Yellow bees love yellow flowers.

The lazy man's treehouse.

Michelle Obama, back in Madison, tomorrow morning.

Does the campaign consider our little lefty city women's work? Why don't we get Biden? (He's off tending to folks the press calls "lunch-bucket Democrats.") Why don't we get Barack Obama? (He's too valuable to use getting too few more votes in a city that is certain to vote overwhelmingly for him.)

Michelle was here last February, the day before the primary. I attended. That was the speech where she said "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country," something that didn't even stand out to me in what I thought was an excellent speech. I'm used to hearing what I'm used to hearing in our little lefty city.

"Sasha undid the object and put it solemnly on the table."

"It was a not very tall candelabra of old bronze and artistic workmanship. It consisted of a group: on the pedestal stood two female figures in the costume of Eve and in attitudes for the description of which I have neither the courage nor the fitting temperament. The figures were smiling coquettishly and altogether looked as though, had it not been for the necessity of supporting the candlestick, they would have skipped off the pedestal and have indulged in an orgy such as is improper for the reader even to imagine."

I took a little walk today and listened to the short story "A Work of Art" -- which you can read here -- on Miette's bedtime story podcast. I was thoroughly amused by the old Chekhov story and replayed the last minute of it as I was passing by the empty gardens of University Heights.

I discovered Miette's podcast after rhhardin very aptly recommended Theodore Roethke's essay "Last Class" in a comment to the post on that NYT Magazine piece about whether it's good for a serious writer to be a creative writing professor. Rh linked to the first page of the essay (story?), and I thought it was phenomenal:

I'm tired of the I-love-me bitches always trying to keep somebody off balance; Park Avenue cuties who, denied dogs, keep wolfcubs named Errol Flynn, or bats and toads with names like Hoagy; all the cutesy, tricksy trivia and paraphernalia with which the stupid and sterile rich try to convince themselves they aren't really dead.

That's a teacher telling his students what he thinks of them!

Looking for the rest of the pages, I hit upon Miette's podcast of it. Sampling it and finding Miette's voice quite charming, I decided to take it out for a walk... over to Barrique's Wine Cave, where I didn't drink wine but had a latte and did the NY crossword in the back of the NYT Magazine.

Why men shave their heads.

Christina Reihill writes:

While the idea of the modern man as a hairless metrosexual more interested in manicures than motors challenges my notions of a heterosexual man, I'm more interested in the state of play between the sexes in our hyper-sexualised, pornified culture.

As young girls are told that it's empowering to pursue men aggressively and young men are learning to lie back and take it, I wonder how these acts of aggressive connection affects the psyche....

On Freud's map, this redefining of male sexuality could be seen as men searching for the mother in them and/or acting out their sexual envy towards woman.

Just as women express penis envy, is this men saying we're not lying back and taking it?

What are we watching and possibly not seeing in the bald head, bullet-proof imagery in today's "anything goes" culture? What is the symbolism in men shaving their heads?

Staying with Freud and his symbolic grammar -- the head represents the penis, while head hair is recognised as semen.

Extending the logic of these associations, long hair expresses unrestrained sexuality, while hair removal makes a statement around sexual restraint, as in celibacy or castration.

What is restrained about exposing the penis? You had to do that hair=semen move to make this theory work.

Al Franken helped write last night's opening "SNL" skit, bashing McCain.

Quite good!

IN THE COMMENTS: Fen said:

"Hi. I'm NBC and I approved this ad."

"The 100 Greatest, Gayest Albums (of all time)."

From Out.com. I have no idea how gay these choices are, but they do seem pretty great.

To create our list of the 100 Greatest, Gayest Albums of All Time, we polled more than 100 actors, comedians, musicians, writers, critics, performance artists, label reps, and DJs, asking each to list the 10 albums that left the most indelible impressions on their lives. After receiving responses from Boy George, Rufus Wainwright, Cyndi Lauper, the Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray, Candis Cayne, Perez Hilton, Nate Berkus, Jake Shears, John Cameron Mitchell, Wilson Cruz, Justin Bond, Darren Hayes, Junior Vasquez, Bruce Vilanch, Janis Ian, the Cliks, Ari Gold, Holly Johnson, and a slew of others, we tallied the results to determine our top-100 list.

So this was about indelible impressions on real people, not any abstract conception of what kind of music is somehow gay. It produced a nice list... and a real tribute to David Bowie.

Which of these albums do I have? 7, 8, 12, 17, 26, 38, 39, 43, 49, 50, 54, 57, 60, 62, 64, 68, 100.

Democrazy.

A typo I just made while trying to IM the line "this shows we don't really have a democracy." The topic was how impossible it is for almost anyone to understand the current financial crisis, how disembodied it is from the presidential candidates we've been so focused on, and how we are forced by the complexity of the system to rely on experts whose reliability we cannot judge.

Blacks vs. gays.

According to the NYT, opponents of the gay marriage ban in California are worried that black people, enthused about Barack Obama, will show up at the polls in unusually high numbers and vote the way people think black people think about homosexuality.

Well, Obama has a lock on California, so, ironically, it will be liberals who perceive an interest in suppressing the black vote.

ADDED: I am expressing no view about the generalization that black people are homophobic. I am only noting the way people of all political stripes will use black people when they find them useful. But I should note that Barack Obama has opined on the reputed homophobia of black people:

America's "literary flowering" was "a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing."

So how can a real, American literary artist take a job as a creative writing professor? Asks David Gessner.

[I]t’s hard to imagine [Thoreau] taking a break from one of his marathon strolls to waste three hours teaching a graduate workshop. Equally difficult is picturing Melville asking a group of undergrads, “What’s at stake in this story?” or Dickinson clapping a colleague on the back after a faculty meeting.

