Positive takeaway: Focus on transparency; minimize legal action; forget all retaliation. Otherwise, “it’s a bleak future.”
Cynical summary: “It’s a bleak future.”
This is not a season of reading. I am mostly an early morning and late night reader. Neither of those times are much available to me right now.
But I’m not sad about it. For one thing, life is (stressful but) good:
OK, technically there’s lots of reading going on, just not of those unread books that I want to get to. But this also means that, as a substitute, it is a season of rereading. And that means a time of looking back, flipping pages, and taking stock.
On that note — and how fun is it that I can say this — I’m currently conversing with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Sayers, Vaclav Havel, Frederick Buechner, Gilbert Meilaender, and Alasdair MacIntyre.
Hopefully some of that conversation, which is dead-center stuff for me, will spill out on the page. For a taste of it, see this post on Bonhoeffer and Sayers from last year.
Anna Akhmatova:
this is bananas, ie: “nothing contrary to the norms of the market” (with an added, post-publish footnote)
I don’t have any glasses yet, but ever since I joked yesterday about losing my notes — “joked”; I really don’t know where they are but I know they’re around here somewhere — and partly also from that funny feeling you get reading the news with your shoes off and your feet up, I’ve had James McMurtry stuck in my head:
And the airline’s drowning in the belly of the beast
And they’re all bogged down from the weather in the east
And we’re not going anywhere soon
It’s thirty degrees on the Emerald Coast
I spilled my coffee and I burned my toast
And the rent car’s sitting on a flat
The internet’s down and they don’t know why
And I damn near made the desk clerk cry
And there wasn’t any reason for that
She’s camped in the shower and she won’t come out
And I don’t have a clue what that’s about
I’ll just have to wait and see
Can’t get online to check the bank
Twitter’s on fire, my stocks all tanked
But what’s really getting to me is
I keep losing my glasses
the antediluvian pattern of life — As usual, Jeffrey Foucault brings some of the best that words can do in his latest newsletter. (With an added a note via Frederick Buechner.)
