On the Road

This is just a programming note. I'm en route to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, whose literary department I'll be interning with for the next couple months. It's going to be terrific fun and a great opportunity, but the workload--I'll be helping to work on seven productions and much more besides--means I'm not going to have time to read or watch much else, and certainly not to write about it. Thus the blog is going on a hiatus of sorts for the next few months. I may do some cross-posting of the material I write for the festival, but I otherwise won't be generating anything here.

Rand Down

The Ayn Rand business of the past few months was starting to take over the blog, which is more general interest and eclecticism, so I started another blog, Objectionism, to house all the old postings, as well as the new. I just posted my final entry on The Fountainhead, considering its popular appeal.

I also happened upon a fellow traveler who is blogging every chapter of Atlas Shrugged in a lead-up to the presidential election. Taylor Bettinson hangs his hat at Atlas Clubbed and I encourage you all, all three of you, to check him out.

Light Reading

So I'm going over an idea for a writing project, a play, that deals with the current economic climate, class warfare, and Wall Street, and have started doing some reading along those lines. Simon Johnson and James Kwak's 13 Bankers made the financial crisis about as digestible as a lay person as possible, yet the Byzantine quantity and workings of such "innovations" as derivatives, Credit Default Swaps, Mortgage-Backed Securities is... daunting, regardless.

My latest read is Jennifer Burns' excellent Ayn Rand biography, Goddess of the Market. I find the ideology of Rand and her followers morally repugnant, but there is no denying her influence, and any inquiry into the lead-in and aftermath of the crash would be incomplete without an understanding of the mindset that stripped "Greed is good" of all irony.

Rand is fascinating figure in her own right, and I'll have more to say along those lines. This is merely a heads-up on the direction the blog will be taking, after laying fallow for so long.

Programming Note

It strikes me that there's no reason for me not to cross-post the material I write for my other gigs, so I'll be doing so with my Washington Fancy pieces as they're published. My contributions can be found in one convenient place here.

Coming Soon

The Yiddish Policeman's Union writeup is going to be a bit longer than I expected, and so is my workweek, so no dice for tonight. Instead I'll mention that I've started Aristotle's Ethics both for a book club and to hopefully generate some material here. C.S. Lewis offered a lot of food for thought, and I can approach a work of philosophy from a lot more angles than fiction.

Further down the pike I plan to get ahold of a copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, after two people, independently of one another, suggested I read it. Reading Orwell's takedown of Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare and King Lear is a good way to whet one's appetite.

Technical Difficulties

Circumstances in the real world plus a haphazard internet connection prevented me from posting anything yesterday, and I won't have time to write today. Tomorrow evening is more like it. Until then, here is what Sean Paul's "Temperature"'s lyrics sound like:

Ho Hum

I don't have anything terribly important to say, but in the Unofficial Month of Blogging I'm rather obliged, aren't I? I ended up being wrong wrong wrong about today's weather, as it was not only sunny but the hottest day DC has had this year, at a freakishly summer-like high of 85 degrees.

I'm also nearly done with The Yiddish Policeman's Union and ought to have my big-picture say of it soon enough. I will say that, as a reader, seeing all the little plot threads resolve themselves into a complete narrative tapestry, as is happening now, is a great pleasure. There's a twin effect of making the world of the story seem somehow smaller, because everything is connected, yet also blowing things open to reveal that there was even more going on than originally suggested. It reminds me of how I felt reading that Indira Gandhi really had it in for Saleem in Midnight's Children, eliciting as it does that same gobsmacked, "Oh shit!" reaction and wanting to know how it's all going to go down.

Anyway. As you were.

Putting Out

Fellow Golden Horder Andy is inviting others to join him in an Unofficial Month of Blogging, in which the participants post at least once a day. I've gotten back up to a decent output in recent days, but it can always be improved. To that end I'll be tossing something up here daily, even if it is just a little note or video....Or an FYI informing my readership of such.

Programming Note

I'm in danger of flogging a dead horse on the God issue, so I'm going to back off of C.S. Lewis and Christian apologetics for the time being. My latest read, already over a hundred pages in, is Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, a decidedly different animal. I'm sure I'll have plenty to say on it.

