As I do from time to time, I’m taking a little bit of a blog pause, but I encourage all of you to go straight over to Netflix and watch all seven series of Peep Show.

…I remarked upon the extraordinary clouds above us. He barely glanced up at them and made no comment. Then, remembering, brightening, he said, ‘Constable did some amazing paintings of clouds; I must show you pictures of them.’ A tree, a painting of a tree: he would always choose the painting.     – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you.     – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

We threaded our way around a group of journalists who were disclosing to each other their coastal preferences…     – Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

“Ahaha,” I agreed politely while Cookie ratified her little witticism with raucous braying.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

“You know,” he said after a moment. “I never meant you to think, that time, that I was saying you were self-absorbed, or something of that sort.” “Oh, I know,” I said. When had he said I was self-absorbed? “I don’t think of myself as a particularly self-absorbed person, so it wouldn’t really have struck home in any case.” How strange. So Rafe had accused me of being self-absorbed.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

‘Dark feelings can become a habit,’ he’d said to me once when we were talking – arguing – about this. ‘And if they’re strong enough, like many strong feelings they can even be enjoyable.’ He said that this was why the peace process wasn’t working, that the whole population was locked in a trance of grief that they didn’t break out of because it defined them, it made them feel real.     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Palestinians are beginning to discover the possibilities of nonviolence, which Israel, with its ethical and political traditions, would find far harder to resist than rocks and rockets. The longer the occupation lasts, and the larger the Arab and Palestinian populations grow in territory under Israeli control, the more untenable Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic becomes.     – Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker

‘…Conventional life always expects you to meet it more than halfway. You should give yourself the benefit of the doubt from time to time.’     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

It was years before I could see why he was doing it – alarm, I suspect, at the unadorned reality of my own personality. Be that as it may, once you’re conscious of what’s happening, it’s incredibly tiresome.     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it.     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Natalie must have been just about my age, but there might be an infinite number of ways to be twenty, I saw, shocked.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to fuck it.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

We can’t expect our gay friends to always be single, celibate, and arriving early with the nacho fixin’s. And we really need to let these people get married, already.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

Ellen calls and asks what I’m doing with myself. When I say I don’t really know, she says, “Well, I mean, you get up, and then what do you do?” Sometimes it seems to me that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

It angers me that I must be so assertive on such shaky grounds to make people believe that I run, and that when they believe me, they don’t care.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

I see Ellen today, and before she gets a chance to ask what I’m up to, I tell her that I’m running a lot lately. She is delighted to hear it. It seems that she, too, after getting home from the office, reading to the kids, clearing up after the dinner guests, studying for her orals, and knocking off an article or two for some little journal, likes to get in a few miles.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

But Al Qaeda long ago fled to all corners, changing its mailing address to franchise cells in Waziristan, Peshawar, southern Yemen, and housing projects in European cities. Bin Laden’s death underscores the question of why we go on losing young men and women daily in the defense of an indefensibly corrupt government in Kabul.     – David Remnick, The New Yorker

That’s the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That’s why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

Strether had become acquainted even on this ground with short gusts of speculation — sudden flights of fancy in Louvre galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

I cry like a three year old who just wants to take her toy cash register into the bathtub.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

Men I had met before suddenly paid attention to me…and I hated them for it.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

If only I could be lifted up and borne off to someplace further along in time, to where the hours would move forward in a benign, steady procession and I would spend the modest coinage of daily life among pleasant people.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

But there is not one management course in the world where they recommend Self-Righteousness as a tool.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

…she had sat through numbers of futile interviews and sent out numbers of futile resumes. The city, in fact, appeared to be quite overstocked with women, each more ornamental and accomplished than any nineteenth-century young lady, huge quantities of whom, Patty noticed with growing terror, were waitresses.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

This is what I like to tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits.     – Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker

