Last Bender

A friend confided to me that he is so disillusioned with the Democratic Party that he would probably not vote for Obama in 2012. He says at this point there is no real difference between the parties, given the failure of the democrats to reform Wall Street. I have heard similar sentiments from others because [...]

I Googled ‘Liberals with Guns’. There is a website, but it reads like a gun fanatic’s screed. I have no love of guns. I didn’t grow up with them and don’t own one. They scare me. But the right wing scares me more. Second Amendment Solutions are available to Leftists too. When AK-47 toting weekend [...]

Last Thursday I took a vacation with my family, a mini jaunt to the Eastern Shore of Maryland where my sister lives. We planned on swimming in her pool and grilling venison and then spending a day at the beach. As Thursday approached so did Irene, a category 3-4 hurricane that was expected to wreak [...]

Happy Bloomsday. Or is it Merry? I started to read Ulysses a week or so ago. I am not ashamed at all to admit that I was unable to finish Ulysses when I was 19. Before that I had made several attempts, and read The Odyssey, which was mostly useless in understanding the book. Visiting [...]

I decided for my mother’s memorial to buy a suit. The suit I possess is a hand-me-down and makes me look fat. It’s also a light color and I wanted something dark that I could wear to interviews (a remote possibility) and actual funerals or weddings. It would have pleased my mother. Between us there [...]

I am a regular reader of Henry Gould’s blog HG Poetics. His new post about the future of american poetry, his prediction, is so well put i want to link to it here. He coins the term Odd High Formalism (or at least i think he does). The term doesn’t do much for me but [...]

  The NYT today reviewed the new HBO series Game of Thrones. It wasn’t a good review. The reviewer says at one point that HBO at its best is a corporate auteur making television that examines institutions and how they fall apart. Deadwood is The West, The Sopranos is The Mafia, The Wire is The [...]

SO MUCH PRETTY  Two things first: Cara is a friend of mine, and this review contains spoilers galore. I can’t pretend to any true objectivity then. But I will be honest, I felt some trepidation reading my friend’s book. It was not on account of her technical abilities as a writer. Our friendship is fed [...]

  Radioactive Wastewater We in Ithaca  recently found out that 20 million gallons of radioactive hydrofracking wastewater was dumped in Cayuga Lake. It was dumped at water treatment plants that could not handle the flow or level of particulates, much less chemicals, in the water. This is the water we drink. The local papers are [...]

A book just crossed my desk called AEROTROPOLIS: the way we’ll live next. Quick, what the fuck could an aerotropolis be? Will we live in the air? Cities with hovercraft and skyways, vertical glass needles full of people, pets and things? No, it’s a book by a couple of businessmen about organizing the city of [...]