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Connie Mack Running For Senate


He’s actually in.

This probably hurts LeMieux and McCallister the most. LeMieux because he will no longer have the “moderate” tag to himself. McCallister because he was never really doing well because people liked him, but just because they weren’t sold on Hasner and LeMieux – and now Mack will be the new shiny object for folks to look at.

The question now becomes whether Mack will be able to pull in the DC money that was flowing more to LeMieux and how much will state based interests put into independent expenditures on Hasner’s behalf (the corollary being whether Mack can raise enough to deal with those IEs).

Also, how much heat will he get for being married to a California congresswoman? It makes for a fine argument that he’s not really as deeply attached to Florida as he ought to be – presumably he’s spending not insignificant time in her Palm Spring district, as well spending a lot of time keeping house together in Washington. I don’t pretend to know the answers, but someone’s going to make hay out of this.

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In 2014, This Man Will Be The Most Powerful Person In Florida


Chris Dorworth will become the Florida House Speaker in 2014.

As you can see here, he appears to be a combination of the kind of stupidity that gives heft to the argument against evolution (‘If evolution were a fact,’ said the philosopher of intelligent design, ‘shouldn’t Chris Dorworth have been killed and eaten by a hedgehog by now?’) and the sickly sweet smell of semi-legal corruption.

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Another Reason Why Los Angeles Is Better Than San Francisco


Yeah. Y’all are the worst tippers in the country.

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‘Where Is Our Culture Heading?’


That was the question Warren Adler asked in this piece.

Leaving aside his pompously self-conscious and clearly deliberate, “old-fashioned fuddy duddy” voice, does he have a point?

I know that before a million channels of television, internet at home (can you believe that I used to only use it at work or in the university computer lab?), I read a lot more. Is there something to his concerns? It’s something I have wondered about before.

Of course, it is very, very hard to get beyond Adler’s irritating style and attitude, so I won’t blame you if your conclusion is ‘no, because that guy is just an a–.’

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The Windup Girl


I’ve been slammed at work, so not much time to say much of anything.

But I will offer a recommendation for The Windup Girl.

Not quite post-apocalyptic, but definitely a vivid and believable bit of world building (critical to any good sci fi or fantasy novel) for an earth after global climate change and made it suicidal to continue to use fossil fuels, coastal cities either used to be inland or are protected by high sea walls, and “calories” (as in both food calories, but also calorie meaning a measure of any form of energy) become the source of power.

It’s sort of like Neuromancer for the Audubon Society set.

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Good News! Reading In The Bathroom Generally Safe For You And Your Loved Ones


Thankfully, someone has looked into this issue.

And I admit it – I read a lot on the toilet. I finished Norman Spinrad’s Agent of Chaos on the toilet. That is where I have almost finished Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. So I’m glad that this habit won’t cause untold destruction on my household.

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Who Gets To Call One’s Self A Writer?


When do you get to say, ‘I am a writer.’ Not yet, according to this person.

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Happy Birthday, Franz Liszt


Today is his 200th birthday.

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Readability Versus Literary Quality


I want to thank British poet Andrew Motion for making this point, that the dichotomy between literary quality and readability is almost entirely a false one.

War and Peace is not a good book because it’s beautifully written but well-night unreadable. No, it’s a damn fine read.

Even so-called difficult books, if well written, are also readable and enjoyable. In different ways than other books, perhaps, but then again, the best selling and very readable Guns, Germs and Steel is readable and enjoyable in a different than The Hobbit.

I’m not reading The Cantos because they’re boring and unreadable. Yes, they are often difficult, but it is not painful to have one’s view expanded and one’s mind challenged. Or rather, if it is, then you are a sad, sad person.

Great literature is great literature for many reasons, none of them are ‘unreadable’ nor ‘providing no pleasure in the reading of it.’

Here’s another bit of (not misplaced) grousing about the direction of the Man Booker Prize.

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Will Literature Live Forever?


I don’t universally agree with what Curtis White writes here, but does pen some lines that chills this would-be poet to his very bones:

Even allowing for the possibility that Amazon will be a benign monopoly and will encourage or at least tolerate the continued unruly flowering of this thing we have known as literature, if you thought it was hard to find a book spine out at a superstore, try finding that book of poetry that changes your life and that you didn’t know you were looking for in the web’s ether, “in the cloud,” as the techno-hip say. You’d have better luck finding a speck of gold in a bucket of sand.

Mr. White does bemoan the death of  book culture, but seems to think that great works will live on. He doesn’t say ‘literature’ because part of his purpose is doing away with that concept.

But, I wonder whether ‘it’ (literature, great works, etc) will really live on? He quotes a bit of Keats as an example of something immortal.

But will such things remain immortal?

How many plays by Sophocles were lost time? Or the rumored lost play of Shakespeare? What about the lost books of Artistotle? The books burnt when the Library of Alexandria caught fire?

How were they immortal?

Or on a more philosophical note, in what way does a great poem exist truly exist if no one reads it?