"During my second pregnancy, rats began clawing their way up our sewage pipes. For months, we found them in our toilet bowl."

"When I began peeing in the bathtub, my husband insisted it was time to move to Providence. He had grown up there — and he’d be able to run his family business. 'The kids will have more space,' he said. 'And if we don’t like it, we can always come back.'... As soon as we purchased the 'beautiful Dutch Colonial,' I was seized with panic. My husband already knew about, and barely tolerated, my penchant for returning things. The most Thoreauvian person I know, he purchased almost nothing in the first place. We were all burdened by our possessions; like Thoreau, he believed we had become 'the tools of our tools.'... [W]hat was it that made me want to reverse our decision...?... It was because the neighborhood wasn’t walkable and I, a New-Orleanian-turned-New-Yorker, didn’t know how to drive well.... [T]he nearest playground or coffee shop a mile away...."

Writes Jackie Delamatre, in "I Had Buyer’s Remorse. It Almost Ended My Marriage. When you can’t agree on the right city to live in, home can be more hell than haven" (NYT).

The way to avoid buyer's remorse is not to buy anything new. But you can't be peeing in the bathtub because of the rats in the toilet.

"The urge to bring back old words is evergreen..."

"... general interest articles on the subject abound, and the political landscape inspires regular pleas on social media to restore potent pejoratives such as 'lummox,' 'bloviate,' 'bumptious' and 'hoodwink.' Some requests are whimsical, too, like that of a user on Bluesky who suggested, 'We should bring back the word "spake," e.g. "Thus spake my friend Jeff."'... Whether these campaigns are sincere or silly, we may be closer to a wordy renaissance than we think.... Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century coinage, 'brain-rot,' is now the ruin of modern minds. Calling someone a 'goon' is no longer just a 1920s habit. We’re saying 'sheesh' again, apparently, and even the president has spoken of skedaddling. Is there a science to this kind of resurgence?"

I'm reading "Why Kids Are Starting to Sound Like Their Grandparents/The strange resurgence of words like 'yap' and 'skedaddle'" (NYT).

1. I'm all for reaching out to more unusual and interesting words and fighting the tendency to withdraw into a smaller and smaller vocabulary. I hope these kids today are doing it because it's fun, it's mind-sharpening, and it's aesthetically pleasing. We're not talking here about showing off or making other people feel dumb, I don't think. This isn't a William F. Buckley move.

2. "Bloviate" — just a few days ago, I had a post titled "Bloviate." It's a Warren G. Harding word. Harding was born in 1865, so he's hardly at the grandparent level for today's "kids." More like great-great grandparent or even great-great-great grandparent. As for Henry David Thoreau, he was born in 1817, so that would put him at the great-great-great or great-great-great-great level. But he's no one's great-great-etc. grandfather. Like so many of these kids today, he was childless.

3. Did Thoreau ever opine about kids? Yes: "Children appear to me as raw as the fresh fungi on a fence rail." More aptly, on the subject of whether one ought to have children: "The only excuse for reproduction is improvement. Nature abhors repetition. Beasts merely propagate their kind, but the offspring of noble men & women will be superior to themselves, as their aspirations are."

4. I didn't remember that "brain-rot" — 2024's Word of the Year — came from Thoreau.

"Jim and Rachel Van Eerden had a 'barn raising' for their cabin in Stokesdale, N.C., with friends building historically accurate furniture, a contractor working on the frame..."

"... and even a blacksmith forging nails in the style of the 1850s. Their 'Walden' cabin is the first in a growing series of literature-inspired structures on their homestead property, rented out via Airbnb and VRBO. The listing explicitly warns would-be visitors about the lack of plumbing, electricity and Wi-Fi; showers and toilets are available at nearby 'Narnia cottage,' instead. Their cabin’s interior is nearly true to Thoreau’s model, with even the dents and nicks in the wood desk matching the writer’s own. They made a few additions to the structure though. 'We gave ourselves what we called the "third year liberty" where we said, "OK, if Thoreau would have stayed a third year, he would have wanted a little front porch. He would’ve wanted a garret,"' said Mr. Van Eerden...."

