# 30 Sep 2005, 08:14AM: Subverting Through Capitalism:
Last night I ran the merchandise table at a Heather Gold show. Those "One Smart Cookie" shirts are really nice.
I keep forgetting that there are people who actually take astrology seriously. These are the people who tell me I'm a classic Virgo, organized and logical. They have not seen my bedroom or my desk or my inbox. I believe it was Harlan Ellison who suggested initially lying to such people, telling them you are a different sign than you actually are, letting them prattle on about how you are a great representative of the species, and then telling them that you'd lied and you're actually a [real sign]. I think it would take a lot to make me be a jerk like that, but I could see myself doing it.
Astrology is bunk and I've known it for as long as I can remember. Give me some double-blind Myers-Briggs science stuff and we'll talk.
# 30 Sep 2005, 11:16AM GMT+5:30: Uplifting, Inspiring, Secular Art:
I'm listening to Dar Williams, "What Do You Hear In These Sounds," and I see Jon Carroll:
It's the making, I think. The making is the important part. If you are lucky enough to be able to make something and earn a living, you should keep making it, because the ability to make something is a gift.
It's the only time we get to feel like gods: when we make something. Of course, not everything we make is good, but God himself has the duck-billed platypus to answer for....And then we do something else. As Samuel Beckett said, we "fail better."
# 30 Sep 2005, 02:29PM: Word Power:
As Jon Carroll has noted, book reviews can spoil you in another way:
The review is so wonderful I am almost afraid to read the book; more than once, particularly with the New York Review of Books, I have preferred the gloss to the text.
I won't go that far about today's main story in Salon, but it taught me the words "orthopraxy" and "frangible," and third page just keeps hitting nails on the head, one after another:
...they will retreat behind the carapace of "faith," which is really their projection of how things should be -- their prejudice. And since there is prejudice enough on both sides, we have arrived at an age of really horrifying division: people shouting across a gorge and hearing only the echoes of their own voices....
And the ending makes me think marriage will be wonderful.
