Notes of long ago Oak Parker: Bread Kitchen. Columns. Blackwood’s Magazine. Fetus targeted. Rush Limbaugh. Karl Popper. Somerset Maugham. Paul Vallas. Road to Serfdom.
2/2/2009 Got a double-, no triple-take this morning at the Bread Kitchen counter from a bicycle-rider commuter, man in 40’s, bespectacled, nicely groomed and suited, day after my Wed. Journal column — as usual with head shot — in which I compared Obama to FDR. Am I notorious?
Ordered at Bread Kitchen, found only a dollar in my pocket, offered to use a card for my $1.82 purchase, young lady said pay next time.
Excellent reading in Times Literary Supplement 1-16-2009 re: Blackwood’s Magazine and role of James Hogg, a self-educated shepherd who got no respect from his editor, John Wilson, for whom Hogg produced much, 1817 to 1835, which featured Hogg as an ill-educated souse in a running feature, tales of tavern revels, called “Noctes Ambrosianae”!
Hogg knew a lot but kept “a certain naivety, often agreeable, sometimes irritating,” Allen Massie says in his review of Contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 1, 1817-28, Ed. Thomas C. Richardson, Edinburgh U. Press, $90!
2/3/2009 Weary, but refreshed by walking, to Bread Kitchen and St. Edmund’s and home.
Reading Scott Fitzgerald’ This Side of Paradise. Good stuff, a break from econ. books.
Very down on blogging now, losing interest in my own observations & commentary. (Tired.)
Nice coffee yesterday with #4 daughter at Jackson and Wabash Starbuck’s.
2/4/2009 Best a column can do is supply plausibility, as opposed to legal or scientific proof. It employs shorthand in its 500 words — the recently imposed limits. Vigorous objection may be in order for a reader, but to say a column proves nothing is to say or complain that a league-leading base-stealer hits no or few home runs.
Trainor [editor] says we oughtn't play God by deciding when the fetus is a person. Highly negative phrase. I think of the Fed chairman deciding the interest rate that’s best for us all or Nancy Pelosi writing an omnibus spending bill intended to bring us prosperity.
Or deciding the heck with it, we’re going to abort that blob, even if we’re not sure. There’s that figure in the woods, which might be a deer or our hired hunting helper from whom we had gotten separated. We’re not sure. We fire anyway — the deer is too good a catch to to take a chance. Oops! It’s our hired helper. Oh well, we’ll hire another one.
That’s the old cervus (deer) - servus (servant) issue of moral theology. If we’re not sure, we should not pull the trigger, the argument went — and still does, unless you’ve decided you’re God or decided to play Him.
More on column: Rush Limbaugh calls us drive-by media — shoot and run. Or hit and run. 500 words because we are here today and gone tomorrow.
No induction, says Karl Popper, only hypotheses tested. Science is the quest for truth, not possession of it. It seeks less verification than falsification. — Kathleen Nott, review, TLS, of first English translation of The Logic of Scientific Discovery — excerpted in TLS 1-9-09.
2-5-09 Sun-Times Spielman: Daley defends privatization as providing better service. “Government doesn’t have customers. They only have citizens.”
Govt. employees watch the clock. Private-enterpriser wants to satisfy customers.
Unless union work rules interfere.
2-5-09 Sun-Times’ Mark Brown miffed at Paul Vallas turning Republican to run for county board president. Concedes he might reform county government as he says he would and that there’s “nothing wrong with dumping Stroger.”
But after quoting Vallas extensively and to good effect for his cause and conceding it’s “tough” for a Dem reformer to get nominated, he still wishes V. hadn’t switched.
2-6-09 See: Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-63.
Also James H. Bowman, grandpa and namesake. LOOK HIM UP. [Did that, found his NY Times obit for 9/25/1935, more later on him.]
See: Hugh Walpole, Rogue Herries, Judith Paris, The Fortress, Vanessa; Walpole’s friend: Arnold (“Arn”) Bennett.
See: Somerset Maughan, as Cakes & Ale (1930) and its Alroy Kear, “A bedtime story for adults” — “fantasy, horrific comedy, the bizarre,” says Grevel Lindop, TLS 12-12-08.
Cakes and Ale, comic novel by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1930.
2-6-09 I wrote columns for many people. Comments and criticisms show that.
I had in mind the nurse who knew a doc I’d written about and engaged me in the park, objecting in detail and to her credit hearing me out.
Or the old friend who knew me as a liberal and was shocked at what I’d become, told me so, even (gently) told me off when we met on the street.
Or another who grilled me at George’s, appalled at my other side: he had read Road to Serfdom too; I had counted it a revelation, he an abomination, but we parted amicably.
Or the peace activist who expected me to join her in rejecting Bush’s Iraq war but found no cause to write me off when I declined, on and on with Oak Parkers I have known and worked with and against over 40 years, leading me to expect restraint and gentility, even sweet reason.
Those are the people I have written for, not to mention the few who commended me.
Those I have not written for? Can’t think of any right now. Sorry.