Darrow wasn’t a philosopher; he wasn’t even an iconoclast. He was an agonist. He would argue one way; he would argue another; he just didn’t want to see bigotry thrive or watch a man die. He liked to say that creeds were dope: “No one can find life tolerable without dope. The Catholics are right, the Christian Scientists are right, the Methodists are right, the drunkards are right.”     – Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

I asked the demonstrators around me, “What are we protesting today?” A university student named Latifa said, “The Interior Ministry refuses to let women be photographed for their identity cards wearing the hijab . . . They force women to remove the hijab,” she continued. “This is an insult to Islam. We are demanding that the ministry allow us to wear the hijab at all times.” Oh.      - Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

…sessions covered everything from search engine optimization for doctors’ Web sites to “The Blue Plate Special,” a urogynecologist’s advice on how to persuade a patient to add cosmetic-gyn to an incontinence surgery.     – Marie Myung-Ok Lee, The Atlantic

“What are you doing?” he said, aghast. “Out. Now. Out, out.” She picked up the suitcase in one hand and shooed Stuart to the door with the other. “This is enough to get by on for a while. Let me know where you are and I’ll send the rest on to you.” “You know,” Stuart said as he trotted down the hall in front of her, “Marcia kept saying, ‘Oh, Patty is so centered. Patty is such a woman,’ but actually, Patty, you’re a very nervous person.” On the street Patty flagged down a taxi. “Take this guy to Port Authority,” she said, giving the driver a ten. She shoved Stuart into the back seat next to his suitcase and ran along behind the taxi as it took off, flapping her skirt. As she walked back down the hall, whimpering, Mr. Martinez peered out from his doorway. “The mens – the mens-” he said, his voice vibrant with commiseration. “They must do this thing. Do not cry, missy. He will come back.”     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

And when Patty returned to George’s table later, she found only more change than he could afford, she knew, and on his plate a pile of little bones that suggested he’d curled up there and died.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like – it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can – it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. . . . The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was forever missing things through his general genius for missing them, while others were forever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

Did the government believe its citizens would survive nuclear attack by hiding in holes in their back yards? Not really, Roy said. The security technologist Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theatre” to describe certain measures, such as post-9/11 T.S.A. pat-downs and subway bag checks, which, he says, improve feelings of security while doing little or nothing to protect people.     – Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker

Getting patients to acknowledge their own disorders also has become an ethical imperative. Implicit in the doctrine of informed consent is the notion that before agreeing to take medication patients should be aware of the nature and course of their own illnesses. In balancing rights against needs, though, psychiatry is stuck in a kind of moral impasse. It is the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish.     - Rachel Aviv,The New Yorker

Deinstitutionalization was a nationwide social experiment that did not go as planned. Overgrown hospitals were shut down or emptied, but many fewer community centers were opened than had been proposed. Resources steadily declined; in just the past three years, $2.2 billion has been cut from state mental-health budgets. “Wishing that mental illness would not exist has led our policymakers to shape a health-care system as if it did not exist,” Paul Appelbaum said in his 2002 inaugural address as president of the American Psychiatric Association. Today, there are three times as many mentally ill people in jails as in hospitals. Others end up on the streets.     – Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker

Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad’s life was doing with Chad’s mother’s emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

Outside, too, was the London Marta had come to but had never before entered.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

From the moment she was born people had been happy to tell her what to do, down to the most minute detail; Eds. Clarke & Melton knew just what was happening; there were admonitions and exhortations plastered all over the walls – this is how to behave, this is what to think, this is how to think it, that’s then, this is now, this is where to put your sock – but no one had ever said one little thing that would get her through any five given minutes of her life!     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

More than 90 percent of the health care provided by Planned Parenthood is preventive. Every year, Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses carry out nearly one million screenings for cervical cancer and 830,000 breast exams. Planned Parenthood health centers also provide affordable birth control to nearly 2.5 million patients, and nearly four million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV testing for women and men. The funding that PPFA receives from the federal government goes toward this basic care, and accounts for roughly one-third of Planned Parenthood’s $1 billion annual budget. These funds come from local, state and federal sources, but 90 percent come from Medicaid and other federal sources. Federal funds pay only for cancer screenings, birth control, family planning visits, annual exams, testing for HIV and other STIs, and other basic care.