Busybody

So I've fallen off the blogging horse once again, and this time it's half-excusable. I started a full-time restaurant job last week that sapped a lot of time and energy, and (more notably) I've been looking for lodging and, for the past couple days, have been couchsurfing.

That's all stabilizing now, and so posting will hopefully resume. Hopefully. I really hope I don't have to resort to a precommitment device to motivate myself to write.

Work in Progress

Apologies for the scant content lately. There's been activity on the internship front, and things are starting to look up. It's kept me a little off-kilter, and as I'll actually start doing paid work again tomorrow on top of an internship, there may be some settling that has to go down here.

I've enjoyed having this as an outlet, and I hope to continue doing it. History, however, paints a different picture. Look that helpful right hand column that quantifies my monthly posting volume, and one will see a history of erratic posting patterns which can be roughly correlated to activity in the rest of my life. Essentially, this blog has given me something to do during previous periods of minimal obligation, be it unemployment, decompressing after finishing a show, or traveling. Finally getting back to work is obviously going to cut into an output that, let's be realistic, has at its best still been fairly moderate in terms of numbers.

But again, I've enjoyed this, even the times where I agonized for way too long on some stupid snarky punchline when I could have thrown up another post or two in the meantime. One of the most satisfying thing about doing this after taking a break from the theater world (and playwriting in particular) is seeing the audience grow. It's a limited audience to be sure, drawn essentially from real-life friends and the Golden Horde/Lost Battalion of Platonic Conversationalists/Team Commie over at Ta-Nehisi's place. But it has been heartening day after day, week after week, to put up a piece and post a notification, and see that people are actually interested. And a variety of people, too! From across the U.S., Brazil, Russia, Israel, and more.

I'm not really sure what else to say at this point; I wasn't planning on having this post go on a long as it has. Basically, posting will slow, but I hope to stave off the inconstant atrophy that has plagued this blog in the past. I like writing, so why should I stop?

I can't figure out any good way to end this post, so I'll just put it vanilla: thanks for showing an interest and reading, whatever happens.

Happy Thanksgiving

I saw Four Lions last night and plan on doing a write-up, but later. For now I'm going to take advantage of the holiday to spend some time down on the National Mall, which I expect to be devoid of sentient life.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, even Tom Delay, whose mug shot is more apropos to the holiday season than the expression he is probably wearing after being convicted of money laundering yesterday.

Pearl In the Pipeline

I just a bit ago finished Steinbeck's The Pearl. It's an excellent little novella, one that I only learned about when I saw it at a bookstore that was going out of business. Analysis forthcoming.

Promises, Promises

Rest assured I'll have some substantive content soon. I'm working on an analysis of Midnight's Children of considerable length that I hope to have up... soon. I won't tempt fate by trying to pin down an exact time, but it is coming.

Meantime, a pit bull cleaning a bunny:

Delayed

Apologies to anyone who came looking, I was ready to get on and post something earlier, but the computer I'm using had to be used.

To make up for it, a peek at where I went today:








Bonus: my family's cat:

Out and About

My grandfather is visiting several memorials today with a veterans group, so I'm going to go downtown and say hello, and visit a museum or something(!) while I'm out. I'll have something up late this afternoon.

Relocation

I've arrived in DC and am settled in where I'll be staying while I look for employment. I'm hoping to continue posting material while I do so, but I'm still working out some of the when and how. But rest assured, activity is soon to resume.

Busybody

I'm meeting up with people, saying my fare-thee-wells, and tying up loose ends these next couple days, so expect light posting. I'll do what I can.

Oh, these life-altering, cross-country relocations. But when you've gotta move....

Programming Note

For the past couple days, I've spent much of the day and evening and early, early morning packing; hence the lack of in-depth posting. I hope to have something up later "this" evening. Until then, courage.

Postscript

I ought to state a couple things regarding the American Psycho analysis:

- Reading the book is something of a slog. Excess is the point, but it's still excess, and my sense when reading it was that it could have been much shorter and lost none of the point it was trying to make. I appreciate it more in retrospect than in the actual reading.
- I don't think the whiny Chicago professor is a serial killer in waiting, only that he exhibits a breathtaking lack of awareness of how good he has it and a Randian insistence that he doesn't owe the world anything for his success. Satire is exaggeration, and American Psycho accordingly takes this attitude of gross entitlement to arresting extremes.