Okay, so Osama Bin Ladin found a way to bombard us with hurricanes. Keeps that up we'll get really mad.
The whole family is sick, some kind of bad cold, not the flu; temperatures are back to normal. Oldest son,10, insisted he go to school. My spirits are headed back to normal, so much so that I did a little jig when I saw the words on CNN, "WANTED: Tom Delay." Ha ha ha ha. Texas Law ain't that somethin'.
Barry
I've almost finished Genesis of Justice by Alan M. Dershowitz, lawyer, Harvard Law School Professor, author, and occasional TV commentator. The book's title is astonishingly apt: the author traces the origin of our present legal system from the first book of the Bible to the Ten Commandments, and from there to Magna Carta, to the present day and our court system.
Frankly, I was totally ignorant of the true nature of the tawdry tales of incest, murder, sodomy, betrayal, fratricide, and argumentativeness with God, that is ever-present in Genesis. On those few times I read a portion or two of this first book of the Bible I allowed myself to be fooled by the majestic tone of the prose while skimming what the words actually say; what I read must have been sanitized. Did Dershowitz, perhaps, come up with the true, accurate Jewish tales of horror? After all, it is their book. When I studied Milton's Paradise Lost we were not told,even though the entire course was devoted to Milton, how selectively Milton chose to tell the story of expulsion from the Garden.
Oh well, I'm not much of a scholar, but from a fiction writing POV Dershowitz's studious exposition of what's really, truly in Genesis is an eye-opener. I'll have to write him a fan letter. (He gives where to write! Ha ha ha.)
Barry
All the writer's boards, professional and
otherwise, are virtually moribund because
of ceaseless personal attacks by messages
of hate from the dispossessed. In previous days
on AOL when there were volunteer, American writers with very good reading comprehension skills, and knowledge of the American vernacular, who could interpret accurately AOL's rules of TOS and CAT, there was no such roaming bands of 'killers,' whose only motive is to wreck the whole message board concept, and in the process even upset the financial maneuvering that is going on between Time Warner and MSN and the other players. AOL's reputation has never been lower with educated writers most of whom have demonstrably
fled to other places on the Internet.
These marauding 'killers,' those who offer nothing except their negative opinions about everyone other than themselves, show by the barrenness of their messages of hate that they
are homeless, unloved, and suicidal.
Barry
>oh, lets not forget men of all ages beating down our door to get Viagra or Cialis... <
That does it: now I MUST say something about Viagra now that another (much admired) blogger has twice brought it up.
Am I alone in sensing some form of disapproval in the phraseology,"...beating down the door..."? I've claimed that women resent the mere existence of Viagra, as if the drug companies had committed yet another gross sin of greed, and humanity be damned.
My doctor seems bent on limiting me to six viagra pills per month. He suggested cutting each one in half. What I assume are illegal sellers of the drug charge $85 a year just to get started. There's apparently no limit to the number one can buy. Then there's a Canadian source I haven't explored yet.
The advent of viagra, advertised on the body of race cars for reasons so obvious it's embarrassing, and the semi-difficulty of acquiring the drug, has spurred a rennaisance of herbal and other types of aphrodisiacs.
Women, I suppose and guess, hate the notion that a drug will enable men to actually impale them minus all caring, foreplay and tenderness. Yet, simultaneously, if the man of the moment can't perform he may never climb up out of that well of disgrace. I've always feared first times, which mostly amounted to over-estimating the goal once up close and personal. But, just plain nerves do play a role sometimes. My first wife, not long before the wedding, took me to bed in her apartment in daylight. Everything went fine. I was in love. But why was there blood? She was a virgin? She'd been put up to it by another woman to make sure I was as good as I looked? Or, she was so naive she didn't know she still had her period?
Is this talk gonna be taken down by those folks in India? They sure follow a quite strange moral code. Take that guy who literally rolls, horizontal, thousands of miles, then his entourage collects money for his pains? By most western standards that's just plain flatout immoral. We should talk: this morning again (October 13) our newspaper front page has still more - God help us - on the huge dimensions ofthe Catholic priest scandal.
More later: gotta run.
Barry
Grumpy today reluctant to force myself to post an entry. Reviewing the entries I peruse, somewhat super-casually I'll admit, and hold up high defying you to disagree, the general tenor reads to me as 'please love little ol' me.'
