AdamSmith

I for one am thinking of going back to carrier pigeons.

BTW, you know only they get away with calling themselves that. Like many such terms, woe betide any of us not from there who let slip that label. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coonass

Thank you! And for the rest as well.

Details!

I just had dinner and now I am hungry again. The ex used to remark that the South is where, while eating and enjoying one meal, you're likely already talking about the next one to come.

Yes! Most importantly:

From the color -- more brown than red -- I would hazard it is Cajun jambalaya, rather than the Creole version which would be redder due to tomatoes being more plentiful, the nearer to New Orleans one is. I wish I had some now. (Irrelevant anecdote -- the Cajun ex and I spent hours one day making an enormous pot of gumbo for a party that night. Making that much roux is considerable labor, especially taking into account burning the first batch and having to start over. After everyone had come and gone, I went to the kitchen for a final spoonful or two before bed. Lo and behold -- no gumbo! He said after spending that much time on it, he had got sick of it and so gave it all away to departing guests. Hmphh!) Back to the OP for a moment. In the spirit of being kind to intelligent design, let us also entertain... Epicycles Phlogisten The ether The brain as an organ for cooling the body ...Fair and Balanced!

Judge exposes Texas strip clubs’ lack of cover by ordering larger underwear Tim Walker The Independent Wednesday 01 May 2013 In a cheeky ruling, which positively bulges with double entendres and dirty literary jokes, a Texas judge has ordered strip club dancers in San Antonio to don larger underwear. Chief US District Judge Fred Biery delivered the formal written ruling on Monday: “The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Bikini Top v The (More) Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Pastie” demands the city’s strip joints adhere to a new regulation, requiring dancers to wear bikini tops instead of the miniscule, nipple-obscuring “pasties” previously favoured. “An ordinance dealing with semi-nude dancers has once again fallen on the Court’s lap,” wrote Biery. “The age-old question before the court, now with constitutional implications, is: Does Size Matter?” Strip clubs, he complained, had “clothe[d] themselves in the First Amendment” while making an “alleged naked grab at unconstitutional power”. They “seek an erection,” he went on, “of a constitutional wall separating themselves from the regulatory power of city government”. The lawyer acting for San Antonio’s strip clubs saw the funny side, saying the ruling was “one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever seen”. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/judge-exposes-texas-strip-clubs-lack-of-cover-by-ordering-larger-underwear-8599728.html

