November 2011

Truth, Decorum, and Lyin’ Ass Bitches

November 28, 2011

. The public square teeters on the edge of comedy and farce. No, really, it is over the edge, and who can say when the fall occurred – maybe 450 BCE? Every culture, though, reinvigorating the social struggle anew, relives the fall for itself, and the U.S. has had its own. In classical comedy – [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXIX) – “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World”

November 26, 2011

. The title “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’ is taken from St. Augustine. “Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree,” says Wilbur, “have known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, to the quotidian; Augustine says it is love that brings us [...]

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A Melancholy Thanksgiving

November 23, 2011

. This is the first Thanksgiving without my brother, who died in May, so it will be a melancholy holiday for my family. It was Jeff’s favorite holiday, as it is mine, and we will try to honor what he loved in it, and why he and Anne hosted our family feasts on the day [...]

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Occupy Distraction

November 21, 2011

Some quick thoughts on continuing Occupy Wall Street developments. A few recent dispersals of protestors, especially the much viewed UC Davis pepper spraying over the weekend, have called attention to unhappy trends in policing over the past decade. James Fallows, Alexis Madrigal, and Ta-Nahisi Coates, all at the Atlantic, had good thoughts about it all. [...]

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Jazz Is: 34 – ‘Poutin’

November 19, 2011

It was a foggy night. Or a long night, and my heart was foggy. The bright lights glared. The crazy cat stared. All around the city no one waited. From across the bay the foghorn made no call. I walked. Came to a club. Something moaned inside. I went in. There were smoke signals. Whiskey. [...]

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Tyranny of Victimhood: Why the Guardian gives a free ride to reactionary Palestinian movement

November 17, 2011

. This is cross-posted by CiF Watch managing editor, Adam Levick. Yesterday, some anti-Israel agitators pretended to be “civil rights” activists by riding on buses Israeli citizens in the territories use to travel to Jerusalem. These buses do not allow non-citizens (without proper permits) to enter communities in Judea and Samaria in order to stop potential Palestinian terror [...]

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Anatomy of an Anti-Semite

November 15, 2011

. Ross Vachon (of Malibu, CA, he informs) has reappeared. A month and a half after I pinned him wriggling to the specimen board in ‘Anti-Semitism, the Ur-Hatred,” he has apparently taken time to emerge from his burrow and discover what I observed of him. He had originally written me privately, in response to “The [...]

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CineFile: Let There Be Light

November 14, 2011

. I wish I’d had this for Veterans Day, but the following day nor any day is too late to view it. Let There Be Light was the last of three films made by John Huston for the Army Signal Corp during and just after World War II. Because of its frank, documentary record of [...]

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How We Lived on It (44) – Unravel

November 12, 2011

. Today is the birthday of my Jewel, from whom, for a while, I was apart. Related articles The Privilege of Being Here (sadredearth.com) Born on This Day (sadredearth.com) Jazz Is: 31 – Freedom Day (sadredearth.com) How We Lived on It (38) – Amen, Brother (sadredearth.com) How We Lived on It (37) – “Knoxville: Summer [...]

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Paterno, Penn State, and Mass Communications

November 10, 2011

. Rob wonders in the comments where to begin in considering the riotous reaction of Penn State students to the firing of football coach Joe Paterno. One can begin by hoping a day will come – tomorrow, forty years from tomorrow – when each student who protested the dismissal will grapple with at least embarrassment, [...]

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I, Governor

November 8, 2011

. Americans love personality. In the centuries since each individual in his distinction from every other unlike him was raised above competing notions of identity, no culture has exalted the individual personality more than that of the American. It is the altar of existential and political personhood. Be any wild and unaccountable thing, but above [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXVIII) – “I Depart from Materials”

November 6, 2011

  “Camerado! This is no book; Who touches this touches a man.” When Walt Whitman‘s Leaves of Grass was published in its first edition in 1855, it was admired by some, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and not so by others. Wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “ It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves [...]

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Warriors in Transition

November 4, 2011

. A little while back I stopped in at the New York branch of the National Museum of the American Indian. It is housed in the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, a monumental Beaux Arts building at the Battery and a National Historic Landmark  listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It has been adapted on [...]

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Razing Cain

November 2, 2011

. American public life is an embarrassment. This is not a relative judgment. The fact that it’s better than Nigeria’s should not be a comfort. Russia? Well, we’re not killing journalists yet, but that may begin with their not doing any work that would merit it by powers threatened by them. Why bother? Far from [...]

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