I really need a break

Whenever I'm unable to begin a project, particularly one I have dreaded for months, paralyzed by some kind of ennui, I'll find myself wandering the halls or going for walks around the White House or to Draper's; sometimes I feel the pressure of this city bearing down on me.

Even though he had events of greater import than my newsletters in mind, Auden's words nonetheless keep coming to me as I sit in meetings, or stare at my computer screen: "The situation of our time surrounds us like a baffling crime."

Maybe I'll go hiking in the mountains this weekend for a little liberation theology.

[Edit: Dave reminded me, I think not for the first time, that there is a scandalous Auden work that crops up at book auctions from time to time called The Platonic Blow. Well, well. I can only hope it is better than its predecessor, The Socratic Grope.]

'Impacted' is only for constipated babies

I saw that our president used 'impact' as a verb today in his comments on methamphetamine use. I assume our speech writer had nothing to do with those.

Like everything else, 'impact' as a verb has probably become acceptable. Eventually everything does.

I'm not a fan of William Buckley, but this does remind me of something the old grammarian once wrote. Back in the 1970s, he would take out a quarter column ad for his magazine each week in The New Republic. In it he would quote something from NR and follow it with a brief editorial rejoinder. After quoting an NR writer who had verbed a noun, Buckley wrote: Let us prayer for him.

Waah!

So the questioning at yesterday's Senate Judicial Committee hearing on Judge Samuel Alito's nomination made his wife cry, so what? Apparently, she's emotionally fragile. Perhaps she shouldn't attend the hearing.

These events are notoriously difficult. (Remember how the Republicans trashed Anita Hill? Now THAT was vicious.) Perhaps Martha-Ann Alito should stay home when adults discuss important matters of state.

My letter

The Hill newspaper, the paper of Capitol Hill, ran my letter to the editor this week. (I realize upon second reading that maybe "juxtaposition with" is more grammatically acceptable than "juxtaposition to." Well, what's done is done.

Patrick Henry’s words apt in reply to Cornyn
From Robert Raible:
Civil liberties might not mean much to the dead, as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) believes (“Civil liberties don’t matter much ‘after you’re dead,’ Cornyn says on spy case,” Dec. 20), but they mean a lot to those of us still alive.

Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-Wis.) juxtaposition of Patrick Henry’s famous speech on liberty to Cornyn’s petulant epigram (“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead”) was brilliant. It showed the whole arc of American oratory, from the zenith to the nadir. Henry’s words were noble and ennobling, while Cornyn’s were poor in form and appalling in content.

Silver Spring, Md.

Oxhead's Obsession or Discussing Titles

I have written previously--at my defunct LiveJournal account--of the trend in book publishing to title works using a possessive noun, as in Mozart's Women or Ahab's Wife. I have to admit, this has really started to bug me. Of course there is also the annoying trend of two- or three-word titles, a gerund followed by a proper noun. Chasing Vermeer, for example. This trend has actually been around awhile and just kind of slipped in under the radar, mostly in movies: "Educating Rita," "Eating Raoul," "Finding Forrester," "Saving Private Ryan."

A friend of mine notes the frequent use of single-word titles for Broadway musicals, followed by an exclamation point. A holdover from the days of "Oklahoma!" Not being a fan of Broadway, I have no other examples to cite.

Longer titles tell us so much more about what to expect. Take The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, for example. Of course John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror gives little hint as to what's between the covers, but maybe that's normal for poetry. In any case, it seems publishers nowadays are loathe to use long titles without a colon in them somewhere.

As for my favorite titles, well, there are a whole host of candidates. Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book is good. Robert Musil has an essay called "The German as Symptom" (which would have been a whole lot funnier if he himself weren't German). And let's not forget titles that started out serious, but got funny over the years, or just in translation, like The Golden Ass, The Fairey Queen and Moby Dick.

Here I go...

This is the maiden post in my new journal. For more than two years I kept one over at LiveJournal but I obliterated it six months ago in a pique of anti-connectedness. I wished to focus solely on a paper journal. The problem is, I'll often write something down on paper and ruefully reflect on how it would make a nice post for an online journal. Perhaps I am hopelessly dependent on the matrix of the web and probably will be at the forefront of humanity diving into Kurzweil's singularity. (If this were a true blog, I would make "Kurzweil's singularity" a link, but I won't trouble myself with such HTML'ing. Either you know what I'm talking about or you don't, and if you don't you can look it up.)