Moreover, 73 percent of Planned Parenthood health centers are in rural or medically underserved areas. Planned Parenthood provides primary and preventive health care to many who otherwise would have nowhere to turn. According to the Guttmacher Institute, six in ten patients who receive care at a family planning health center like Planned Parenthood consider it their main source of health care.

The more of these discussions I have . . . the more I realize one important difference between America, or rather Washington, and the Czech Republic, or rather Prague.  Here people enjoy politics; in our country they don’t.  Here they really enjoy talking about politics; in our country they merely complain about it.  Here politicians, scientists and academics, journalists, and other important people appear to stay fresh the whole day, and perhaps they say the cleverest things in the evening.  In our country, by the evening, such people are either tired or desperately trying to catch up on work, or they’re drunk or just glad to be home watching television with no need to talk to anyone. . . . Why is it we Czechs are always so harried?  Always so irritated?  Why are we always complaining about something instead of doing a decent day’s work?

- Vaclev Havel, To the Castle and Back

Maybe I should move to Prague…

I’ve been in a bad mood because it’s fall, the season of darkness and death, and also because even though it’s icy cold in my room, one last mosquito is hanging in there and biting me in special places all night long, and also because I’ve been working more than usual and I just can’t understand how people who work full-time ever get their laundry or their reading done, and also because my best buddy will be moving out soon and I will miss her and also I have to find a new roommate, and also because Thomasina has been a right little bitch lately, having established this routine of running up and biting me just before bedtime as a way (I’m only guessing here) of asserting that her day has not been entirely perfect in every respect.  Maybe it’s because I have been at work all day this week, when I am usually home with her most of the time, or maybe she has decided that she likes me being out of the way and is annoyed when I get back in it.  Who knows what rabbits think?  You?  If so, please tell me.  Anyway, a chihuahua will be moving in soon, and then she’ll be sorry she was mean to me.    

But despite all these annoyances, I have decided to begin looking in the general direction of the bright side.  So, here – here are two positive things:

The Dresden Dolls were AMAZING on Halloween.  They played two full encore sets, and just generally rocked, and also, if Amanda Palmer ever gets sick of Neal Gaiman, I would like to marry her, and if Amanda Palmer ever gets sick of Amanda Palmer, I would like to be her.  

Also, today is the day we vote!  Voting is healthy fun for boys and girls, even when it’s cold and dark out and all you want to do is whine about things and be angry, and even if the voting in question will very likely spin the country off in a different direction from the one you want it to be going in, when it wasn’t even going in your direction in the first place, but rather, just sort of making emptyish gestures in the direction of the direction, which it clearly never intended to go in at all, anyway, but was just saying that it might in order to appease you, and so, you know, democracy is an illusion and your vote doesn’t really matter at all.  Still – vote!  

Oh, and hey, here’s another good thing – I am now a green belt in Shotokan karate, so anyone who’d like to beat the snot out of me is advised to do so within the next five years, because after that, who knows but I might be able to make it rather difficult for you.   

Look at that!  Good things flopping out all over. 

…Is it summer yet?

Image via Wikipedia

I don’t usually pay much attention to anything Tea Party, because, no matter how much the media tells me this movement is significant, I refuse to admit it’s not just a lot of news bait and nonsense and won’t end up being about as relevant to U.S. politics as the Socialist Labor Party.  But I have to point out that Peggy Noonan’s latest WSJ Op-Ed is pretty hilarious:

Actually, Maureen “Moe” Tucker, former drummer of the Velvet Underground, has done the best job ever of explaining where the tea party stands and why it stands there. She also suggests the breadth and variety of the movement.  . . . “Anyone who thinks I’m crazy about Sarah Palin, Bush, etc., has made quite the presumption. I have voted Democrat all my life, until I started listening to what Obama was promising and started wondering how the hell will this utopian dream be paid for?”

