She let her song rise again and spread out her arms. In Louisiana the old black people called that kind of singing a bajo or banjo song, a homesick blues for where you’ve never been, which for them was Africa but for her was God only knows. Be there, Lu Anne sang. Be there, Sweet Jesus. Be there. She leaned back in the lounger, exhausted, When she turned to the mirror she saw her own secret eyes. No other person... Read more
writes: …Today in America, SWAT teams are deployed about 100 to 150 times per day, or about 50,000 times per year — a dramatic increase from the 3,000 or so annual deployments in the early 1980s, or the few hundred in the 1970s. The vast majority of today’s deployments are to serve search warrants for drug crimes. But the use of SWAT tactics to enforce regulatory law also appears to be rising. This month, for example, a SWAT team raided... Read more
I realize this particular hard-workin’ metaphor doesn’t work for everybody, but it pretty much always works for me. Via Mockingbird. Read more
The day they switched the captions by mistake. Probably via Jesse Walker. Read more
I never knew that was a) not solely a Venetian tradition and b) tied to the Assumption of Our Lady! Super-fascinating. Here’s the great Robert Browning poem, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s.” You’ll see that I misremembered it in the title of this post. Oh well. Read more
Man, I was so close to loving this movie. Basically it’s a John Hughes movie where you replace the romantic lead with a barely-functional alcoholic, which to no one’s surprise turns out to be the way to make me finally love a John Hughes movie. I really, genuinely adored a lot of this and found it funny, sweet, and poignant, with at least some degree of wisdom. Most of the audience I saw it with (at Bethesda Row Cinema; it’s... Read more
This is super-neat. Probably via Jesse Walker. Read more
here; and definitely spoilerous for the overall mood of the book’s ending: Imagine that someone failed and disgraced came back to his family, and they grieved with him, and took his sadness upon themselves, and sat down together to ponder the mysteries of human life. This is… human and beautiful, I propose, even if it yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries. Perhaps it is the calling of some families to console, because intractable grief is visited upon... Read more
by problem of family and honesty: This thing of demanding honesty of people is in the upper reaches of extreme Innocence. The only people of whom you can demand honesty are those you pay to get it from. When you ask [someone] to be honest with you, you are asking him to act like God, whom he is not, but whom he makes some attempt to be like in giving you what you want, and it doesn’t make him show... Read more
BBC reports! A 15th Century hotel owned by the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White has been repainted because it was the wrong shade of pink. Babergh District Council visited the Angel Hotel in Lavenham, Suffolk, on Tuesday and found the wrong colour had been used on the building. The pale pink makeover had been sanctioned by a manager but local people said it “lowered the tone”. It has now been replaced with a more traditional, darker, Suffolk Pink. The building,... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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