In this section are thoughts on whatever comes to mind,
no limit on topics, written for this web site. When
I get the impulse, I’ll write thoughts and add them to
what’s already here (I don’t plan on ever deleting any
thoughts). For each thought, there will be a title,
length, the month and year I wrote it, a blurb on what
it’s about, and a PDF of the thought.
To get a sense of who I am and how I see things and
what's going on with me, you could read these thoughts in
order beginning with "On Foucault," the June, 2007
thought. The thoughts are self-contained, however, and you
can read them in any order.
If the PDFs are oversize, adjust them to accommodate your
reading preference.
Beginning in 2018, I'm going go put the latest thought
at the top rather than at the bottom.
• On What Some
Songs Add Up To, 6 pp. September, 2020.
Last night, I watched a YouTube of singer Bobby
Hatfield, who was half of a duo called The Righteous
Brothers, performing
the song “Unchained Melody” on the Andy Williams
television show on NBC back in 1965.Read the
thought here.
•On
Advice to a Young Teacher, 3 pp., September, 2020.
A former student of mine when I taught teacher education
courses in the university is now in her late twenties
and a high school
English teacher in the midwestern part of the United
States.She
stays in touch with me by email.This thought
is a portion of my
most recent reply to her.Read it here.
•On
Joanna Hogg, 2 pp.,August,
2020.
Joanna Hogg is a British film director and screenwriter,
and from the three films I’ve seen of hers—she’s made a
total of four—she
is truly brilliant.Read the complete review
here.
•On a
Rejection Hook, 6 pp., July, 2020.
As long as I can remember, I have been attempting to
make sense of, and personally deal with, what I have
come to call a
“rejection hook” that keeps me from living as well as I
would like to.Read
the thought here.
• On Krzysztof Kieślowski, 3 pp., June, 2020.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
(1941-1996) was a Polish film director and screenwriter,
and in my view, a truly great artist.
Read the thought here.
•On
the Casey Anthony Murder Case, 3 pp., May, 2020.
I had a good experience with a couple of true-crime
books by attorneys for the prosecution and defense in
the Casey Anthony murder
trial in 2011.Read
the complete thought here.
•On Saying Goodbye to Michael Jordan,
5 pp., May, 2020.
I’m sitting on my leather couch watching a sports
documentary called “Jordan Rides the Bus,” and about
twelve minutes into it,
it washes over me, “What the hell am I watching this
silliness for?”Read the complete thought here.
•On
My Box Seat, 3 pp., May, 2020.
I find my dreams to be lessons on what is currently
going on with me. I’ll
analyze last night’s dream and the meaning I gave it as
a way of suggesting that you do the same kind of thing
with your dreams. Read
the analysis here.
• On Towards and Avoids, 3 pp, April, 2020.
Recently, I’ve been dividing everything in my life into
two categories.Something
or someone is either a Toward or an Avoid. Read the thought here.
•
On
COVID-19 and Curtis LeMay, 4 pp., March, 2020.
As I write this, the world is under attack from a deadly
strain of coronavirus called COVID-19.People have
been
warned to stay in their houses or apartments hunkered
down in the face of this menacing enemy. Tonight,
hunkered down,
I read a biography
of a World War II air force general by the name of
Curtis LeMay.It
prompted me to compare LeMay
and COVID-19 as killing machines. Read the
complete thought here.
• On Rhiannon, 7 pp., March,
2020.
An excerpt from an email to my fifteen-year-old daughter
about the Welsh mythological figure Rhiannon and a
popular song that
was written about her.Read the excerpt here.
• On What It's Like to Be on Death Row, 1 p., March,
2020.
Voice-over narration from the 1967 film “On Cold
Blood,” about two men, Perry Smith and Dick Hickok,
sentenced to
death for the murder of four members of a Kansas
farm family, Read the narration here.
•On
Getting the Word About Mookie, 3 pp., March, 2020.
At this writing, Mookie Betts, a star outfielder for the
Boston Red Sox, has been traded to the Los Angeles
Dodgers. An old high
school friend sent a mass email to “undisclosed
recipients,” which includes me, with a link to an
article
about the trade he obviously liked.Read the
complete thought here.
• On Movie Messages, 6 pp., February, 2020.
Two movies that got big media hype this
past year were screenwriter and director Quentin
Tarantino’s “Once Upon a
Time . . . in Hollywood” and a South Korean film,
“Parasite.” I
was disappointed with both.Read my review
here.
•On
“The
White Crow,” 2 pp., January, 2020.
As of last night, all I knew about the film “The White
Crow” was that it was about 23-year-old Russian ballet
dancer Rudolf
Nureyev’s 1961 defection to the West in a Paris airport;
I hadn’t read any reviews or anything.Read my review
here.
• On Tennessee Williams, 1 p., January, 2020.
Lines from a Williams play and poem.Read them here.
• On Being Vigilant for Life’s Lessons, 4 pp.,
January, 2020.
A couple of weeks ago, I
decided that it would be a good idea to be vigilant, or
watchful, for lessons about how to best conduct my life
that came to me during course of going about the
activities of my day.Read the complete thought here.
• On “What About Bob,” 3 pp., December, 2019.
I’ve learned to go with my impulses.Even if they
don’t make sense to me when they come up, invariably
later on they do.This was
the case with the old movie “What About Bob?”Read the
thought here.
• On Maren Ade, 2 pp., December, 2019.
Maren
Ade
(born 1976) is a German film director and screenwriter.Judging by the
two films of hers I’ve seen the past few days,
she is top-of-the line at both directing and writing.Read the
commentary here.
• On Ricard Jewell, 2 pp., December, 2019.
Richard Jewell was a security guard
suspected, falsely it turned out, of setting off a bomb
at the site of the 1996 Olympic Games in
Atlanta.At
this writing, a new book has just come out about him.Read my
comments on the book here.
• On John Simon, 2 pp., November 2019.
I read John Simon’s obituary in The New York Times
today. Read
the thought here.
• On John Klute, 4 pp., November, 2019.
“Klute” is a 1971 film
directed by Alan J. Pakula starring Jane Fonda and
Donald Sutherland.Set in contemporary New York City, it
tells the story of a call girl Bree Daniels (Fonda), who
assists a policeman working freelance, John Klute
(Sutherland), with a missing person
case. Over the
years, the Bree Daniels character has been analyzed in
great depth and the John Klute character very little
if at all.
