"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."
Relative of one of the Fort Dix Six, terrorists seeking to kill American soldiers, on where they went wrong:
…”It’s fine to be a religion man,” said Murat Duka, 55, a distant relative of the defendants who was the first of the Dukas — now numbering about 200 — to move to the Northeast and work as a roofer. “But if you get too much to the religion, you get out of your mind and you do stupid things.”
Sounds about right.
Ill. Gov. Blagojevich, seeing he would lose yesterday’s senate vote about his tax plan, urged them beforehand to vote against it, on trumped-up last-minute consideration that more time was needed to consider it.
Blagojevich sought to minimize the vote’s impact. Beforehand, he suddenly asked lawmakers to vote against his plan as a signal that they think it’s too soon to take a firm position.
More time for him to pass out key favors, rather. It’s how George Ryan did it: pass out the goodies, call it Illinois First, and watch your legislation go sailing through. Statesmanlike conduct!
Then he lost the vote, 170–0 (!) and had the further unmitigated gall to look on the bright side:
“There’s ups and downs, but (I) feel good about it,” Blagojevich said after an appearance in Chicago. “Things went pretty well today.”
He is the boy who got a pile of manure for his birthday and jumped for joy because he knew “a pony can’t be far away.”
Smile and the world smiles with you, Guv. Cry and you cry alone.
With ledes like this, from veteran wordslinger Jon Van, of the Chi Trib technology beat, writing about what’s to come in Internet speed, newspapers may yet beat the dullness-irrelevance-end-of-line rap:
Like Wild West gunslingers, cable TV operators and telephone companies are squaring off for a contest over who’s the fastest.
The story, interesting in itself and written professionally as befits the lede, is about raising the ante in a telcom (telephone company) vs. cable operators duel in the sun that could lead (not “lede,” note, because does not refer to first paragraph of a news story) to TV on demand on your computer screen.
More to the point right now, the story has this ‘net surfer rethinking his reliance on a telcom connection — SBC’s DSL — and considering an escape to the already faster cable access — Comcast.
More later, I’m sure, on this tech front.
Last night’s Midland Authors event, the annual awards dinner at the Chicago Athletic Assn. on Boul Mich, was a hit. The dinner in the 8th-floor dining room overlooking Millennium Park was marvelous, but award presenters and award recipients sealed the deal. It was an excellent demonstration for the most part of how smart, nice people can talk to each other.
Highlights included the stunning appearance of Roger and Chaz Ebert, he joining her at the podium to receive an award, she doing the talking because he doesn’t do any these days (tracheostomy does it), and making quite a presence. No surprise to many, I’m sure, but it was my first time seeing her. She’s poised and genuine, and the two of them, one hand covering the other’s at the stand, just looked great as thoroughly believable loving couple.
The Fradins, another excellent couple, were awarded for their children’s book on Jane Addams. They are Judy and Dennis. Best line of evening was his noting that he rarely leaves his study, where he researches and writes, but did so for this event. Their book, Jane Addams: Champion of Democracy (Clarion), has a painting by their daughter on its cover, one that the parents couldn’t afford to buy, Dennis noted.
As to his library and study concentration, I told him afterwards it was rather medieval of him, and he agreed. A monk’s life, I said. And in today’s limelight-seeking climate full of back-slapping, even of oneself sometimes, he was refreshing indeed.
It was fun meeting the adult fiction winner, Samrat Upadhyay, a young teacher at Indiana U.-Bloomington who hadn’t been informed even that his novel, Royal Ghosts (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin), had been submitted, much less that he’d won. The committee tried to reach him but couldn’t until the day before the dinner.
It was fun, I say, because he’s from Kathmandu, Nepal, where he was taught by Jesuits I know, including Rev. Charles Law, a physics teacher. Samrat and I chatted about Charley, one of my best Jesuit friends, who died a few years ago in Nepal of natural causes. “He loved Nepal,” Samrat told me with feeling. He was very well liked by the students and loved them too.
Go here for the winners and runners-up.
Capping the evening was my chat on the return Green Line ride back to Oak Park with two long-time residents, who had got on the stop before me after hearing the Chicago Symphony perform. We passed on our experiences. Theirs was wonderful (Brahms) but also forgettable (some new German stuff interspersed with the Brahms) — somebody’s idea of bring along the Great Unwashed regular symphony-goers, apparently, giving them a dose of new good stuff.
There we were on a 20–minute ride. They lived near the “L” stop, as do I. Living in Oak Park, we hopped the train and returned same way, each heading for his cultural event of the evening. Not bad.
This came out of the Fort Dix episode:
“If these people [arrested for plotting to attack the fort] did something, then they deserve to be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” said Sohail Mohammed, a lawyer who represented scores of detainees after the 2001 attacks. “But when the government says ‘Islamic militants,’ it sends a message to the public that Islam and militancy are synonymous.”
Not so. If they said “Islamic” people when they meant militants, that would send that message. But to speak of Islamic militants is to say not all Islamic people are militants or all militants Islamic. Don’t they teach logic where that guy went to law school?
Health care in Canada — “single-payer,” hailed by statists as the sort we ought to have — ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, according to this from the Hamilton, (Ont.) Spectator discussion opinion polls showing more than three out of four Canadians think their system is “in crisis”:
This . . . is illustrated in our own community by a severe doctor shortage. More than 60,000 city residents do not have a family doctor.
Which is typical of a statist program that imposes itself on how people act when buying and selling things.
There’s trouble in Maine too, Cato Institute tells us:
When Maine became the first state in years to enact a law intended to provide universal health care, one of its goals was to cover the estimated 130,000 residents who had no insurance by 2009, starting with 31,000 of them by the end of 2005, the program’s first year,” The New York Times reports. “So far, it has not come close to that goal. Only 18,800 people have signed up for the state’s coverage and many of them already had insurance.”
Have signed up? Can’t sell it, apparently. Two of Cato’s people, Michael D. Tanner and Michael F. Cannon, have another idea — enacting a standard health insurance deduction, expanding health savings accounts, and deregulating insurance markets. These reforms “could . . . expand coverage, improve quality [of care] and make care more affordable.” Don’t know if they’re on the mark or not but strongly suspect it.
Asked if he would write about Virginia Tech, Christopher Hitchens avowed “no interest in it,” but said he might (he did, at Slate). More to the point, I think, is his comment about us:
My heart sinks when yellow-ribbon events occur, if that doesn’t sound too cynical. What one needs in this society is less sentimentality and more stoicism.
Perfect.
“I never knew a passion for politics exist for a long time without swallowing up, absolutely excluding, a passion for Religion,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 5/16/1797 letter to J.P. Estlin.
A few months later, to his clergyman brother, Coleridge said he had withdrawn himself from consideration of “immediate causes,” i.e., current political arguments.
Samuel Johnson’s aunt, a gossip, was “willing to find something to censure in the absent,” said SJ. It’s in Kingsmill, editor, Johnson Without Boswell, 1941.
Prime Min. Gladstone’s falling into the Thames would be a misfortune, his being pulled out a calamity, said witty man quoted in 1/19/07 Times Lit Supplement.
A “gentle dimming of the libido” is a benefit of growing old. “It’s like being unshackled from a lunatic,” said a contributor to Late Youth: an anthology celebrating the joys of being over fifty (S. Johnson ed., Arcadia), reviewed in TLS “In Brief,” 3/9/07.
It’s “a fat book covering just two years, with gruel-thin contents,” said Jan Marsh of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ed. Wm. E. Friedman, Brewer), vol. 6: Last Decade, 1873-84, Kelmscott to Birchington I: 1873-74.
“I always have to be the bad guy. Let’s both be good guys,” said Johnny, 4, to Madeline, 6, in playground in Intercourse, PA.
AUTHOR: Hugh Kingsmill, mentioned here earlier as declaring Victorian sentimentality the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism,” has two books on Samuel Johnson, one, Samuel Johnson, is a bio. The other, Johnson Without Boswell, consists of passages from others who knew him besides his famous chronicler.
ANOTHER: Coleridge’s writing his Biographia Literaria is a case of long-delayed production, short-term hard work on a publisher’s advance. It distilled and summed up his life’s work as poet, essayist, and philosopher, combining autobiography, criticism, and philosophy in a manner best suited to his talents as he had come to understand them. This is from the 1955 intro by Geo. Watson to the Everyman’s Edition of BL.
MOVIE, MOVIE: “Touchez pas au grisbi” (Do not touch the loot) is a 1954 film with Jean Gabin and several gorgeous women, none of whom in vulgar fashion remove their clothes or leer into the camera. He’s a criminal who protects swag from a huge bullion robbery. It ends in a gunfight on a country road which I’d say the Cohen brothers drew on for their small-city film of Prohibition times, “Miller’s Crossing.”
This “Do not touch” is deliciously tense from the start and blessedly refrains from being cute or maudlin. No faux O. Henry ending here. The film puts pleasurable tension even into a man brushing his teeth. It’s part of the Criterion Collection, which the OP library stocks to our continuing benefit.
A recent online (members only) discussion of how to save newspapers in our digital age considered perils and advantages of digitilization. Left out, and maybe irrelevant considering the Decline of Taste and Reason in our time, was an editorial rather than technical solution to the decline of newspaperdom, namely to write tighter.
Newspapers such as Chi Trib, what I’m most familiar with, lets people go on and on, leaving unedited and uncut the writer who knows what people ought to know and will tell them regardless of people’s willingness to be told, or at least told so much. The writer knows what’s best for people and supplies it. He must have space or his professional dignity is compromised.
This is not counting those who very carefully use much ink saying something that requires it, which is of course where editorial judgment comes in, i.e. taste.
Meanwhile, however, readers have turned the page and it’s readers one, newspaper nothing.
This by Carol Marin tells us yet more about the increasingly visible clay feet of our Afro-American Idol Who Would Be President:
Barack Obama tells us he is the messenger of a new kind of politics.
Open. Transparent. Different.
But put the pedal to the metal and ask Illinois’ junior senator new and serious questions about his radioactive, federally indicted, former friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko, and suddenly this gleaming presidential hopeful and paragon of new politics behaves just like any other dissembling, dismissive Chicago pol, ducking the discussion while pretending not to.
It’s her follow-up on the Tim Novak two-parter in their paper, Sun-Times, including this tidbit:
Here’s a candidate who these days is on camera more than many TV anchors, whose staff is putting out press releases faster than IHOP cranks out pancakes, and yet, the senator just didn’t have time, his staffers claimed, to stop and talk on Monday even though he was in Chicago giving a speech at which, conservatively, there were 30 reporters and 15 cameras.
We didn’t know it then, but while Novak and I were staking out the senator’s big, black SUV parked outside, he was giving a quiet private interview to the Tribune about the wrongheadedness of the Sun-Times’ story.
Meanwhile, an Obama staffer, sent to watch us, nimbly Blackberried our movements to someone inside.
Suddenly, bodyguards pulled the SUV down into a parking garage, grabbed Obama, and with wheels squealing, sped out and away.
This guy doth not protest enough.
