Silk and Gold and Caviar All Round
The concept of sumptuary laws is so alien, I am intrigued. Though they pretended to be highminded and austere, a free pass could nearly always be bought.
Dispatches
Do Our Words Shape Our Feelings?
The next time I wonder what I am feeling, maybe I should take my actual pulse. What is my body feeling? How should I interpret that? Will a label help, and if so, what label will help the most? Because I suspect I jump too quickly to the same old conclusions.
Some Interesting Things I Found on the Internet, October Edition
Orange is a wonderful color, useful for denoting everything from royalty to religion, from the incarcerated to the insightful.
A Heroic Escape Plot
This a tricky time to start a theatre company. But halfway into Albion Theatre company's run of "Heroes," the play is a resounding success. It ignores short attention spans, opening with the three vets sitting silent on the patio, staring at the weather.
Without Fear or Favor
We do need our muck raked. But who, in the current corporate oligarchy, will want to pay for that? And in a media landscape clogged with charging knights—their steeds kicking up clouds of dust in every direction—how are we to locate moral clarity?
Fun on the Mississippi
Mississippi River, steamboat, dinner cruise, St. Louis, waterfront, excursion
Naked Truth
While I have never had the courage to—another telling phrase—“prance around” naked in public, I can imagine how free it would feel. To move through the world naked as the day you were born, casting aside all costume, an emperor unashamed? To be unclothed is to be vulnerable, your flesh unhidden and unprotected; to be comfortable being vulnerable is to relax, easy in your own skin at last.
The Queen’s Corgis
Were they with her, I wonder, when she died? I hope so. No living creature is as much comfort at a deathbed.
The Memorial to Joan Didion in NYC
The memorial service for Joan Didion, who died December 23, 2021, was held this week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. (You can watch it here. There is no audio during the slideshow at the start.) Organizers explained the…
Why Our Minds Wander
A wandering mind has slipped its moorings, severing connection with its immediate environment. No longer paying attention to what it can perceive in the surrounding world, it turns inward, self-referential, occupied by dreams and memories and stray thoughts. Instead of musing about what its partnered body is experiencing, reading, hearing, thinking, it slides away to a different destination altogether.