Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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I don't do a lot of online Bush-bashing, but I feel compelled to link to a recent Mary Jacoby report from Yoshi Tsurumi, one of George W. Bush's teachers at Harvard Business School.
Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war in which others were dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off."
Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion," he said. There's something about the craven arrogance of the student that comes through in this story that really irritates me. Could it have something to do with the fact that two years later (his degree is from 1975, mine from Penn in 1979) I won my place in graduate school the old-fashioned way (grades, board scores, and professor recommendations) and that I paid my own way? Maybe. posted: 9:07:34 PM |
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The Whole Story and Other Stories, by Ali Smith
Ali Smith's smart stories in the collection often employ multiple perspectives to get at the truth in relationships. She may relate a tale out of traditional narrative order (as in the fine "Erosive"). Or she may use several personal points of view. "The Start of Things" presents both sides of the ugly end of an affair (and a mysterious third side), while "Paradise" is the shared story of three sisters. (And by the way, judging from this story, at one time in her life Smith must have had a rough time in the service industry.) She is the master of the honkingly outrageous metaphor, like the imaginary pipe band that haunts the characters of "Scottish Love Songs." Or, in "Being Quick," Death, who we meet in a railway station concourse:
Death was unexpected. He was handsome, balding, a middle-aged man in a suit so light-coloured it seemed contrite, and he was vaguely recognizable, vaguely arty, like a BBC executive from the days when TV still promised both decency and aesthetic ambition, the days when its drama was still courageous and you could trust that the mid-evening news was about what was actually happening in the world, not ratings or money or channel protocol. But those days were over and we both knew it, and anyway I was idealizing them, his smile, which was melancholy but civilized, said.
She is fond of trees, or at least her characters are, as the narrator of "May" goes so far as to become infatuated with one. No matter how outlandish the events, when she writes (as in "Gothic"), "This actually happened to me," we believe her. posted: 8:54:07 PM |
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