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.
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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Burning down the cloth house. Have you a shred of a chance of realizing all that you know in your heart are your dreams withheld, stifled, lost? And does this loss, what you have already lost and what will come, does it resonate anywhere? Or do your struggles as women rise and disappear like waves in the ocean, what does one woman matter, in a world you know is Wrong. Misguided, stupid to the core. Could you do better with one little finger than the men you refuse to call, anymore, leaders. And don’t you have to live with the terrible obviousness. Your perfect skill to find the moral balance midst conflict. Isn’t it all a big pissing contest, no more than gang behavior … and aren’t you, as a woman, with your maternal, familial skills, aren’t you the hope of the world?

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