"Men, to the best of my knowledge, don’t even read."

"When’s the last time you heard a man say, 'I’ve been reading this great book, you’d really like it’? My girlfriend always tells me about these books she’s reading, and I don’t even see her reading the book! Where does this book live?"

A quote from Bryan Goldberg, the founder of the website Bustle, quoted in this New Yorker article titled "FROM MARS/A young man’s adventures in women’s publishing." I enjoyed the whole article — Goldberg raised $6.5 million to start up a website for women, though he knew he knew nothing about what women want to read. He just knew there was money to be made from advertising if he could deliver big numbers of young female readers, and he hired a whole lot of young women to work for $50 or $100 a day writing blog posts about whatever interests them (because what interests them will kinda sorta already be what interests young women). His goal is 50 million readers a month, and as of the publication of that article (last September), he'd gotten the traffic up to 14,000 a day — i.e., about half the traffic I get here, with just my own self writing, albeit not to the demographic most loved by advertisers, even though I am sure that some of you do get excited by the newest innovation in eyeliner.


But what got me thinking about that quote about reading was running acrosss this new article in Slate: "Dan Kois’ Favorite Books of 2013." Dan, a man, apparently read enough books to have 15 favorites in one year. How many books do you need to read in a year to have 15 favorites? I'd say at least 1 a week. But he's the book editor there, so he'd better do some reading. The truth is, if you put me in a room with all the books sent to the book editor in a year, I could produce a 15 favorites list in a single 8-hour workday. You just need a methodology, right? Spend less than 10 seconds on most books until you've got about 30 that seem as though you're going to like them. Maybe 30 more that you'll give a chance. Go through the first pile of 30, 5 minutes per book, and see if you get 15 you like. If not, proceed to the second pile. Put another 10 minutes into each of the chosen 15 to check that you haven't been fooled. If you find any clunkers, swap in one of the also rans from the top 60, maybe something with a colorful title or strange author name. I see Dan has on his list "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories," by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Ha ha. Does my method sound like a male way to construct a top 15 list? It would amuse me.

Council of Croatian Community in France files suit against Bob Dylan in a Paris court, accuses him of racism.

"He was without any doubt inciting hatred against Croatians," according to the Council of Croatian Community in France. What did Bob do? In an interview with Rolling Stone, he said (as quoted at the link): "Black people can sense Klan blood, Jews can sense Nazi blood and Serbs can sense Croat blood."

What does that mean "sensing blood"? Talking in terms of blood does have a racist feeling to it. He's a poet though, so there's that tendency to use vivid metaphor. Blood is one of the great metaphors — used in 49 Dylan songs — but it's complicated, a refers to many different things. The word "sense" is vague, unlike say "smell" or "taste," and tied to "blood," it can cause too much confusion, and I don't recommend judicial relief.

Here's the Rolling Stone interview (which came out last year). Check the context and the actual verbatim quote:

Do you see any parallels between the 1860s and present-day America?

Mmm, I don't know how to put it. It's like . . . the United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery. The USA wouldn't give it up. It had to be grinded out. The whole system had to be ripped out with force. A lot of killing. What, like, 500,000 people? A lot of destruction to end slavery. And that's what it really was all about.

This country is just too fucked up about color. It's a distraction. People at each other's throats just because they are of a different color. It's the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.

It's doubtful that America's ever going to get rid of that stigmatization. It's a country founded on the backs of slaves. You know what I mean? Because it goes way back. It's the root cause. If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today. Whoever invented the idea "lost cause . . . ." There's nothing heroic about any lost cause. No such thing, though there are people who still believe it.

The statement "He was without any doubt inciting hatred against Croatians" incites... negative opinions against... the person who makes that statement... in that I'm left thinking he's not too good at reading. But reading's an emotional thing. I'm continually amazed at what happens to words when they're swirled around with the readers' emotions.

"What do you think about the idea of the 'flipped classroom'..."

"... where homework consists of lectures that were typically given during class time, and in-class time is used for hands-on projects?"

