Virtual Memories

Hey, world, thanks for letting me know that you’re not supposed to throw a chenille blanket in a washing machine. Jerks.

This morning’s reading, from Love & Sleep, the second novel in John Crowley’s Ægypt series:

But even if those fires really were the same fire — if both had been the one that began at the Oliphant’s trash baskets beside the old garage, in that summer of 1952 — still it might have been the Salamander who started it: might have been the Salamander who snatched the burning paper from Pierce’s rake, and blew it into the waiting mulleins and the milkweed. He experienced, and not for the first time this week, this winter, the sensation that he was simply creating the story backward from this moment, reasons and all. But isn’t that what memory is always doing? Making bricks without straw, mortaring them in place one by one into a so-called past, a labyrinth actually, in which to hide a monster, or a monstrosity?

Is it Friday already? I’d better make with the links!

(more…)

John McCain: unnatural-born American?

McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

Let’s say you’re in sales.

Let’s say you and a coworker take out a client for lunch.

Let’s say you start drinking.

Let’s say you keep drinking.

A lot.

Let’s say that you and your coworker realize that it’s 4:30.

Do you:

1. immediately enter a treatment program, as you’ve become the butt of a million drunk-jokes in an office renowned for its drinkers,
2. have another beer and wait till 5:15 or 5:30 before slinking back to the office to get your things, so you can just start tomorrow fresh, or
3. race to the office so as to get back before 5, drunkenly stumble down the hall to your desk, giggling with your coworker and stinking of booze?

I’m pleased to report that fat, drunk and stupid is too a way to go through life, Dean Wormer!

(2/29 Update! It gets better! It turns out there was no client involved! Just a couple of salespeople out at an 18-martini lunch!) 

Ladies and gentlemen: Ms. Whitney Houston performs . . . I Go To The Rock.

Recently, we began receiving the New York Sun, I think as an add-on to our Wall Street Journal subscription. I’m not entirely sure. I mean, I do know that the owner of our company canceled our office subscription to the New York Times a few years ago because he, um, disagreed with its political agenda.

Anyway, I was reading the Arts+ section of the Sun at the lunchtable today when I discovered that the section’s editor is actually . . . my alter ego!

How else can we explain the page 18 & 19 spread of today’s paper featuring this double-whammy:

Mysticism in Youth – Barbara Probst Solomon’s review of the early diaries of Jewish mystic & scholar Gershom Scholem

With Gasol, Lakers Now Look Unstoppable – John Hollinger’s weekly power rankings of the NBA

Toss in a front-page piece on Louis I. Kahn’s travel sketches, and the only conclusion to draw is that my lack of sleep is merely a cover for Tyler Durden-like plot to redefine arts & leisure in my own demented image.