-
The United States Senate is starting to annoy me. Seriously. By tapping a guy accused of having sex at a party with a 17-year-old girl to be America’s top law enforcement officer, Donald Trump discovered that even life forms as supine as congressional Republicans have a limit to how much sleaze they can rationalize. But I wonder if, in hindsight, the president regrets letting Gaetz withdraw from consideration instead of daring the Senate GOP to vote him down.
… everything we’ve seen from them since then proves that they do not, in fact, take their jobs very seriously.
-
They Break Things The … Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites.. but you know who’s really going to pay? … working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions… the essence of Trumpism: [is] to be blithely unconcerned that people without a college degree die about eight years sooner or that hundreds of thousands of Africans might now die of AIDS, but to go into paroxysms of moral panic because of who competes in a high-school girls’ swim meet.
-
John Graves' Small Swift Birds In recent decades it has become customary, and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight, to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon. What I myself seem to damn mainly though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight I would likely have helped in the ravaging…
But God! To have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine, and call at night in the sky.
-
For Valentine’s Day: Love Tokens from the Thames Another great post from the inestimable Spitalfields Life.
-
Victoria Goddard Fantasy readers, I highly recommend Victoria Goddard’s wonderful books. Her masterpiece, in my opinion, is The Hands of the Emperor, and for sheer fun (and, at first, disorienting weirdness), Stargazy Pie and its companion books are wonderful. Goddard is so good.
-
Bueller… Bueller… Bueller… Um, he’s sick. Vis a vis the 2025 coup: Checks and balances only work if the other two branches check and balance. Congress and the courts are, um, sick (unto death, for Congress). If they croak, they’ll be very difficult to resurrect.
-
Whaddya Think? Ringo Starr and Lucinda Williams need to record together. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, daylight’s burning.)
-
Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama Often, a highlight of my week is a new (to me) poem shared by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Today’s, “Neanderthal Dig” by Don McKay, is especially rich.
-
RIP, Garth Hudson “Anybody who gets a chance to play with Garth Hudson, they’d be a fool not to. As far as The Band is concerned, he’s the one who rubbed off on the rest of us and made us sound as good as we did.” – Levon Helm
Update: more here.
🎵
-
Ringo at Eighty-four Here’s a thoughtful and appreciative review of a new(!) album of all-new country songs by Ringo Starr. Some remind me a little of Nick Lowe.
-
Linky Goals @simonwillison.net says,
I wish people would post more links to interesting things ... Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.
That sounds right. I'll make that a goal for this year, and I'll start with Simon's (may I call you Simon?), "My approach to running a link blog." His custom-built image-size reducer is a real gift.
-
Yuck Ted Gioia:
Few things are more distressing than praise lavished on irredeemable ugliness.
At the risk of becoming a yeller-at-clouds, I fret about this in our current media environment: The Joker, American Horror Story, Saw (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, 3D), etc. This can’t be a sign of cultural health, right?
-
Coherence A couple of years ago, @ayjay’s Breaking Bread With the Dead. Today, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift:
… art is not confined by time. Just as material gifts establish and maintain the collective in social life, so the gifts of imagination, as long as they are treated as such, will contribute toward those collectives we call culture and tradition. This commerce is one of the few ways by which the dead may inform the living and the living preserve the spiritual treasures of the past. To have the works of the past come to life in the active imagination is what it means “to have gathered from the air a live tradition,” to use Ezra Pound’s wonderful phrase. Moreover, as a commerce of gifts allows us to give more than we have been given, so those who participate in a live tradition are drawn into a life higher than that to which they have been born. Bestowed from the dead to the living and from the living to the unborn, our gifts grow invisibly among us to sustain each man and woman above the imperfections of state and age.
-
Noice, Abe Hard to imagine a sweeter time than the Sunday afternoon between Christmas and New Year listening to “My Bar’s Jukebox” and enjoying local IPAs in the backyard on a sunny 67(F)-degree day with my associate.
subscribe via RSS