From "They Went to the Woods Because They Wished to Live Deliberately/Paying homage to the long-dead Transcendentalist, some people are building full-scale replicas of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden cabin" (NYT)(gift link, so you can read more and see the pictures, and read the comments, predictably from folks who just have to recite the received idea, his mother did his laundry).

"Even before 'Walden,' critics questioned Thoreau’s motivations for building and moving into his isolated cabin. 'I think he touches a lot of nerves,' said Laura Walls, a scholar of American Transcendentalism. 'What a lazy bum this guy has to be, not pulling his weight in society and isolating himself like that,' she said, paraphrasing his detractors.

"Most men live lives of quiet desperation," said Joe Rogan.

On the new episode of Duncan Trussell's podcast — audio and transcript here.

The guys were not talking about Henry David Thoreau. They were talking about men struggling to live with women. Here's the context (which begins at 00:57:11):

ROGAN: I had a buddy of mine who was an actor and he got this part, I think it was in a movie. It was good, you know, good little, small part. He was real excited and his girlfriend started crying and she said, when is something gonna happen for me?... That was her response....

TRUSSELL: Jesus, dude. That's so dark.

ROGAN: I think about that guy sometimes. 'cause I was, I was on a, a show with him, one day, just bit part on a show. And I was like, this guy's gonna be a movie star.... But I remember him telling me, he's like, she started crying, man.... She was crying saying, when is it gonna happen to me? So [he says] I don't know what to do. And I was like Captain Fucking Jettison — I'm Captain Fucking Pull the Parachutes — that's me.... So I was like, dude, you gotta bail out.... You gotta bail now. This one, you can't fix that girl....

TRUSSELL: That's so fucked up.

ROGAN: But she's pretty hot.... 

TRUSSELL: Dude, I wouldn't have bailed.

ROGAN: She had the heavies... she had natural heavies.

TRUSSELL: Natural heavies. It's worth it!

"While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"

Wrote Henry David Thoreau, quoted in "Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year Is… Brain Rot" (NYT).

Thoreau published that sentence in 1854 — it's in "Walden" — but somehow, 170 years later, his word/phrase is the official Word of the Year. I'm just going to guess that Thoreau would consider choosing a word of the year to be a rotten-brain activity. 

Is this word-of-the-year-choosing "Oxford" really the same as the Oxford English Dictionary? The NYT says it's "the publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary," but I look up the word in the OED, and I get:

Why I read something this blurry.

I'd just watched "What a Way to Go" — the Criterion Channel is featuring Shirley MacLaine movies — and checking Rotten Tomatoes, I saw that Joan Didion wrote a review in the May 1964 issue of Vogue. I could subscribe to Vogue just to read that paragraph, but I found that by calming down and believing in myself, I could read it. It's not much different from reading without one's reading glasses. It's an apt and pithy review. "What a Way to Go" was a big movie in its day, so it deserves the bad reviews it got, but 60 years later, it's fun to look at the stars and the costumes and the sets. The Hollywood that produced it no longer exists. Nothing to get mad at now. Here's a sentence from the contemporaneous NYT review by Bosley Crowther:

Inspired by a Gwen Davis story, which has not swum into my ken, so I cannot tell you how fairly or fouly it has been used, the team of musical-comedy writers is making kookie jokes about a girl whose sad fate it is to marry a succession of burgeoning millionaires.

The "girl" hates money, loves Henry David Thoreau, and only wants to live the simple life, but the movie seems to have been made on the theory that the way to make good art is by spending as much money as possible.

"Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every goddamn liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore."

"Please, somebody stop us before we enlighten again."

"The partitioning of the region wasn't decided by Jews but by a vote of the United Nations in 1947 with everyone from Russia to Haiti voting for it. But apparently, they don't teach this at Drag Queen Story Hour anymore."

"On a continuum of good vs. evil, Zuckerberg is probably less evil than Elon. I don't like Zuckerberg, but Elon is a disgusting bottom dweller. I hope this is the nail in Twitter's coffin."

This is the top rated comment at the WaPo article "What we love and hate about Threads, Meta’s new Twitter clone/Threads may be the first Twitter alternative that really matters because it’s built on top of Instagram’s existing base of billions of users."

And it's a better answer to the question of what to "love and hate about Threads" than anything in the article, which suggests we ought to love Threads because it's easy to get on it via your Instagram account (which millions did without realizing that they can't delete their Threads account without deleting their Instagram account). 

