January 17: fifth column
Analysis of, and crackdown on, 'fifth column' activities in developed countries often appears to be paranoia in the ruling power rather than actual dissent or sabotage by others.
February 17: maieutic
My college mentor employs a maieutic approach not only in class but toward life in general. It makes interactions challenging, stimulating, and always rewarding. I miss him very much.
The ongoing interview series with bgm of Sledding with Rosebud, volume II
- The Time Machine has been revved up, but there has been a slight malfunction - you get to go back in time, but this time, you get to BE somebody. So, in the wide wonderful world of all history, who do you want to be?
The first time I read these questions, I loved this alternate take on the alternate-history entry. Now that I'm writing it, though, it seems much less fun. I think that (thanks to "maieutic", above - and I believe that the question-giver will know about whom I was writing there), in thinking about history from the point of view of 'a real historian' (rather than a regular person), it has become impossible for me to consider injecting myself into it without "poisoning the timeline." If I admire someone and the way that they lived their life, how can I think that I would do it even so well? (And if I did not admire them, why would I want to live that life at all?) I think it probably answers the question just as much (or it answers a different question even better) to say that I cannot answer this question in the way it was intended.
So, the best that I can do is to say that, putting aside issues of personality and practicality (e.g. cleanliness standards of the day), I would love to spend a day or two in the inner circle of the following people, to be someone that each of them talked to about what really mattered:
- Frank Murphy (Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1940-1949, he wrote a dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States)
- Gene Sarazen (an athlete and a gentleman)
- my paternal grandfather, who died about 5 years before I was born
- Jim Henson (it is literally impossible to imagine my childhood without Sesame Street and The Muppets!)
- Adrienne Shelly (an actor/filmmaker whose work means a lot to me)
- Ah, a novel idea. Do you have any ideas rattling around in your expansive intellect about writing a novel? If you did, how would you approach it? Would you take notes on people you already know to flesh out characters? Would you choose to write an historical novel? Which direction might you take?
I do have some ideas for longer fiction. There are handwritten notes, some vague (handwritten) outlines, some short treatments on each of my home computers and on various portable media. I would not take notes on people that I already know, necessarily - more like, through conversations with people that I know well, I will gain insight into characters that already exist in my head, in sort of not-yet-set form. Historical? No, I don't think so. Maybe it sounds strange, but that's not the way that I think. (It won't be set in the future, either.) - Oh, the places you'll go... name three places you would like to visit before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
Ireland - nothing more specific than that, since I'd like to go with someone who's been before and knows what's to see; Spain (everything); and Canada - I understand the bowling is terrific. - You have sweet feet - this is self-evident. Is there a regimen you maintain to keep your feet awesome? What things do you do to pamper or dress up your peds?
There's nothing too outlandish, I don't think? I started with good genes, of course. Hmm. Without getting into anything too technical, proprietary or unseemly...
- regular washing (with lengthy soaking) in warmer rather than cooler water
- scrubbing to remove dead skin - this is not something to do "only during warm weather"; regular upkeep is necessary or it gets completely out of control
- tending to nail length and relative smoothness
- lotion regularly. As in, more than once per day. I use a "foot-specific" cream at night, but usually either hand-lotion or even face cream in the morning. More expensive but it lasts a lot longer.
- change polish regularly. During spring/summer/fall, that's every three days. Winter, it drags out to five- to seven.
- I considered using the word succulent in the previous question, but it sounded so... wrong. So, is there anything you find succulent, whether it be food, or a book, or a person, or a physical characteristic of someone?
Succulent food: a perfectly-cooked steak, dripping with juice and redolent of garlic
Succulent reading: when the phone rings and you jump because you didn't even realize you were - the book has you so into it that you cease to be separate from what you're reading. Example: anything by Jennifer Crusie.
Succulent person/physical characteristic of a person: hmmm. How to answer this without getting myself in heaps and loads of trouble...? I suppose it would be someone whose particular combination of physical and psychological attributes seem like a potential match to the awkward, 'oddly-shaped, interlocking and tessellating' edges that make up my individual puzzle piece. Maybe the great (if stupidly obscure) Danish author Jens Christian Grøndahl said it best, in (his fantastic novel) Silence in October:“What was it about her that made her such a watershed? ... Was it our mutual love of Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, her way of intuiting what I was going to say about them and about everything else we discussed because each of us had thought and felt the same thing? Was it the remarkable, finely tuned, undisturbed, and noiseless wavelength where we had found each other so easily, because for years we had transmitted on the same frequency without knowing it?”
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