Monday, November 18, 2002

Which Is It? In the past week, I have been publicly accused of being a a hayseed from Connecticut, in New York with no credibility and a Connecticut-hating, New York-centric elitist. Those can't both be true, can they? 9:33:19 PM     What do you think? ()

Why Should I Pay You to Satisfy Your Craving For Attention? At the significant risk of incurring the scorn of a witty woman, I'm a bit puzzled by this entry at the reverse cowgirl's weblog. I suspect (I hope) that it is meant as a joke, but it reads as pretty forced. In fact, it reads as dangerously close to a passive-aggressive (oh, how sick I am of that phrase) snit. Why on earth would anyone donate money to a Weblog? A Weblog is an act of incredible self-indulgence--a public cry of "Listen to me!"--and any Weblogger who doesn't see that is deluding themselves. So I think that the graceful thing to do is to just be happy if anyone reads it. Expecting them to pay on top of that seems a little extra needy. I can't imagine that anyone would pay for pointers to almost-but-not-quite obscene Web sites that are collected from other Web sites, lists of funny porn movie titles, and occasional (admittedly quite good) photographs. Though as Susannah points out, people have donated money to Andrew Sullivan and Karyn Bosnak for less. 9:26:52 PM     What do you think? ()

Is This What Thomas Wolfe Meant by You Can't Go Home Again? My wife, her brother, and I drove up to Hartford and back last night to see Bob Dylan. The show itself was astonishing. I had seen him a year ago in New York, and that was a great show (the instrumental interplay in "Just Like a Woman" almost made me cry), but this show was even more powerful, despite Dylan's voice being much more ragged. It seemed to hold the whole of American popular music, from the gentle acoustic beauty of "Girl of the North Country" and "Visions of Johanna" to the gorgeous harmonies on the chorus of "Shelter From the Storm," from the solid whomp of "Brown Sugar" to the "Free Bird"-style triple guitar finish of "Summer Days," and so much more. His band is, as he says, the best band in the land. But everything around the show was less pleasant. We drove up and back in the season's first nor'easter, the arena was only about two-thirds full of a distinctly non-New York crowd of yahoos and rubes, and it took us more than twenty minutes to get through security into the arena (as if al-Qaida is going strike its crippling blow against America at a Bob Dylan concert in Hartford, Connecticut). And just as we were starting home on I-91, a car just in front of us hit the guard rail. It looked like the view from the in-car camera in a NASCAR race--a shower of sparks and car parts and then the suddenly dark car smoking and spinning across the highway--only much slower. Luckily, it was far enough ahead of us that we were able to avoid it and get home safely, listening to Steve Van Zandt's very cool radio show once we got near enough to New York. 9:34:07 AM     What do you think? ()

Isn't It Obvious? Why does this point have to keep being made? Doesn't everyone see that a bunch of not-really-valid reasons to invade Iraq don't, through some cumulative magic, become a single valid reason? 9:05:13 AM     What do you think? ()

© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist. Last update: 11/2/03; 10:31:07 AM.

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