Interview from 2002 that I just came across... Reynolds Price by Caleb Smith BOMB 80/Summer 2002, IN MEMORIAM Photo by Jill Krementz. Courtesy of Scribners. On a rainy Sunday in March I drove to Reynolds Price’s house in the country outside Durham, North Carolina. The air after a morning thunderstorm was still heavy, an atmosphere that seemed to dilate the moment. My trip through those woods and swamps was something of a homecoming—Price and I were just back from separate travels in the deeper South. I’d been to Charleston, South Carolina, an old capital of Southern history and culture. Once a great Atlantic slave port, now a regional curiosity, the preserved city is exquisite and frigid, an assembly of monuments to denial. The dead in Charleston are muzzled by the living, and the ghosts of the brutal past, visible but obscure, had spooked me badly. I was glad to be on my way to see somebody who knew them well. Price’s first novel, A Long and Happy Life, was published in 1962; since then he’s produced a whole shelf of books—fiction, poetry, translations, drama, essays and a memoir called A Whole New Life, the story of his survival of cancer, a tumor in his spine that nearly killed him. Eighteen years later, Price wears none of the invalid’s aspect. He sits on his wheelchair more like a monarch on a throne. Price’s writing as I understand it has always been nourished, rather than cowed or oppressed, by the oldest narrative traditions, from the gospels on down. His main experiment is imaginative, rather than formal. And the force of his work is restorative, rather than iconoclastic. Modern discourses carve a person into body and mind—Price finds these two halves inadequate and returns the spirit to his characters, a sense of “the world’s unity as a vast kinship.” The notion of a formal art severed from the lives of its makers and audience looks pedantic, even grotesquely clinical, next to Price’s highest achievements, his stubborn commitment to “honest narrative.” His new book, Noble Norfleet, is a fictional confession rising from the fissure between skin pleasures and spiritual ecstasy, between madness and revelation. Of course I knew, that Sunday, that no brief conversation could hold such a ponderous biography or the full weight of those mighty themes. Rather, Reynolds and I poured a drink and talked. Recorded here is simply a visit, which between us is something shared, not paid. Caleb Smith Tell me about your trip. Reynolds Price We drove over to Memphis, which strangely enough is almost exactly as far from here as New York City. We saw old friends there, then we took this road that runs from Nashville all the way to Natchez, Mississippi. CS The Natchez Trace. RP We drove almost the whole length of it—nearly 300 miles—on a day as cloudy as this one. Amazingly beautiful. I don’t think we saw ten cars on our way to Jackson. I wasn’t able to go to Eudora Welty’s funeral in August, so I wanted to get down there and do something in the way of rounding off my long friendship with her. We had dinner with some of Eudora’s friends and family and went over to her house, which is sitting there empty now, waiting for museumification. It seemed both very desolate and also very haunted by her presence. She had lived in that house every day from the time she was 15 years old; she died at 92. It was her central place of residence for all those years, and there’s a lot of her still in the house. Finally we drove on through Alabama up to Atlanta, where we spent the night, then through South Carolina and on home. The deep South is not the upper South. It’s deeply different—much older feeling (though it’s not)–and yet there are tremendous likenesses. The social life and the accents and the body language of my friends who are my age and come from Mississippi are almost identical to the ones I grew up with as a boy in eastern North Carolina. But it’s 800 miles away. CS I’ve just come back from my first trip ever to Charleston, and it felt like even the things I was discovering about that place were somehow genealogical to me. RP And what does it all come out of except slavery and the Confederacy? I finally have to think that’s what the South is still about. I was born in 1933, in the Depression; and at that point, the South was a very separate country. People rarely left unless they were miserable with their station in life or fleeing their mother or father. CS You think people’s whole imaginations about the world were more regionally bound? RP God, yes. My father, who was born in 1900—a wonderfully witty and perfectly viable man—saw no reason whatever to go outside the state of North Carolina. He made a trip to New York once on business, and he couldn’t wait to get home—those harried people were driving him insane. Then in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s virtually everybody with a college education got out of the South—everybody who was interested in the arts went straight to New York City. I stayed, for complicated reasons that had nothing to do with virtue. We were the most hated place on the face of the Earth in those days, because of the tragic responses to the civil rights movement. Some of the hatred was righteous judgment on the South, and some of it was just utter hypocrisy—as though the whole nation isn’t profoundly racist. And now, again, the South has slowly emerged and is looked upon as a very attractive part of the world—but also still very exotic and a little scary. When you get off the interstate at a diner in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and see the waiters and the staff, you realize that this ain’t Kansas, Toto. CS I took a walk around a swamp in Charleston. You’re about a foot above the stillest green water you’ve ever seen in your life. Alligators are sunning themselves on these planks. The Spanish moss. It’s the tropical gothic that’s been so fantasized. RP People think we made it up. (laughter) The first time I ever went through one of those gardens was with some Duke colleagues of mine in the late 1950s, in a rowboat. You paid a young black man, probably 13 years old, to row you through the swamp. One of the people with us was British. He saw these very live alligators and this very dark water, and he said, “About how many people a year do you lose in here?” The young man said, “’Bout 11.” (laughter) I loved his precision—11 people vanish in that swamp in a year. CS Not ten, or a dozen. RP No, 11. (laughter) That was very Southern too. CS I remember an essay you wrote for the Southern Review about what it takes for a piece of writing to qualify as Southern literature. That essay made a very similar point, bringing it all back to the history of slavery and white-on-black oppression. Even now, that’s not the sort of thing you find in many prefaces to Southern anthologies. You hear more about front-porch storytelling. RP The other morning we were having our farewell breakfast at the Hilton Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. I’ve gone to that hotel for a number of years, and I said to my friend, “Why is it that every single black person I meet in Mississippi is just so inexplicably kind to me? They have every reason in the world to cut my throat.” You have this unspeakable white oppression of blacks—but also, simultaneously, you have this completely inexplicable immense ongoing interrelationship. Where does this working intimacy continue to come from? CS I want to ask you a little more about Eudora Welty. Last summer you wrote a brief obituary for her, in the New York Times. You described meeting her so long ago and the way she became a mentor to you. Is Eudora Welty