January 2011
37 posts
▶ Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues →
“You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much,...”
– Francis Ford Coppola [via kottke.org]
“And the heart doesn’t die when one thinks it should.”
– Milosz, from “Elegy for N.N.”
Fitness and Virtue
What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul. “There seems to be a whole...
2 tags
War and Affection
wesleyhill:
I just read this quote from W. H. Auden: “In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need.”
And it reminded me of the picture everybody, including me, has been passing around on the internet.
Just wanted to note the...
“Indeed, Clinton has repeatedly described Mubarak as a family friend. Perhaps Ms...”
– President Obama, say the ‘D-Word’
1 tag
The joy of sharing a house with a hunter
Cleaning the monastery’s student freezer, I opened up a white plastic bag and found deer hooves, moose hooves, and a dead squirrel.
“You can watch movies and listen to music for tens of thousands of hours without...”
– n+1: Revolt of the Elites (via sarplus)
The House GOP's Plan to Redefine Rape →
This is a terrible, terrible idea.
My review of Newman's Unquiet Grave →
“Anyone, I think, who reads a novel for pleasure or instruction takes an interest...”
– Edward Mendelson (via)
“As Newt Gingrich discovered in the mid-nineties, making policy from the House of...”
– John Cassidy: Why Is Obama Smiling? : The New Yorker
1 tag
“I met Czeslaw Milosz in North Carolina once. A very nice man. We talked about...”
– my current world-literature professor
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Swedish Spinning
I just joined spinning classes to prepare for the bike trip I’m taking this summer and because Swedish winter is exceptionally dreary and I figured some natural endorphins couldn’t hurt. Seventy attractive Swedes in spandex gather on our stationary bikes around a stage where an instructor rides a bike next to this enormous console, where she adjusts the mood-lighting and the music,...
“The Übermensch and the Sartrean Existentialist-cum-Marxist belong in the pages...”
– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
When the sun goes down in Stockholm, the music... →
“Price became confined to a wheelchair in 1984 when a cancerous tumor affecting...”
– -CharlotteObserver.com
Reynolds Price, 1933-2011 →
Deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Reynolds Price, the North Carolina novelist and Duke professor.
“However wrongheaded you believe your ideological opponents to be, laying ‘all...”
– Ross Douthat (via ayjay)
“You know, I want to advise people watching at home who are playing that...”
– Rep. Anthony Weiner - TheHill.com
Portraits From a Job-Starved City - Rockford, Ill.... →
My hometown makes national news for being a shitty city.
“Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is...”
– Amy Chua Is a Wimp - NYTimes.com (via ayjay)
Police respond after A.C. Slater's photo smashed... →
Ah Chicagoland….
An interview I did with Paul Muldoon →
“We Live in Two Different Worlds,”...
“On a typically busy workday, Liu Yuan, 29, an administrative assistant at Lenovo...”
– The Facebooks of China (via sarplus)
“I’m not exactly a slow writer—when I’m really cooking I can do 800-1,000 good,...”
– Michael Chabon (via ayjay)
The Curious Politics of Arizona
[…] Indeed, by most social rankings, Arizona is huddled down near the states in the Deep South. Anecdotally, a visitor sees that the state is very big on, well, bigness, whether it’s waist sizes or SUVs. (The latter are collected like commemorative plates, and extras are displayed proudly in many residents’ front yards.) The 2007 crash wiped out fully half of the value of the...
“Apart from being gratified that my book has been filmed by one of the best...”
– Anthony Burgess, from the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange (via wwnorton)
1 tag
jetlag
The problem with sleeping till 2pm is that, here in Southern Sweden, it gets dark at 3:30pm.
2 tags
Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for Y. Z."
Never forget that you are a son of the King. — Martin Buber A year after your death, dear Y.Z., I flew from Houston to San Francisco And remembered our meeting on Third Avenue When we took such a liking to each other. You told me then that as a child you had never seen a forest, Only a brick wall outside a window, And I felt sorry for you because So much disinheritance is our portion. If you were...