an odd convergence. Two unrelated pieces of writing seemed to harmonize, to enter into unexpected conversation. The first: a blog post by The New Yorker’s Steve Coll titled “The Future of Soldiering.” The second: a thin-on-data NY Times mag story postulating a trend toward “‘free-range parenting,’ a return to the days when childhood...
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From pacifist professor to WWII Marine to senator... →
My total immersion in Robert Caro’s masterpiece about LBJ’s Senate years led me to Google the name of Sen. Paul Douglas. That yielded this 1951 cover story in Time. Fascinating glimpse of a moment when America was wrestling between isolationism and a global challenge to the USSR.
A taste …
This week Paul Douglas, a burly man in a rumpled grey suit, stepped on to the Senate floor...
New Yorker picks mind-opening Iraq book for its... →
After just now cryptically posting a couple of paragraphs from The Weight of a Mustard Seed, I Googled the author’s name and was happy to learn that The New Yorker selected the book for its online book club this month. There may be other books like it, but I haven’t seen them.
Steavenson spent her time in Iraq trying to learn Iraqi stories. Her Iraqis aren’t merely victims. They...
“It was this disquiet I was looking for, these flickers of conscience. This army,...”
– Wendell Steavenson in an excellent book I’m reading, The Weight of a Mustard Seed (The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny)