I am seeking lethargy. No ballet classes this week. But I seem to have other things to do. Like get my Mom back and forth to doctors. And myself as well on Friday. Meetings at church.
In the mean time, I seem to be slipping into a vacation mood. I do what I usually do: read, practice. But I am thinking I have less places I have to be less times.
Finished Berryman’s The Dream Songs this morning. Not sure exactly what I think about them, except that I enjoyed reading them.
The Neuroscience of Your Brain On Fiction – NYTimes.com
Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
I have been wondering if my morning poetry reading is part of why my blood pressure is down. I look forward to saying this to my doctor on Friday. If for nothing else to watch her reaction.
The Way We Read Now – NYTimes.com
Once again the net book is left out of the discussion. I read on my netbook. But that doesn’t seem to be on the radar in the talk about the death of the book and the birth of the digital reader.
I also find it odd that people speaking in defense of the book feel so threatened and seem to misunderstand that it’s probably a good thing that people read whenever they bother to and however they can.
Knights Erroneous « The Honest Courtesan
This is the web site of a militant call girl. I linked into it via a Tweet of Nicholas Kristof. He pointed to it as critical of his series on sex trafficking.
She despises what she sees as his paternalism.
The Honest Courtesan linked in to an article “Kristof and the Rescue Industry: The Soft Side of Imperialism” by LAURA AGUSTÍN on Counterpunch.
I am libertarian enough to think that if someone chooses to sell their body this is totally their business (theirs and their customers). But I also am soft headed enough to be concerned when people are drawn into situations beyond their control.
Also I read some of this stuff because I am trying to reach out of my own echo chamber of sources.
But frankly, The Honest Courtesan seems more coherent than the article by Laura Augustin which begins with paragraph after paragraph reviling Kristof. I see more content in the former than the latter.
In both cases, I am in a learning stance. I guess do-gooders like Kristof inevitably open themselves up to charges of paternalism and “soft imperialism.” It does seem however that if he has developed the game that Augustin describes it’s pretty goofy.
I think this blog is pretty cool. It seems that Markson scans in pages of books he is studying with his marks in them or his name in them with a date. Then there is some prose regarding the concepts he is thinking about….. I like it.
The AIDS Warriors’ Legacy – NYTimes.com
I think this is a brave and wonderful telling of the early “tribe” of AIDS activists.
“If you come at a problem in a way that’s just disruptive and iconoclastic, but you don’t know what you’re talking about, all you are is a nuisance,” said Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when we talked last week. Act Up’s leaders, he told me, knew what they were talking about. As a result, they “cracked open the opaque process” of drug development, altered the patient-doctor relationship and “changed the whole face of advocacy,” he said.
Dear GOP: You do know how pregnancy works, right? « Emily L. Hauser – In My Head
Some fun phrases in this admittedly biased but excellent article. I like
“And sperm, you may recall, come from penises.
Which are attached to men.