Revisiting Joan Didion.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.


JOAN DIDION.

We seem to have no trouble in spending money for the production of organized violence designed to kill people...

The war on the social state is in high gear and is most evident in a range of polices designed to punish unions, abrogate the bargaining rights of workers, cut social protections and disinvest in higher education as a site of critical learning while reorganizing it according to the interests and values of a market-driven culture.

[ ... ]

As the rich and powerful rewrite the script of politics, they are largely assisted by a number of Republican governors are not only breaking the backs of labor unions but are also firing police officers and fire fighters, curtailing benefits for the unemployed, denying poor people access to health services and “cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care or other services needed by low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities or are significantly increasing the cost of these services.” As social problems are privatized and public spaces commodified, there has been an increased emphasis on individual solutions to socially produced problems, while at the same time market relations and the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics and responsibility. How else to explain the lack of massive protests over the recent revelations that mega-corporations such as General Electric and the Bank of America paid no taxes in spite of accruing massive financial profits. The commodification of thought and the depoliticization of everyday life have created both a culture of illiteracy and cruelty in which notions of the public good, community and the obligations of citizenship are replaced by the overburdened demands of individual responsibility and an utterly privatized ideal of freedom.


Henry Giroux. Militarized Conservatism and the End(s) of Higher Education.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Several times a day, I wish for a sheet of paper as big as a room, and I imagine myself unrolling this paper and starting to fill in a gigantic web of connections. I want to be all on one page. Right now I have too many thoughts on too many subjects rolling loosely in my head. I know every last idea is connected, bound to everything else out of necessity, but I need the neatness of a sketched-out web just once, capturing all those systems and complexes and economies, and the people, animals, plants, ecosystems and assumptions that comprise each, and the thousands of relationships that link anything to everything.

When you Google things to do in my hometown, the top attraction is the Germantown Travel office... so you can go somewhere else pronto.

Haven't you seen me sleep-walking?

Though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.

Every morning since you fell down on the face of the earth,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Sometimes I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you will miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.

I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that or anything like that on this weekday in March.
And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

A dramatic rise in income may be a reason
to treat yourself, but that would apply
more to all the Pisces who are still alive today,
still swimming up and down the stream of life
or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

But it will come as a relief to learn
that you don’t need to reflect carefully before acting
nor do you have to think more of others,
and never again will creative work take a back seat
to the business responsibilities that you never really had.

And don’t worry today or any other day
about unwanted problems caused by your failure
to interact rationally with your many associates.
No more goals for you, no more pressing matters,
no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,
but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

So leave it to me now
to plan carefully for success and the wealth it brings,
to counsel the dear ones close to my heart
and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way
though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.

I am better off closing the newspaper,
putting on the clothes I wore yesterday
(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)
then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle
and pedaling along the road by the shore of the bay.

And you go on being perfect just where you are,
lying there in your beautiful blue suit,
your hands crossed upon your chest
like the wings of a bird who has flown
in its strange migration straight up from earth
and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

BILLY COLLINS. HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD.

Having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Figure out how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out... with the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE.

Why, in fact, should economists be the only ones empowered to define what a society's wealth is? It is certainly useful to know what a society produces, but it's a bit stunted: GDP tells us nothing about our social health, no more than it informs us about the attacks on the environment and the explosion of inequality. With so many blind spots, it will become difficult to avoid catastrophe. (From And if we were to change ...everything.)

I don't want to schedule / Love, I want to pour it out

--even in this cold season love can endure
And be green again, which I do want to believe
Despite my unconstant heart--

So I nailed my heart to the wall.

He just stands with his toes on the edge.

Anxious election night. Sitting on my hands and waiting is not my M. O.

Antsy pants.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

‎"Be concerned about your brother... either we go up together, or we go down together."

Our first spring thunderstorm barreled through last night, unleashing hailstones as big as golf balls that upset car alarms up and down our street, and lightning that made the whole sky flash day-bright.

The weekend forecast teases us with the promise of sunny 60-degree days. Too good to be true after this false wench of a spring.

I worry that I'm worried all the time.

Winter is retreating, but too slowly.

The Belleville Outfit's "Once and For All" has my heart in its clutch right now.