Because I have nothing much to say this morning.
However, our reading group is doing the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso today. I will have something to say about that. Later.…
DISTAL MUSE – OBSERVATIONS, OPINIONS, EPHEMERA, & VIEWS
Because I have nothing much to say this morning.
However, our reading group is doing the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso today. I will have something to say about that. Later.…
I want to talk a little bit about women.
I like to count myself as a feminist. Unapologetically. I would like to believe that I’ve been one more or less forever, and maybe on some level that’s true (and if so I credit early exposure to science fiction, which I’ll talk about later**), but really what I could point to as early feminism was more a matter of an idealized attitude about fair play, not any kind of studied assessment concerning women’s rights and so forth. My progress toward self-conscious feminism took a while.
First, a video:
Okay, it is that negative reaction she experienced which (a) I don’t “get” in any visceral way and (b) I find continually, almost universally shrugged off as “harmless” by people who otherwise would never dream of behaving that way.…
This week at Left Bank Books, as December begins and Christmas is upon us, a number of books—Staff Picks (all of us have them, please check out the list)—are being offered at discount for on-line purchase. For Wednesday, the 5th, my particular pick is…
China Miéville’s novel Embassytown is, to my mind, one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade. Not necessarily the best novel published as science fiction, but one of the best examples of what science fiction at novel length can do.
Maybe that’s a fine distinction, possibly one without a difference, but what I want to talk about now is what I mean by “science fiction” in this context and recommend a first-rate experience.…
We had a treat recently and I wanted to share a bit of it.
I like jazz.
No, that’s not accurate. I love jazz. So imagine my delight to be asked to work an event at our local jazz spot, Jazz At The Bistro, selling copies of John Pizzarelli’s new memoir, World On A String, for Left Bank Books, during his quartet’s Saturday night performance.
There is something about live jazz that just goes right into me. A good group of masterful musicians, having a conversation on stage, it’s just magic. Pizzarelli is one of the best guitarists in the business and frankly, I didn’t fully appreciate just how good he is till this event.…
I have published 529 posts on this blog.
Absurd.
I started the Distal Muse as part of an effort toward self-promotion, an effort that has in some ways failed. But in the years since it was first established (I think it’s first incarnation, as part of a ridiculously complicated site, was 2003) I’ve used it to hone a skill—the short essay—and indulge whims that I frankly have little interest in trying out professionally. After that original site was replaced by the current one, in 2006 or ’07, I started using it for all sorts of things, including putting up original art.…
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.…