A landmark falls

Caricaturist David Levine has died, aged 83.

-and he doubtless had Christmas and the birthday lumped together

Author David Sedaris is 53 today.

A book chain where it was hard to find real books

In Borders Books UK's receivership lies the seeds of its failure:

It was a forlorn scene; the literary fiction and big name biographies that the shop once sold to Islington's bookish were long gone, leaving a small and somewhat more prosaic selection on display by the door. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink's autobiography, now 69p; Letters to Penthouse VIII, 79p; something called Troll Blood ("Savage spirits, Viking villains"), 69p.

This day in 1929

An entirely improper, and therefore delightful, writer

It's the birthday of the mordant British short story author Saki, born 1870. While serving in France in World War I:

In 1915, he sent his sister a Christmas card that said, "While the Shepherds watched their flocks by night / All seated on the ground / A high-explosive shell came down / And mutton rained around." He died from a bullet wound the next year.

There was a writer

English author Elizabeth Berridge has died, age 89:

Although she was, on the surface, a conventional master of conservative suburban fiction, her work concealed a deep subversiveness. The reader continually finds his expectations railroaded on to a completely different track. She was, par excellence, the celebrator of family life. There is, as she said herself, no substitute for the family: "It is society's first teething ring, man's proving ground. When repudiated, it still leaves its strengthening mark. When it does the rejecting, the outcast is damaged. Within its confines, devils and angels rage together, emotions creep underfoot like wet rot, or flourish like Russian ivy. It is the world in microcosm, the nursery of tyrants, the no man's land of suffering, a place and a time, a rehearsal for silent parlour murder."

Berridge was an expert at charting the small cruelties that husband and wife, parent and child, can inflict on each other in the domestic arena, and at describing the intrinsic dignity and extrinsic humiliations of old age. On the other hand, she freely admitted to a preoccupation with aunts, and this is manifest in most of her finely crafted fiction, where aunts of all varieties – mainly elderly – proliferate on the page, realistically, if lovingly, described. Readers of Across the Common will not soon forget Aunt Seraphina, expertly stuffing her bag with cuttings from the flowerbeds of Regent's Park under the nose of the keeper for the benefit of her garden at home.

Kitty Hawk, today, 1903.

-and don't bring up how that shiksa Meredith Baxter Birney turned out a lesbian

The New Yorker's Paul Rudnick offers some helpful tips for getting through the coming season:

When I can't sleep, I turn to Kathleen Norris

Reading from one of Kathleen Norris' books- Dakota, The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace- miraculously seems to center me and make me ready to turn the light out and sleep. She writes episodically and conversationally, which lends itself to dipping in when you can't sleep.

So there-

 Brazil's most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer, celebrated his 102nd birthday Tuesday in typical fashion: at work on projects rather than pondering his supercentennial age.

"Turning 102 is crap, and there is nothing to commemorate," he told AFP.

As Serious Eats noted, "Zombies meet Ruth Reichl's Slow Food Movement

For Charleston Daily Photo:



Details here.

Copy editor out to lunch again

The Oxford American:

Fading From View: Was Thomas Wolfe a genuis? And should we care?

'tis the season-

Daniel Finkelstein has come across a holiday promotion by a Nashville novelty company:



It's a CHRIST-mas tree.

Proceeds from the no doubt robust sales will go the Liberty Counsel and the American Center for Law & Justice, which, when they aren't busy trying to get judges to go activist and take rights away from gay people, sue over making the world safe for Christianists.

A thoughtful church leader, ready to weather a storm

A great interviewer and an open subject make for a fascination story. The Times' religion writer, Ruth Gledhill, found that combination with LA Episcopal Bishop-elect Mary Glasspool:

Canon Mary Glasspool graciously consented to speak to me yesterday. Some clerics, when you speak to them on the phone, are so holy it is impossible to get a news story out of them. Others are so political that it is equally impossible, but for opposite reasons. The best, like Canon Glasspool, syncretise wisdom and innocence, making them compelling to listen to and a joy to interview. In today's material world, it still takes my breath away to encounter men and women like this, reminding me of why I love this job.

The full story is here.

Called back but not forgotten

Emily Dickson was born this day in 1830.