Anyway, for me, the key thing to like (or "love") would be good, readable writing (and part of readability is the absence of visual clutter). But Threads won't let me look at it as a web page, and I won't accept the app without seeing that it's something I want. It's what people used to call a pig in a poke. Or, in some countries, a cat in a bag. At least with Twitter, I can see the pig/cat. 

And didn't Thoreau say, "Beware of enterprises requiring new apps"?

But let's think about that comment (in the post title). It states the "lesser of 2 evils" principle. I understand that in an election, but is this a lesser-of-2-evils situation? We don't need to choose one or the other. We can reject both.

Now, I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Lesser of two evils principle":

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: "For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good". The modern formulation was popularized by Thomas à Kempis' devotional book The Imitation of Christ written in early 15th century.

In part IV of his Ethics, Spinoza states the following maxim: 

Proposition 65: "According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less."

I'm sure these wise men all realized that there are circumstances where you can choose neither. For example, I abstained in the last election, and I endorse abstention as an option and argue with those who say you're doing something wrong if you refuse to vote. 

I get diverted into the Wikipedia article "False dilemma." The best thing about that article is this cool poster from 1910:

ADDED: I'm just noticing that the scales held aloft by the Chief Justice embody the principle of the lesser of 2 evils. There are just 2 options, and the weightier one ought to win.

AND: At least the Justice is considering legal arguments as the 2 options and choosing between the entities who are the parties in the lawsuit. By contrast, in the WaPo commenter's formulation, the 2 options are 2 human beings — Zuckerberg and Musk. We're not expected to understand the substance of what we'd be getting if we chose Threads or Twitter. That's too hard and too sober for us, the social media people, who gravitate toward decisions that are personified and inflated with scary, emotive insinuations of evil.

Tiny travel: going for a walk.

I'm reading "How to Make Your Walk a 'Microadventure'/Start small, look up and let your nose guide you" by Jancee Dunn (NYT).  

I like this topic as a contrast to yesterday's inquiry into the philosophy and psychology of overseas travel, that is, moving about the face of the Earth on a grand scale. The alternative isn't to remain stoically immobile, pent up at home, but to move within a smaller scale in your locality. You have not yet seen what is there. You have not seen it every day of the year, every time of the day. Enlarge your powers to go small. There is infinite smallness.

Was Louisa May Alcott a trans man?

Peyton Thomas — host of "Jo’s Boys: A Little Women Podcast" — looks at the evidence in a NYT op-ed.

Alcott, we're told, "used the names Lou, Lu or Louy." And: 

I've got exactly 2 TikToks to show you tonight.

1. "The Lord... maketh me to lie down in green pastures," it says in Psalm 23, but is it really a good idea to lie down in a pasture? I see a problem (or 2). But this lady lies down. She's got her idea. She wants to see what animal comes to her first.

2. Thoreau wrote: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." And here is that man, God bless him.

"Rather than working late on a Friday evening, organising the annual team-building trip to Slough or volunteering to supervise the boss’s teenager on work experience..."

"... the quiet quitters are avoiding the above and beyond, the hustle culture mentality, or what psychologists call 'occupational citizenship behaviours.'... TikTok posts about quiet quitting may have been inspired by Chinese social media: #TangPing, or lying flat, is a now-censored hashtag apparently prompted by China’s shrinking workforce and long-hours culture.... 'The search for meaning has become far more apparent. There was a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking "What should work mean for me? How can I do a role that’s more aligned to my values?"'"

From "Quiet quitting: why doing the bare minimum at work has gone global/The meaninglessness of modern work – and the pandemic – has led many to question their approach to their jobs" (The Guardian). 

I blogged about quiet quitting 2 weeks ago, here. And I blogged about tangping in June 2021, here. And click my tag "idleness" for various manifestations of my interest in this concept over the years — my blogging years. 

But I've been interested in it for as long as I remember. The Guardian article mentions "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which had a big impact on me when I was a high school student. Talk about a quiet quitter! 

Somewhat noisier examples from my high school English classes that got into my head: "Walden" and "The World Is Too Much With Us":

"When the snow melts in the spring, fields can get so muddy in the plains of Eastern Europe that Russians have a word for it: Rasputitsa, or 'the season of bad roads.'..."

