Reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/Seventies-American-Culture-Society-Politics/dp/030681126X
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/10/reviews/010610.10packert.html
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Sony Walkman: R.I.P.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20020573-37.html
I bought a Walkman in the Autumn of 1980.
Carried it on countless flights.
Used thousands of batteries.
Tried half a dozen or more headsets.
I bought a Walkman in the Autumn of 1980.
Carried it on countless flights.
Used thousands of batteries.
Tried half a dozen or more headsets.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Alternative Weeklies in the U.S.
http://www.commondreams.org/weeklies.htm
I clicked on the Vermont one and it is suspending soon. Yikes.
I clicked on the Vermont one and it is suspending soon. Yikes.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Your right to personal privacy is shrinking even as Corporate America's is growing.
http://www.slate.com/id/2270956/
Quote du jour from this article:
"Might we contemplate what's happened to our own individual privacy in this country in recent years? That the government should have more and more access to our personal information, while we have less and less access to corporate information defies all logic. It's one thing to ask us to give up personal liberty for greater safety or security. It's another matter entirely to slowly take away privacy and dignity from living, breathing humans, while giving more and more of it to faceless interest groups and corporations."
Quote du jour from this article:
"Might we contemplate what's happened to our own individual privacy in this country in recent years? That the government should have more and more access to our personal information, while we have less and less access to corporate information defies all logic. It's one thing to ask us to give up personal liberty for greater safety or security. It's another matter entirely to slowly take away privacy and dignity from living, breathing humans, while giving more and more of it to faceless interest groups and corporations."
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Home is where your stuff is....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/garden/30domestic.html?ref=style
September 29, 2010
Home Is Where Your Stuff IsBy THOMAS BELLER
A FEW weeks ago I returned home to New Orleans after more than three months. There are two techniques I know of that allow you to see your house with fresh eyes. One is to have a party, when at the last minute you suddenly become aware of every imperfection, discoloration or aesthetically displeasing thing about your house. The other is to leave home for an extended period.
For most of the year, home for me and my family is a rambling house on State Street, one half of a shotgun double, room after room dripping with chandeliers hanging from ornate medallions on the ceilings, and two bedrooms upstairs, along with a third space, just off the bedroom, carpeted and hushed. In New Orleans this is called an attic; in New York, it would be an apartment.
When I walked into our house in late August, there was a strange hiccup in time — the place felt almost unrecognizable, though it was unchanged from when I was last there. Objects that I had held so dear I now saw as just objects. The photographs on the wall, some of them of me and my wife and daughter, seemed like artifacts of another era.
David Berman, the poet, might understand this confusing shift. “Souvenirs only remind you of buying them,” he wrote. It’s an ambiguous line — souvenirs are worthless, or souvenirs are like madeleines, each a portal into the past.
For three years now, my family and I have spent the bulk of the year in one place and then, in summer, high-tailed it to our native stomping grounds of New York City and environs. People who behave this way are either rich, on the run or in academia. I recently joined the last group, and moved to New Orleans to teach at Tulane.
New Orleans, with its unhappy distinction of being a place that can get completely submerged, is a strange place to leave your personal effects for the summer. In Tom Piazza’s novel about Hurricane Katrina, “City of Refuge,” a character returns to his flooded home in Mid-City and picks up what looks like a limp, wet sausage. It turns out to be the remains of a pair of white gloves his mother had worn to her wedding.
At some point last summer — perhaps with that image in my mind — I reflected that in our house in New Orleans is a photograph of my wife resplendent in her wedding gown, holding a bouquet whose stems were wrapped in my grandmother’s white wedding gloves.
Each summer we rent a different house; this past summer we were in Sag Harbor. We have become very good at making a rented house feel like our own. My wife is expert at rearranging furniture to suit our needs. (She points, I drag things around.) My daughter, now 3 1/2, turns every environment into a playroom. When she was smaller she required a lot of equipment, but now she has just her purple princess carry-on, which she enjoys packing with various random things.
Then we settle in and the summer begins to unfold. We have been able to maintain a kind of dual citizenship, in New York and New Orleans, and every summer there seems to be one special family we make friends with. It feels a bit promiscuous, but it’s also nice.
But there must be, or should be, one unquestioned home, and ours is in New Orleans. Not because we own a house there (we rent) but because our stuff is there. For example, there exists a photograph of me and an elderly lady who gives every impression of being my grandmother, but she is not. She is Eudora Welty, who in her 80s came to Columbia University, where I was studying, to give a reading.
