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I would pay someone $20 to scribble this in a restroom stall at some red-carpet event. It's here not only because I think it's appropriate to our celebrity gossip-soaked times, but because the Cantos really should be read in print.
[W]hile the internet may be a nifty vehicle for delivering one's polished prose and penetrating insights to an impatiently waiting world, it can't help you become a better writer if you, pardon my French, suck.
Moreover, the internet leads to all sorts of unsavory writing practices, like blogging. You know, the journal of the 21st century.
[...]
A lot of people will tell you that blogging is merely journaling online. It is not. Blogging is not private, but very public. And very few blogs involve the kind of introspection that characterizes a serious journal. Most blogging is sheer exhibitionism, either the self-absorbed ramblings of an individual blogger or the corporate site that exists for the sole purpose of making money. (If anyone sees a disturbing parallel between blogging and column writing, kindly keep it to yourself.)
This doesn't mean blogs have to be badly written. It just means that most are.
-- "You, To, Can Right Like a Blogger," Wired News, Apr 27, 06
According to rundeep, here's the real problem with blogging:
1) It causes the untalented to believe themselves writers with something of interest to say, and;
2) He who blogs is often not reading books, so as to develop the ability which might cure 1) above.
-- "Blogoholism" via Slate's Fraywatch, Apr 25, 06
Any suggestion that [marijuana] might be medically useful is politically controversial, whatever the science says. It is in this context that, on April 20th, America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that smoked marijuana has no accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
The statement is curious in a number of ways. For one thing, it overlooks a report made in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the National Academy of Sciences, which came to a different conclusion. John Benson, a professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska who co-chaired the committee that drew up the report, found some sound scientific information that supports the medical use of marijuana for certain patients for short periods—even for smoked marijuana.
[...]
Another reason the FDA statement is odd is that it seems to lack common sense. Cannabis has been used as a medicinal plant for millennia. In fact, the American government actually supplied cannabis as a medicine for some time, before the scheme was shut down in the early 1990s. Today, cannabis is used all over the world, despite its illegality, to relieve pain and anxiety, to aid sleep, and to prevent seizures and muscle spasms. For example, two of its long-advocated benefits are that it suppresses vomiting and enhances appetite—qualities that AIDS patients and those on anti-cancer chemotherapy find useful. So useful, in fact, that the FDA has licensed a drug called Marinol, a synthetic version of one of the active ingredients of marijuana—delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Unfortunately, many users of Marinol complain that it gets them high (which isn't what they actually want) and is not nearly as effective, nor cheap, as the real weed itself.
-- "Reefer Madness," The Economist, Apr 27, 06
A cheaply-produced, effective medicinal treatment? Outlaw it!
Here's what should get Americans -- or at least those investing in the stock market -- really worried: because of the FDA's ridiculous stance on marijuana, other countries have a tremendous head start on cannabis-derived drugs that are highly engineered to treat specific maladies. So even if common sense does manage to eventually cut through the reefer madness, we're still operating from a point of weakness in the biopharm market.
On my list of morally suspect pleasures, commenting on how other people spend their money ranks right up there. Who doesn't love fiscal gossip? That's why Terri Cullen's "Fiscally Fit" column in the WSJ has turned into a must-read for me.
In January, she announced plans to write about the financial decisions she and her family make. The idea is pretty cool -- have a financial columnist put her mouth where her money really is. Yet the execution makes me wonder if I'm ever going to be part of the WSJ's demographic. In previous columns, she's discussed the need for big-screen TVs, the impetus to downscale their fishing boat to a more manageable model, and how to catch a break on insuring their fourth car.
However, today's column is what's sent me over the edge: "Turf War."
U.S. residents can breathe a bit easier than they did a decade ago, as the number of days that air quality was deemed unhealthy has fallen, according to a report by the American Lung Association on Thursday.
The report found real improvement in air quality over much of the United States, due in part to reduced emissions from power plants.
-- "U.S. Air Quality Has Improved in Past Decade," Reuters, Apr 27, 06
The report covers the last 10 years. Of note: the Bush administration began relaxing rules on power plant emissions three years ago, so we'll see how much of that progress they'll have managed to undo by the next report.
The poetry of the early 20th century has always interested me more than anything that came later. I think it's because the really great poets evoke time and place with extreme poignancy and specificity: you can read the turmoil that came from increasing awareness of a shrinking world, the encroachment of technology, the fomenting currents of social change.
You all know I love Wilfred Owens and T.S. Eliot. Here's a piece by a compadre of theirs that's a most angry and eloquent query. I think it'd make a fine political protest piece.
''Paloma, Patrick is throwing up!'' Flanagan used to tell her son's nanny. ''She would literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow,'' Flanagan recalls. ''I would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up.'' I put my kids in day care and I can't iron. But I've never stood in a doorway when my child was puking, and I resent being lectured to by someone who has.
-- "To Hell With All That," EW, Apr 14, 06
And then, not two weeks later ...
Let others call themselves infovores. I am an infosnacker, and thus adore the kinds of books that purport to fill in some critical educational gap with a breezy tour of Western Civ/The Greats of Literature/Science Made Simple/Trivia That Fools People Into Thinking You're Erudite/Etc. I have two shelves devoted to these compendiums. Not only do I enjoy flipping through and refreshing my recollection of the history of medicine, I also like seeing how authors approach the material. It is my not-so-secret dream to be tapped to write one of these types of books; I view reading them as training for that bright day in the future when I am called to the glorious task.
Although my recent favorite is Richard Zacks' An Underground Education : The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge, I have a special place in my heart for An Incomplete Education by Judy Jones and William Wilson. I got the first edition as a Christmas gift in 1991 and was immediately enamored of both the book's contents and its breezy tone.
Continue reading "What I read last week: the vade mecum edition" »
I understood this poem so much better after living in a city.
When I was working in San Francisco and watching knots of drunks and junkies weave around the China Basin parking lots that would be filled in with stadiums and condos, when I became familiar with the funk of homeless guys standing in line behind you at McDonald's, when I got pulled over on Sixth and Market and watched a crack deal go down as I was written up for running a red light ... this poem made more sense than it had when I was reading it in a bucolic, rural college town.
This is my favorite type of poem: it beautifully illustrates the tension between what we see and what we know to be true in the dark corners of our minds. This is the type of poem you shouldn't read after 10 p.m. at night, not unless you'd like to stay up until 2 a.m. brooding.
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