Last night, before we slept, I suggested to Rosemarie that we might give up our Saturday morning Boston Globe in favor of the poetry she'd been revelling in recently.

So Rosemarie and I got out early this morning. We were out of the house by 7:30, headed for the West… Read full post »

From Cintra Wilson's essay in today's Salon: "In the lack of a dialogue about political economy and its effects on individual psyches, capitalist nations instead indulge the delusion that these things are unrelated. We are tacitly encouraged, as a society, not to see corruption as the product… Read full post »

Cintra Wilson probably never did a PhD in Philosophy.  But somebody should give her an honorary one for her column in today's Salon.  It's succinct, accurate, straightforward, and it connects a lot of dots between individual and collective human behavior.

What Ms. Wilson does in the es… Read full post »

Yesterday and today I've been spending a good deal of time watching Al Jazeera's coverage of the popular demonstrations in Egypt, particularly in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

I've never been to Egypt.  I don't know anybody from there.

I'm tremendously moved by the conduct of the people there.  Th… Read full post »

A couple of weeks ago Gary Fandango wrote up some reflections on passive-aggressive personalities.  I guess we've all run into such people.  (If you haven't yet, be patient: you will, maybe soon.)  Gary's misfortune was to find that his mother was one.  It's not funny.

Rosema… Read full post »

I spent the afternoon drafting a post.  Seriously, about three hours, including little bits of research to get the details right.

Just before I was ready to post, I did one last Google search for something on Bach's number symbolism.

I forgot to do that in a new tab.  I forgot… Read full post »

Pop Culture guys, and their opposites.

Got a kick out of Kevin's post, but yeah, I was one of the opposites.

I mostly didn't notice the popular songs around me when I was growing up.  And that was so long ago that the additional media currents we notice and comment on… Read full post »

Some readers have wondered where the dialog sequence I've called Praying for Atheists is heading, or what I'm trying to accomplish with it.

I've had doubts about stepping out from behind the prompt box to say anything about that.  The doubts are probably right. But I'm doing it anyway,… Read full post »

Tom, Chris, and I were having a goround about religion and atheism.  Tom had just popped a bit of logic that left us slack-jawed: based on what I had just said, he argued, either I (the professed Christian) wasn't Christian or Chris (the atheist of the day) wasn't atheist.

There… Read full post »

Tom and I, sitting at Cappy's Bar and Grill one day, had seen my prayers for an atheist-worth-arguing-with answered when Chris overheard and then joined us.  The three of us were now deep in conversation at the front table.

“OK” said Tom. “Let's take this once more from the… Read full post »

I haven't been to Cappy's for a while. On a rainy day last week, I parked across the street and – sort of – wandered in. The bar was crowded, I walked all the way to the back and then all the way back to the front.

A guy was… Read full post »

Last night R and I saw Lord of the Rings, for the fourth time.  This morning, as we savored our cornflakes, the phone rang.  I got it, and took it in the other room so R could continue listening to the morning news.

“Mr. M--”, said an unpleasantly jolly… Read full post »

For a couple of years after leaving graduate school I wrote very short, dense poems.  The shortest was only four words:

 eye           balls

… Read full post »

One afternoon at Doyle's, I met Burr.  We got to talking about Keanu Reeves in Constantine.  Well not so much Keanu Reeves, as about the hell-for-suicides idea that drives so much of the plot in that movie.  At Burr's suggestion, we stuck to whether such an idea could be true or… Read full post »

Folks, this is someone to watch.  I've done some poetry myself, and I do catch Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac sometimes on the morning drive to pick up Rosemarie's coffeendonut.  I haven't encountered anyone this good and provocative in quite some time.

If you have any interest in the… Read full post »

No sentence, in any human language, can be constructed in such a way as to contain the rules for its own interpretation.

No sentence can stand outside of the occasion of its utterance.

A sentence outside of, or stripped of, its context, is without intention.  You are walking along… Read full post »

Well well well.

Face-recognition.  Biometrics.  Iris-scans.

Here's a pretty good summary of at least some of what's been going, in this regard, with the U.S. and U.K. governments.  At any rate, it got me exercised enough to begin drafting this post.

I suppose you know that some people… Read full post »

The comment thread in response to Susan Cheever's piece on Diane Schuler exemplifies a pair of themes that is ubiquitous in our public discourse: empathy <> moral judgment.

These two kinds of imaginative exercise do not live well together.  I engage in each of them regularly.  But nev… Read full post »

This morning Rosemarie and I, at Panera's in Dedham, talked once again about being Dutch (me) and being Italian (her).  We have a good-sized fund of in-jokes about that, a collection of shared witticisms that we have been contributing to for more than forty years now.

It began (this morning's co… Read full post »

So I've been learning Drupal, a content management system people use to build websites.  And all of a sudden it's three weeks since I looked at the blog.

The fact is, my own site at michmer.net is looking its age.  I got my first internet account in 1993, and began to… Read full post »

OK, fasting's over.

Well, actually, really and truly, it was over a day after it started.  So I renamed the period as a "vacation", and didn't post anything, but I was back to browsing all the news just like I did before.

I simply have no discipline at all.

When one's… Read full post »

Finally, a day that reminds everybody around here of what the sun used to look like -- and still does, up there in a now cloudless sky.

A day when Rosemarie and I can look at each other, candidly, and confess that getting out into fresh air is more important than… Read full post »

I keep telling myself, never sit at the bar with a book. But yesterday afternoon I was sitting at Doyle's with a book. I'd been immersed in Augustine's City of God for a couple of months.

So this huge biker type comes in – there were maybe a dozen… Read full post »

From Greenwald's post on the NPR torture-language tactics:

"next semester at Georgetown:  Karl Rove teaches Civility in a Post-Partisan Age, Bill Kristol lectures on Accountability in Punditry, while David Gregory examines The Role of Intellect in Adversarial Questioning)."

I said to… Read full post »