Is visiting this week. Also known to use the aliases “Alibaba” and “The Chicago Kid”. She is known to be unarmed and not dangerous. If you run into her, tell her she’s a little late.
The Prodigal Daughter
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Monthly Archives: October 2019
Don’t Box People In
My advice to myself after reading this short article, “Emotional Michael Jordan unveils first of two medical clinics in Charlotte”.
One day in the spring of 1984, MJ walked into UCLA’s Wooden Center where a scrawny senior history major, who would one day become a famous blogger, was on fire. After helping my team hold court again, I stopped to watch MJ run with an assortment of professional and UCLA varsity ballers. In town to accept the John Wooden Award, he was on another level, even compared to me.
Like any basketball fan I suspect, I always admired his talent, the ease in which he moved, got open, shot, defended. Simultaneously, I was always dismayed by his refusal to use his platform and incredible wealth to benefit others. Did he have his social conscious surgically removed I wondered?
I shoulda been more patient. I apologize MJ for not giving you the benefit of the doubt that someday you’d most definitely give back in the most meaningful of ways. Good on you.
Passion Till The Very End
The word of the day, harangue, a lengthy and aggressive speech. One could add “see Bernie Sanders”. I’m not a fan of Bernie’s oratorical style, but I’m in total awe of his passion especially given the fact that he’s 78 years old.
By 78, a lot of men are dead, hell, Bernie peered over the abyss last week. Elderly men and women in their eighth, ninth, tenth decades often struggle with more than just declining health. There’s the huge psychological challenge of having a purpose to continue living. Something beyond watching television and marking time.
That’s not a problem for Bernie, nor was it for Harold Bloom who died earlier this week. The New York Times described Bloom as the “most notorious literary critic in America” explaining:
“Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.”
I find his unabiding passion even more fascinating than his contrarian intellect for which he’s best known.
Dig this:
“Professor Bloom called himself ‘a monster’ of reading; he said he could read, and absorb, a 400-page book in an hour. His friend Richard Bernstein, a professor of philosophy at the New School, told a reporter that watching Professor Bloom read was ‘scary.’
Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental ‘The Fairie Queen.'”
In junior high school I memorized some bible verses in Confirmation classes, I just can’t remember which ones.
The Times adds:
“. . . his output was vast: more than 40 books of his own authorship and hundreds of volumes he edited. And he remained prolific to the end, publishing two books in 2017, two in 2018 and two this year: ‘Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind’ and ‘Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism.’ His final book is to be released on an unspecified date by Yale University Press, his wife said.”
Further evidence of his all consuming passion, he taught his last class at Yale last Thursday.*
I texted an academic friend who followed Bloom’s work this humorous excerpt from the Times. Years ago Bloom predicted:
“’What are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies, where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens.”
“He nailed that!” my friend texted back.
May you live long, similarly passionate lives.
*Bloom looks really spent in the 2011 picture. For shit’s sake, can we please revisit mandatory retirement provisions? How about you have to hang em’ up at 88 years young?
Kenyan Marathon Mastery
• I’m disappointed I didn’t get the call to help pace Kipchoge in Austria Friday. I could easily maintain 13.1 miles per hour. . . on a mountain bike.
• I’ve always said I’ll never see a sub 2 hour marathon. Now I have to acknowledge I may. Among other miscalculations, I didn’t account for the technological improvement in shoes.
• Kipchoge is a high character guy who may be on nothing more than oatmeal, his pre-race breakfast. On the other hand, Kosgei’s drastic improvement, coupled with the litany of suspended female Kenyan long distances runners, makes me highly suspicious of her performance in Chicago Sunday. Lots of people assumed Radcliffe, the previous world record holder, was running dirty too.
• Many East African runners grow up poor with limited education making them vulnerable to exploitation by family, friends, national coaches, and managers. The sad underreported story of East African running success is one of sudden unimaginable wealth being squandered in short order. For the sake of his family, I hope Kipchoge can break the cycle of successful Kenyan marathoners mismanaging their money.
Quotes of the Week
Steve Kerr on being singled out by the President of the (dis)United States:
“I realize the horse was out of the barn a long time on this. But for me personally, this was my experience with, wow, has the office sunken low. My hope is that we can find a mature unifier from either party to sit in that chair and try to restore some dignity to the Oval Office again, and I think it will happen.”