one of the reasons you feel yourself fastened to the tradition of what’s called Southern writing? RP She was certainly my one close contact with the first great generation. I actually saw William Faulkner once at an awards ceremony—where Eudora presented him with the gold medal in fiction from the American Academy–but he died a few months later. I met Katherine Anne Porter. I met, and was treated very kindly by, Robert Penn Warren. But Eudora was my enduring close friend. I met her when I was a senior at Duke. I was 22; she was about to turn 46 and was an easy person to be friendly with. We had great amounts of fun together and a great deal in common. Even though her father was from Ohio and her mother was from West Virginia, she herself was born in Mississippi and had the odor of that world about her—that upper-middle-class white world. Her family had a little money because her father was president of a small insurance company. My family was not quite genteel poverty; we were people who’d wound up being unmoneyed upper middle class. Never farm people, always living in either the small town where my grandfather Price was in the clerk of courts office or in Macon, this village of 137 people where I was born and where my mother’s father was stationmaster of the Seaboard Station. Warren County, North Carolina, was nearly 70 percent black when I was born. Lord knows, there was virtually nothing to admire in the way the structure of segregation worked in that part of the South; yet the quantity of murderous violence and the relentless white meanspiritedness that erupted in Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana did not erupt in my part of the upper South. That’s something to be grateful for–and I don’t know how to explain it, especially since my hometown is only about 40 miles from the site of Nat Turner’s rebellion. So Eudora and I had deep cultural links, and we talked a good deal about them, but always the great thing for me was being the young person who knew that this dear friend was also one of the world’s great masters of the short story. CS These days, you yourself have become a mentor to many. RP Well, I’ve taught at Duke for 44 years now; and I’ve taught a number of people who have gone on to become professional writers. I’ve been very skittish with my writing students. I basically just want them to write. What I try to do, as I hope you know, is really keep an ear out for that sort of keen, high, homing sound of somebody who has got what it takes. I’ve just tried to listen for that sound and then say to the possessor, “I hear it. Go on and do it if you need to.” CS I’ve seen a story Anne Tyler wrote for you when she was 17 years old. Was your encounter with that story your first time hearing that sound? RP That particular story was written in her sophomore year, 1958 or ‘59. The registrar’s office, by the luck of the draw, had put her in my freshman English class. It was the first semester I ever taught, just plain old bonehead freshman English; and Anne turned up. I was 25 and Anne was 16. The very first theme she wrote for me was so good that I told her, secretly, “You can ignore the assignments from now on and write whatever you want.” She wrote me this extraordinary series of open-eyed sad childhood memories about growing up in a proto-pacifist commune in the North Carolina mountains during the Second World War. Then the next year I taught a course in narrative writing, and Anne was in that. She produced the story you alluded to, called “The Saints in Caesar’s Household.” Suddenly, here’s this 17-year-old out there flying with her own very strong arms. I immediately sent the story to my agent, Diarmuid Russell [who was also Eudora Welty’s agent], and the rest was history. Anne just never looked back. CS Let’s talk about the new novel. Noble Norfleet, which is also the narrator’s name, fits into a tradition of long first-person narratives that you’ve written. The first one was Kate Vaiden in 1986, Blue Calhoun is another, Roxanna Slade —and one might insert your own memoir, A Whole New Life. RP There’s also another first-person novel called The Tongues of Angels, but it’s not a person’s life story. It’s simply his account of a brief episode in his youth. That’s why it’s not named for the narrator. CS Each of the eponymous novels attempts to be adequate to a person’s entire life. They’re driven as much by voice as they are by any unifying plot. That is, instead of being held together by structure, they’re really held together by character itself. RP Absolutely true, and you know it yourself because you’ve been writing one. It sounds so corny to say it, because it’s something that non-writers always ask you—”Do the characters take over the story?” But the answer is yes. I spend a good deal of time, before I begin the actual writing of a first-person novel, thinking about who the character is. The name helps me a lot. In fact, the name is crucial. Also a sense of what the person does as a life’s work. Then I try to find a pregnant situation to open the book with. Then I just fire the starting pistol, and they take off. CS You hear some writers talk about their writing, once they’ve achieved a certain momentum, being more like transcription than it is like genesis. RP I don’t have an auditory sensation, and I don’t have a sense of literally transcribing, but I really do feel as though my fingers make the book. Truman Capote said a catty but dangerously accurate thing about some of the early work of Jack Kerouac. Capote said, “That’s not writing, that’s typewriting.” You’ve got to be mighty careful, whether you’re working at a typewriter or a Macintosh—which is what I’ve got—that you’re not just typewriting. One help is that I’ve always kept a notebook. It’s just me talking to myself about what I’m doing, where it’s going in the short run. In virtually every case of the first-person life accounts, I know from the beginning what the main character will be doing—in general—at the end of the book. I don’t think I’ve ever surprised myself about that. The great pleasure, and I think the only thing that keeps me from dying of boredom, is the whole business of how to make it evolve from the initial loaded situation. It’s an odyssey, literally–a long trip home. I try very hard. I don’t think my friends think of me as a jaded character; but I am, in fact, easily bored. CS Especially as a reader. RP Oh, God, absolutely. The number of books I shut, unread, is phenomenal compared to the number I actually finish. CS Yet you seem to be easily fascinated by a diner in Spartanburg, South Carolina. RP (laughter) That’s a whole other order of reality, I guess. I just try to keep myself from dying of boredom and try to be as keenly aware as I can of keeping the reader hungry for the next piece of the story. One of the huge problems a narrative writer has is that it takes you hours or days to write a five-page scene. It’s going to take the reader six minutes, at best, to read it. The rate at which you write is so different from the rate at which the reader reads, that you never know until the results are in whether you’ve kept people hungry or not. CS It seemed to me, as I was reading Noble Norfleet, that you were looking for situations that would put a new kind of pressure on the character, and force him to respond in a different way, or even to discover something new about himself, as you were discovering this same quality along with him. RP I don’t think I ever defined it that way to myself, but I hope that’s what happens. CS Noble’s story begins with the loss of his virginity and with the discovery that meanwhile, his