Lectures... hands-on projects... don't people learn by reading anymore?

Let's say there were 2 schools: Reading School and No Reading School. In Reading School, the homework is to read, and in the classroom, there is discussion of the readings, led by a teacher who lectures and facilitates discussion. (This is what traditional law school is like, and what I've been used to for 30+ years.) In No Reading School, homework is to watch a video of your teacher lecturing, and in the classroom, you do some sort of activity.

Which school would you want your child to go to? I suspect the "flipped classroom" is a nice way to refer to a school experience for children who are not expected to handle reading. Am I wrong?

I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

Cox concedes that it's completely boring that a bunch of female Democrats support a Hillary candidacy. So what's to talk about? The fact that it was secret. A letter with nothing interesting to say was nevertheless written and revealed to have been written but we still can't see the text even though the text is presumably uninteresting. Well, there's your reason right there for not revealing the text. It's thuddingly dull. Cox says:

There's not much reason to make your support for something political private....

Which is why the existence of the letter and its gist was revealed. Cox concedes this as well: The secrecy label was "less about keeping the support in the note secret than making the support note-worthy." I won't get tripped up by that hyphen. That must be how they write "noteworthy" in the U.K.

So the letter functioned, dully, to give a teensy bounce to the Hillary for President beachball that no one feels like playing with right now. So what's to say? Here's where we get to the part of Cox's column that I found so hard to read:

Hillary... knows a thing or two about "inevitability", and what she knows is not likely to make her more excited to suffer through a fourth presidential campaign (I think we can safely say what she went through during Bill's campaigns counts as suffering). 

What? Hillary doesn't want to run? Excited to suffer? The meaning of suffering? There's just enough of a frisson of masochism in that to make me notice the absence of sex, which sets me off for this:

One of the maddening things about covering the Clintons is Bill's love of the dramatic reveal, the tension-filled lead-up...

Now you've got me thinking about the time "Bill Clinton Finally Just Show[ed] America His Penis."

Excuse the expression: back to Cox:

Bill Clinton is called the "The Big Dog", but he's really a tomcat (in more ways than one) – he likes to toy with his victims. He likes to play hard-to-get, though in the ends, he's almost always gotten. 

In the ends.... More Brit-talk? Does that mean the same as "in the end." The ends? Is that like the way there's an "s" on "buttocks"? (Is it the "s" that absconded from "Sessions"?)

I don't know what I'm supposed to think about here. Bill Clinton likes to play hard to get? That's not how Juanita Broaddrick describes it.

Based on that, journalists have determinedly disregarded any indication that Hillary's ambivalence is genuine. 

But Hillary is not Bill. Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her.

All right. I've settled down. I guess there was no call to think about sex. No sex, please, we're British. Cox was just trying to say that Bill Clinton is good at toying with us politically, so if he were to act ambivalent, it would be theater. Is Cox saying that because Hillary isn't good at that kind of theater, somehow she might actually be sincere in her ambivalence? Most of us are just ignoring the lady's coyness. We already know what she wants. If she can't do coyness as prettily as Bill, that's a reason not to look at the insipid show.

Maybe Cox is just saying the thing that is too boring to write about: We already know that Hillary is running for President. And: Just say it! Cox gets back to her feminism-as-sexism with that last line, which is trying so hard to be a zinger: "Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her." Games — plural — are for boys, and this particular game — the teasing roll-out of a candidacy — is not for her. If games are for boys and Hillary is not a boy, then no games are for her. To specify that one game is not for her is to imply that she is a boy. I'm just talking about logic here, not saying that's where Cox meant to go.

Cox apparently meant to end where she began: The premise that female politicians are the adults. But the evidence is that the females have acted like children, so what are you going to do? Cox tells them to stop acting like men, because men are childish. But they're all childish! They're all acting like politicians! Cox should only be able to say wouldn't it be nice if only the males behaved like children, and then you could say the males are children and the females are grown-ups?

