salad bowl liberal

@mjraskob.bsky.social

1042 Followers 705 Following

Sweetness & light. | “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.“ | Some writing at: https://mjraskob.substack.com/

A youthful Christopher Hitchens speaking (google Hitchens Thatcher spanking).
Consequently, the task of the New Novel is nothing less than to seek “new forms for the novel... forms capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations between man and the world, to all those who have determined to invent the novel, in other words, to invent man. Such writers know that the systematic repetition of the forms of the past is not only absurd and futile, but that it can even become harmful: blinding us to our real situation in the world today, it keeps us, ultimately, from constructing the world and man of tomorrow.” With the change of a noun or two, this could easily be the coda of an address on American foreign policy, delivered by Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to the ADA.
An illustration of Queequeg from Moby-Dick.
Keefe Chambers & Kelvin Gemstone from THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES.
Albert, Prince of Wales (Edward VII)
In one letter, Wilhelm writes: "I have been dreaming about your dear soft, warm hands, I am awaiting with impatience the time when I can sit near you and kiss them but pray keep your promise you gave me always to give me alone the soft inside of your hand to kiss, but of course you keep this as a secret for yourself." In another letter, he tells her: "I have again dreamt about you, this time I was alone with you in your library when you stretched forth your arms and pulled me down. Then you took off your gloves and laid your hand gently on my lips for me to kiss it...I wish you would do the same when I am in Berlin alone with you in the evening."
Mali War belligerents
Unfortunately, young Ronald Reagan was hot.
Thomas Friedman, inventor of the Friedman Unit (the crucial next six months).
Sanders performed a number of classified experiments and investigations at Detrick, '' including some with disastrous results; during experiments involving brucellosis and tularemia, many scientists on Sanders' team ended up falling ill with the virus. According to Sanders, there were "casualties in the workplace", and an experiment by his team nearly resulted in the death of the infant Gifford Pinchot IlI, grandson of Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot. After Sanders informed the elder Pinchot of his grandson's condition, in a meeting where Supreme Court justice Hugo Black was also present, Sanders was placed under house arrest for 48 hours.
According to one relative, Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder as a child as well as attention deficit disorder, twice tried to commit suicide at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times. These early issues appear to have been compounded by service in the military and deployments to Afghanistan which left him with an increased propensity to violence as well as PTSD. A relative told the AP, “They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine.” (An additional, horrifying detail: Brouillette was initially rejected by the military because of his mental health history. “But recruiters encouraged him to go off his medications for a year and reapply, which he did,” and he was then enlisted.) If all this weren’t enough, in 2021 he was broke and in some kind of firefighter training program when he was hit in the head by a steal beam and suffered a serious concussion and some sort of permanent brain damage, “with symptoms including impaired memory, cognitive deficits, headaches, vertigo and light sensitivity.”
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail. All the dexterity is in the good cookery and management of them…"
Ben Tillman
WrItIng, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; - so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own
Tobias Fünke
Another A la recherche du temps perdu? or Les caves du Vatican? Neither, I fear. My Ouija board has already spelled out what was next on the drawing board: Of Human Bondage. Does any of this matter? I suspect not. After all, literature is no longer of very great interest even to the makers. It may well be that that current phenomenon, the writer who makes his life his art, is the most useful of all. If so, then perhaps Mishima's artificial flowers were never intended to survive the glare of sun and steel or compete with his own fleshly fact, made bloody with an ax. What, after all, has a mask to confess except that it covers a skull? All honor then to a man who lived and died the way he wanted to. I only regret we never met, for friends found him a good companion, a fine drinking partner, and fun to cruise with.
[from an NYT newsletter] “The level of U.S. involvement in Venezuela since American forces captured its former president this year is remarkable. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become a “de facto viceroy,” my colleagues report in a revealing story published this weekend. Through a steady stream of WhatsApp messages with its new president, Rubio controls Venezuela’s export revenues and decides how that money should be spent, who should be allowed to do business in the country and who should hold important offices.
Swift (Jonathan)
"But what was absolutely unmistakable in the extraordinary clarity and warmth of Mentone was that the one person with whom he would have wanted to share this experience and whose health might have benefited from it was dead. Apparently he did not give thought to the possibility that her life might have been prolonged if he had proposed the benefit of a warm, dry climate. But, in good health despite his usual complaints, he was not unaware of the irony of the healthy widower finding solace on "this sunny Rivera" immediately after the death of his frail wife, who all her life had taken the punishment of English winters.