I’m reading Freedom, and it’s way better than The Corrections, which I read and promptly forgot pretty much the entire contents of. Yeah, I know, pretty novel for me to rave about Jonathan Franzen’s latest, but there you have it. It’s quite riveting. I always forget, though, when I embark on a Serious Contemporary Novel, how such books never ever have happy endings (or beginnings or middles, typically). Sometimes this bums me out. Like, there’s enough true sad stuff without having to spend one’s leisure time reading about fake sad stuff. I watched The Social Network, and...
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Poem of the Week: The Rain
The Rain by Robert Creeley All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent— am I to be locked in this final uneasiness. Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with...
Continue reading...The Politics of Birth Control
Pop Quiz: Match the country with its government’s birth control news: 1) In Country A, the president pledges to provide birth control to poor couples who want it. 2) In Country B, the legislature hedges on making any commitments to providing low-cost birth control to women who want it, in the face of loud opposition from Catholic Bishops. Ok, from the set-up of the question, you might already have guessed that Country B is the U.S. (come on, President Obama making pledges about birth control? Sounds like something Candidate Obama might have said…) The surprising part is that Country A is...
Continue reading...Florida and Gay Adoption Laws
Kudos to Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal, which last week overturned the state’s thirty-year-old blanket ban on gay adoption. According to NYT, Florida was the last state in the country to have such a law, and Newly Progressive Gov. Charlie Crist came out in support of the decision, saying it was \”a great day for children.” It was an especially great day for plaintiff Martin Gill and the two boys (biological brothers) who he had been trying for years to adopt. Ironically, the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) strongly urged Gill to take in...
Continue reading...Poem of the Week
At the National Book Festival, in addition to snagging the awesome commemorative poster (which, seriously, I’m pretty excited about), I also got a copy of the Poetry Out Loud Anthology, a collection of poems high schoolers can memorize for the National Recitation Contest. Among a lot of familiar classics, here’s one I hadn’t seen before: How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson It was like soul-kissing, the way the words filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk. All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15, but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely...
Continue reading...The National Book Festival
This afternoon I braved the unseasonable heat (over 90 degrees in late September? Really, DC?) to check out the National Book Festival. Every year, the Festival takes over 4 blocks of the National Mall and sets up a dozen or so tents featuring authors and other literary programs. This was my first year going, and it’s the kind of thing that makes me want to live here forever, so I can go every year and take my hypothetical future children. In a day full of luminary literary stars, I only made it to a few events, but...
Continue reading...From the annals of minor hypocrisy
I know some enterprising young girls who like to set up lemonade stands on warm days. Lucky for them, they live in a well-to-do neighborhood where folks tend to tip high (“a lot of times,” they tell me breathlessly, “people give us a dollar and say to keep the change” for the 50 cent cups). It’s also a well-trafficked area. Among other things, there’s a large synagogue just down the street. On Saturday, the girls tell me, they made “so much money.” “Lots of people who were going to services got lemonade and cookies,” they inform me....
Continue reading...Poem of the Week
It’s a gorgeous afternoon in the Midwest, sunny and breezy with that autumn something in the air. Here’s a poem. Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home, Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop...
Continue reading...This is how bad it got: Poverty and unemployment insurance
This chart is pretty staggering, and gives a little more credence to the call to keep expanding unemployment insurance, even if Sharron Angle thinks it “spoils” the unemployed. This chart comes from Arloc Sherman from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who writes: The headline story in today’s Census Bureau report is the large jump in the poverty rate in 2009. But an exclusive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the new survey data shows that unemployment insurance benefits — which expanded substantially last year in response to the increased need — kept 3.3 million people...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Friday, 17 September 2010
Good morning, everybody. Did you know Lady Gaga is the most-searched-for woman on the Internet? Well, here’s your morning constitutional: The success of the tea party groups is forcing Republicans to revise their playbooks for 2012. Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, is shut down after Imran Farooq, the exiled leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, was stabbed in London. President Obama is expected to announce today that he will appoint Elizabeth Warren to lead the new consumer financial protection bureau. The Great Recession has driven the poverty rate to its highest in 15 years. The Senate yesterday passed...
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