Really, all you can say is that they're all politicians, acting like politicians, and some are better at playing politics than others, and — clearly! — Bill is better than Hillary. Therefore: Hillary should keep it simple. Noted. In my note-book of things that are just barely note-worthy.

Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Ms. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the prize."

Is that interesting or exciting? I can't remember if I've ever read anything of hers. Were there stories in The New Yorker back in the 1970s, when it seemed important to read delicately honed observations of what men and women were doing in their relationships? I can't remember if there were or even why it seemed important back then, when it quite obviously isn't doesn't anymore.

Let's see what The New Yorker is saying about this. They're highlighting an interview from 2012:

In your stories, there is often a stigma attached to any girl who attracts attention to herself—individualism, for women, is seen as a shameful impulse....

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was “call attention to yourself,” or “think you were smart.”...

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life....

It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful....

I’m sure this is an irritating question, but do you consider yourself a feminist writer?

I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn’t know. I don’t see things all put together in that way. I do think it’s plenty hard to be a man. Think if I’d had to support a family, in those early years of failure?

Reading Elmore Leonard.

I paid some attention when Elmore Leonard died, but the truth is that I'd never read any Elmore Leonard books. I toyed with the idea of ordering an Elmore Leonard book, but I hadn't pulled the trigger. But then I was tearing everything out of the bookcases in the room where we just redid the floors. My agenda is to get all our books onto the existing bookshelves, a process that's involved filling 8 shopping bags with books to be taken to Half Price Books for recycling.

And what the hell? I find an Elmore Leonard book. See:



Of all the Elmore Leonard books that somebody — not me — might have left in the house, I find "Bandits." This solves the problem of which Elmore Leonard book to order. I start reading "Bandits." I get about 15 pages in and I'm onto his game. Not saying it's not a good game. It is. Not putting down people who enjoy reading this kind of thing. I'm just saying it's not my kind of thing to read. If I had to write a novel — and I'm always getting ideas about novels that could be written — I'd get a bang out of writing like this. It's an easy way to fill out a lot of pages, even as you make your target readers feel that it's all very fast moving. I am not one of those target readers. For me, it's slow going.

What he's doing is: He has a story. Something that happened in the past. We're hearing 2 guys talk about whatever 2 guys would be talking about while doing whatever it is they're doing. In this case — in the case of "Bandits" — what they're doing is preparing a corpse for burial. So there's this whole sideline routine, telling us about some area of human expertise, which you could find out about in a couple minutes reading Wikipedia or stumbling onto an episode of "How It's Made." And as these guys talk, it slips out, every half page or so, some little dribble of information about whatever that thing was that happened in the past. You're supposed to care. What the hell happened? Who was this dead guy and who was that lady he was with and so forth. I'm just not the kind of person who cares.

A writer who wanted to take the trouble to write out descriptions of this and that might show us some event unfolding so we picture it, seemingly as it happened. But here, the thing already happened, and 2 guys are talking, while they're doing this other thing, which is an ordinary thing that's somewhat interesting to hear details about, preparing a corpse for burial. That's a great formula for having fun writing, and I know many readers find that fun to read. But I'm thinking: There's some damned thing that already happened, that could be told in a few sentences, and I'm supposed to hang out in this blather and catch the bits of the story as they float by. What's my motivation?

"As you are too thin, I am too white. I am so white I literally appear to glow in the dark."

"'Get some sun,' I'm often told. 'Haven't you ever heard of a tanning bed?' It's hurtful, and neither of us should be shamed by anyone for our bodies. HOWEVER. I do not write nonsense comparing myself to long-oppressed people of more pigmented ancestry and taking cheap shots at their intelligence, will-power, and self-discipline just because someone who saw me on the beach failed to understand that my skin color options are white, pink, or red. This piece you've written? It is ridiculous."

A comment on this Daily Beast piece which I got to via this Kate Waldman item that began: "I must yawp my indignation after hate-reading the Daily Beast’s Emma Woolf bemoan the scourge of 'thin-shaming' in Western society."

