Thursday, July 24, 2025
D+258/186/1275
1943, the RAF began bombing Hamburg, creating a firestorm and killing 42,600 people
1952 "High Noon", starring Gary Cooper and Thomas Mitchell, was released
1967 The first modern hospice was founded in London, beginning modern palliative care.
2019 Robert Mueller reported that President Trump was not exonerated of obstruction of justice and that Russia interfered in the US election to benefit Trump
2024 Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a defiant address to a joint session of US Congress re Gaza
In bed at 10 after LO'D's rant re Epstein's Birthday Book, up at 6:20.
Meds, etc. I never filled my empty pill boxes yesterday and thus never took my meds. I'm hoping the lack of prostate meds won't lead to more difficulty emptying my bladder. I start the day with twinges or hints of miserableness, hoping they don't develop into the full thing. I filled the pill boxes today & took the meds around noon. On Jill Hansen's advice, I stopped taking Jardiance to see if my peroneal itching abates. I also stopped taking vitamin and other supplements and 325 mg aspirin, pre-surgery.
A thought I had yesterday about the ICEmen. Admitedly, I operate on very sparse evidence, i.e,, only what I am shown on TV news programs, but it seems to me that the Donald Trump's/Kristi Noem's/Tom Homan's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who are rounding up, 'detaining', i.e., imprisoning, and deporting undocumented immigrants are pretty rough characters. Indeed, they remind me of the NRA's Wayne LaPierre's notorious description of federal BATF agents as "jack-booted government thugs." I reflected that Hitler could not have succeeded in utterly dominating German society without the help of the great many Germans who willingly joined his SA 'brownshirts,' his SS 'storm troopers,' and his Gestapo, or state police. Mussolini couldn't have succeeded in controlling Italy without the brutal assistance of his thugish 'blackshirts.' It's looking very much like ICE has become America's first National Police Force, filled with agents who are only too happy to serve as his jack-booted, government thugs, ever ready to advance the cause of their Dear Leader. I ask myself why anyone would want to make a living doing what the ICEmen are doing every day, destroying dreams and lives, separating families, putting peaceable, hardworking agricultural and long-term care workers behind bars,
Catherine Rampell's "11 tips for becoming a columnist" in yesterday's WaPo.
1. It’s not difficult to say something interesting. It’s not difficult to say something true. The real challenge is saying something both interesting and true.
2. Always put the shoe on the other foot.
3. It’s harder to publicly break with your friends than your enemies. But you have to be willing to do it.
4. That said, your goal is not to deliberately pander or provoke. Your goal is to persuade.
5. Pay more attention to what politicians do than what they say.
6. Clear writing comes from clear thinking.
7. If readers don’t understand your writing, that’s your fault, not theirs.
8. Never conclude a column with “only time will tell.”
9. Always have more material than you need.
10. Resist the instinct to conflate confidence with competence, or certainty with correctness.
11. That said, know your immovable principles and red lines — journalistically, ethically, ideologically — and why you’re columnizing in the first place.
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett. It's recommended in the current Atlantic. I hope to get it at the North Shore Library today.
Academia.edu tells me that I have 14 readers in 9 different countries of my law review articles, published a million years ago, and of no particular note. Even my 1997 "Uncle Bob" tribute to my first law school dean, Robert F. Boden, has attracted clicks from readers in foreign lands. I know these trivial facts because the Academia.edu website wants me to subscribe to their application so I can keep track of such things, which is what the application is designed to do. Every time I receive an email from this site, it reminds me of the kind of self-adulatory data that so many academics generate and hoard as a matter of course for their faculty bios.
The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon is the subject of NY Times art critic A. O. Scott's essay in this morning's Times. She is a favorite of mine, originally because of her powerful poem, Otherwise, to which I later added other wonderful works, including Woman, Why Are You Weeping, Depression in Winter, and Trouble With Math in a One-Room Country Schoolhouse. Her much more famous husband (and former professor), Donald Hall, was Poet Laureate of the United States. I've read all of his very entertaining essays in his Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, but I've never really gotten into his poetry, much preferring his wife's.
Here is The Pond at Dusk with its lyrical first two stanzas and stomach-punching final stanza.
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.
The end reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, that starts
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
and ends
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
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