…another from a RAW original. And yes, this one is also available for purchase. If you’re interested, drop me an email at info@marktiedemann.com…
DISTAL MUSE – OBSERVATIONS, OPINIONS, EPHEMERA, & VIEWS
…another from a RAW original. And yes, this one is also available for purchase. If you’re interested, drop me an email at info@marktiedemann.com…
One of my more annoying personal characteristics is a seeming aversion to instruction manuals. For someone to whom reading is one of the four or five great pleasures of life, for whatever reason, I cannot abide the tedium of reading a set of instructions. For one thing, nothing seems to stick until I actually try to perform the functions laid out. I might as well be reading Linear-B. (Oddly, I can read theoretical texts without much difficulty—physics, art, philosophy, psychology, and so forth—it’s only step by step “how to” works that both try my patience and do me no apparent good.) …
I asked Donna this morning, “Is this the first Thanksgiving we’ve spent entirely alone, at home?” She thought for a moment and nodded. “I think so.”
Just as well. I seem to have caught a bug that has churned me up a bit the last couple of days. Not bad, just very uncomfortable, leaving me not in a very congenial mood.
But it got me thinking on the nature of the day and its uses.
We lounged, walked the dog, talked, read a little (I’m finishing up a stack I’ve been working on for a time and this morning completed William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways), talked some more, napped, ate a little. …
Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts. It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.
We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist. Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives. …
Okay, I’m going to be a bit less here for a while. For one thing, I think I’m fairly toasted from the election season. My blood pressure hasn’t been this consistently tasked since, I don’t know. And the aftermath has gone from bad to silly. Sure, I could probably comment on the silly (oh, the stupid—it hurts precious, it hurrrtsss), but why? Just seeing it should be enough and I don’t need to get angry all over again every day.
Look, guys (yeah, you old white farts who seem to think the only two things of value in this country are money and the military), Romney lost. …
My previous post, over-the-top as it was in some ways (yet heartfelt and, I think, not misdirected) spurred a few remarks about the so-called War On Women. There are people who claim this is a myth, a straw man argument, a distraction, that there is no war on women, only the mouthings of a few extremists with no real authority and, really, nothing has or will change.
I can agree to an extent that maybe War On Women is perhaps an overstatement, because—and it’s a fine distinction—I don’t really believe most of the politicians engaged in it care one way or the other. …
From the Department of the Chronically Clueless, we learn that Romney lost the election because of the Slut Vote. I thought I’d heard everything, but this is a new candor I’d not quite expected.
I’ve been saying for years that the major driver behind much of the deep core, far right, religiously self-identified GOP agenda is an obsession over Other People’s Sex Lives. This past year and change, they’ve been making it explicit in surprising, sometimes funny, but usually jaw-droppingly amazing ways, and this is just a continuation of it. If anyone is inclined to cut them slack over this anymore, it is an exercise in strained tolerance.…
I’m listening to Bartok. The Miraculous Mandarin, a recording by the St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting.
Earlier I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR. A report caught my attention about—you guessed it—why Mitt Romney lost. Or, more to the point, why he almost won. It had to do with something I find utterly baffling about the American political consciousness. I don’t know, maybe it’s true everywhere.
Basically, that during most of the campaign Romney ran on issues and did little to “let people know him personally.” This, according to the report, was the cause of his low approval numbers. …
I’m listening to the Republican strategists trying to figure out what happened and can’t help but feel that they’re still missing something.
Several of them are claiming that they lost because their candidate was “not conservative enough.” That this “betrayed” their values and led to a failure to bring off the electoral coup they’d hoped for.
I’m shaking my head. “Not conservative enough?” Please. You had a couple of those and your own base chose someone else. If those “values” of which you speak mattered that much, Rick Santorum would have been your man. Maybe Michele Bachman, but, if I’m reading your values correctly, she has a major flaw—she’s female. …
As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote.
I didn’t watch last night. Couldn’t. We went to bed early.
But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish.
To my small surprise and relief, Obama won.
I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers. I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election). …