Hermenautic Circle blog

I did that get home in the middle of the night thing again but this time it was because my train from New York City got in to Rutland at around midnight and then I had to drive an hour home. This time I did not nearly hit a moose. I also had a new EVDO card for my laptop which meant that I was online for a lot of the train trip which made it go a lot faster. Sneaky bossman, giving me new ways to work.

The trip to New York was a flyby, in on Wednesday, out on Friday. I was talking to some people about “digital nomadism” and I’d like to say that it was for some sociology white paper, but it was really for a Dell ad. I’ll let you know if my yammering face is going to be on the web somewhere. You know how I like to talk.

The photos from my NY trip are online here. I managed to see a lot of friends and go a lot of places in such a short time. The weather was great and I was feeling pretty good. I even charted my walking routes using mapmyhike.com which told me that I’d walked about seven miles in two days which told me that it was okay to eat rice krispie treats on the train on the way home.

Once I got home I had my obligatory all-online day. I used it this time to upgrade my main blogs to the latest WordPress and put my photos from DNC 2004 online. I had them up before in a sort of php-run photo essay, but now they’re on Flickr, tagged and everything. Today was Art Day over at Kelly and Forrest and we all went over there to do projects. I’ve been sending out change of address postcards so I made a bunch more today. My apologies to those of you who get a few of them because I’ve forgotten I already sent you one. I sure do have a ton of stamps.

I have no real plans for Labor Day — or as I call it Fake American Labor Day — except to shake my fist at all the places that are closed. I’ve got to get the house in decent shape for the weekend since I’m having people over to give me a birthday high five on Saturday [my real borthday is Friday]. If you’re in the area, consider a trip over.

Adam Mars-Jones has a thoughtful piece at the Observer on the problem with publishing Dirk Bogarde's letters, and I cannot resist pasting in these paragraphs:

Dirk Bogarde's books were painstakingly shaped and rewritten. Writing letters functioned as a sort of five-finger exercise for him, but they were exercises mainly in the key of G: gush and grumble. The English moan is a complex phenomenon. Well-off expatriates moan about little things ('I refuse to pay five francs 50 for a small root of impatiens'; 'We cannot really afford to have [meat] more than once a week') because things are so nearly as they want them, or because they don't want to discuss their real worries, or for superstitious reasons. If you stop grumbling, the gods may suddenly notice how fortunate you are and take steps.

Letter writing was part of Dirk Bogarde's life-support system, but what part, exactly? Perhaps it had a sort of renal function, clearing the blood of toxins. Many of these letters express the negatives of his virtues, such as a reflex of ungraciousness after generous hospitality, written when the washing-up was a stronger memory than the meal (which Forwood cooked anyway). 'A huge, really big, leek-pie, which Dick had two helpings of, TWO chocolate ice creams with nuts and cream walloped on top, half a round of cheese, lots of bread and butter, figs from the garden and TWO bananas from the greengrocer!' If that's what happens when you invite your dear neighbour Dickie Attenborough to dinner, either don't ask him again or don't expect leftovers next time.

Another guest, the British consul's wife, may have thought she was making things easy for her host by drinking only hot water, but no ('A bit tiresome topping up her cup all afternoon ... ').

Kathryn Jean Lopez, the National Review Online's most single-minded proponent of pro-life positions of every stripe, outspoken defender of the Catholic Church's orthodoxies, approvingly passes along this endorsement of Sarah Palin, gleaned from her mailbox.

A gentleman on Palin: She's smashing: highly intelligent, brave, unfazeable (I should guess), likeable, and a total knockout sexually.

Republican V.P. pick Sarah Palin Hubba hubba. And this wasn't a one-off thing: Earlier today, Lopez enthusiastically passed along the following comment from a culturally conservative female blogger at Culture11, a new online magazine: [...]

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"If you can't, resign!" was the overriding cheer during Saturday night's massive march and demonstration against insecurity at the Zocalo in Mexico City. As in, if you, the political elites, cannot solve the intractable problems in Mexican society of delincuency, violence, organized crime, narco warfare, and corruption and impunity, then you should just leave office.

And who might take their places? Doesn't really matter, apparently, so long as the politicians are punished for allowing to govern the way governments have run Mexico since the Revolution. There were calls for the death penalty for kidnappers and narco criminals, but there was no acknowledgment of the complex social failures that often lead to criminal activity, no acknowledgment of the collapse of the social contract in Mexico, or whatever might be left of it.

* Read aggragated coverage of the march at Google News in English and in Spanish.

My review of John Cacioppo and William Patrick’s Loneliness appears in this morning’s Chicago Sun-Times. The book inspired me to use a very unusual metaphor, and I could have easily devoted another 800 words in response to the book’s arguments. Alas, there was only so much space.

Rachel Johnson has a very nice profile of Dick Francis and son/collaborator Felix at the Times Online:

Okay, but what about the violence and the injuries that all Dick Francis heroes have to sustain on a page-by-page basis? Both admit that Dick Francis heroes, all of whom are in some way injured, disappointed, lame or wing-down, are based on Francis père. Did the two men have the same approach to character, to violence and to, er, sex?

At the mention of physical pain and injury, Dick perks up. “As I’ve got older I’ve become no less violent,” he says cheerily.

“Yes, the Queen Mother did once complain you were getting too bloodthirsty,” Felix reminds him. “But the truth, Dad, is that the books are about what you’re about. Loyalty and courage. Not sex and violence.”

It is still slightly one of my life goals to write a thriller that has some of the appeal of a Dick Francis novel - I do not know that I quite have it in me, but it would be worth a shot. (The alternate universe where I am a writer of irresistible thrillers is less vivid and plausible to me than the universe where I am an epidemiologist specializing in science-fictional disaster scenarios. However on the whole I think I am pretty much in the right line of work as is. I am gaining self-knowledge with age!)

Happy birthday to Debbie Gibson, born this day in 1970! Here's a mid-'90s MTV News clip that includes footage of her performing the Soft Boys' "I Wanna Destroy You" with the Circle Jerks. It's a strange world we live in.

Happy birthday to Gerard Love, born this day in 1967! Here's Teenage Fanclub's 2000 video for "I Need Direction."

ULTIMATE BRANDING

This week in Consumed, a look at TapouT and other brands that “speak to the mixed-martial arts lifestyle.”

The vague term “lifestyle” is particularly vexing in this context. Perhaps clothing lines associated with surfing or hip-hop or Ralph Lauren suggest such a thing. But what “lifestyle” might we associate with one person kicking another in the face?

Read the column in the August 31, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

–> Murketing readers will recall that I floated this subject here a few weeks ago and got some great comments that both convinced me this was worth pursuing as a column, and offered me a lot of excellent guidance in doing so. Thank you!

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The Times‘ Consumed RSS feed is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

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• Imitators Profiting From Artist's Obama Design : NPR
  "Fairey, whose posters have helped raise money for the campaign, says he has little patience for people who have copied the image for personal profit or resold his posters — at huge markups — on eBay."

undream has added a photo to the pool:

undream has added a photo to the pool:

undream has added a photo to the pool:

undream has added a photo to the pool:

undream has added a photo to the pool:

undream has added a photo to the pool:

we have always lived in the castle