Hate-reading. I like that. I looked it up in Urban Dictionary and saw it had an entry from January 2012, but only one person had voted on it. 

hate-reading

(n.) -- an online activity in which one visits a website, Twitter feed, or Facebook page for the express purpose of ridiculing -- or indulging one's disdain for -- the author and/or the content on the site

"Okay, I'll be honest: I indulge in hate-reading from time to time, sure, ever since I discovered the Internet in junior high. It's something I usually do alone, late at night, when I'm procrastinating or drunk or bored."

overheard at an office watercooler in Modesto, California, December 16, 2011

The vote was thumbs-up. I agree.

Now, some questions:

Do you hate-read?
	Of course. It's my raw material for blogging/commenting.
	To some extent. For exercise and recreation, but I get back to stuff I like.
	No. Life's too short and negativity is bad. I read only for work or for pleasure.
	I only hate-read Althouse.
pollcode.com free polls

Is it OK to say to someone: You're so thin/You're so white?
	No, it's wrong because you wouldn't say You're so fat/You're so black.
	Yes, because it's usually an advantage to be thin/white.
	You're so thin is okay unless the person looks ill, but You're so white is insulting.
	You're so white is OK if you think the topic is tanning, and You're so thin is OK if you're envious.
	Don't say You're so thin because there is anorexia in the world. Feel free to antagonize a whitey.
pollcode.com free polls

"Can you start a post and thread on the adverse economic and environmental impact of pets?"

Asked Phaedrus in the comments to "If you really care about global warming, stop all unnecessary travel."

The same tree huggers that yammer on and on about the environment allow their pets to use everyone else property, public and private as a restroom for their animal. Human waste has to be treated under all kinds of regulatory requirements. Pets are allowed to deposit equivalent waste at will wherever as if they are wild animals which they aren't. And don't get me started on what it takes to feed them, the grain, meat etc. You could feed a lot of starving people using the grain that goes into pet food.

Consider this that post. And let me also call attention to my 2010 post "If you really believed in global warming, you would turn off your air conditioning," which had an addendum with a list of 6 more things people should do to demonstrate actual belief in the coming calamity:

1. Your weight should be at the low end of normal, indicating that you are not overconsuming the products of agriculture.

2. You should not engage in vigorous physical exercise, as this will increase your caloric requirements. You may do simple weight-lifting or calisthenics to keep in shape. Check how many calories per hour are burned and choose a form of exercise that burns as few calories as possible.

3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don't run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.

4. Get up at sunrise. Don't waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.

5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don't have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.

6. If you have free time, such as a vacation from work, spend it in your home town. Read library books, redo old jigsaw puzzles, meditate, tell stories to your children — the list of activities is endless. Just thinking up more items to put on that list is an activity that could be on the list. Really embrace this new way of life. A deep satisfaction and mental peace can be achieved knowing that you are saving the earth.

"Mother — crazy as she was — had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop."

"Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town."

You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.

That's a random excerpt from an interview with Mary Karr in The Paris Review, which I found via Andrew Sullivan who excerpts a completely different section about why and how Karr prays.

Is that SAT story true? I don't know. What a vivid detail! Today, you'd only have to remember a couple key words, and you'd be able to find the poem later by Googling. And it's interesting to think about the psychology of reading. You may think it's a shame that people — including you yourself — don't read whole books the way we used to. But many people were meeting psychological needs through book reading because there was no other option, and the internet works better for the purposes people really have.

And yet, we worry that the internet is degrading us. We don't read books. We don't memorize poems. But stop and think: Why were we doing those things in the past? Why, other than: there were no alternatives? If we've chosen this internet alternative, it could be that it's better — better for our true purposes.

It's not a better way to learn, say, Russian and Chinese history, but Mary Karr's mother's true purpose was not to learn Russian and Chinese history.

Do you wonder why you spend so many hours reading on the internet, when there are so many worthy books you could be reading? Do you tell yourself you should be reading books? Consider the likelihood that what you are doing is what you should be doing. Assume it is, and put into words why it is.