younger brother and sister have been murdered in their sleep. It strikes me that Noble is discovering himself as he goes along. Unlike Roxanna Slade, who’s so old and wise, or even Kate Vaiden, who is also more self-aware—Noble seems to be along for the ride of self-discovery. RP I think that’s true. Noble rides the top of his life with a particular buoyancy that’s not necessarily available to the other life describers I’ve dealt with. Blue Calhoun has a much harder time with his life than Noble does. Blue does some terrible things and he knows it. Kate does a perfectly awful thing and knows it and lives with it and, at the very end of the novel, tries to begin repairing that error. The main thing, other than Noble’s name, that I started with, was the sense that Noble is a saint who doesn’t know he’s a saint. This is in my notes; I’m not imagining it. I don’t mean Noble’s a saint in the canonizable sense, but he does a lot of very good things. He dedicates his life to being a nurse. Over a three-year period, I spent about 42 nights at Duke University Hospital. I encountered some grotesque doctors in those years, but I never met a nurse who wasn’t an awfully good person. They aren’t getting paid much money. What are they doing there if they haven’t some sense of vocation? And Noble’s got it. CS He’s learning even his own goodness as he goes along. He surprises himself by saying he wants a medical career, using the phrase, “a kind of destiny I discovered on the spot.” He doesn’t know where this idea has come from, and yet, once he’s said it, it begins to guide him. RP In the first 100 pages of the novel, he has these things that can only be called visions. His mother is certifiably schizophrenic, paranoid schizophrenic, in a very scary way. None of us knows if he’s in the process of going crazy or what. He’s not ever in his life a consciously religious person—but all sorts of people are handing him his destiny, and he’s not the world’s smartest guy but he realizes it. CS And he has a powerful moral imagination. He persistently thinks of himself as a sinner, although the only sins of his own he discovers are sins of passivity, the sin of allowing disasters to happen all around him. RP I think, if the reader is fair-minded toward Noble, it turns out that the disasters he can blame himself for would have happened whether he’d been terribly alert or not. He’s this saint who very much loves to go to a massage parlor called All Girl Staff. CS There are some really comical moments. I think Noble Norfleet is more playful and naughtier, in a lighthearted way, than any of your other novels. RP Oh, I think it is. And I wanted it to be. When I finally submitted it, my editor, Susan Muldow, a marvelous person, said, “Reynolds, you didn’t tell me it was going to be so dirty!” (laughter) It’s not dirty but it’s very sexual. Noble tries to talk honestly about what he calls his sexual worship of women. He finally says, “There’s a certain part of the female anatomy that many times I’ve wished I could have just taken out and put in a box.” And he says, “If any women reading this think I’m insane, believe me, a very large proportion of the men I’ve ever known have said a similar thing at some point in their lives, if not always.” The presence of certain women makes him want to pay what he thinks is a tribute to them. CS That kind of desire, which expresses itself as worship, is surely one of the brighter burning stars in the constellation that makes up his character. What you just said, about what Noble has in common with ordinary men, reminds me that your books don’t have the ambition of “creating a world.” These are characters who are very much understood to share the reader’s world. RP I want the reader to have a great sense of intimacy with the characters. And not just the intimacy of overhearing somebody telling you the worst things he’s ever done or thought or desired. What I want to create is a very thorough interior world. Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe—I loved to read about these people when I was a kid. It’s an absolute necessity of Southern life that you have the patience to listen to people tell their life stories; otherwise you’d die of loneliness. Noble has the conscious sense that his life is important, that his life has meaning. He’s also got the unconscious assumption that you want to sit still and listen to him telling the story of his life. But he’s deeply concerned that he not bore your ass off—so he doesn’t tell you what kind of razor blade he uses or what brand of gas he buys. And I must say that I have deeply lost patience with the kind of fiction that tells me all that. CS Nor does Noble seem concerned to create a world so strange in all its details that we would have to give him more authority than we already do. We don’t have to beg for a key that will open up a palace, a created universe separate from our own. Instead, we’re allowed to sit beside him. What we’re after is his own mind. RP I never thought it until this moment, but in each of those four novels the character takes the great risk of having you think that he or she’s a criminal, a psychopath, a fool, a number of other things. Is Kate Vaiden a criminal? Is Blue Calhoun a child molester? Is Noble psychotic? His family history makes that a real possibility. CS Noble has his first vision the morning after the death of his brother and sister, when he looks into a dogwood tree and sees the cross-shaped blossoms become hands. A central hand, larger than the rest, is beckoning him onward. “Onward” is what many of these visions are telling him. RP I know. CS That’s how the book takes shape. “Onward” seems to be its slogan. But it’s not a picaresque, right? It’s not just a series of unrelated adventures—in this book, as in Kate Vaiden, the character alternately flees and returns home. The narrative alternately flees from and returns to the opening moment, the pregnant situation that holds all the various important themes together. RP Noble goes from North Carolina to Maryland and back, and then to Vietnam and back. Basically, he’s a homebody. CS Well, I have an idea about what sets these visions in motion. I’ll remind you of the first words I can ever remember you saying to me. You probably don’t remember, and I’ve never brought it up since, but we were talking about a story— RP I know exactly what you’re going to say. (chuckles) CS —written by a young Croatian woman in our class. And you didn’t know that I had really worked hard with her to turn the story into legible, idiomatic English. I had a history with the story and I had thought hard about it. I proudly brought my opinion into the room and said that I thought one of the metaphors was being asked to bear more weight than it could bear. You gave me a piercing stare— RP I tried to burn your face off. CS You said, “I think you’re too literary. I think you’ve had a privileged life and you don’t know what it means to suffer.” RP That sounds about fair. CS Those are the words. They’re etched into my mind. That experience, that particular way I got to know you, has conditioned all the reading I’ve done of your books. Also, many of your readers, of at least your recent books, are familiar with the story you tell in A Whole New Life. It’s not as if you’re still telling that same story, but that experience is finding its way into these later narratives. Grief is Noble’s main posture when we meet him, and it occurred to me that I was encountering someone whose very suffering gave him access to new knowledge and to mystical experience. RP Yes. CS When I read about Noble, and really about the rest of these