Taxing thoughts

A friend reviews Little Miss Sunshine today leading me to compare Mary Lynn Rajskub and Renee Zellweger, adding them both to the "Lunch Dates I'd Love" list I begin to wonder who said, "Wanting to meet the artist because you like the art is like wanting to meet the goose because you like paté."  A woman I think from around here somewhere, a novelist, passed on I believe.  Then I begin to ponder why I want

... when a grad student with whom he fell in love fell in love with the second-best Proust scholar

in my friend's review to read

... when his lover, a grad student, dumped him for the second-best Proust scholar

Taxing my brain again when what I really need to do is figure and pay my Federal and State income taxes for 2005.  August 14th draws near.  The weather here today is miserable, there's a real chance taxes might get paid today but who did say that about art, artists and geese?   Ankle deep ponds of last night's rain litter the gray streets during the sunrise walk this morning with gray overcast skies nearly hugging the ground.  Damp, close, windless, a bit more heat and New Orleans or Houston would come to mind.  Ancient gray Schnauzer snoring at my feet now.  Out the window green peppers and clusters of red cherry tomatoes tugging the vines down to where the Westie can graze.  A dog who eats tomatoes, who knew?  Pick tomatoes and peppers or pay taxes?  The morning is young still.  How many taxes could a pepper picker pay, if a pepper picker paid ... 

 

Which is better

a dog who active verb ...   or   a dog that active verb ...

which is correct, does one or the other convey a different meaning?  If there is a rule, can we break it to get a different meaning?  Is it like Uncle Sid's middle aged housekeeper riding along Westheimer from downtown  between Louisiana and Montrose Blvd for the first time, fresh off the plane from Guatemala going to meet her new jefé, eyeing the crowd on both sides of the street saying softly to me, "Mira, Jorge, los femininas.", using the contrast of gender between article and noun to avoid the vulgar M word?  Can we cross languages like that and keep the mood, keep the meaning?  Subtlety, subtlety, all is subtlety except penalties and interest.

 

Taxing thoughts.

Surf's Up! Who's got that coin from the fish's mouth?

Surf's Up!, a call that always interferes with work. Work will always be there but good surf comes and goes.


A nice start from memeorandum a political news summary site with some interesting sister sites.


A few nice runs from the Washington Post, one from three years ago, one from this week

Hussein's Baghdad Falls

U.S. Forces Move Triumphantly Through Capital Streets, Cheered by Crowds Jubilant at End of Repressive Regime

By Anthony Shadid

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 10, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, April 9 -- Swept aside by U.S. troops who drove through the streets of Baghdad, President Saddam Hussein's government collapsed today, ending three decades of ruthless Baath Party rule that sought to make Iraq the champion of a modern Arab world but left a legacy of fear, poverty and bitterness.

As U.S. Army troops occupied the west ... -read more-

'Waiting to Get Blown Up'

Some Troops in Baghdad Express Frustration With the War and Their Mission

By Joshua Partlow

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 27, 2006; Page A01

"How did it become, 'Well, now we have to rebuild this place from the ground up'?" Fulcher asked.

He kept talking. "They say we're here and we've given them freedom, but really what is that? You know, what is freedom? You've got kids here who can't go to school. You've got people here who don't have jobs anymore. You've got people here who don't have power," he said. "You know, so yeah, they've got freedom now, but when they didn't have freedom, everybody had a job."

-read more-

Very tubular from Time

World

Condi in Diplomatic Disneyland

Viewpoint: The Secretary of State tells the Lebanese that the blood they're seeing represents the birth of a brave new order. She's convincing nobody

By TONY KARON , Posted Wednesday, Jul. 26, 2006

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faced a thankless, all but impossible task in trying to sell the Arab world on the U.S. policy of delaying a cease-fire so that the Israeli military can continue its anti-Hizballah campaign. But her case was hardly helped when she explained that the violence that has already killed more than 400 Lebanese and turned more than a half million into refugees represents the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." Phrases like that and her rejection of the call for an immediate cease-fire on the grounds that "whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East" carry a revolutionary ring that scares the hell out of America's allies in the region. It was revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao, after all, who rationalized violence and suffering as the wages of progress, in the way a doctor might rationalize surgery painful, bloody, even risking the life of the patient, but ultimately necessary. Social engineering is not surgery, however, and its victims find little comfort in the homilies of its authors.

