January 2012
6 posts
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The fragile teenage brain →
If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the...
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The Autumn of Joan Didion →
The primary question raised form my point of view: do you need to be a woman to enjoy the work of Joan Didion? In any case, the article, by The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan, is worth your time. For some inferior reading, you can see my own article on Didion’s Blue Nights here.
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Celestial Santa Claus
Facebook can always be an amusing place to dwell. When one of my online comrades posted the following rather amusing status update (which I can only assume is not facetious, and which I have admittedly reproduced here without permission):
So, I pray for good weather after 4 days of rain and it’s great the next day! Thankyou God, you are actually the man ;D
I simply couldn’t...
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“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is...”
– H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun (9 August 1926)
December 2011
2 posts
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Hitch
The eminent journalist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens, in the words of his contemporary Stephen Fry, “was one of very, very few people on earth whom I would have missed just as much had I never had the pleasure and fortune of knowing him.” Like most, I hadn’t the fortune of knowing Hitchens, but news of his death was met with profound regret. The knowledge that unpleasant...
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Go Back Into the Blue
There is something oddly enchanting about Joan Didion. Her prose features the kind of jagged, sharp, spellbinding, poetic, almost Bob Dylan-like sentences that leads some to use words like ‘rough’ to describe its lyrical refrains and labyrinthine twists. It has made her iconic: a literary celebrity, of sorts (assuming one is willing to forgive the oxymoronic feel to such a phrase). While in her...