"If Russian President Vladimir Putin orders his forces to invade, analysts believe it would come before the spring thaw. 'The best time to do it is winter because it's going to be a mechanized advance and the mechanized divisions need hard frozen ground'... At a news conference Wednesday marking his first year in office, President Joe Biden warned Putin against an invasion, threatening a strong response by the US and NATO, but waffled over what would happen if Russia made a 'minor incursion,' in an awkward statement he sought to clarify afterward. 'The Russian dictator has not been subtle or secretive about what he wants. He might as well make the national anthem the Beatles' "Back in the U.S.S.R.,"' wrote Max Boot, in the Washington Post. 'He definitely wants to resurrect the Soviet empire, thereby undoing what he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. And that requires bringing back into the fold the second-largest former Soviet republic (by population) — the independent state of Ukraine.'"

From "Putin confronts the mud of Ukraine" (CNN).

*** 

From a 2011 post of mine, collecting mud quotes: 

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev 

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle 

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau 

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

Russian, French, American, British.

ADDED: Thank God we have a mentally competent President. He understands the seasons — "First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.... Yes, there will be growth in the spring!"

"I think the Commission's summary of the case against court-packing (pp. 79-84) includes much stronger arguments than its overview of the case for it (pp. 74-79)."

"But then again, I myself am a longtime opponent of the idea. Readers can judge the arguments in the report for themselves. The report does reject arguments that court-packing is unconstitutional, such as that advanced in co-blogger Randy Barnett's testimony before the Commission (see also Joshua Braver's response to Randy here). The Commission's conclusion on this point reflects the dominant view among legal scholars, though Randy and Michael Rappaport have offered serious arguments on the other side. I wish they were right, but so far remain unpersuaded."

I'm reading "Biden Supreme Court Commission Issues Final Report/The report doesn't endorse court-packing or term limits. But it's generally more to the latter than the former. It also provides valuable overview of a wide range of SCOTUS-related issues" — by Ilya Somin (at Reason).

If Court-packing ever happens, it will be the Supreme Court that decides whether Court-packing is unconstitutional, and if this happens soon, with the current configuration of the Court, I doubt that "the dominant view among legal scholars" will matter much. 

I feel like quoting the Thoreau adage again — last quoted 10 days ago — "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." In this light, Randy Barnett is the majority. Or will be to any Supreme Court that finds itself on the receiving end of a packing plan.

From Barnett's testimony (linked above):

I'm pulled into the upper right hand corner of The Washington Post — so dangerous, so syrup-drenched.

Here's that corner (9 items):

It's an omakase breakfast — omakase, not omicron — the selections entrusted to the illustrious mainstream newspaper. I will update this post, course by course. 

1. "For Clarence Thomas, avowed critic of Roe v. Wade, Mississippi abortion case a moment long awaited" by Robert Barnes. There's oral argument in the big abortion case this Wednesday, and, we're told, Thomas receives "unprecedented deference" these days — because of all his new colleagues, who "think like him," and because there's a new method of asking questions at oral argument, and not only does he speak now, he goes first, and no one cuts him off. They let him finish "his low-key inquiries." Thomas has repeatedly written separate opinions to say that Roe ought to be overruled. "Thomas’s idiosyncratic views and his resistance to compromise still make him the justice most likely to write a solo opinion," writes Barnes. But what's to prevent these new Justices, who may genuinely respect him, from curing that loneliness? Asking that question, I thought of the adage, "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." And then I realized I'm talking about the person named in the next headline down, Henry David Thoreau.

2. "The Black people who lived in Walden Woods long before Henry David Thoreau": "'Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill lived Brister Freeman, ‘a handy Negro,’ slave of Squire Cummings once... With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly – large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since,' Thoreau wrote in 'Walden.'"

3. "Amid massive shortage, Canada taps strategic reserves — of maple syrup": "Petroleum stockpiles aren’t the only strategic reserves being tapped this season amid concerns of supply shortages and sky-high prices." There's a Canadian federation that, we're told, gets called "the OPEC of maple syrup." The shortage seems to have mostly to do with people cooking more pancakes and such on account of the lockdown, but there's also stress to the maple trees from climate change, so make sure to keep worrying about climate change. It affects pancakes!