I was assigned to be her bodyguard, and at the moment of the photograph I had just fetched her a plastic cup of bourbon, which might account for the slightly surprised look on my face. I had read and enjoyed Welty but I was not a devotee; she hailed from the South, a part of the country I knew nothing about. In fact she had spent a fair amount of time in New Orleans, and the photograph is there now, a curious and unlikely round trip.
While living in New Orleans, I can go weeks and months without thinking about this picture. But this summer, when I was away, I started thinking about it, wondering where in the house it was. I needed the distance for it to surface in my memory.
The fact is, I am often transfixed when in the presence of the artifacts of my own existence. Being transfixed is a cousin to being paralyzed.
By summer’s end, as August moved inexorably toward September, I flew back to New Orleans. I told my daughter I had “to blow away all the hurricanes,” but a more accurate description would be that I had “to blow away all the cobwebs,” before coming back to fetch her and my wife.
As I came through the door on State Street, into the hot stillness of the house, right away I saw a million details of my life as it had been three and a half months earlier. Pocket change on a mantel, two cans of dog treats for the neighbor’s dog, a three-taper candlestick with wax melted over some Mardi Gras beads.
Much of this stuff — that casual, almost derogatory term for those objects in your life you have invested with meaning — is important to me. I have a lot of stuff. I am an accumulator (my wife is not).
Nevertheless, I greeted these objects with ambivalence. Part of me felt exhausted by their presence. They exerted a kind of lunar pull, tugging me out of the present and into the past. It was like seeing an old friend after a long interval and being overcome with the sickening feeling that one of you has changed beyond recognition, that the old magic is gone.
At one point I came across a snapshot of the old Shakespeare & Company bookstore on Broadway and 81st Street. You see a table full of books and hanging above it a poster for my first book, “Seduction Theory.” In the background is a man on a ladder, stocking one of the store’s sturdy floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Shakespeare & Company had been, for me, the original bookstore, the place where I would wallow for long stretches of browsing, seesawing between elation and a stunned sense of being overwhelmed and reproached, for the books I wanted to read but hadn’t, for the books I thought I should have read but hadn’t, and for the books I feel I should have written but had been too lazy and now someone else has gone ahead and done it.
The photograph in question is sitting on the very shelves that are themselves in the photograph — when the store went out of business I told myself that change was inevitable and life goes on, and then in abrupt self-contradiction ran inside and begged them to let me take some of the shelves home at any cost. At the time, I could never have imagined that they, and I (and we, I don’t think I could have imagined a we) would end up in New Orleans. Yet here we all were. I’d brought that atmosphere of a bookstore home.
But now, as I saw them after the summer, they were just bookshelves.
After a disorienting week, I returned to New York, gathered my family and brought them down. My wife was as stunned as I was; the kid hardly missed a beat, having a lengthy reunion party with every one of the 20 or so stuffed animals that hadn’t fit in her purple carry-on bag.
Now a month has passed, and the place again feels like home. The rooster made of shells, the old pictures, even the bookshelves, no longer seem conspicuous to me, though the books do at times reproach me for my neglect. The place feels ours again; the stuff is a comfort, but not a priority. It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that while artifacts are important, the living cannot be replaced. Except the living keep generating these illuminating sparks — souvenirs that remind you of life.
September 29, 2010
Home Is Where Your Stuff IsBy THOMAS BELLER
A FEW weeks ago I returned home to New Orleans after more than three months. There are two techniques I know of that allow you to see your house with fresh eyes. One is to have a party, when at the last minute you suddenly become aware of every imperfection, discoloration or aesthetically displeasing thing about your house. The other is to leave home for an extended period.
For most of the year, home for me and my family is a rambling house on State Street, one half of a shotgun double, room after room dripping with chandeliers hanging from ornate medallions on the ceilings, and two bedrooms upstairs, along with a third space, just off the bedroom, carpeted and hushed. In New Orleans this is called an attic; in New York, it would be an apartment.
When I walked into our house in late August, there was a strange hiccup in time — the place felt almost unrecognizable, though it was unchanged from when I was last there. Objects that I had held so dear I now saw as just objects. The photographs on the wall, some of them of me and my wife and daughter, seemed like artifacts of another era.
David Berman, the poet, might understand this confusing shift. “Souvenirs only remind you of buying them,” he wrote. It’s an ambiguous line — souvenirs are worthless, or souvenirs are like madeleines, each a portal into the past.
For three years now, my family and I have spent the bulk of the year in one place and then, in summer, high-tailed it to our native stomping grounds of New York City and environs. People who behave this way are either rich, on the run or in academia. I recently joined the last group, and moved to New Orleans to teach at Tulane.
