On Molly Ivins

When I read her column, which was not regularly, I thought she was generally right on. We need more like her.

Some choice quotes from Paul Krugman's column (NYT Pay Per View), courtesy E&P.

And a tremendous tribute from the Rude Pundit:


She was goddamned smart, so smart she didn't have to flaunt it. So smart that she could use the down to earth side to say what she meant so all of us could understand it. She didn't suffer bullies. She loved Texas like a parent loves her child even after that child has gone on a three-state killing spree. She was unfailingly polite. And she could eviscerate anyone who was failing all of us with just an image or two. Those guttings will be desperately missed. That sense and celebration of the decency of the average American will be missed even more.

We've lost one of our defenders.

Thanks to Atrios.

La Valse

I tend to have a highly visual response to music -- if I find something really engaging, there will be a visual narrative going on in my head while I'm listening. Some things, like opera, tend to provide their own scenarios: it's hard not to visualize Don Giovanni or Das Reingold while listening to Don Giovanni or Das Reingold. Other works are more open to interpretation, and there are some that sometimes present themselves as soundtracks for segments of my life, or the world in general.

The second strongest response I have is to visualize a dance -- I choreograph things in my head, if the music is sufficiently visceral. (No, this is not limited to rock or pop -- Schubert can be amazingly visceral.)

One work that has been subject to both reactions is Ravel's La Valse. I always visualized, at the beginning, a glittering ballroom -- Vienna, perhaps in the spring or summer of 1914. A beautiful, richly gowned woman is led to the floor by an elegant but faceless man. They are the height of fashionable society, and as the music begins to find its rhythm, they embark on a graceful waltz. But gradually, the music becomes strident, the dancing more intense, and there are explosions, the tall windows along the side of the hall shatter, great crystal chandeliers crash to the floor, the floor itself cracks and the cracks become chasms, and as the woman's panic increases, her partner's grip becomes more and more unbreakable, the devastation more and more frightening, until she is left standing on a pinnacle, staring at the devastation around her, completely unprepared to deal with it.

Pick a time period -- the past week, the past year, the past six years, since Reagan, since JFK, and think about the events and the context they created.

Or just read the headlines.

Featured

If you look over at the sidebar, under "Featured," you'll see links to my new reviews of Shortbus and Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. Read the reviews.


This is my third review of Ready to Catch Him, and the one in which I think I've finally gotten close to what I wanted to say. (Not that the others aren't valid, but my feeling is that if a book or other work is substantial -- and this one is -- as time goes by and it sinks into your foundations, especially if you experience it several times, your thinking gets stripped to the essentials, and then you start building a new structure to house it. My prior reviews were valid then; this one is valid now, with the additional insights provided by the film.)

It's interesting, looking back at my past reviews sometimes, particularly of those works that moved me. My first review of Glen Cook's Tyranny of the Night, for example, was really atrocious. The second, taking it in combination with Lord of the Silend Kingdom, is much more intelligent -- much closer to what I feel I should be doing in a review.

Another thing about Bartlett's book that gives me words where I didn't quite have them: it's an elegy, a memory of the loss of what we -- gay men -- once had to offer the world. Andrew Sullivan notwithstanding, I mourn the demise of "gay culture" -- it was heady, it was reckless, it was earthy and sensual, and it was the product of a kind of innocence and courage that no one else had, and no one else has still. I miss it -- I don't want to be like everyone else, and I want to live in a real world that is not completely prepackaged, and that's what we're heading for. We had something better. The mythic framework of Bartlett's novel is perfect -- we were creating myth then, and now all we have is houses, children, and SUVs.

That's quite a come-down.