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 »

Is this like something you have to be? Or automatically become?

And why are there these special, all-cringeworthy words for getting older?

Why aren’t I the same person, in somewhat different form? Read the rest of this entry »

Should Google Tweak the News? asks the New York Times.

Count me Horrified. Can the Times retract, even, the question?

     ”Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news?” Read the rest of this entry »

What is important to understand is that these same messages about how awful the latest version of Mac OS X is appear each and every time there’s a new upgrade. Thomas Reed, Apple Discussions

An Apple user since 1992, and OS X since Jaguar—I strongly disagree. 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 »

“Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?” asks Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker

Oh, but it doesn’t—or rather, not only then. Not at all. Anything fantastic enough, witnessed, will do the trick.
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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.
Read the rest of this entry »