Not Posting but Drowning

[With apologies to stevie smith, and acknowledging that my own situation is not remotely so dire as that in her poem.]

Whoo-ee!  What's it been?  Nearly three weeks without a post?  It is most certainly a pity that it's the lawyerin' and not the webloggin' that needs must be counted on to pay the bills 'round here, now isn't it?  Mind you, just because I don't write doesn't mean I haven't been reading, so allow me please to point you to a random selection of items that have caught my eye these past weeks.  More of my own to follow, I hope.

• Morgan Meis, of 3quarksdaily, recently rewatched The Philadelphia Story.  Naturally, it inspired him to think about . . . Abelard and Heloise.   In the process, it also inspired him to this comment on my own favorite -- which should by rights be every attorney's favorite, and possibly even every happily married person's favorite -- Tracy and Hepburn picture:
  

[Katharine Hepburn] fell in love with Spencer Tracy and he fell in love with her but because of his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church he would never get a divorce from his wife.  So he and Hepburn lived in some form of sin together until his death.  It is hard not to feel that her position was the nobler and braver of the two, though she never seems to have chided him much for it.  They made a number of classic films together and one in particular, Adam’s Rib, that is a secretly utopian film.  It imagines a situation in which a man and a woman could love one another and make each other better for it, instead of tearing one another apart, slowly or quickly as the case may be.  One of the best details of the movie is the fact that they both have the same pet name for each other, Pinky.  One can only imagine the process of emotional exhaustion by which they finally reached the sublime stasis of Pinky and Pinky.  That, in itself, is one of those small triumphs of love.

• Alan Sullivan has relocated his weblog and tricked it out with your choice of three interchangeable and attractive designs.   I have updated the links list to the left accordingly.  Thus far, I seem to be the only person subscribed to Alan's RSS feed through Bloglines.   At least one other of Alan's regular "rare readers" -- Mike Snider -- has made note of the move.  Mike himself has also relocated and that change, too, is now reflected in my links.

Here, Alan has reproduced at length some insightful helpful remarks he made in 2004 on the subject of Beowulf, following his co-translation of the poem with Tim Murphy.  Peter Jackson is mentioned, in passing, favorably.  In a shorter and more recent post, he offers a credible approach to the problem of a screen adaptation of the tale of the 'wulf.   (I last went on a bit about Beowulf and adaptation into other media this past September, here.)

BONUS: The otherworldly photo linked by Alan in this post is also well worth your while.  Darkness visible, indeed.

• escapegrace just turned "1" two weeks ago.   Best wishes on that.   If I recall right - and I may have my facts altogether wrong in my dotage - Chris inexplicably linked this weblog among other Los Angeles-centric sites on her sidebar shortly before venturing West from New York last April.   Although I started linking to her in my posts back then, I was criminally remiss in not adding her to the sidebar until November.   Mea culpa, et bonne bloggiversaire.

• While I have been languishing in awkward silence, David Giacalone has been posting at a furious pace.  (He seems pretty darned voluble for a self-proclaimed "one-breath pundit.")  I'd recommend starting at the top and just scrolling on down to read the whole thing, but those who want only highlights might start with David's appreciation of the late and remarkable Al Lewis, or perhaps his cross-pollination of lawn bowls, law and Star Wars as he wonders whether we should all speak bocce.  I'll remaining mum on his ongoing linguistic crusades against the neolawgism "blawg" and the creeping scourge of "e"'s not merely silent but invisible.

• Oh, look!  Red china! 

(More of the same here.   All in some roundabout way triggered by this item -- "Hockney is boring, watercolours are boring and East Yorkshire is boring.  Watercolours by Hockney of East Yorkshire are boring cubed. . . ." --  which seems actually to have been about something else altogether.)

• Have I ever mentioned my theory that cellular phones make already foolish people more foolish?   stereogum provides anecdotal evidence in support.

Comments

[david giacalone]

Hi, George, I've really missed your online presence and hope you'll be dog-paddling to shore soon. Thanks for all the good pointers today (despite your punting on "blawg"). Meanwhile, please notice that my tagline has been amended (long ago) from "one-breath" to "breathless pundit."

[George Wallace]

So it's anaerobic punditry now, is it? Shouldn't posts with no breath be even shorter than posts with one?

What is the sound of one breath punditating, anyway?

[david giacalone]

I'm not sure of the sound (I mostly get breathless from hyper-punditating), but a few minutes ago, I finished reading the children's book The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts by Shinto Cho. For $1, I could not pass it by at our County Library's used book store.