narrators, I think about the relationship between suffering and speech. Suffering forms their characters and teaches them how to talk. RP Yes, suffering is also the thing they are trying to navigate. I’ve had four surgeries on my spinal cord, I have a lot of constant pain in my body, and one of the main things you try to do is think and talk your way around it. Your writing can become a means of escape, a navigational tool. But I think it’s true of any human being who lives past 50. Eventually most people get through their divorce or the death of their child or their husband’s alcoholic abuse or whatever. I hope that one of the major impressions you have of me is how much you and I have laughed together. I’m almost a certified chucklehead. CS That playfulness is also a part of Noble’s character. RP Very much. CS The professor, Hutchins Mayfield, in your book The Promise of Rest, contends that the lyric beauty of Milton’s Lycidas is testament to the sincerity of the poet’s own pain: “Words as freshly minted and potentially thrusting as the words of Lycidas all but never come out of a human mind for any reason less than enormous feeling, a nearly stifling pressure to speak.” RP And I happen to agree with Hutch. At least since the 18th century it’s been critically unfashionable to say something like that. But I do deeply believe it. See, my father died when I was 21. He smoked himself to death; he died of lung cancer at the age of 54 in a lot of pain. I sat there with him in the hospital for the last ten days of his life. I saw an awful lot of suffering early; and it has never left my mind, even when my work has been playful. I think if you were to have a drink with Noble and try to talk to him about God and suffering and whatever, he might well agree with a sentence I put in a little book called Letter to a Man in the Fire, a letter I wrote to a young man dying of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. I said something like, “God is very interested in suffering.” CS Lycidas is the story of a drowning, and I thought of it when I met, in the first part of Noble Norfleet, the mysterious part-time policeman, Dellum Stillman. His wife and son have drowned in the ocean. RP Or so he says. CS So he says. He may be a liar, but there is something compelling and even sincere about his story. RP Oh, I think there is. You know, Dell was just a device, somebody to call the police in Noble’s town. I had no idea he was going to turn out to be this potentially sinister character, but he does have that story. God, doesn’t everybody have one of some sort? CS I think the most elegant description of the interplay of suffering and joy is in James Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues.” The blues are the real experience of anguish. And yet blues music is this rare art that creates, through the process of articulating that anguish, the literal experience of joy. Baldwin says, “Now joy is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not exist.” RP That’s marvelous. It reminds me of a hugely important part of my life and of my work, which is that I was, to a large extent, reared by black people. And joy is almost, in this country at least, an invention of blacks. The abolitionists who came to the South before the Civil War were often chagrined to discover joy among these people whom they expected to find in an advanced state of melancholia. This is certainly not an attempt on my part to defend slavery but a simple fact. I was born 68 years after Appomattox, and now I’m 69. Though we had very little money, black people surrounded my childhood, in the home of my family. And their joy was inextinguishable. It wasn’t constant, but it was inextinguishable. CS You described your writing as a way to channel pain. It’s that same alchemy of suffering into joy. RP Oh, surely. What are you going to do to keep from going crazy? How are you going to consume time? How are you going to get through it? CS Let me read you one last thing. This is from a talk Virginia Woolf gave in 1924, called “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” “Novelists,” she said, “differ from the rest of the world because they do not cease to be interested in character when they have learnt enough about it for practical purposes. They go a step further, they feel that there is something permanently interesting in character in itself….The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession.” These lines came to mind as I read and prepared for this conversation, not just because so much of your work is devoted to the rendering of durable characters, but also because of the connection Woolf is making between character and permanence —that “there is something permanently interesting in character.” I wonder if your long fascination with character might be what binds you to narrative traditions older than yourself, and even older than Virginia Woolf. You mentioned Dickens, but it goes back further. The way you read Milton, for instance, with an eye for the character of the poet—you’re telling your own story about Milton’s life, about his relationship to his friend, Edward King, about the grief that transforms his power of speech. And when you think about the gospels, too, you’re not thinking in theosophical abstractions. The people in your versions of those stories are live men and women, really fleshed and passionate. And so is Noble Norfleet. A minister tells him that the bare human body is God’s altar on the earth, and Noble spends much of his life testing the limits of that very proposition. RP Very true. CS How much suffering can physical contact itself actually heal? How mystical can bodily experience be? RP And how portable is that experience? Can it be brought back into daily life in any usable form? It’s been 40 years since I’ve read that Virginia Woolf essay, and I’d forgotten that particular passage. I would say, just sitting here listening to you read it, that it describes my interest in character more than her own. When I think of Virginia Woolf’s novels, some of which I admire terrifically, I don’t especially remember vivid characters—the mother in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway maybe; but I don’t think of her as interested in character in the way I am. I’ve got a voracious need to watch the world around me, to watch the people in it. Going to that diner in Spartanburg, South Carolina, watching the people in there, was almost the most interesting part of my whole six-day journey through the deep South. It’s a peculiar kind of hunger. I don’t know where I get it, maybe from my mother. When I was still an only child, my mother would drive us downtown in this central North Carolina town we lived in, Asheboro. We would park on Main Street in her little Ford coupe, and we’d sit there. I’d say, “Mother, what are we doing?” She’d say, “Just watching people.” She had always thought of herself as an orphan, in a very unself-pitying way. Though she never had to leave her family home, she was reared by an elder sister who moved in when my mother’s parents died. My mother was a watchful person, who partly watched because she was just fascinated by vanity fair, by people going about their donkey business. But her watching was also slightly apprehensive. You’re vaccinating yourself by knowing as much about people as you can. You’re a kind of Dellum Stillman, an off-duty policeman–or, as Noble would say, a lawman. But you don’t want to tell people that you’re an off-duty policeman. That would stop them from reading your books—or from making you a friend. http://bombsite.com/articles/author?issue=80&who=Smith%2C+Caleb