Don't love me, please. There are two topics I'd like to write about and both are unpopular: yet, both are wildly popular. How explain such ambivalence? Societal ambivalence I mean. I want to write about two unrelated subjects, Howard Stern and Viagra. Neither subject would be introduced at a polite dinner party: too controversial; too argumentative. Too political. Women particularly turn rigid at the mention of either. While my own wife greatly appreciated Stern's splendid movie comedy Private Parts I know better than to turn Stern's radio program on while driving if my wife is with me.
While I'm struggling to write this, CNN just started showing Indian mothers suddenly childless from the earthquake! Oh God!
later, maybe, or something......
Barry
There's one glaring error in Polanski's new version of Oliver Twist. The children aren't hungry. Polanski has been hungry but he seemed to have forgotten what it is like. I've been hungry. Hunger is insidious in that you get used to it. If suddenly presented with food when truly hungry you slowly nibble at the food as if it were a foreign object. It's as if one had to relearn how to bite, chew, and swallow.
In other words, rehearsals for the acting of the movie didn't include study of human behaviour of hungry boys. Even hungry dogs look around to see if anyone might snatch their food away. Oliver looked too fat. Polanski has been living it easy for too long.
Odd, also, that NY-er critic Lane said the other boys put him up to asking for more, when Oliver thought he was drawing lots, not suspecting they'd cheat.
Barry
For years I've carried around with my mental baggage the phrase, "...it was the season of divorce," written by now very famous American author Joan Didion, whose latest book The Year Of Magical Thinking has just been published. The phrase occurs in the first paragraph of a fleshed out account of a real life murder which took place in or near San Berdardino, CA. As I remember the complete sentence reads, "The Santa Anas were blowing, and it was the season of divorce."
Joan Didion's writing style includes the author's rare ability to observe both herself and others, and the world, without judgment. In her writing she struggles to fill in 'what's so.' My tendency, often, is to leap to a conclusion and/or judgment on the thinnest thread of factual knowledge. I might not be alone in this proclivity.
In other words, the sentence quoted above could very well mean that the Santa Anas, hot, relentless winds from the desert, blow in every year and they tend to make people irritable. Furthermore, they nearly always usher in annual, California forest fires. Every year, as yesterday and probably again tomorrow, on TV we see family members outside their beloved forest homes clutching their photo albums saved before their homes were incinerated.
Is divorce as arbitrarily selected as the weather is imposed? Joan Didion doesn't answer, she just poses the question. In the recounting of what happened she manages to reveal the following details. A young woman has fallen in love with her dentist, so sets about to murder her husband, so she can be with the dentist, even though the dentist makes it quite clear he doesn't want her. After the murder is accomplished, by, as I remember, setting fire to her husband's VW while he was in it, she discovers that her dentist meant it when he said he had no more interest in her. The woman is now living out her life in a California prison for women.
In today's LA Times (under new, and most excellent management since the year 2000) it is reported that Joan Didion has been accused of not being in complete sympathy with Feminism. Her reply: "I didn't feel unsympathetic, I felt it was becoming mired in arguments over who did the dishes."
In our house I do the dishes. I believe in Palmolive, 'Original' (on a pink background), and that can't be used in a dishwasher. Ours is new, used once by my wife, who'd use it again if I didn't insist on washing the dishes myself as a means to keep my nails and hands quite clean. I soak. I wash, fast, and put away equally fast. No problem. Who does the dishes, and with what, has nothing to do with cohabiting, marriage, togetherness or motive for murder.
In short, Joan Didion gives excellent instruction through the power and precision of her insights; But she does it with no desire to be didactic: she simply marvels at the intransigence of human behaviour, probably including her own.
She wrote a terrific novel called Play it as it Lays.
All clear, I wish to sound the all clear. Anthony Lane in The New Yorker is full of it; Polanski's version of Oliver Twist is just fine for children of any age to watch, especially when one considers the violent drecht (sp?) in lots and lots of everyday cartoons for kids on TV. Furthermore Anthony Lane's gratuitous ('Look at me, I'm pure') riff about AntiSemitism in the original, published version of the novel about 160 years ago, has zero relevance to this accurate movie version of the novel which was published four years after the original.
The murder of Nancy occurs virtually off-camera, a detail 'puff-up' Lane leaves out.
His reservations about the performance of the actor playing Fagin is completely inexplicable.
My only reservation in the acting is that I wish the actor who played Sikes in the David Lean version years ago could have been available to Polanski.
This movie is a splendid effort, produced by France, England and Czechoslavakia. The nominal Producers are Polanski himself, and two others. It makes Hollywood look like the girlieman playground it really has become. Trash.
Barry