As for memorizing things that, these days, can be looked up: Is there ever good reason? I say yes. It's no longer out of fear of losing something forever, but there are other reasons. What is the last poem you memorized? (Don't tell me about song lyrics. You don't have to memorize them. They just get imprinted by some magical musical process.)

ADDED: I loved Mary Karr's memoir "Liars' Club." It transformed my thinking about what a memoir could be, and I toyed with the idea of writing a memoir for many years, mostly before starting this blog. There's some line between truth and fiction in these things. No one remembers all those quotes and details. How do you get into the imaginative zone to do this well and not get dragged down by the ethics of what you are saying about real people? I thought Karr's answer was: Don't flatter yourself. Be even harder on yourself than everyone else.

Rachel Jeantel's inability to read cursive leads to articles about why we're even teaching cursive anymore.

Here's one: "Is cursive writing dead?"

A single sentence, uttered in the trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin, has catapulted an issue into the national spotlight.

When asked if she could read a letter in court, witness Rachel Jeantel, her head bowed, murmured with embarrassment, "I don't read cursive," according to court testimony.

Jeantel was embarrassed, so let's all stop. Let's find everything that some people can't do and feel embarrassed about. And let's ask: Is this really necessary? Is this serving a purpose... other than to make some people feel embarrassed?

Jeantel is an icon not only in the fight to end education in cursive handwriting, but the fight to spare everyone embarrassment. This is the necessary extension of the struggle against bullying, a struggle to control deliberate meanness. But think of all the unintentional things that create emotional burdens for some people. There was a time when sidewalks lacked ramps for wheelchairs, not because anyone was out to make life difficult for wheelchairs, but simply because we failed to notice. Step up — wheel up — and become aware of all the needless barriers out there.

ADDED: When I learned cursive — in the late 1950s in northern Delaware — the word "cursive" was not used. We just called it "writing," "handwriting," or — I think — "manuscript" or "script." Consequently, the word "cursive" has always seemed strange to me.

I hear the ugly words "cur" and "curse," but, looking it up in the (unlinkable) OED, I see the etymology is connected to the Latin for "run" — cursīvus — and the idea is: "Written with a running hand, so that the characters are rapidly formed without raising the pen, and in consequence have their angles rounded, and separate strokes joined, and at length become slanted."

The word "cur" — meaning a low-quality dog — goes back to Middle Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian.

Middle English curre corresponds to... Norwegian (widely-spread) dialect kurre, korre ‘dog’, etc. The latter is generally associated with the onomatopoeic verb Old Norse kurra to murmur, grumble, Swedish kurra to grumble, rumble, snarl, Danish kurre to coo, German obsolete and dialect kurren to growl, grumble, murmur, coo....

So hear the grrrr in "cur."

The word "curse," the OED says, has unknown origin: "Late Old English curs, of unknown origin; no word of similar form and sense is known in Germanic, Romanic, or Celtic."  (Of connection with cross, which has been suggested, there is no trace.)"

Interesting to see that people have imagined that "curse" had to do with "cross," even as I imagined that "cursive" had to do with "cur" and "curse." What words have influenced your understanding of other words? Isn't that something that happened to you a lot when you were a child? Did you ever find it emotionally difficult to learn about something because you made an imaginative connection like this? Would "cursive" be easier to learn if we called it "script"?

"The idea that 'shame works' — that stigmatizing behaviors and shaming the people who do them are necessary and honorable tools of public policy..."

"... is a recurring theme in both conservative and more communitarian/paternalistic liberal rhetoric. It’s often based on personal experience, or home truths from one’s mom, and because people do sometimes say that shame worked for them I had a hard time articulating why I rejected this rhetoric so completely."

Writes Eve Tushnet, who figured out the answer from reading "Middlemarch."

