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Teachout on Stoppard
Two-and-half years after his death, I miss reading new essays (and reviews and blog posts and tweets) by Terry Teachout. Here’s a good piece about Tom Stoppard, whom I also will miss profoundly, someday. (He said, perhaps naively).
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Two(+/-) for ThreeSCOTUS last week:
(1) Affirmative action - yep.
(2) Student loans - yep.
(3) Refusing to sell services to folks you disagree with - nope.*
A web-design service is just that -- a _service_; it's not an expressive act. You're a hired hand. If you offer services, you can't say, "but not for the gays." * update: nope-ish. For some fool reason, Colorado agreed to stipulate that the plaintiff was, in fact, engaging in personal expression in creating webpages for hire. I don't get why they agreed to that, but there it is. Makes the ruling less wrong. Maybe not right, but less wrong.
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from "East Coker" | T.S. EliotAnd what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Trite, perhaps. But true. Often, the “tried and true” is trite. But, so what? The truth is the point.
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Winter After the Stillbirth | Renee Emerson
My husband dreads the winter. Born himself on the darkest day of the year and disregarded, he sees nothing but black ice, danger of pipes bursting, other people’s cats freezing, left outside like a name scratched off the list. But fish still swim beneath the frozen surface of lakes, and there are frogs that let their blood ice over in the mud to thaw again in the spring, green Lazarus come forth.And even I, born on the last day of winter, can see how the snow can cover this all up to look cleaner than it ever was, for a moment at least, while it is still falling in our hair, in our up-turned, hope-filled faces.
Jon Flaming (Am. 1962-), Peggy Sue BBQ, Dallas
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