Yet again, no joke here.

Hmm ... the concern may be not for the great, but the merely good. But another thought occurs too: I'm trying to think of any occasion since, say, the mid-nineteenth century where state (nation/state) backing of anti-science did not have a deleterious effect on that state's/society's scientific standing and progress. Not something like the Church coming down on Galileo, but rather a modern state rejecting mainstream or emerging-mainstream scientific thought. E.g., the Nazis' rejection of the new "Jewish" physics. Certainly lost them a lot of talent; arguably they could have won the race for the Bomb had they not spurred that exodus. Or what Stalin's backing of Lysenkoism cost Soviet genetic science. To be sure, one U.S. state doing something like this will only drive qualified folks to other states, as the article notes, not squelch national progress. But still, in miniature, seems right for folks invested in that state to fret as reported.

Well, exactly. My view is that evolution and Judeo-Christian belief have no reason to be in conflict. In fact it seems to me that believers who insist there is a conflict between the two are guilty of very badly trivializing their religion. Here we will have to disagree. The article quotes people, who are in a position to know, making factual statements about how the pro-creationist policy is making it difficult to recruit qualified students and science workers. Just the facts, ma'am.

...again, not a joke at all for dog people.

Deeply missed.

Whew... A Gomez upset of Markey? Don’t count on it. Posted by Sean Sullivan on May 1, 2013 at 2:35 pm Here we go again in Massachusetts. A little more than three years after Scott Brown’s stunning special election upset win, Republicans are pinning hopes of a repeat on Gabriel Gomez, a first-time candidate who easily won the Republican Senate nomination on Tuesday. There’s a reason why Brown’s win was so remarkable. That stuff simply doesn’t happen very often. And the early read in the Bay State this time around is that it’s unlikely to happen again. Massachusetts GOP Senate nominee Gabriel Gomez. (Steven Senne/AP). To understand Brown’s win in 2010 is to understand the perfect storm that sunk Democrats’ hopes that year. For starters, Brown was up against a flawed candidate, Attorney General Martha Coakley (D). Coakley dissed stumping in front of Fenway Park, seemed unfamiliar with Curt Schilling, and otherwise ran a poor campaign. Brown, by contrast, was the ultimate feel-good story. He barnstormed the state in his pickup truck, which became a powerful symbol for his regular guy persona. If Coakley didn’t already seem out of touch enough, Brown’s easy demeanor and underdog attitude added insult to injury. Then, there was the broader political climate. Backlash against President Obama’s health care reform plan had enraged conservatives and a depressed economic climate didn’t help him or his party. Later that year, Republicans would make historic gains at the ballot box as they seized back control of the House. Fast forward to 2013. Having learned a painful lesson with Coakley, Democratic leaders resolved early to hand select a candidate for the seat once held by Secretary of State John Kerry. That candidate was Markey, the liberal dean of the congressional delegation. Senate Democrats, Kerry, and host of other influentials launched Markey with their full weight behind him. And he never looked back, cruising to victory in the Democratic primary. Markey’s not the flashiest candidate around. And he has some potential vulnerabilities, including the amount of time he spends away from the state. But Democrats will have an extra close eye on him, and anything that smacks of a misstep. He’ll also have a lot of money in his war chest. Gomez has an intriguing background. He’s a former Navy SEAL and the son of Colombian immigrants. He can play the outsider card, and has cut a pretty moderate profile. In a letter he sent Gov. Deval Patrick (D) seeking an appointment to the Senate, he noted his support for Obama in 2008. Still, this is deep blue Massachusetts. And already, Democrats have moved hard against Gomez, signaling a desire to define him before he defines himself. Statements from Democratic groups and the Markey campaign Tuesday night slammed Gomez’s personal opposition to abortion, and hit him on guns and entitlements. Here’s what Gomez needs to do to win. First and foremost, he has to run the perfect campaign. In addition, Markey would have to run an awful one. And Gomez would have to raise tons of money and convince Republican groups to enter the race to support him — something they may be hesitant to do, considering that a win would only buy time until 2014, when Gomez would be up for reelection again. Defining Markey also will be a crucial component. The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a memo Wednesday telegraphing their intent to cast Markey as a creature of Washington and focus on independent voters. Really driving home that narrative will require expending substantial resources. Coakley fed the narrative that she was out of touch with misstep after misstep. She was essentially doing the Brown campaign’s job for him. If Markey doesn’t end up being a train wreck — and so far there are no indications he will be — the burden will be on Gomez and his allies to define him. And that will be no small task. Impossible? No. Unlikely? Very. That’s the way the possibility of a Massachusetts upset on June 25 should be viewed right now. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/05/01/a-gomez-upset-of-markey-dont-count-on-it/

There is that: biologists for instance like to point out that the haphazardness of our own physiognomy is the best argument against intelligent design. Never mind our behavior.