What? You're ashamed never to have read "Middlemarch"? I'm not, because I have read it, not that I remember the part about shame.
I remember one thing about the book: Some lady was hugely supportive of her husband's writing, but then — spoiler alert! — after he dies, she gets a good look at his supposed magnum opus and it's no damned good at all. Did I get that right? I read it decades ago, and though I've seen it listed among the top books that you're supposed to read — at least if you want to be considered a reader of serious literature — I don't think you need to read it. You're off the hook — in my book — for not reading it. So no need to approach this discussion with any shame about that. And I'll just leap to what's so bad about shame that reading "Middlemarch" made Eve Tushnet capable of articulating. Then we can discuss what's so bad about shame. (You can also discuss how "Middlemarch," specifically, elucidates things, or how reading serious literature enables us to fathom complex concepts.)

Tushnet looks at "what I was like in the year or two before I quit drinking":

During that time, when I knew that I had a serious drinking problem but hadn’t yet quit, shame completely corroded my moral sense. It isolated me. I felt like there was nobody I could trust or talk to. I had no hope of change and no sense that there was any way out. I was able to imagine taking actions to hide what was going on, but stopping was completely unimaginable....

When people try to shame you, you might "just get[] angry... and totally reject[] their judgment... and decide[] to make [your] way in the world while paying them as little attention as possible."

Shame is closely allied with disgust, and we attach it to things like poverty at least as often as to actual wrongdoing. Few people feel guilty for smelling bad or getting their period in gym class; plenty of people feel ashamed for those things. This makes shame inherently a more suspect tool. It’s also inherently more tied to outside opinion than guilt is. This is part of its usefulness – like I said above, shame forces you to see yourself through other people’s eyes, which can be a powerful corrective – but shame does involve a kind of outsourced or socialized conscience.

"Sorry about the smell of cat piss. That's why we have to cover everything in plastic."

Says Patti Smith, leading the Guardian interviewer through her house, which "looks as if it's been squatted by a class of particularly manky art students" and is "dark and dingy and stinks of cat."

Excerpt from the interview, 3 reasons why she gave up music performance and recording in the late 70s:

In 1977, she fell off the stage, fractured her back in four places and broke her skull (she needed 42 stitches in her head). She was never as mobile again. Then she fell in love with Fred "Sonic" Smith and married him. Finally, she says, she found fame too corrosive. "I didn't have time to read, I wasn't studying, wasn't writing. I was basically promoting, going to radio stations, performing, battling bronchitis because there was so much smoke in venues. I thought, I see a lot of potential fame and fortune, but I don't see a lot of human evolution. Nothing will stifle your human evolution more than fame and fortune." How? "It doesn't do a whole lot for making you a better person. I found myself being more demanding, or spoilt." Was she horrible? She balks at the suggestion. "No, just impatient, agitated. The main thing was I didn't think I was producing anything of extraordinary worth."

As Smith talks, I notice she's eating a tub of something. It seems to have appeared out of nowhere. What is that, I ask. "Wakame. Basically seaweed and sesame oil." My stomach's rumbling. I could murder that cup of tea.

ADDED:

Would she like a new Mr Patti Smith? She looks shocked. "I would never have a Mr Patti Smith. To me, I'm happy to have the man as king. I would never consider a man in that position."

Now it's my turn to be shocked. After all, this is Patti Smith, rocker extraordinaire and feminist icon. "I wouldn't care if he was a gardener or plumber or physicist, he wouldn't be in second place in our household." She'd happily be subservient? "I don't mind. I have no problem with a man being in first place. I know who I am. If a man would need to be in first place, what of it?"

AND: I looked up "manky" in the (unlinkable) OED:

Brit. colloq. Bad, inferior, defective; dirty, disgusting, unpleasant.

In quot. 1939 mankey is a play on monkey (cf. monkey nut n.), and may not have any admixture of this sense.

