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Room 64
This thing often happens when I go to museums. There’s so much to see, I’m usually in a city with a million other things to do, and I get tired of standing. So as I walk from painting to painting, I’ll often pause at a piece that really grabs me, stop in wonder for a…
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The Most Misanthropic Blog Post Imaginable
I was flipping through the channels about a week ago, and I paused for a few minutes to watch Glenn Beck interviewing Michael Bublé. Absolutely excruciating. I obviously hate Glenn Beck, but Michael Bublé has always infuriated me as well. I can’t stand the way he puts weird inflections into his singing and destroys great…
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Quote of the day
Instead of writing an essay, I found myself looking at whitehouse.gov’s descriptions of Presidents. I found this money quote about Warren Harding: A Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, called Harding’s speeches “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”
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Reading Baudelaire While Grouchy
I’ve been feeling a little grouchy lately. Perhaps it was not wise, then, to read Baudelaire. Baudelaire, the French Romantic poet, was the writer of the spleen–intellectual 19th century France’s emo. Really though. For Baudelaire, le spleen was about expressing “profound boredom and weariness about existence” (my translation from the French wikipedia entry). Etymologically, the…
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My Contribution To A Meme
I find the various remixes of Kanye’s interruption at the VMAs to be absolutely hilarious: So I decided to make my own:
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My Dinner with Ari Fleischer
Tonight Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s first press secretary, was on campus to give a talk. I had the good fortune of being one of about fifteen students who had dinner with Fleischer, a Middlebury alum, before his talk. Fleischer is certainly a kind man, and I appreciated the honest way he spoke to us students.…
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An attempt at flânerie in San Francisco: Part I, The Idea
I started the day restless and angsty: I made the mistake of going online first thing in the morning. My house in San Francisco now has wifi, so I did the standard online circuit of email, Facebook, newspaper sites and blogs before even getting out of bed. For a variety of reasons, this left me…
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Detritus
Last weekend, I drove to Charleston, Oregon, a small town on Coos Bay. I was visiting my friend who is studying marine biology there. The drive was four hours long, and I did it without stopping. On route 42, I passed through a large-scale plywood processing plant. It was complete with 18-wheelers coming and going,…
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Ashland
I was sitting, writing an essay I wasn’t excited about on the history of Oregon’s Native Peoples. It had been over a hundred degrees earlier in the day. I craved beer. I read about Barack Obama and Joe Biden having a beer with a Harvard Professor and a cop. This didn’t help. The only alcohol…
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Poitiers
I went to Poitiers, France this weekend to see a friend. Poitiers is a university city of 100,000 in Western France. Getting out of the big city was refreshing, and I absolutely love the decor of non-Parisian France. Here are some photos:
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George Altshuler 