Joy in concrete form

I'll probably never see Fallingwater, but I'm not sure I will mind. I think I can die happy having been to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the last commission Frank Lloyd Wright personally supervised. Paul Goldberger celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and the completion of a major restoration, as one of the major architectural events of the year in Manhattan. Who'd have thought a museum could look like this:

(Photograph: Siegfried Layda)

A happy Christmas memory

Exceeding customer expectations of a non-shopper

During rush hour on a cold, damp day just before Christmas about ten years ago, my car's alternator gave out on Fourth Avenue, where Nordstrom was then headquartered. There was no parking and the street was three lanes wide, one way. I had to get out of the car and stand behind it to wave people around me. I called the AAA, which miscoded my call as routine rather then ASAP, so I was out there for 90 minutes.



Even with an overcoat on it was bitterly cold. About half an hour before the tow truck arrived, a barista from a coffee shop next to where I was parked brought out an enormous cup of coffee. "The ladies over at Nordstrom called and said you looked cold," she told me. I looked up at the big picture window on the third floor and two women from ladies' wear waved to me.



I'll never forget that.

Morning Museum Break

Want to see a great museum show from the comfort of home? The Guggenheim in New York has an online exhibition with an exceptional video that not only show and explains the works but gives one a sense of the amazing exhbiition space Frank Lloyd Wright designed.



The Morgan Library has a Jane Austen show, including this fascination short film about her:


The Divine Jane: Reflections on Austen from The Morgan Library & Museum on Vimeo.


And finally, Washington's National Gallery of Art has more videos and podcasts than you can shake a stick at.

As Max Beerbohm said, "I was a modest, good-natured boy. It was Oxford that made me insufferable."

I was an ocean away from family, forced to play way above my accustomed intellectual game, and and able to try stuff out without anyone telling me it was a bad idea or I wouldn't be any good at it. I got to see foreign movies, and plays in London, and grand concerts. I learned to travel all over Britain and Scotland by train and auto (a left-hander, right hand drive made perfect sense to me); had an affair; fell in love with real ale and BBC radio (John Peel and punk rock! Definitely not North Carolina); acted in a musical, and had the run of more libraries than I could have imagined existed. I got to grow up.

If only he'd also spilled the beans on who's buried in Grant's Tomb

Here's a new twist on heredity: the great-great-grandson of one of the worst presidents in US history seems to think that gives him special value when it comes to commenting on marriage equality.

"Not", says Waldo.

But Ulysses Dietz is on firmer ground explaining why second class really is:

My partner of 34 years and I have lived in New Jersey for more than 29 of those years. A couple of years ago, we were officially joined in a state-sanctioned civil union ceremony.Geoffrey M. Connor, a municipal judge, performed the ceremony in our living room; his wife Holly, a colleague and friend of mine, looked on approvingly. Witnesses included my 91-year-old widowed mother, my brother and sister-in-law, and as many friends as we could gather on short notice. Our two children, then 11 and 12, acted as attendants.

This happened on April 28, a Saturday. It is a date I will always remember — only because it is the day after April 27, the anniversary of the birth of my great-great grandfather,Ulysses S. Grant. Although the ceremony moved me more than I expected, the notion of a civil union seemed to me, and seems to me still, inadequate.

After 34 years of joy and sorrow; after building a home together; after combining our lives and careers; after dealing with the death of three of our parents; after struggling for four years to become parents ourselves through adoption — after all this, civil union is still a day late and a dollar short of the real thing: marriage.

Gary and I have not suffered from the egregious sort of discrimination that makes up the heart-breaking stories we have heard over the years from gay-marriage advocates. We have carefully drafted wills, as well as a drawer full of legal documents giving each other spousal rights in terms of hospital visits, medical decisions and end-of-life determinations. We worry about taxes, college funds, insurance issues and, ultimately, about added inheritance penalties because we are not legally married. We are, of course, tightly bound by the fact that we are both the legal guardians of our kids (although they are at the stage when they might wish to forget that detail). We always travel with adoption documents, in case someone somewhere decides to question the legality of our parenthood.

We have been blessed by the fact that we have never had need to use these documents; have never been kept from one another or from our children in times of illness or need. Except once, before our civil union, during a summer vacation.