...why not? For Wallace Stevens, Hartford as Muse Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times Westerly Terrace, the street where Stevens lived. More Photos » By JEFF GORDINIER Published: February 23, 2012 IN those rare moments when Hartford leaps to mind, I’m guessing that your head does not then turn to watermelon pavilions, a man with a blue guitar, an old sailor catching tigers in red weather or an emperor of ice cream. Multimedia Slide Show Literary Hartford In Transit: Making Sense of Wallace Stevens (With Help From Some Experts) A lot of us think of Connecticut’s capital as a generic New England way station between Boston and New York. A decent place to stop for pancakes? Sure. A wildly lyrical geyser of the American imagination? Not so much. And yet, as I discovered on a recent weekend trip, Hartford could probably rival the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as a wellspring of psychedelic imagery — thanks, in large part, to one man. Hartford is the place where the poet Wallace Stevens spent a substantial portion of his life, and he composed many of his verses — bizarrely exquisite blossoms unlike anything else in the canon of American literature — while migrating back and forth on foot between his comfortable house on Westerly Terrace and his office at an insurance company. You can, as I did on a Saturday morning, stroll along the commute that helped dislodge the man’s subconscious musings. Thanks to a few advocates from an organization that’s cheekily known as the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, there is a marked walk that winds along for about 2.4 miles, starting at the white-columned colossus of the Hartford, the insurance giant where one of the most creative men in American letters ascended to the position of vice president, and ending at the white-clapboard house where the Pulitzer Prize winner lived. Who knew? Hartford is like that: full of surprises. There are more. Just a few blocks away, on Farmington Avenue, in a 25-room mansion that looks like something from “Downton Abbey: The American Years,” two of the greatest characters in American fiction — Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — came to life. Contrary to mythology, Mark Twain did not conjure up his masterpieces while puffing cigars on a Southern riverboat. He wrote them, or at least parts of them, at a table in a third-floor billiard room in his house in Hartford, where he and his family lived for about 17 years. (He also cranked out his books at a summer house in Elmira, N.Y., but either way the slow churn of the Mississippi River was nowhere in sight.) If there were moments back then when “Sam,” as Hartford locals called him, felt a yearning to procrastinate with a little literary chitchat, he could pay a call on his next-door neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had turned her into the most famous woman in America. Twain, Stowe, Stevens — does Hartford have Sedona-like cosmic rays of genius passing through it? Are there magic pyramids of Parnassus buried beneath its landlocked streets? Scholars might know all about the city’s pivotal role in the evolution of American literature, but for most of us average readers, this all comes as news. I called Wilson H. Faude, a Hartford historian who served as the first curator for the Mark Twain House, and told him that this highway stop in the middle of Connecticut seemed to qualify, at least from a literary standpoint, as a pretty important place. “Bingo,” he said with a jolly tone that suggested I might also soon discover that chocolate is delicious and sunshine is nice. “Hartford is where Tom and Huck were born!” If Hartford doesn’t crow about that, Mr. Faude attributes it to the region’s taciturn Yankee tendencies. “We don’t do enough talking,” he said. “We all know that it’s here. Why do we have to go public? This is reticent Connecticut.” Even so, it wasn’t long before Mr. Faude was regaling me with historical morsels. “At one point, it was said that Hartford was the richest city in America,” he said. It became a vortex of American publishing, which is what originally attracted the likes of Twain in the 19th century, and its dominance in the insurance business is what provided Stevens with a well-kept bourgeois cocoon in the first part of the 1900s. Hartford also produced guns and banks, and a long, high tide of prosperity flooded the city with art and culture. The Wadsworth Atheneum, advertised as “the oldest public art museum in the United States,” was founded in 1842. It’s where Pablo Picasso had his first American retrospective. I took a tour of the Mark Twain House on my weekend visit, and I found it unexpectedly opulent. (Our guide told us that Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, the daughter of a rich coal baron, had spent thousands of dollars a year on its upkeep; they were forced to move out in 1891 after a few lousy tech investments left the author bankrupt.) But for a poetry obsessive like me, the Stevens walk was the main attraction. This particular perambulation, though, is, like Hartford itself, quite modest. There are no tour guides; in keeping with the private enterprise of creating poetry, you’re on your own. Along the walk there are pale slabs of Connecticut granite engraved with verses from one of Wallace Stevens’s most indelible poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” That’s about it. Nevertheless, I found the walk to be deeply moving. After all, how often do we get to explore the cranial machinery of a literary titan by slipping into the groove of his daily commute? Stevens never learned to drive. Even though many of his neighbors had no idea what he was up to, he would amble along Asylum Avenue methodically measuring the pace of his steps and murmuring phrases to himself — phrases that would become some of the most haunting lines in the English language. “It seems as though Stevens composed poems in his head, and then wrote them down, often after he arrived at the office,” Prof. Helen Vendler, Harvard’s grande dame of poetry and the author of “Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire,” explained to me in an e-mail. “As for his commute, he enjoyed it profoundly. It was his only time out of doors, alone, thinking, receptive to the influx of nature into all the senses.” It’s all too easy to assume that Stevens was some tortured artist forced into a life of Babbitt-y corporate drudgery. In fact, evidence suggests that he rather liked his peaceful routine in Hartford — his backyard garden, his wine cellar, even his job at the insurance company. “Stevens enjoyed his work very much,” said James Longenbach, a poet, a professor at the University of Rochester, and the author of “Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things.” “It was crucial to his achievement. He turned down an offer to be the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard because he didn’t want to leave his work. He continued to go to the office even when he was beyond the mandatory age of retirement. He never showed that he felt any conflict or tension between what might appear to be the different aspects of his life.” Still, the poetry that poured forth from this burgher’s daily rendezvous with his “interior paramour” — to use a phrase from a Stevens lyric — can, for the casual reader, border on opaque. “People just throw up their hands and say, ‘I can’t understand this, it doesn’t make any sense,’ ” said Jim Finnegan, the president of the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, which has brought poets like Robert Pinsky and Mark Strand to town for events. None of this deters the literary pilgrims. “I get e-mails from people from all over the world,” Mr. Finnegan said. “Stevens has this far-flung readership out there.” It would be silly to suggest that a couple of hours of walking around gave me miraculous insight into a poem like “Peter Quince at the Clavier” — yet I did come to understand something simple but crucial about Stevens. What moved me about the walk, in the end, was that he had chosen to walk at all. In a car-mad country that prides itself in being perpetually in motion, the poet made a clear and conscious decision to stop, to slow down, to burrow into his imagination. And walking had opened his eyes and ears to a place that was full of surprises. As Stevens himself put it in a poem: “It is like a region full of intonings./It is Hartford seen in a purple light.” http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/travel/for-the-poet-wallace-stevens-hartford-was-an-unlikely-muse.html?_r=0

