I’m off! To Tucson!
Information about what I’m doing on the Migrant Trail and why
“Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.”
- Sargent Shriver
Moment of Sap:
Sometimes I feel so loved by my friends and family that I feel like my heart is going to explode. It’s getting worse with age.
By the time I’m a senior citizen I’ll be a pile of mush.
The deeper answer is that Lawrence v. Texas, in all its emotional, social and legal complexity, is a reflection of life itself. People do indeed lead complex lives. They fall in love, cheat, lie, drink. None of this makes them any less entitled, as Justice Kennedy put it, to “respect for their private lives.” If it were otherwise, there would be very few people—gay or straight—entitled to liberty.
Barack Obama
If Obama loses in November, he at least has a bright future as a literary critic. In that case, we’ll let him write on more Liveright books anytime.
(via liverightpub)
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
Who is that angel?
San Francisco, California. March 2012.
Squint skyward and listen—
wnyc:
This morning, Margaret Atwood visited WNYC to discuss her book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. She also talked with Brian Lehrer about the question at the center of the our End of War series: Is war inevitable?
-Jody, BL Show-
She is just so awesome.