Randi Mayem Singer on Twitter where she has changed her name to Randi Great and Unmatched Wisdom Singer:
“BREAKING: The president is refusing to be impeached on grounds that if he were impeached, then he would be impeached.”
Ruth Whippman in a New York Times essay, “Enough Leaning In. Let’s Tell Men to Lean Out.”
“So perhaps instead of nagging women to scramble to meet the male standard, we should instead be training men and boys to aspire to women’s cultural norms, and selling those norms to men as both default and desirable. To be more deferential. To reflect and listen and apologize where an apology is due (and if unsure, to err on the side of a superfluous sorry than an absent one). To aim for modesty and humility and cooperation rather than blowhard arrogance.”
The backlash in the comments from Whippman’s male readers speaks volumes about the validity and importance of her insight.
The Latina Beyonce
Paragraph to ponder from the New York Times Magazine’s profile of Rosalía.
“The field hushed. Everyone onstage went silent. As Rosalía poured out the flamenco classic ‘Catalina,’ people wiped away tears. Her voice is both raw and liquid, vaulting smoothly from aching tenderness to angry longing. When she performs pure flamenco, Rosalía often sounds as if she’s pulling her heart out through her mouth. Duende — the ability to transmit deep, authentic emotion — is a moment of nearly mystical self-effacement in flamenco, akin to an actor’s disappearance inside a role. Its emotional vulnerability cannot be faked. Whenever she performs, Rosalía told me, she always tries to find that moment when “you’re not there as an artist, not there as a person with your first and last name,” she said. “You’re nothing more than a channel” for the song’s “soul” to pass through to an audience. “You’re there more than ever, and super awake, but at the same time you’re gone.” She smiled with embarrassment, as if she were sharing a secret.”
The Bane of Every Teacher’s Existence
Students act out. The question is why?
- It’s personal. They don’t like you. Never have, never will.
- It’s karmic payback for the way you treated your teachers.
- It’s a religious conspiracy. God placed them in your classroom to make your life as miserable as possible.
- It’s in their nature, they can’t help it, their brains aren’t fully developed.
- They are compensating for too little attention elsewhere.
- They’re so hungry, they’re distracted.
- They’re distracted and upset about other outside-of-school life challenges.
- They don’t understand what you’re asking them to do.
- They understand what you’re asking, but don’t have the necessary background skills and/or knowledge to successfully complete it.
Most of the time, it’s the last two. How frustrating would it be if you felt yourself falling behind your peers?
And In Hopelessly Underreported Sports Stories
This week’s United States women’s professional golf purse was 18.6% of the men’s.
Sentence to Ponder
“What are a few severed body parts among allies?”
From “How to Sell Your Soul to Donald Trump” by Frank Bruni.
Aspiring opinion writers should study this stellar model of devastating and memorable political commentary for hours on end.
Who Will Hold Weinstein’s Lawyers To Account?
Harvey Weinstein tried to rape Rowena Chiu, a Miramax assistant, twenty one years ago after evaluating scripts with her in a Venice hotel. Chiu, who has a degree from Oxford in English Literature can write, so she tells a lucid and harrowing story that details how Weinstein, and others like him if we extrapolate, wreak havoc on their victims’ lives.
Props to you for getting this far in the post.
But will you take the 7-8 minutes required to read her story or is it too unpleasant a topic for a fall weekend? Are you giving in to a MeToo malaise? I hope not, women who have suffered sexual abuse deserve much better. And given the intense silencing of victims that Chiu details, we’re really just getting started understanding the breadth and depth of the problem.
Chiu reflects:
“I’ve had many years to ruminate on how I fell into Harvey’s trap, and the best way to understand it is through the four power dynamics of gender, race, seniority and wealth.”
Power over. Power over. Power over. Power over.
I shudder to think Weinstein may leverage his immense wealth to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison. In the U.S. we talk sporadically about growing inequality, but not nearly enough about how that growing inequality creates two distinct judicial systems.
Granted, our legal system depends upon everyone receiving a robust defense when charged with a crime, but what about before then, how is it okay for lawyers to enable monsters to continue committing crimes indiscriminately by strong arming victims into non-disclosure agreements? Why can’t we go after those attorneys and get them disbarred for moral turpitude? It’s not enough to ask “How do they sleep at night?”
Pressing Pause 