We were stopped at the Canadian border, returning from a visit to Victoria on Vancouver Island. It was the American border police who stopped us, who chose to dismiss the copies of our adoption papers and our children’s birth certificates (naming us both as parents) and then separated us from our children, questioning us as if we were potential kidnapers and our children as if they were potential victims.

This lone incident freaked out the kids and angered us; but it is small potatoes compared to what some have suffered at the hands of unfeeling medical personnel or keepers of the law. We were treated politely by the officers involved, but nothing could lessen the feeling of isolation, of suddenly being bereft of all of the benefits of citizenship that we have always assumed. No other kind of family would have been subjected to this sort of intrusive upset.

There is no valid legal justification in this state not to grant marriage status to same-gender couples. There is not one shred of evidence from anywhere in the world that same-sex marriages cause any sort of rift in the fabric of civilization. My own religion validates my wish to be married. The rector of my church preached a sermon in strong support of marriage equality this past Sunday. My bishop joined the throng in Trenton last week to speak out in favor of passing the gay marriage law now stumbling around in our state Legislature.

Heterosexuals can get married with barely any forethought, and then divorced and married again and again as often as they wish (or can afford). Marriage is not a perfect institution, but it is the social building block of this nation, and anyone who seeks to accept its limitations and abide by its rules should be welcomed

Cures for what ails ya

Daniel Finkelstein has found an online bookseller with a website room for the strangest books ever. Among the titles:

"all right- you heard a seal bark."

Today is the birthday of James Thurber (1893).

-and don't forget the shoot-up of the Ruritanian wedding

In the UK, Sky TV seems to have rebranded a romance channel as "CBS Drama." Pride of place goes to the lurid nighttime soaps of the Age of Ronaldus Magnus. Caitlin Moran remembers the hilarities of one:

Over on Dynasty, meanwhile, the sweet, handsome and incomparably dumb Jeff Colby is being poisoned by the wallpaper in his office, which has been impregnated with a fatal compound by Adam, his long-lost evil brother. Adam is a complex character — on the one hand, master crafter of fatal decor, on the other, seemingly hot for his long-lost mother, Alexis Carrington Colby. But then, what person on Earth would not be mesmerised by Alexis Carrington Colby? — who is, was and will continue to be simply the greatest woman television has ever made. Compared with all other women we saw on television in the 1980s — downtrodden fishwives running market stalls, clad in dun-coloured anoraks in EastEnders — she was a far more appealing role model. Alexis did stuff. Alexis got results. Alexis had hair as big as a badger. Sometimes the stuff and the results were quite bad — such as the episode when she rigged herself up in tartan plus fours and what we came to refer to as “The Tam O’Shanter of Evil”, and made Krystle miscarry by shooting at her horse — but at least she was proactive, and had a bit of pep about her. She didn’t just sit around like a pudding, drinking tea and moaning about Ozcabs.

And, my God, to a houseful of fearful, virginal teenage girls, that woman’s technique around men was a revelation. Watching her in action was like observing the Horse Whisperer reel in a mustang. Instance: having resolved, quite practically, that she must marry the trillionaire Cecil Colby, Alexis invites him over to her cottage. Answering the door in one of her six million peach-coloured negligees, Alexis beckons Cecil to the chaise longue, offers him a slice of, what was then, exotic pepperoni pizza, lights a fag, and then goes right at him — fag held aloft. The ensuing sex scene is surreally lengthy — maybe two minutes, a lifetime in drama — and appears to involve Cecil Colby and a stuntman in an Alexis wig humping on the floor, up against a wall, under the coffee table and, finally, in bed.

“How was it, darling?” Alexis purrs, lighting up another fag, as Cecil lies there, breathless, and sporting a thatch of chest hair so dense that when, later in the series, Fallon’s baby goes missing, it’s hard not to believe it might simply have got ensnared in the area around Cecil’s nipple.

To us — and, I think, to be fair, the writers — the male characters in Dynasty were, by and large, shadowy, stunted and sidelined creatures compared with the women. Although we were aware of Blake (“Scary. Old”) Jeff (“Beautiful. Dumb as a box of hair”) and Stephen (“Is he gay in this episode, or has he gone straight again? I can’t remember”), really it was all about the chicks. Primarily Alexis — who is shot like a goddess, and clad in a series of definitively hot frocks, shoes and hats — but also Blake Carrington’s long-suffering wife, Krystle.