Yes, Peggy, absolutely a former drummer for the Velvet Underground is representative of Tea Partiers!  Tea Partiers are totally a bunch of awesome rockers!  I’m convinced.

Mayor Michael ‘No Fatties’ Bloomberg would like to remove soft drinks from the list of items that can be purchased with food stamps.

In general, I’ve been a fan of Bloomberg’s waistline-reducing initiatives, but I think this one is pretty ugly, however unintentionally. Obviously, there’s a stigma around using food stamps, and people who use them say it can be humiliating to grocery shop with them. Cashiers and other shoppers can be nasty and intrusive; people don’t think you should buy junk food at all, but they don’t think you should be able to buy pricey, healthy food, either.

Here, the health commissioners defend the measure in the Times:

This proposal to adjust the food stamp program is just one of many steps New York City is taking to reduce obesity. The city also has programs to increase the availability of fresh produce in poor neighborhoods; has set nutrition requirements for meals served in schools, after-school and day care programs and centers for the elderly; and has begun advertising campaigns to educate the public about obesity and nutrition. Taken together, these efforts will bring us closer to stemming the wave of obesity and diabetes in New York.

They, and other proponents of the ban, argue that soda isn’t food, and that there are many restrictions on the use of food stamps and this is one that should have been there all along.  But the thing is, it hasn’t been a restriction up until now, and this would be scoring a point about a mere symptom of a much larger problem at the expense of people who need additional social censure even less than they need a 2-liter of Coke. People on food stamps probably have other concerns currently taking precedence over kicking their soda habit, like, oh, say, getting off food stamps. Institutes that study such things say one of the big obstacles to digging yourself out of poverty is feeling like you have no control over your situation or your decisions, so further restricting people’s personal choices doesn’t seem very productive.

This very interesting blog post explains in detail how food stamps work in New York, and why this measure would be unlikely to produce the desired effect.

And here’s Sadhbhe Walshe in The Guardian:

On a recent shopping expedition (in my local C-town not some fancy organic joint), I paid $7 for a bag of apples, $5 for four oranges and $2 for one red pepper. Just those few items would eat up almost half one person’s weekly food stamp allotment. It’s no wonder, then, that people would opt for cheaper, high-calorie processed foods when money is tight.

The really frustrating part is that the reason that junk food and soda are so inexpensive (and therefore widely consumed) is that these products are subsidised by the federal government. All these foods contain high-fructose corn syrup, made from corn, which is a subsidised crop. So, while the poor are being frowned upon for their bad food choices, they are simultaneously being incentivised by misguided policy to make these choices. The hand that wants to take away is also the hand that giveth.

How much more sense would it make to subsidise the production of fruit and vegetables in low-income neighbourhoods, instead of Big Macs and 20-ounce Cokes and the like? That way, instead of imposing virtue on the poor, we could offer them a choice – and then try to move past the assumption that they might make a bad one.

Frankly, people need to stop talking about produce as if it were food in itself.  It has hardly any calories in it, so, while we should all ideally be eating a bushel of it with every portion of carbs and fat, the produce itself is extraneous to assuaging hunger. It’s more like a really elaborate, time-consuming vitamin. For example, last night after karate, I had a big bowl of brown rice, eggs, beans and cheese, and I also had a giant handful of spinach, a tomato and two carrots.  If I didn’t have any money, the first thing to go from that sentence would be the karate and the next would be the spinach, tomato and carrots, because, while they might be the most important part of that meal for my health, they’re the least helpful in my not going to bed hungry. Soda costs next to nothing, however, which is probably why it’s usually free where most people work.