Yes, but did Henry and Herman and Emily have health care insurance and a retirement plan?

Gessner struggles with his cushy life and its obligations:

[C]reation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.

But surely there are some jobs that provide substance and raw material for the writer. (Whaling, for example.) The problem with writers having jobs other than writing occurs when those jobs consume their time and attention, turn them into boring, conventional people, and give back nothing worth writing about.

But Gessner worries that the ideal of just writing is too irrational:

[Y]ou are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you’re going next. Creating your own world is an invitation to solipsism, if not narcissism, and as well as being alone when we work, we are left, for the most part, to judge by ourselves if we have succeeded or failed in our tasks. (Three guesses in which direction we most often lean.) My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. “You’re not living in the real world,” he said. I reacted with a young man’s defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don’t forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching.

Ah, yes, academia is lovely. I love teaching. All teachers must say that. But there are other, richer jobs for the writer. And I'm not convinced that a literary writer does well to spend so much time reading and correcting the writing of other people who are not very good. If you're going to teach and write, wouldn't it be better to teach some substantial subject that will have you thinking about something about that real world your father wanted you to live in? History, science, law....

Gessner ends his reverie thusly:

[A] part of me worries that my work has become too professional, too small, and worries that I don’t spend as much time as I should reading or brooding or even fretting. Yes, my lifestyle is more healthful, but is health always the most important thing? The part that answers no to that question is now lying in wait, looking for ways to undermine my so-far-successful teaching career. In fact you could argue that that part of me had a hand in writing this essay, which I am finishing now, a few weeks before going up for tenure. After all, what would that part, my inner monomaniac, like more than to tear off his collar and sabotage the job that keeps him from running wild?

Oh, is that what this essay is all about? Conquering the fear of being denied tenure? What do you think, would tenure denial be a blessing for Mr. Gessner? Do you want him back in his room, brooding and fretting year 'round?

Obama "does not believe it is necessary or fair to hardworking seniors to raise the retirement age."

A sentence that was just deleted from Barack Obama's website page about Social Security. Noted by Peter Bray, who asks: "Is he trying to stoke anxiety about his position on Social Security?"

My thoughts:

1. Raising the retirement age makes a lot of sense and should at least be considered. People are healthier these days and live a lot longer, and the age ought to be adjusted to account for that. It's at least arguable and belongs on the table.

2. To say that you don't currently "believe it is necessary or fair" to do something doesn't mean you aren't planning to consider it. I know what the meaning of is is. What you believe is necessary now many not be what you believe later after further study, and what is necessary now may not be what is necessary after the situation develops a while longer.

3. Must politicians always butter us up by telling us we're "hardworking"? I suspect that many voters hear that and think about how they actually don't work that hard. I don't like the insinuation that people who aren't nose-to-the-grindstone are written out of all the policy. Slackers vote too you know!

4. What's with the "seniors" talk? Right now, you can start collecting Social Security when you are 62! So it's people under 62 that have to worry about raising the retirement age. Do these people call themselves "seniors"? I'm 5 years away from age 62 myself, and while I often -- being the straight-talker that I am -- call myself "old," it would never occur to me to say I'm a "senior." Euphemisms have a way of becoming more offensive the the original plain English.

Would you have labor induced to deliver a 20-week-old fetus that had already died?

David Hlavsa's wife, given the choice between childbirth and a D&C, chose to go through labor -- painful, induced labor in a maternity ward-- so that she could see and hold the dead child. She keeps the baby's ashes -- a teaspoonful -- in the drawer at her bedside.

We each assumed there was only one possible decision, so when we talked, we talked logistics: appointments to reschedule, job responsibilities to manage. We asked questions we might have asked the midwife, about recovery time.

Then we realized we weren’t in agreement. I was talking about the D and C, while Lisa had decided to give birth. Incredulous, I asked why she would want to go through all that pain. She said she couldn’t imagine just getting rid of our child by a surgical procedure; she wanted to see him....

Resting on my outstretched hand, he was thin, nearly weightless, his skin pinkish-gray and translucent. He seemed to me less like a small baby than a scale model of a stripling child. I cradled his head between the ends of my middle and ring fingers, his features peaceful, perfect, blank.

When we got back from the hospital, the epidural had not quite worn off, so Lisa did not have full use of her legs and clung to me as we staggered up the front steps. Thinking of ourselves as a public spectacle (How must we look to the neighbors? Drunk again!), we burst out laughing. Once inside, the bleak humor continued: Anacephalic? All right, so he won’t go to Harvard.

It wasn’t until I had settled Lisa onto the couch that my own legs quit working. I was in midsentence — something about an errand — teakettle in hand, halfway between the tap and the stove. A spasm went through me, I doubled over and I heard my own voice howling from far off, the full-throated cry of a child.

This story is published in the "Modern Love" section of the NYT. I know it will make some people talk about abortion and the right to life, and I know what both sides will say about the story to appropriate it. It's inevitable, but maybe it's wrong.

Let's think about the man America rejected because he was Mormon or seemed plastic or whatever.

We Americans will get the leader we deserve, one or the other of two men who have absolutely no background in economics. We'll have to rely on whatever judgment they manage to apply to the advice their faceless advisers hand them.

We enjoyed the tasty new blood that was Sarah Palin's, but now her blood is just as vile as the old blood we were drinking.

Everybody at Arianna Huffington's blood-swilling party is sick of Sarah Palin now, says the hostess, reapplying her lipstick.


Photo by 96dpi.

"When things are serious enough, people want their leaders to be serious."

Obama and McCain try to get serious. Or at least look serious.

That quote is from an unnamed Obama adviser. I love the implication that things could actually be rather serious, and we the people would still want our leaders putting on the usual comedy show.

Sunday Morning Café.

I'll be joining you soon, but please start the early morning talk without me.