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
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.
“Vanya on 42nd Street” is a 1994 film directed by French
director Louis Malle. The
film is a rehearsal-type performance of the
classic
Russian play “Uncle Vonya” before a small invited
audience in an abandoned theater in New York City. The last lines
of the play are spoken
to Uncle Vanya by his niece Sonya.Read the
complete thought here.
• On Babe Ruth’s Legs, 8 pp., November, 2019.
Here
are three pictures of the Yankee baseball star Babe
Ruth.Would you
say that he had spindly legs?Long, thin,
frail? Make a call: spindly, not spindly.Read the
complete thought here.
• On
How Life Ends Up, 2 pp., October, 2019.
I spent the past week updating an article I wrote ten
years ago with the intention of submitting it to an
online magazine.When I looked
it over when I
was done, I decided it was old news and dropped the
idea.The
one thing that wasn’t old news in what I had put
together was
an introductory note about why I was doing the update.Read the
complete thought here.
• On
Jimmy Rayl, 3 pp., September, 2019.
I recently thought about an incident involving a former
Indiana basketball player by the name of Jimmy Rayl,
both as he was then and
as he is now (or was,he just
died) Read
the thought here.
• On Sandy Duncan’s Ears, 3 pp., September, 2019.
Sandy Duncan is old now, 73, but
at one time she was really big in the entertainment
field.Read
the thought here.
• On Dying, 5 pp., August, 2019.
I read a book that helped me clarify the difference
between death and dying. Read the thought here.
• On
Being Really Old, 4 pp., August, 2019.
I read a book and saw a film on old age I’d like you to
know about.Read
the thought here.
