"Ljubljana is lovely, and incredibly prosperous," he wrote home to a secretary from the conference, though the meeting was "incredibly disorganized and wasteful of time and energy, but it is, I think, worth it to me." To the worldly and sardonic Dick Goodwin, he cabled a summary...
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Bookbag: The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin
In practice, it is perfectly possible to be coherent without having a theory. The sculptor fashioning his statue out of marble has a coherent aim, and realizes this aim in an object which manifests and embodies that coherence, but he need not be, and generally is not, guided...
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Hold 'Em, NYU
As NYU's protest/"blast from the past" unravels, it would be nice to take a moment to commemorate those right-wingers who, during the "occupation" wars of the 1960's, gave as good as they got. Well, almost as good as they got:. . . twenty-two YAF members occupied the headquarters...
Friday, February 20, 2009
"Oh, how the ghost of you clings!"
Watchmen without cigarettes—isn't it ironic?: Where were Laurie's smokes, Zack?"Yeah, Alan hates smoking. Alan Horn—the head of the studio—that's his biggest, biggest thing. The Comedian can smoke, because he might be a bad guy, he's the bad guy, but that's it. That was the...
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Follow-Up: A Story about Shame
This story from Floyd Patterson (as told to Gay Talese) combines my two obsessions—shame and boxing—and is beautiful besides:"It is not a bad feeling when you're knocked out," he said. "It's a good feeling, actually. It's not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don't see angels...
What If They Threw a Shame Culture and Nobody Came?
I've been having a long and glorious seizure over the blogosphere's recent interest in shame—how could I be anything but ecstatic that Douthat, Dreher, Serwer, McArdle, and Friedersdorf have all taken up my favorite topic?Yet it seems, sadly enough, that shame needs defending...
People Who Kiss in Train Stations, Local 527.
To arms, brothers and sisters! We are under attack! (Via.)Unless the sign simply means "You may not kiss in this train station if you have weird bumpy hair, or if you are wearing a stupid hat," in which case everything's fi...
Who Writes This Stuff, Terry Southern?
Or maybe Henny Youngman, since this story is his kind of bare-bones, set-it-up-and-knock-it-down, premise-and-punchline joke (via Jacob Sullum):A 20-year-old Port Hope, Ont., man has been ticketed for smoking in a car in which a 15-year-old girl was one of his passengers.While...
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Shame! I'm Gonna Live Forever, Baby Remember My Name . . .
And you thought I was the only one awaiting a Shame-Culture Renaissance:It is a measure of how limited and poor our understanding of politics is nowadays that the only thing Linker envisions as an alternative to laissez-faire morality is legalistic intrusion into personal behavior...
Transgenderism was just a red herring
When I told my mother I would be sharing an apartment with two men, she shrugged. "Hey, it's your uterus." Happily, I survived the year with my maiden virtue intact and with a new appreciation for the arguments against mixed-sex housing, which, apparently, my alma mater may...
Friday, February 13, 2009
I'll Drink to My Defeat If You'll Drink to Yours
Peter Suderman's post on civil partisanship sounds like this line from The Big Sleep: "I knew Sean Regan in the old days, when he used to run rum out of Mexico and I was on the other side. We used to swap shots between drinks. Or drinks between shots, whichever you lik...
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Hit That Book with a Club
If you live in New York City, please consider joining "X. Trapnel's" new libertarian book club. You'll get to learn his real name! I'll be there, in my capacity as loyal oppositi...
Because Boxing is a Metaphor for Everything
For better or for worse, the “alternative” generation, and especially the alternative comic book, has been almost completely irrelevant to my comics life.Say it ain't so, Joe! That was Leigh Walton in response to Diamond Comic Distributors' announcement that they're raising...
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Boxing Breaks Your Face. It is Designed to Break Your Face.
More bookbag from Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History:The very transience of the ideal body is made all the more poignant by the less than perfect bodies that surround it. This phenomenon is foregrounded in boxing—and not in other Olympic sports such as the discus or running—by...
Three Uses of Smoking
I. Brechtian AlienationAudiences should be encouraged to smoke as "it is hopeless to 'carry away' any man who is smoking and accordingly pretty well occupied with himself." —Kasia Boddy, quoting BrechtII. Calendar MemoryThe family admires Zeno's remarkable memory for birthdays...
Monday, February 9, 2009
"Oh, I'm sorry. Did we get our movement in your status quo?"
And that's not all Nicola Karras has to say to Sam Tanenhaus:American conservatism has always been counterrevolutionary conservatism, whatever Russell Kirk says. Even more than that, it's always been a youth counterrevolutionary conservatism. It was born at the 1960 Republican...
The road to success is paved with cheesecake.
How to justify such brazen-faced hit-baiting? I am rescued, again, by gender roles.Christina Hendricks is the very flower of womanhood—you can tell by the stems. So how does it feel to see her go butch?To ask the same thing a different way: Would the second picture be half as...
'Cause He's Not Not Not Not in Your Academy
William Deresiewicz turns in an A paper:. . . The audacity of Bolano's fiction, its disregard for convention and even probability, puts me in mind of a remark a friend once made after a jazz concert. I said I thought the keyboard player had really been taking chances, and he...
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Is Boxing Conservative?
Is boxing conservative? Well, do all mailmen drink bourbon? Are butchers known for their stamp collections? Are ducks susceptible to the Pelagian heresy? "Is boxing conservative"—what question could be more idle?But there may be some interesting overlap between conservatism...
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Wanted: Young Man, Single and Free; Experience in Love Preferred but Will Accept a Young Trainee
I notice that the music blog Mainstream Isn't So Bad has posted a copy of my favorite song as last week's bit of "Sunday Soul." I really do mean favorite song, too; I've drafted plenty of Top Ten lists, all radically different, but all listing "Want Ads" by Honey Cone at the...
Thursday, February 5, 2009
An Irishman by Any Other Name
This joke from Elinor Teele's review of The Irish Americans: A History:My great great grandmother insisted on calling her County Dingle maid Marie, real name Catherine, since her Irish cook had the same name.reminds me of my favorite joke from Florence King's commemoration of...
In the Future, When We are All Bohemians
When it comes to Sarah Palin and the future of conservatism, Conor Friedersdorf can't stop, won't stop:Americans disdain the cultural radicalism of men like Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and their ilk, and comparing their lives, rhetoric, and personas to Barack Obama, a cautious,...
If D. H. Lawrence is Too Uptight for Your Tastes . . .
How should we feel about the appearance of an Edward Carpenter biography? If we are Martin Pugh, delighted. But is this wise? Carpenter was gay before gay was chic (the late 1800's), for which he is to be applauded on the grounds of extraordinary courage if nothing else, but,...
"I Only Went With Her 'Cause She Looks Like You"
Aloof from Inspiration asks a stumper:How does pop music shape our own erotic understandings, the kind of desires that we find desirable, particularly during one’s adolescence?Her own story:My holy teenage triumvirate between the years of 12-16 was Joy Division, The Cure, and...
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
". . . the expectation was that, if you had a fistfight with somebody, you'd become friends afterwards."
When they asked Sugar Ray Robinson what he liked best about boxing, he said, "Getting hit." Speaking of kindred souls!I did not expect to have my combativeness validated at last night's Opium Magazine Eighth Anniversary event, which I was promised would be full-to-brimming with...
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Something to Keep in Mind
Schwenkler knows I love him, so I can ask, in response to these posts, what he would have written about this Reagan gaffe (as described by the late, great John Patrick Diggins):A hostile journalist, determined to reveal his ignorance, asked Reagan if he knew who the leader was...
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