God, as children we hated Krystle — apart from the episode when she got a brain tumour and went mad, hurling plates down the corridors of Carrington Mansion intoning “Dinner is served! Dinner is served!” over and over again. We would often recreate that scene, on picnics.

At the time, it was just the general dislike that children have for characters who are “nice” — but, watching it again now, I see it must also have been some early feminist survival instinct kicking in, too. Krystle is just a spineless punchbag — albeit one with absolutely incredible tits, and hair in the shape of a Swiss skiing lodge. Halfway through the first series — when Blake has gone hysterically blind, and wanders around the mansion bellowing “Watch the blind man rage!” — he finally locates Krystle, by touch, has a quick chat with her, and then rapes her. I know. Amazing. Not only is this treated as a minor narrative incident, but, the next day, Krystle is doe-eyedly forgiving Blake, and even snuggles up to him. Yes — one of those post-rape snuggles that everyone loves. What a div. That tumour couldn’t come quick enough.

Having spent the weekend with CBS Drama — essentially the wardrobe back to 1980s Narnia — I realised that the average age of the women in these dramas is almost double that of modern shows; presumably why we found it so comforting, back in the day. After all, if you’re a confused teenager, it’s of no use to you at all to watch other, confused teenagers. You want proper, old-school, Hollywood-style broads who have been round the block a few times — Alexis Carrington Colby becomes a grandmother seven episodes into her first series: not something you can imagine happening to the main character in the biggest TV show in the world today. On top of this she keeps her clothes on, gets her groove on and never, ever whines: a weekend of watching her is, in a world full of anorexic ingénues, like being given a shot of whisky by Lauren Bacall.

Sources of a mind's calm

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/march-13-2009/kathleen-norris/1343/Thank God someone/something inspired Kathleen Norris to be a writer. For a number of years her books, including Dakota, The Cloister Walk, Accedia and Me, and Amazing Grace, have become a secular lectionary for me. I read a section each night before turning out the light; or, was the case, at length when an anxiety storm blows up out of nowhere and makes sleep impossible for hours. Inexplicably- this morning, when I was struggling till 4 am, I tried a number of other expedients before remembering what was needed: that's how distracted I was. A chapter of The Cloister Walk and the storm had dissipated. I read a little more just to be sure and, although I slept fitfully, I slept.

Now in her 60s, Norris grew up in a Navy family and lived in a variety of places, last of which was Hawaii. She attending Bennington College, moved to New York, and had early success as a poet. She married another poet who, over time, turned out to have some truly debilitating issues with depression.

A couple of decades ago, Norris's grandmother died, and she and her husband moved to Lemmon, SD, population 1600, where they cobbled together a life managing the family farming interest, bartending, bookkeeping, setting up a local cable company, and writing. She traveled to do writers' and school workshops. And she fell in with her grandmother's Presbyterian congregation, though a strong strain of Methodism runs through her from the other side of her family.

A chance visit to a Benedictine abbey let to repeat visits, explorations, and finally, long stays working on becoming an oblate- a lay associate. She became a lay preacher at a couple of local churches for extended periods: sometimes it's hard to call a minister to a congregation of 40.

Out of all of this experience has come a remarkable series of books: all the more remarkable because  in a way they are all the same. Autobiography, meditation, and scholarship into origins and modern day applications of faith intertwine. Like family on a farm front porch on a cool summer's evening, she retells the same stories of her kin, but interpreting or applying them in different ways each time.

Purists will say Norris is a cafeteria Christian, taking a bit from this dish and a couple of spoonfuls from that. It's a fair complaint if your view is that once you choose a dish, you have to eat it every Sunday for the rest of your life, seasoned and served exactly the same way. Norris' goal is larger, I think: she seeks wisdom and understanding driven by the hardscrabble landscape of the Dakotas, where- to no small- extend- you gotta make do as best you can to get from one season to the next.

Here's a link to a PBS page on Norris, with an interview from eight months ago. A half hour interview from 2002 is here.

"-but otherwise we'd have to make a new program"

The shame that is South Carolina public radio continues: Joan Mack retired from hosting a boring, didactic, weekly radio interview show June 29. Here it is December 5, and ETV Radio is re-running her self-congratulatory victory lap.