4. "The Rule of Six: A newly radicalized Supreme Court is poised to reshape the nation" by Ruth Marcus. The conservatives are no longer just looking for a 5th vote. With 6, it's like "an heir and spare." They can afford to lose one. No more need to cajole that last one, the fussed-over "swing" voter. And Marcus tells WaPo readers to be be afraid, be very afraid.

5. "Hanukkah isn’t ‘Jewish Christmas.’ Stop treating it that way. No need to include our holiday in the winter extravaganza of commercialization, thanks." Sample sentence, representing the tone and message of the entire piece: "No Jew has ever gazed longingly at a 12-foot inflatable reindeer and wished in her heart she had an equally large Moses to display in front of her house."

6. "Greece was in deep trouble. How did it right the ship? Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the arrival of migrants — and tech companies." An interview with the prime minister. Highlights: "We should agree in principle that no country has a right to weaponize migrants. . . . We won’t let people come in as they please." About criminalizing “fake news”: "What we are doing is very measured and very valid."

7. "Five myths about the supply chain/No, self-driving trucks wouldn’t fix all our problems." "Much of today’s mess was caused by relying on extremely fragile — and extremely long — supply lines. Ohno would have shuddered at the thought that his ideas were being applied in this manner." Oh no! Taiichi Ohno originated the concept of just-in-time delivery.

8. "The newest coronavirus variant is raising alarms. The pandemic is not over." "It will take time to determine if the variant is more transmissible than delta, or more virulent, but it is a worrisome development." Won't there always be a new variant so that we will always be told we don't know enough yet and we will need, once again, to err on the side of safety? This feels like a treadmill that we can never step off.

9. "Stephen Sondheim made art that made life more real" by Alexandra Petri. A song "can’t be too clever, and it can’t be too dull. It has to land on your ear as a surprise. If it contains jokes, they have to rhyme. (If it contains rhymes, words that are spelled differently are funnier, Sondheim thought, than words that are spelled the same.)... The song has to take the character singing it somewhere. It has to be essential to the show. 'If you can take the song out,' Sondheim said, 'and it doesn’t leave a hole, then the song’s not necessary.'... Life also exists in time. You cannot stop it and start it and go back and hope to make yourself better understood. You must express yourself in the moments allotted and make yourself heard and choose what to say." 

If I hadn't committed to reading every one of those 9 stories, the ones I would have read would be: 1, 2, and 9. And I would have blogged all 3. 

Having read all the stories, I rank their bloggability, for me, beginning with: 1, 9, 2. Then, there's a big drop off. There's something I'd wanted to say that 8 gave me the chance to say, so I'll put 8 next. I'd put 3 dead last, because I don't really want to blog about the syrup supply, though it would shoot to the top if I had a "syrup" tag (and I might create a "syrup" tag, but it will take a while to add it retrospectively, and it's only interesting if it collects a lot of old things, which it will, more than 10). I put 4 next to last, because it's obvious to me what it will be from the headline and the author, and I don't need more of that. Third from last is 5, which is unnecessary holiday fluff, and I didn't like the insinuation that I was "treating" Hanukkah in any particular way. That leaves 6 in dead center. The Greek Prime Minister. I had to force myself to read that, but he was concise and hard core — quotable.

Oops, I forgot the supply chain. I know it's important, but it's not my thing. I put Greek Prime Minister at what I called "dead center" and in 5th place, so let's put 7 in 6th place. 

Final ranking: 1, 9, 2, 8, 6, 7, 5, 4, 3.

ADDED: I have now made the tag "syrup." Click. It's pretty exciting. 

"In the 1860s, New England was in the grip of a 'pear mania,' an enthusiasm for amateur horticulture which irked Henry David Thoreau, who felt pears were..."

"... a finicky and 'aristocratic' fruit compared to the apples he loved. 'The hired man gathers the apples and barrels them. The proprietor plucks the pears at odd hours for a pastime, and his daughter wraps them each in its paper,' he wrote. 'Judges & ex-judges & honorables are connoisseurs of pears & discourse of them at length between sessions.'… In his 1862 essay 'Wild Apples,' Thoreau describes an apple-picking walk through the Massachusetts countryside in November as a full sensory experience, in which the fruit can only be appreciated as part of the environment that produced it—as a way to taste late autumn. 'These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly,—that is, out-of-doors.' Wild apples, randomly cross-pollinated by bees, have a wide range of flavors, sometimes even when grown from the same tree, and a love for them requires a palate that can tolerate the occasionally sour, gnarled, irregular, intense. This is a kind of novelty that has been eradicated in our quest for endless choice. Thoreau himself predicted that 'The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past… I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!'"