-read more-

One final run from an obscure SciFi author

When there is no real hope, we must mint our own. If the coin be counterfeit it still may be passed.
- Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light, 1968

Why am I having trouble sending tax money in?

OK, W-2's, 1099R's, 1009I's, bank statements, 2004 Intuit passwords, coffee ...

Ready, begin, www.turbotax.com. Who's got that coin from the fish's mouth?

Gets my attention

In Western literature, the form of the novel is coincidental with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the late seventeenth century, and this is why, for its first century, the novel is all about birth, possible orphanhood, the discovery of roots, and the creation of a new world, a career, and society. Robinson Crusoe. Tom Jones. Tristram Shandy.

To locate a beginning in retrospective time is to ground a project (such as an experiment, or a governmental commission, or Dickens's beginning to write Bleak House) in that moment, which is always subject to revision. Beginnings of this sort necessarily involve an intention that either is fulfilled, totally or in part, or is viewed as totally failed, in successive time. And so the second great problematic is about the continuity that occurs after birth, the exfoliation from a beginning: in the time from birth to youth, reproductive generation, maturity. Every culture offers and circulates images of what has been wonderfully called the dialectic of incarnation, or in FranÁois Jacob's phrase, la logique du vivant. Again to give examples from the history of the novel (the Western aesthetic form that offers the largest and most complex image of ourselves that we have), there is the bildungsroman or novel of education, the novel of idealism and disappointment (L'Education sentimentale, Les Illusions perdues), the novel of immaturity and community (like George Eliot's Middlemarch, which the English critic Gillian Beer has shown was powerfully influenced by what she calls Dar- win's plots for the patterns of generation that structure this great novel of nineteenth-century British society). Other aesthetic forms, in music and painting, follow similar patterns.

But there are also exceptions, examples of deviation from the overall assumed pattern to human life. One thinks of Gulliver's Travels, Crime and Punishment, and The Trial, works that seem to break away from the amazingly persistent underlying compact between the notion of the successive ages of man (as in Shakespeare) and aesthetic reflections of and on them. For it bears saying explicitly that both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness, by which I mean that what is appropriate to early life is not appropriate for later stages, and vice versa. You will recall, for example, the stern biblical observation that to everything there is a season and a time, to every purpose under the heaven, a time to be born, and a time to die, and so on: "wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? ... All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean ...  -read more-

The text above likely tests the limits of fair use and was lifted from the first chapter of On Late Style by Edward Said, posted on The New York Times at First Chapters.  An NYT registration is required to follow the links.  I may have bitten off more than I can digest here but what I've read here will move me toward buying the book.  There is, I'm sure, a vast literature in the history of the novel of which I'm completely ignorant save for Jane Smiley and there, as is indicative of my depth, I have read only the review linked here.  I encourage your recommendations in the area to increase my resonance.

 

L'esprit de l'escalier

Mes amis,

Remorse, regret, recrimination are they of any value at all in this party we call life?  Such thoughts haunt me today.  Let the rough side drag, eh?  Ditch the past and run with the moment!

Perhaps, all I really need is a nice ride with the top down to the Bolivar Ferry and back, eh?

Un jour nous serons victorieux au dessus des escaliers, n'est-ce pas?

Le maître de l'esprit de l'escalier,

George

Something worthwhile

Finally, from the daily stream corporate email something worthwhile

On July 25th, 2006, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies. If you have a cell phone, whether company owned or not, you will start to receive sale calls, and YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS. To prevent these calls you should do the following to get your number on the National DO NOT CALL List:

1) Call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time.
It blocks your number for five (5) years.

Or,

2) On the Internet, log onto: http://www.donotcall.gov/ and follow the on-screen 3 step instructions completely.
Again, it blocks your number for five (5) years.

I would, and you can, register any phone number, not just cell phone numbers, using this information.

Enjoy!