Via Eli's Coffer, who is carrying on the Yale Mafia's good name, this dialogue from Confessions of a Superhero, "a 2007 documentary about costumed panhandlers outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre":"Superman" and "Ghost Rider" are walking down the Walk of Fame.Superman: Ya gotta...
Monday, August 17, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Big Shoulders, Manly Words, Womanly Deeds?
If you buy a hardback copy of One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, as I almost did, you'll see that the inside flap blurb begins:With the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko was a Chicago institution . . . Am I wrong, or is that...
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Bookbag: "She had registered as a Democrat, figuring he would never be the wiser."
From Frances Costikyan's "The Captain in the Election District," published in her husband's Behind Closed Doors: Politics in the Public Interest:We have often unwittingly betrayed husbands and wives politically to each other. I remember one young bride who had married a very...
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Scando-Asian Calvinism is no way to run a city.
Is it important for politics to be entertaining? If you live in "Scando-Asian Calvinist" Seattle, according to Knute Berger, the answer is no:Big-city bosses make great story characters, and political wards and machines are fodder for entertaining narratives. It’s civic soap...
"Maginot Joe" Puts that MFA to Good Use
Joe Pernice would like to explain something about the song "Black Smoke (No Pope)" and his new novel It Feels So Good When I Stop:The story behind this tune is something akin to an Escher print. The Young Accuser is a band I made up for my book. That fictitious band gets a scathing...
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
It doesn't sum it up to say he's singing the blues. Well, maybe.
Some things hurt much more than cars and girls, and Prefab Sprout's silence was one of them, at least until word got out that they plan to release a new album in September. The title is Let's Change the World with Music. I only hope that the title's intention comes true.I...
Monday, August 10, 2009
In 1896, the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" was the matter with Kansas.
I am willing to admit that, as much as I love machine-style politics, it may not be always and everywhere the right way to run things. If the time and place is 1950s California and one fourth of the people in your state did not live at their present addresses one year ago,...
Bookbag: "Stop Gushing" Postscript
From Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950 by John Lukacs, this snippet from the society column "Deborah Debbie":After church this morning we all went over to Uncle Robert's and Aunt Helen's for lunch. The conversation centered on their forthcoming trip to Palm...
Monday, August 3, 2009
"Most likely they are."
Via Conor Friedersdorf, I see that Paul Graham hates meetings. He has his own solution; I prefer the Chicago method. From a 1950s news story quoted in City Politics:Alderman Keane (31st) arrived eleven minutes late for a meeting Tuesday morning of the council committee on...
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