Sugar

"A smiley face but with hearts for eyes and the hearts are pulsating."

-- Sugar's tweet

That's why I hated losing her in my e-life. She really does have that extra writerly twist of mind. It makes for a great e-friend, where you are mostly trading only in words and phrases anyway. A little extra snap, crackle, pop in your cereal.

Putin

As the Ukraine crisis teeters along, we have a sharp encapsulation by Thomas Friedman on Putin's limiting perspective - essentially that of a thug with nukes.

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Any man who actually believes, as Putin has said, that the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century is caught up in a dangerous fantasy that can’t end well for him or his people. The Soviet Union died because Communism could not provide rising standards of living, and its collapse actually unleashed boundless human energy all across Eastern Europe and Russia. A wise Putin would have redesigned Russia so its vast human talent could take advantage of all that energy. He would be fighting today to get Russia into the European Union, not to keep Ukraine out. But that is not who Putin is and never will be. He is guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations toward his people and prefers to turn Russia into a mafia-run petro-state — all the better to steal from.

-- Thomas L. Friedman at The New York Times

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Three Journal

I don’t want to ignore my Three Journal as much as I have. However, not feeling a great deal of love for it, I see that if I am to continue to make progress on it, I am going to have to give it a formal place in my routines. Accordingly, my first plan is to give it a slot between the books of my daily reading sessions. I finished my chapter on Lincoln yesterday, and before going to the next book, my intention is to spend two or three days or so on a batch of entries for the Three Journal. To sweeten the slot, I would take up a book from either my morning or bedtime reading to turn to in between bouts of work.

Alas, this is not working well. Maybe it is just today and just me. The plan itself seems solid, and I still believe in it. However, the fact remains, I am not getting any work done, and this is not because I am just surrendering myself to the joys of my novel. I am not getting much reading done either. Like I said, maybe it’s just me, just today, just a mood. It also could be that I just need to shake out a new twist in the daily routine. Maybe I only need a little time to settle into it.

Hannibal

I have finished the first season of “Hannibal”. I am glad I gave the show another chance. Now I can follow the second season on TV. I have the first episode waiting for me on DVR, and the next one airs on Friday night. I didn’t think I’d be interested in a series about a cannibalistic serial killer, but it is an absorbing cat and mouse dance. Everyone says the second season is only better. I can see myself blogging the show, though not in the near future.

Philip Roth

Philip Roth, in an interview, tackles the charge of misogyny directly. I actually haven't read a single book of his, though I have certainly meant to, and still want to. However, I have seen enough discussion on the issue and his work that I have the idea that he is very saucy in his writing, that there is a lot of sex in his stories. Moreover, he is an older man who seems to have the attitudes of men who grew up in the sixties, when the fount of female sexuality seemed to open up and gush most freely and abundantly, and he is a bit macho about it: it's a man's world and girls are a lot of fun. It is phallic-centric, but I think you have to have a pretty substantive notion of 'misogyny' to lay that on him. In these highly feminist, politically-correct days, we do have such substantive notions. Of course, I cannot hold it against him. At least Roth does not seem to be given to rape fantasies, nor even to an appetite for rough sex - as far as I can tell without having read any of his novels.

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