...familiar?

Name 50.

Well, thank goodness not absolutely everyone has lost their mind just yet. The writer is a Louisiana native who, as his online Guardian bio says, "is a science education activist and student at Rice University in Houston. For his efforts to prevent the public funding of the teaching of creationism, he won the National Center for Science Education's Friend of Darwin Award and the Hugh M Hefner First Amendment Award." Louisiana counts the cost of teaching creationism – in reputation and dollarsGOP Governor Bobby Jindal defends anti-evolution education policy, but it costs his state millions in science-based business Zack Kopplin guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 May 2013 08.30 EDT Louisiana State University's former graduate dean of science, Kevin Carman, says: 'teaching pseudo-science drives scientists away.' Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal endorsed teaching creationism in public schools, by way of the state's creationism law, a misnamed and misguided piece of legislation called the Louisiana Science Education Act. In a recent interview with NBC News, Jindal said: "Let's teach them about intelligent design … What are we scared of?" Governor Jindal, we are scared of the harm to Louisiana students and to our state. The Louisiana Science Education Act has already hurt our economy. The chairman of Louisiana's senate education committee, Conrad Appel, has called for high schools and colleges to graduate more students in Stem fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), because "the amount of income [students] can earn in these related fields is best." Teaching students that creationism is science will confuse them about the scientific method and the nature of science, which, in turn, will hold them back from getting jobs in any cutting-edge scientific field. We can't teach students misleading lessons that blur the lines between rigorous fact and religious belief. If the law stays in place, we will not graduate more students into careers in science unless we teach them evolution, which is vital to fields like agriculture and medicine. We need our students to understand the concept to get jobs in places such as Baton Rouge's top-notch Pennington Biomedical Research Center or New Orleans' BioDistrict. Claude Bouchard, a former executive director of the Pennington Research Center, told me that because of the Louisiana Science Education Act: "[students] will continue to believe that the laws of chemistry, physics and biology are optional when addressing the big issues of our time. Unfortunately, this is also not without economic consequences. "If you are an employer in a high-tech industry, in the biotechnology sector or in a business that depends heavily on science, would you prefer to hire a graduate from a state where the legislature has in a sense declared that the laws of chemistry, physics or biology can be suspended at times or someone from a state with a rigorous science curriculum for its sons and daughters?" Peter Kulakowsky, a biotech entrepreneur in Louisiana, recently published a letter in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, saying that: "As the director of a biological laboratory in Louisiana, I need enlightened staff. Distracting the state's students in their formative training [through the Louisiana Science Education Act] only cripples them." The Louisiana Science Education Act does more than harm the potential of Louisiana's students. It is already directly impacting the state's economy. Louisiana State University's former graduate dean of science, Kevin Carman, testified before the state legislature in 2012 that top scientists had left the university citing the Louisiana Science Education Act as a reason. Other scientists chose to accept jobs elsewhere, because they didn't want to come to a state with a creationism law. Carman said: "teaching pseudo-science drives scientists away." Louisiana's third largest industry is tourism, and the state generates millions of dollars each year from conventions. After the Louisiana Science Education Act was passed, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology cancelled a scheduled convention in New Orleans in 2011, costing the city an estimated $2.9m. The society launched a boycott of Louisiana, and the state has become less competitive at attracting certain conventions because of its anti-science stance. Thankfully, the boycott of New Orleans has ended, because the New Orleans city council has endorsed a repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act and the Orleans Parish School Board banned the teaching of creationism in its schools. The boycott on the rest of the state still remains, however. Kristin Gisleson Palmer, a member of the city council, said the act needed to be repealed because of the economic harm it caused the city: "With the New Orleans Medical Corridor poised for tremendous growth, this law also profoundly impacts our ability to fill jobs in the cutting-edge science fields with students educated in our state's public schools." On 1 May, Louisiana's lawmakers will have a chance to stand up for students and help repair the damage done to our economy. A bill to repeal the act will be heard in the education committee of the state senate, and they can vote to repeal. We should all urge our elected officials to do the right thing. The economic damage from the Louisiana Science Education Act should serve as a warning to other states. Tennessee passed a copycat bill and other states around the country introduce creationism bills every year. Any state that passes a creationism law will harm their students and drive scientists – and business – away. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/01/louisiana-cost-teaching-creationism

Sometimes you can't afford a divorce. Believe me!