From "Fruits of Empire/The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?" by Willa Glickman (NY Review of Books).

(The illustration, from the NYRB article, is of a Belle Angevine pear from Fleury-sous-Meudon, Île-de-France, France, 1900.)

"These days, we understand Thoreau to have been a nonpracticing gay man, whose retreat to his weatherized cabana at Walden was... an anti-heteronormative broadside."

I'm trying to read "Thoreau in Love/The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife" by James Marcus (The New Yorker). 

I've taken an ongoing interest in Thoreau ever since I encountered him when I was a high school student in the 1960s, and I've noticed and blogged things about him throughout the 17 years of this blog, and I'm even also interested in the subject of historical figures who might have been gay. How did I miss the development of this understanding that Thoreau was "a nonpracticing gay man"? 

If he's nonpracticing, and he didn't talk about it, whence the idea that he was gay? Doesn't that erase asexuality?

Anyway. Let's read:

"I thought Robin hated me. He had a habit of making a ton of jokes on set. At 18, I found that incredibly irritating."

"He wouldn’t stop and I wouldn’t laugh at anything he did.... There was this scene in the film ['Dead Poets Society'] when he makes me spontaneously make up a poem in front of the class. He made this joke at the end of it, saying that he found me intimidating. I thought it was a joke. As I get older, I realize there is something intimidating about young people’s earnestness, their intensity. It is intimidating – to be the person they think you are. Robin was that for me."

Said Ethan Hawke, quoted in "Ethan Hawke on Richard Linklater Transcendentalism Project, Politicization of Pandemic in U.S." (Variety). Robin = Robin Williams. 

I clicked on that because I was interested in Richard Linklater's "transcendentalism project." It seems that Linklater is writing a screenplay about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their friends. As Hawke puts it: "They were the first leaders of the abolition movement; they were vegetarians; they fought for women’s rights. Rick is obsessed with how their ideas are still very radical. This could be a super cool movie and Rick is writing it right now." But Variety adds that Linklater "has been working on a movie about Transcendentalism since 1999, according to an interview in The New Yorker in 2014."

From the New Yorker article:

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... "

"We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”  

Wrote Henry David Thoreau. I'm quoting that now, because of that post earlier today about a telegram and because it seems to relate to our current predicament living on the internet.

In case you're wondering about Princess Adelaide, she does look interesting:

ADDED: A reader questions whether I have the right Princess Adelaide. There's also this Princess Adelaide, a granddaughter of King George III. She was born in 1833, and was portrayed like this in 1846:

Age and photography rendered her less cute:

"The moon in China has a special meaning. And when it's full, that represents the fullness and reunification of the family. So that poem struck the deep core of my heart whenever I miss my family."

Says Yuan Haiwang, author of "This Is China: The First 5,000 Years," quoted in "Li Bai and Du Fu: China's drunken superstar poets" (BBC). He was talking about a poem by Li Bai (701-762 AD).

Moonlight in front of my bed 

I took it for frost on the ground 

I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon 

Lower it, and think of home.

I'm reading that this morning because a reader, K, saw my post about "tangping" and emailed:

Tang was the greatest age of Chinese poetry and the greatest Tang poetry included attacks on the court, and on corruption and in praise of "drunkenness" or withdrawal from the struggle to get ahead at the court. Perhaps for the Chinese "tang-ling" [sic] has some sort of resonance suggesting these great Tang poets. Asking, was the Tang era the greatest Chinese era or is Xi's China the greatest. Subtle, maybe, but the Chinese have been civilized for a long time. I wonder. Perhaps we should love bomb Beijing with millions of copies of On Walden Pond and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to counter the Confucian Institutes here.

I don't know what classic literature you're reading right now. Me, I've been reading G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." That line about the moon — "The moon in China has a special meaning" — caught my eye, because I'd just read this, from Chesterton: