The groom- and bride-to-be, last October at the Hi Life Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Ave. Courtesy of Tina.
Mind reading
Whew! I found a reading for my wedding on Sunday! Being all literary and such, it was pretty difficult for me to come up with something good (I’ll post it sometime after the wedding). In my neurotic way, I felt pressure to come up with a Really Good Reading. The search reminded me of an article I read once about how difficult real writers find it to do things like write a note for their kids’ schoolteachers.
Anyway, it’s a Really Good Reading. The friend who’s going to read it on Sunday tells me she cried when she read it this morning. Amy sez she got choked up, too. Dames. . .
Sunday-Sunday-SUNDAY!
When Amy & I picked a date for the wedding, we had to accommodate my conference schedule, the weather in New Orleans, and our magazine & catalog deadlines. We settled on March 12: not too hot and humid, low chance of northeasterners getting derailed by snow, no conference for a week or so. It looked like a good date.
Since then, we discovered that our wedding night overlaps with both the premiere of The Sopranos AND Selection Sunday.
No one in Amy’s family will have a problem with this, but my brother and some of my friends will be praying for the uninterrupted functioning of their TiVos.
Breathe with me
I’ve long contended that conspiracy theories are a substitute-religion for the disillusioned; it gives them the opportunity to believe in a Greater Power, even if it’s just a power for evil. I think this ties into that Orwell passage I quoted a few weeks ago.
Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has a great piece on the mainstreaming of paranoia:
The rise of the conspiracy theory points to an important shift in journalism and public debate. There has been a move from debating the substance of someone’s beliefs or behaviour to focusing myopically on the motivations behind them; from challenging individuals over their words or actions to trying to uncover some deep, dark ulterior motive. This has had a deadening effect on public debate. It replaces a critical engagement with political developments with a destructive neverending search for the secret agenda. And it means that no one is ever truly held to account for what they say or do. After all, if Blair is merely the puppet of dark neocons forces when it comes to Iraq, then how can we hold him up to public ridicule for what has happened there?
This is not investigative journalism; it is gossip.
Read more, if you dare.
Update
Sorry I’ve been out of touch, dear reader. We’re closing in on the wedding date (March 12!), and this has necessitated a ton of work at the day job, preparing the April issue of the magazine so that my associate editor can handle what I’m leaving behind.
This will necessitate my knocking out articles on biogeneric drugs and site selection criteria for pharma facilities, and updating our glossary of pharma & biopharma terms. Since one of my associates at a major pharma company just sent me an in-house list of acronyms used in the industry, it looks like I’ll be updating a bunch of the glossary entries for this year’s edition.
And I’ll be getting married in 9 days. So, I’m probably not going to post anything for the next bunch of days, is what I’m saying. Typing. Whatever.
This ain’t no liberry
George Hunka has a good post on thinning out his library. Not like I can sympathize . . .
Mo’ Woe
In January, I wrote about Anya Kamenetz’ book, Generation Debt, and Daniel Gross’ criticism of it. I was mean (enough to warrant a smackdown challenge from Mrs. Kamenetz), but hey. Buy a dog.
Today, we have more criticism of the book, by Kerry Howley at Reason:
Kamenetz, a 2002 Yale graduate, is the latest spokesperson for a paroxysm of anxiety among “emerging adults.” But you don’t have to accept Kamanetz’s absurd thesisâ€â€that a group of people among the healthiest, wealthiest, and most educated in human history deserve your pityâ€â€to get angry about the way their prosperity has been manhandled. The term Generation Debt is nothing if not apt: Young Americans come of age in a world where heaps of their as yet-unearned cash has already been promised away. They are embodied I.O.U.s to Medicare, to Social Security, to extended obligations in foreign countries with unclear objectives and no end in sight. A glance at the latest projections for, say, Medicare Part D is fair game for some righteous anger.
As a bonus, Chris Farrell at BusinessWeek has an article critiquing the arguments of another book in the “WAH! We’re going to be poor” cycle, Tamara Drout’s Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead:
Drout takes a hardline stand in her book. She argues that the younger American generation faces a life of “downscaled dreams.” The traditional middle-class life is out of reach for more and more young people. Going to college, owning a home, and having a child — or two — is increasingly expensive. Paychecks are increasingly meager, so more and more, the younger generation is taking on onerous debt. “They will be the first generation who won’t match the prosperity of their parents,” Drout writes.
Considering that a staple belief in American society is that each generation ends up a bit better off than the previous one, Drout’s charge is remarkable. And it’s also largely nonsense. For instance, she laments that recent college graduates, already burdened with student-loan obligations, have to rack up steep credit charges to furnish their apartments and buy a wardrobe for work.
Beads and beer: the universal language
It’s Mardi Gras in Iraq! Head here for pictures! There’s a song-file that plays when you’re on this page, so turn the volume down on your computer before clicking through.
Overthinking It
Amy & I are getting married in two weeks, and I’m still trying to come up with a good reading for the pre-game show. The following passage is a hoot, mainly because I always envision it on one of those “Love Is” fridge magnets, except it’d have to be about two miles long and has disastrously fascist overtones:
Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. But love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in its natural form. In the state, it is no longer present. There, one is conscious of unity as law; there, the content must be rational, and I must know it. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person in my own right and that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I gain recognition in this person, who in turn gains recognition in me. Love is therefore the most immense contradiction; the understanding cannnot resolve it, because there is nothing more intractable than this punctiliousness of the self-consciousness which is negated and which I ought nevertheless to possess as affirmative. Love is both the production and the resolution of this contradiction. As its resolution, it is ethical unity.
–G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Don Not
Don Knotts died last night, at 81. I find it hard to believe he was only in 25 movies.
In the Divine Trash doucmentary, Steve Buscemi remarked that he and John Waters should fight it out to see who gets to play the lead in the Don Knotts biopic.