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 “Museum Hours,”
2 pp.April,2022.
“Museum Hours” is a 2012 film by Jem Cohen.I streamed it
back in 2014 and was so taken with it I bought the DVD,
which
I’ve watched several times since and it has always been
a rewarding experience.This time, I particularly picked up on how,
or so I believe, the film was created. Read the thought
here.
•On the Death of
Virginia Maier, 1p., March, 2022.
Vivian Maier (1926–2009) was an American street
photographer.She
worked for forty years as a nanny while pursuing
her photography, which she didn’t share.Her work was
discovered and highly lauded after her death.Read the
thought here.
•On the Bingo Incident, 2 pp.,
January, 2022.
I don’t know if bingo is still played these years.What I’m
recounting here
happened back in the 1940s
•On
“The Comfort of Strangers,” 2 pp., December, 2021.
They really had it going with the 1990 film, “The
Comfort of Strangers," but didn’t complete the job.Read the film
review here.
•On
“To Tell the Truth,” 3 pp., December, 2021.
The past couple of weeks, a
game show from sixty years ago has been part of my life.Episodes are
online and I watch them just
about daily.The
show, “To Tell the Truth,” which was on CBS as I remember
in prime time. Read
the thought here.
• On
Therapy, 7 pp., November, 2021.
This is about talk therapy.You go once
week, or maybe more often, and tell someone about your
problems. Read the thought here.
•On
Why I Didn’t Watch the World Series This Year, 3pp.,
November, 2021.
After a long lifetime of watching the World Series on
television, this year (2021) it never crossed my mind.I asked myself
why. I
came up with an answer. Here
it is.
•On
Three Empowering Personal Qualities, 2 pp., October,
2021.
I’ve concluded that there are three personal
qualities—or attributes, or characteristics—that
particularly contribute to living
well. Read
about the three here.
•On
Doctors, 5pp, October, 2021,
Medical doctors do a lot of good
in the world.I
do have some reservations about them, however,
particularly around their
treatment of personal problems, and I’ll go into that here.
• On Roy Rogers Riding
Tonight, 6 pp, October, 2021.
I don’t know how much people these days know about Roy
Rogers, but he was big when I was growing up in the ‘40s
and ‘50s,
a singing cowboy in movies, and then he had a half-hour
TV show.This
thought is about him . . . and me.Read it here.
• On Ross Macdonald, 2 pp., September, 2021.
I’d read here, there, and everywhere about what a
world class writer Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) was. I had
never read anything
by Macdonald and picked The Chill, published
in 1964, which is ranked high on the “Macdonald’s
best” lists.
Read the thought here.
•On
the Leopold-Loeb Case, 2 pp., July, 2021.
These days in retirement, I go wherever my impulses take
me.I don’t
try to figure anything out, I just do what I’m told.This
past weekend, it was a book on a murder case from the
1920s, the Leopold-Loeb case, that I had heard about all
of my life.Two
rich college students from Chicago murdered a young boy
for the excitement of it—or something like that, that’s
as much as I
knew.Read
the thought here.
•
On What The New York Times Didn’t Consider Fit to
Print, 2pp., June, 2021.
I submit comments now and again to articles in The
New York Times.Some are accepted, some not.Here’s a
comment that was
met with
silence—they don’t even let me know why a comment is
unacceptable.Read
the thought here.
• On the West
Memphis Three, 3 pp., June, 2021.
After a long lifetime of paying little attention to true
crime, suddenly I’m caught up with it. The latest,
the West Memphis
Three case. Read the thought here.
• On the Flashy Uniform Challenge, 1 p., May, 2021.
Here’s a picture of two guys who I think set the upper
limit for flashy uniforms. My challenge to you is
to come up with a flashier
uniform than these two did. Bet you
can’t. See the picture here.
•On
Canadian Serial Killers, 4 pp., April, 2021.
It’s been Canadian serial killer week for me.All of the
cases I’ll refer to here received enormous media
attention in Canada,
one of them in
the early 1990s and the other three around 2010. I hadn’t
known of any of them until the last few days. Read the
thought here.
• On What’s Wrong
with Baseball, 5 pp., April, 2021.
I’m a big fan of New
York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick.This thought
is an email I sent to him in response to his
column of April 17th, 2021 entitled “Exploiting Shift is
Just Part of Playing True Winning Baseball.”Read the
email here.
•
On Tim O’Brien (and Me), 4 pp., March, 2021.
Tim O’Brien (1946-) is an American novelist. I’ve spent the
past couple of days with O’Brien in a way, or I suppose
better,
reacting to him.
First, I watched the 2021 documentary on him, “The War
and Peace of Tim O’Brien,” which inspired me to
read his 2019 book, Dad’s Maybe Book.Read the
complete thought here.
• On
Staying Clear of Straight Men, and Whether Gerard
Depardieu Could Be Any Fatter, 2 pp., March, 2021.
“Let the Sunshine In,” released in 2017,
is a superbly made film.Dialogue, cinematography, editing, Juliette
Binoche and
every other actor, first
rate.Intelligent,
classy, worth my time.That acknowledged, I found it one-note and
didactic.See
the
complete review here.
•
On Not Taking What Isn’t Freely Given, 3 pp.,
February, 2021.
The past couple of months, I have been looking for ways
to come at a fundamental issue: how should I be with
other people? Read
the thought here.
• On MaeBorenAxton,
3
pp., February, 2021.
I’ve decided that Mae Boren Axton had nothing to do with
writing Elvis’ first big national hit, “Heartbreak
Hotel.”Read
the
thought here.
• On Honing Our Instrument, 2pp., February, 2021.
A young man wrote me asking about the late
William Pierce’s daily habits—I wrote a book on Pierce
two decades ago--and I
mentioned that Pierce
munched on small chewy candies from a big bowl
throughout his very long workday, I presume for the
sugar
high it gave him.The young man
immediately got back to me asking, I believe seriously,
whether I thought the
candy-munching was a good practice, and I
answered him.As
I looked over the few sentences I had jotted down to
send this
young man, it struck me they summarize
what I think each if us needs to get in place in order
to up our chances of living well,
so decided to share what I wrote with you here.See the
reply here.
•
On the Working Poor, 2 pp., December, 2020.
The past couple weeks, I
watched three films that, tied together, I found
artistically superb, personally moving, and very
thought-provoking.Read the thought
here.
• On the Sensei and William Saroyan, 2 pp., November,
2020.
Trump’s lost and I’m sitting here on this leather couch
letting my mind go where it will and aikido classes I
took years ago pops
into my head.Read
the thought here,
• On How
to Deal with People Like Me, 5 pp., November, 2020.
My grade school and high school friend Ed, as I’ll call
him, from Saint Paul, Minnesota, now a retired dentist,
has an e-mailing list
of people, which includes me, he regularly send things
to that strike him as worth sharing.Read the
thought here.