Biting the Bullet Points
Items in the passing parade:
- Into the sunset? You’ve probably noted a reduction in frequency of posts here. I’m musing on whether and/or with what purpose to continue this blog – ruminations influenced by factors ranging from personal/family/work considerations… to tonight’s news of the apparent absorption into the OBorg of my political hero and the original raison d’etre for my alter ego’s animadversions.
- Go read David Brooks in tomorrow’s Times. Yes, David Brooks. Whether Obama rises to the occasion or not, whether or not we get a New New Deal, one thing is certain: People are going to curse the name of George W. Bush. (If Depression I gave us Hoovervilles, will Depression II give us Bushburbs?)
- The Girls of MSNBC. What goes through the heads and hearts of the kept women of this hothouse of misogyny – up to and including Rachel Maddow (who seems, per her New York Magazine piece of puffery, to be just hunky-dory with KO, Tweety, Chuck and the Ladz)?
- Hopeless for a Cure. I know we’ll eventually conquer cancer, AIDS, schizophrenia and hangnails, but if the Martians do invade, they’d better be prepared for something a lot more persistent.
- Derridean Derivatives: Another one to go read – John Lanchester’s consideration of the financial meltdown as a crisis of postmodernism, in the Nov. 10 New Yorker. The nut graf: “If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.”
4 comments:
I hope whatever you do, you keep on writing about something.
I'm going to miss your extraordinary ability to find the exact words for this weird political landscape. Not even Sideshow Bob could have turned a neater phrase.
D'oh! (To turn a sloppy phrase...)
Thanks for the props, lexia. I do enjoy this, and I may well find a new wellspring of energy to fuel it with my erstwhile frequency. I haven't made some hard and fast decision to quit... but I'm just acknowledging that the feelings that spurred it initially have largely settled into something else, something that's a bit lower-octane.
But I'll see. Maybe the world will supply sufficiently sexy outrages or inspirations for all of us... lures to keep thinking and learning in public.
Into the sunset? You’ve probably noted a reduction in frequency of posts here. I’m musing on whether and/or with what purpose to continue this blog . . .
Ah yes, as with my own "Out to Pasture" post of several weeks ago. Blogging is, as someone tried to warn me, incredibly time-consuming.
I find some of the most interesting blogs are those that began for a simple or single motivation but then, having lived past their initial purpose, go on to reflect the blogger's wider interests and reactions over time.
So I say keep it, and don't worry: frequency is overrated. Simmers produce more flavors over time than does a roiling boil.
And, I suspect, as long as there is occasional subway commuting time, there will be hypergraphia. And if there's a Falstaff blog, there will therefore be a place to read the resulting screeds. That would be a good thing.
In Rachel Maddow's defense, she doesn't watch television (she claimed, probably to be gracious to her benefactor, that she only watches KO, but at another time said she doesn't watch any of the other shows, because she doesn't want to be derivative; and since he's on live right before she is, I'd be surprised if she has the leisure to watch more than his last few minutes before the toss). When she's been offended by something when she's part of the panel, she's called the person on it -- especially her "fake uncle Pat," of course, but she doesn't hesitate to speak her mind in discussion with any of them, albeit respectfully. Beyond that, she seems to have strenuously avoided being a part of the televised punditry echo chamber and therefore makes almost no comment on media coverage of politics, intent only to focus on the politics.
Anyway, I think she's great and a class act. Especially in comparison to the other time slots there.
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