[1939 J. Joyce Finnegans Wake 337 Your hahititahiti licks the mankey nuts!]
1958 F. Norman Bang to Rights iii. 124 He would have to have all his teeth out as it seems that they were all mankey.
1971 B. W. Aldiss Soldier Erect 121 Have you chucked out that dirty manky beer you poisoned me with last time I came?
1973 A. Garner Red Shift 14 That's your manky palate, lad. The dressing and the wine have to balance.
1983 J. Kelman Not not while Giro 163 Away you ya manky swine ye, cried Sammy.
1988 Coarse Fishing Handbk. June–July 48/3 In addition to one really manky dead rabbit, we also netted over 2000 small roach.
1993 Daily Tel. 4 May 14/8 We could have been back in the Seventies—the unfashionably flowing locks, the manky T-shirts, the tight trousers.

"25 Signs You’re Addicted To Books."

"9. ... You’ve even developed a crush on a bookstore employee based solely on their staff picks."

"Do I really like reading?"

"Perhaps it is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice my own distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite bad at reading after all?"

"I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises."

Writes Notre Dame philosophy prof Gary Gutting, who teaches a freshman seminar reading "a wide range of wonderful texts, from Plato and Thucydides to Calvino and Nabokov."

We have lively discussions that require a thorough knowledge of the text, and the students write excellent papers that give close readings of particular passages. But the half-life of their detailed knowledge is probably far less than a year. The goal of the course is simply that they have had close encounters with some great writing>.

What’s the value of such encounters? They make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name....

We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates. Knowledge, when it comes, is a later arrival, flaring up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls.

I wonder how this applies to law teaching, law school coming later in the students' lives and Supreme Court opinions not being truly "wonderful texts" like Plato and Thucydides to Calvino and Nabokov (though they are kind of wonderful in their own special way). Even though I'm always imploring students to "engage" with the texts we must read in a constitutional law class, it seems a little nutty to expect them to become "vividly aware" or to find "fulfillment" and "pleasure" and "enduring excitement" (and yet somehow I feel entirely comfortable with that kind of nuttiness).

Time to read "The Great Gatsby"!

"Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity..."

"... one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught."

If a book is less a book than it is the whole of the discussion about it, we must pay attention to that discussion in order to talk about the book without reading it. For it is not the book itself that is at stake, but what it has become within the critical space in which it intervenes and is continually transformed. It is this moving object, a supple fabric of relations between texts and beings, about which one must be in a position to formulate accurate statements at the right moment.

That's written by Pierre Bayard, who would like you to read his book, "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." But you don't have to read that, because you're reading about it here. I would like you to move in the supple fabric of the Althouse blog, where you can have all manner of relations between texts and beings, right here in the comments, and you're free to formulate accurate and inaccurate statements and the right and the wrong moments.

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.

Baroness Thatcher died sitting up in "a top suite" at the Ritz Hotel in London.

She was in bed, reading a book. She'd been staying there since Christmas, where she'd moved after a hospital stay. It was "one of her favourite places – and she was invited by its owners the Barclay brothers to stay there for the foreseeable future."

The article doesn't say what the book was. What book do you like to think it was?

Sitting up reading in bed — would you not want that to be your final moment? What book do you like to think you would be reading? If you say the Bible, name the chapter.

"Every cloud has a silver lining, and one of the benefits of the exclusion of women from most professions..."

"... was that we had wonderful teachers, especially the women who today would probably be CEOs."

Justice Antonin Scalia, remembering his school days, in NYC, circa 1947.

He also talks about playing street hockey, camping in vacant lots, and sledding in a cemetery:

It was pretty much devise your own amusement. I’ve never been a parent to go to all the soccer games and all that, because my parents never came to my street-hockey or pickup softball games; they just said go out and play.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s in Delaware, and it was the same thing: You made your own amusement. The only difference, at least in my family, is that we weren't told to go out (or to play). If you wanted to stay in and if you wanted to work or do nothing, my parents wouldn't say you should do something else. I'm not sure why my parents refrained from pushing us out into the fresh air, and it's too late now to ask, but sifting through the evidence I have, I think that they didn't like being told what to do. I know my mother, as a young girl in the 1930s, was told not to read too much and she wanted to read. Maybe in my old age, I'm seeing my departed parents in a golden light, but what makes sense to me now is that they were staunchly libertarian.