Apparently he was a dam-buster, too

It's been all over BBC Radio 4 that actor Richard Todd, who was the very model of a British actor, has died at age 90. His son Andrew, who gave interviews to the radio, said the man was a bit of a strict sort. A measure, perhaps, of how much so, is contained in his New York Times obit:

His survivors include a daughter, Fiona, from his first marriage, and a son, Andrew, from his second. Two other sons died before him: Seumas, from Mr. Todd’s second marriage, committed suicide in 1997; Peter, from his first marriage, committed suicide in 2005.

In an interview with The Daily Mail of London in 2006, Mr. Todd spoke about the loss of his sons with the kind of stoicism his characters so often displayed. “I am not going around saying: ‘Why me? Why me?’ ” he said. “What helps me is accepting it, getting on with things.” He added: “You can’t let yourself go on wallowing.”

The Royal Horticultural Society has no opinion.

In the UK 50,000 people a year sell their homes and move because they can't bear the neighbors.

A man with a truly open mind

Don Congdon, who repped authors from Ray Bradbury to David Sedaris, has died at 91.

“I married Don Congdon the same month I married my wife,” Mr. Bradbury said in a speech to the National Book Foundation in 2000. “So I had 53 years of being spoiled by my wife and by Don Congdon. We’ve never had a fight or an argument during that time because he’s always been out on the road ahead of me clearing away the dragons and the monsters and the fakes.” Mr. Bradbury dedicated his novel “Fahrenheit 451” to Mr. Congdon.

How I learned I am not made for long commutes

I took a job in Kelso and initially thought I'd stay in Vancouver, where I had a flat I liked and it was just across the river from Portland, where all my friends lived and where I'd lived myself for a decade.



After six months commuting in the dark and rain, 45 minutes each way, I got a place in Kelso.

They were discussing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and suddenly Mrs Tiger decided to act it out.

The Guardian:

It's been a terrible week for Tiger Woods, but the golf star's moment of madness at the steering wheel has brought a surge in sales for a book written by a science writer teaching at Sussex University.

A series of pictures released by Florida police of Woods's wrecked SUV includes a shot of the back seat, complete with waterbottle, towel and furled umbrella. But there among the shards of tinted glass in the footwell sits a well-thumbed copy of a paperback with the golf-appropriate title clearly visible: Get a Grip on Physics.

This incidental role in Woods's domestic drama has been enough to create a rush to get hold of the book, with the title's sales rank on Amazon.com jumping from 396,224 earlier in the week to a high spotted yesterday by the Wall Street Journal of 2,268.

Speaking in a break between lectures this morning, the author, John Gribbin, said he was "delighted that anyboy's reading my books. I just wish it was one that's still in print."

Part of a planned series on subject areas which was cancelled after poor sales, Get a Grip on Physics is an illustrated introduction to modern physics first published in 1999 which tells the story of developments in physics since the 1950s, charting the discovery of the four forces of nature, the search for grand unified theories and the beginnings of string theory.

Marriage: nice in theory

Well, actually, the choices are a bit limited. Call it almost marriage.



I was living in Seattle. I'd met a guy who was the perfect fit: intellectually, physically- the whole meal deal.



Litigation was moving ahead on marriage equality. I was working hard on that. It looked promising. I was able to get a Fortune 500 company to abandon its challenge to Seattle's nondiscrimination ordinance.



Then he stopped returning calls. Then emails. Then a friend emailed me, "I've met this guy who says he knows you."



Then the Supreme Court of Washington issued one of the most hateful opinions it has ever issued on marriage equality. I hung on for another couple of years, then left the state. I doubt I'll live to see marriage equality in SC, where I now live. As in so many other things, SC will be in a race to the bottom with Mississippi and Alabama on the issue.



And, at 54, the odds of finding another partner- especially in this deeply closeted, unhappy land- are pretty much nil. But my living alone makes my mother happy, because that way she doesn't have to admit she has a gay son.



Life's good in so many other ways, but I wish I had a happy marriage story to tell like my friends in the several states where reality has prevailed.

Somewhere, Willim Strunk is shouting, "Does no one proofread?"

From Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish:

The present circumstances are different -- huge flows of international money and support tend to seek and even require a strong central government. But the model I elude to is probably more plausible.

Her sign is really 1960s, too

From Boing Boing, a tale of fashion forward advice for haters at Syracuse University: