Sunday Night Journal
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Sunday Night Journal — June 20, 2010 I caught only the last few words of Mr. Obama’s Tuesday night speech on the Gulf Coast oil spill, and have just now tracked down the text and read it (you can find it here). As you may have heard, the speech was not especially well received, even
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Sunday Night Journal — May 30, 2010 Friday night when I went for my usual walk to the bay with the dogs there was a car, a dark red Ford Explorer, parked in the turnaround at the end of the street. It’s not unusual for teenagers to come down here on weekend nights and have
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Sunday Night Journal — May 16, 2010 I sat down this afternoon to resume work on the next installment of the memoir, and had written a few paragraphs when my wife offered me some lunch, which of course I accepted. Then we decided to eat in front of the television, something we haven’t done very
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Movie Roundup, End of Year Edition Hard to believe it was back in June when I did the last one of these. I see by our Netflix history that we’ve had 27 rentals since then, and there have been a few from other sources, so I’m not going to mention all of them, just the
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Klaatu the Genocidal Peacenik NOTE: spoilers follow. Don’t read any further if you’ve never seen The Day the Earth Stood Still and don’t want to know how it ends. (I think this is fair use of this image, copied from Wikipedia). If you’ve seen it, you know this classic 1951 movie involves an alien emissary
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Women, Music, and Modernity “You’re into girls.” That was the startling but not inaccurate remark my wife made last Saturday when she walked by as I was browsing YouTube for Patty Griffin songs. Since 90% of my music listening is done when I’m alone in my car going to and from work, and she is
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Complaining of the People (A Metapolitical Comment) Yeats tells how Maud Gonne (“my phoenix”) admonished him for regretting that he had spent much of his life working for the ungrateful Irish people: Thereon my phoenix answered in reproof, ‘The drunkards, pilferers of public funds, All the dishonest crowd I had driven away, When my luck
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Cart and Horse and Caritas This is a follow-up to last week’s journal; I want to expand a bit on my reasons for more or less dropping out of the bitter and embittering American cultural-political debate. (My apologies if I repeat myself; I felt that I had not said all that I wanted to say.
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Goodbye to Politics and Culture Wars It’s been twenty-five years or so since I first heard someone explicitly take politics into account in his views of another person. A friend was asking me about a mutual acquaintance, saying “I’m not sure about him. He seems like a nice guy and his politics are okay, but…”
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Nature’s Indifference? I think every person has a sense that he is at the center of a world which exists mainly in relation to him, that he is the main character in a novel or play. And that’s because he is. We understand that a human author imbues, as far as possible, everything in his
Light On Dark Water 