Related Articles

• Let them drink Coke | Sadhbh Walshe (guardian.co.uk)
• Bloomberg: No Food Stamps for Sodas (theroot.com)

Simply put, the global world of today can hope for for a decent and peaceful life only if, among other things, there is an absolutely evenhanded cooperation among various large supranational or regional entities, defined in terms of their civilization, their history, their culture, and their geographical position.  A necessary condition for such cooperation, however, is a clear agreement on where a particular sphere begins and where it ends.  In short, there must be a clear agreement on mutual borders.  Only clearly delineated and defined entities can be genuine and creative partners; in the future, any vague or blurred or disputed border can only be – as it was with nation-states in the past – a source of instability, tension, and ultimately war.  That’s why I think that the creation of a new political world order requires that special attention be paid to the problem of borders between individual spheres of civilization, a problem that can be solved only if the spheres that are momentarily wealthier cease to consider themselves superior to those that are momentarily poorer.

– on Ukraine, 4/9/05

Also:

In the period of communism the Nobel Prize would have considerably invigorated our struggle, that’s obvious.  During my presidency, however, I would have felt awkward about accepting it.  I think that politicians in office have a duty to work for peace and for a better and more just world; you might say that’s what they’re paid for, and so it’s better that the prize go to someone who works for a good cause voluntarily, and possibly at great risk.  That kind of recognition always emboldens such people and their struggle in very concrete ways, and therefore it must not merely be a reward for past merits.

– on failure to win the Nobel, 4/9/05

Also:

First some brief news about myself:  I spent the first two days of Easter (Friday and Saturday) in a rather poor state.  I was angry at the whole world; either because I have no Easter and I have to work (along with emergency room nurses and train drivers), or because I have to write so many speeches at once, or because I have such a thick file of documents and altogether so much weekend reading from you (circa three hundred pages), or because my printer isn’t working and without it it’s practically impossible to write speeches, or because I can’t find anyone to repair it because everyone’s away somewhere for the holidays.  I felt as if I were out on a limb, a man betrayed by history, which has burdened him with endless tasks and now mocks him for his inability to master them, and I’ve paced back and forth like a lion in its cage consumed by anger at an unspecified perpetrator (even though the lightning rod that drew my ire was my staff).  In the end, however, the situation took a turn for the better:  on Saturday evening people were found who could at least make temporary repairs to my printer, and on Sunday morning, that is, today, I finally began to work.

– to his staff re:  his printer, 4/16/95

(All from To the Castle and Back)

Inequality is especially marked in political life. Despite the high profile of a few female leaders — including Ms. Gandhi and the president of India, Pratibha Patil — fewer than 11 percent of members of Parliament are women.

By contrast, the panchayats stand as bastions of female representation. Academic studies suggest that the quotas have not benefited upper castes at the expense of more impoverished groups. Women are as likely as men to come from lower castes to serve on the panchayats.

And the quota seems to be benefiting both sexes in more tangible ways. One study, by Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that panchayats led by women provided more public services, from wells to roads, over all.

NY Times

There is no biological basis for what we call race, meaning that most human variation occurs within individual “races” rather than between them.  Race is a social fiction.  But it is also, for now at least, a social fact. 
[. . . ]
If they are willing to make any sort of nod toward the existence of race as a legitimate category, most scientists agree that a person’s race is self-identified, and the U.S. census now categorizes people only as they self-identify.  But our racial categories are so closely policed by the culture at large that it would be much more accurate to say that we are collectively identified.   

Eula Biss, “Relations.”   

The obvious question—perhaps not to an American, but certainly to a visitor from another planet—is why if someone’s ancestry is predominantly white, they are not identified as “white” rather than “black.” It’s not because of the way they look. Walter White was widely “mistaken” as a white person. As a student at Colgate, Adam Clayton Powell was initially believed to be “white.” But once it became known that they had black ancestry, they became black. And American law backed up this conclusion. In the South, the idea that any black ancestry would qualify someone as black, negro, or colored was called the “one-drop rule.”
[. . . ]
By denying the existence of race, one denies the existence of racial inequality. Yet by using the constructed language of race, one perpetuates invidious racial distinctions. Obama faced this dilemma when he chose how to designate himself on the census. And he may have done the right thing—but only in the short run. If racism is finally to disappear, so must the peculiar logic of blackness.  

John Judis in The New Republic.