Sunday Morning

I went for my walk this morning. The temperature was in the higher sixties. A little warm actually, for the early morning. But I am not too worried about it, because one more cold snap is expected, arriving tonight, bringing temperatures back down to the thirties. As we are now into March, I imagine this will be Winter’s last hurrah, and then we will be left to the mercies of a merciless summer, albeit with perhaps a few weeks of tender spring in between.

Neo-Conservatives

Do we still have neo-conservatives? It seems to me they went fairly extinct as the Dubya administration slinked away from power. Nevertheless, Damon Linker gives us an interesting historical account of the movement. He argues that at its inception, as manifested in the magazine The Public Interest founded in 1965 by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, neo-conservatism was meant to be anti-ideological. It was supposedly a reaction to the ideologically charged polarization of the country in the late 1960s:

[I]t is the essential peculiarity of ideologies that they do not simply prescribe ends but also insistently propose prefabricated interpretations of existing social realities — interpretations that bitterly resist all sensible revision. "The Public Interest" will be animated by a bias against all such prefabrications.

But I suppose innocence does not last forever.

( Read more... )

Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER

Is it old-fashioned to think that the purpose of literature is to educate us about life?

SONTAG

Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world.

-- Susan Sontag, The Paris Review

Wintry Blast

It has gotten cold faster than I anticipated. I thought the temperature wasn’t going to drop like a stone until the overnight hours. But all is cozy and I already have all the cats indoors.

Sunday Night

Pop goes to bed early, at nine. That means another set of log-ins, since I had already moved to the office, and I also hate putting the laptop to this extra work. The worst, though, is that he has to crank up the radio in his room. He’ll presumably shut it off when I ask, but one has to go to the trouble of waking him and asking.

I’m going to sleep in the big room, in a bid to improve my chances at keeping the cats quiet. Since the wind is kicking up a storm, I have brought the wind chimes inside, again. I still need to take down the ticky-tocky clock on the kitchen wall. What a slightly neurotic guy will do for quiet, eh? And the thing is, I know I am not going to get a good night’s sleep anyway. But you have to try.

“You know, Monk, with you, it will probably always be something. Even if your dad was as quiet as can be, or if you were living here alone, and you had it all as you like - no clock, no wind chimes, no country and western music - you would probably still be going mad over something else. Maybe it would be the smell of the house. Maybe it would be the noise of the traffic. But you would find something to drive you crazy. And do you know why?”

Why?

“Because you are fucking crazy! You just want a good excuse.”

Heh, well, that would explain it. But I have to try. I gotta sleep. I just want a good sleep. Is that really so crazy?