Heart-rending story in the New York Times, The Life and Death of Therapist Bob Bergeron. … but perhaps rending not the way you think. Depending on whether, of course, you are a gay man. I’m not, but the beauty-fade? The loss of looks, beyond one’s control? Like, life? Getting sick? Old? The Creeping Decrepits, my son calls them. He, however, is only eighteen years younger than I, so he’ll get his. (He’s a Good Boy.) (Also a senior geo-tech engineer, so I probably won’t be sending him this post.) Read the rest of this entry »

I never watch the news, but you know what I learned on the news? The fucking humanitarian aid, food and supplies, North Korea receives?  The North Korean people are told that these are tributes. To their Leader. Then, if they’re lucky, I guess they get to eat. Read the rest of this entry »

Jobs had been teaching us to say goodbye to all that for decades — we just didn’t know it.

… in these final years, when the auditorium lights in would go down and the crowd would go wild for Jobs, who increasingly greeted his followers and touted the latest neat, new thing even as he wore the look of a person who was not going into that future with us.

He would be getting off here; we were to proceed without him … Let it go and look ahead was the message all along.
Hank Stueval in the Washington Post

Okay, I’m going to cry some more. Read the rest of this entry »

On Richard Brody’s New Yorker Blog, the DVD of the Week is that fave, that treasure, Terrence Malick’s Badlands.  Read the rest of this entry »

“Facebook seems to want to pull everything in to its playground,whereas Google seem rather more inclined to make their toys show up wherever you already are. Sometimes,anyway –although I sense their thinking about all this is probably as confused as mine is.” One of Michael O’Conner Clarke’s excellent Thoughts on Google+ this morning.

Which is certainly more human of Google. Being confused. Though it feels odd to say so. Read the rest of this entry »

After reading Partial Objects today, an amazing post, all about things like Lacan and the Soul—

All I know is, my soul is a pest. Or whatever that internal thing is that has kept yammering away, lo these many decades. Always with a very clear idea of what is right. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the scenes in the book, the one most resembling the later life of the Tolstoys is not a Levin-Kitty scene, but the final row between Vronsky and Anna just before she goes out to throw herself under a train. Tolstoy’s mastery of the feat of simultaneously putting the reader inside the heads of both characters as well as his own, as if the ball is being tossed from Anna to Vronsky to the narrator at high speed without ever being dropped, is one of the supreme moments of craft in all fiction … James Meek, LRB

… A statement so disarming, I had to go find it.
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As a result of the blending of reality and fantasy, some women have chosen to willingly play along by a new set of rules in order to keep their men interested: They’re intentionally impersonating porn stars. Sadie, a real-estate agent, says, “A lot of guys have come to expect P.S.E. [the “Porn-Star Experience”] as a common thing—snatches waxed bald, access to every hole—and plenty of women are more than happy to provide. A few might enjoy it, but for most it’s harrowing. I think there’s a fear that if they can’t make it happen, their boyfriend will retreat online.” New York Magazine

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