New Orleans, with its unhappy distinction of being a place that can get completely submerged, is a strange place to leave your personal effects for the summer. In Tom Piazza’s novel about Hurricane Katrina, “City of Refuge,” a character returns to his flooded home in Mid-City and picks up what looks like a limp, wet sausage. It turns out to be the remains of a pair of white gloves his mother had worn to her wedding.
At some point last summer — perhaps with that image in my mind — I reflected that in our house in New Orleans is a photograph of my wife resplendent in her wedding gown, holding a bouquet whose stems were wrapped in my grandmother’s white wedding gloves.
Each summer we rent a different house; this past summer we were in Sag Harbor. We have become very good at making a rented house feel like our own. My wife is expert at rearranging furniture to suit our needs. (She points, I drag things around.) My daughter, now 3 1/2, turns every environment into a playroom. When she was smaller she required a lot of equipment, but now she has just her purple princess carry-on, which she enjoys packing with various random things.
Then we settle in and the summer begins to unfold. We have been able to maintain a kind of dual citizenship, in New York and New Orleans, and every summer there seems to be one special family we make friends with. It feels a bit promiscuous, but it’s also nice.
But there must be, or should be, one unquestioned home, and ours is in New Orleans. Not because we own a house there (we rent) but because our stuff is there. For example, there exists a photograph of me and an elderly lady who gives every impression of being my grandmother, but she is not. She is Eudora Welty, who in her 80s came to Columbia University, where I was studying, to give a reading.
I was assigned to be her bodyguard, and at the moment of the photograph I had just fetched her a plastic cup of bourbon, which might account for the slightly surprised look on my face. I had read and enjoyed Welty but I was not a devotee; she hailed from the South, a part of the country I knew nothing about. In fact she had spent a fair amount of time in New Orleans, and the photograph is there now, a curious and unlikely round trip.
While living in New Orleans, I can go weeks and months without thinking about this picture. But this summer, when I was away, I started thinking about it, wondering where in the house it was. I needed the distance for it to surface in my memory.
The fact is, I am often transfixed when in the presence of the artifacts of my own existence. Being transfixed is a cousin to being paralyzed.
By summer’s end, as August moved inexorably toward September, I flew back to New Orleans. I told my daughter I had “to blow away all the hurricanes,” but a more accurate description would be that I had “to blow away all the cobwebs,” before coming back to fetch her and my wife.
As I came through the door on State Street, into the hot stillness of the house, right away I saw a million details of my life as it had been three and a half months earlier. Pocket change on a mantel, two cans of dog treats for the neighbor’s dog, a three-taper candlestick with wax melted over some Mardi Gras beads.
Much of this stuff — that casual, almost derogatory term for those objects in your life you have invested with meaning — is important to me. I have a lot of stuff. I am an accumulator (my wife is not).
Nevertheless, I greeted these objects with ambivalence. Part of me felt exhausted by their presence. They exerted a kind of lunar pull, tugging me out of the present and into the past. It was like seeing an old friend after a long interval and being overcome with the sickening feeling that one of you has changed beyond recognition, that the old magic is gone.
At one point I came across a snapshot of the old Shakespeare & Company bookstore on Broadway and 81st Street. You see a table full of books and hanging above it a poster for my first book, “Seduction Theory.” In the background is a man on a ladder, stocking one of the store’s sturdy floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Shakespeare & Company had been, for me, the original bookstore, the place where I would wallow for long stretches of browsing, seesawing between elation and a stunned sense of being overwhelmed and reproached, for the books I wanted to read but hadn’t, for the books I thought I should have read but hadn’t, and for the books I feel I should have written but had been too lazy and now someone else has gone ahead and done it.
The photograph in question is sitting on the very shelves that are themselves in the photograph — when the store went out of business I told myself that change was inevitable and life goes on, and then in abrupt self-contradiction ran inside and begged them to let me take some of the shelves home at any cost. At the time, I could never have imagined that they, and I (and we, I don’t think I could have imagined a we) would end up in New Orleans. Yet here we all were. I’d brought that atmosphere of a bookstore home.
But now, as I saw them after the summer, they were just bookshelves.
After a disorienting week, I returned to New York, gathered my family and brought them down. My wife was as stunned as I was; the kid hardly missed a beat, having a lengthy reunion party with every one of the 20 or so stuffed animals that hadn’t fit in her purple carry-on bag.
Now a month has passed, and the place again feels like home. The rooster made of shells, the old pictures, even the bookshelves, no longer seem conspicuous to me, though the books do at times reproach me for my neglect. The place feels ours again; the stuff is a comfort, but not a priority. It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that while artifacts are important, the living cannot be replaced. Except the living keep generating these illuminating sparks — souvenirs that remind you of life.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
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