Henry's place

You hear 'Walden Pond' and you think of something like a stock tank, but a pond's a different proposition in Mass, apparently. We all know Walden because that's where Henry D Thoreau had his cabin where he wrote that stuff we all had to read in school. The govt has moved the cabin onto a park grounds, no doubt because discerning students were vandalizing it to get even with the pious misanthrope. The cabin is maybe 90 or 100 square feet. He didn't need more because he could hotfoot it home to eat at the parents' place, which was nearby. Sort of the 19th-Century version of mom's basement, I guess. The original hippie – idle, pious, and ready to instruct everyone in moral behavior. It was still fun to see something as iconic in American literature as Thoreau's cabin.

Little woman

The girl is sitting on the grounds of the Alcott house in Mass. I couldn't resist the image of her with her cell phone and notebook out in the yard of the house where Louisa wrote the deadly girl book Little Women. Yesterday was the birthday of Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa and the rest of the tribe that was immortalized in the novel. Bronson had an academy, pictured also, out back of the house. His proposition was to make wages running the school, but it was really Louisa's book that put the family in the chips. I saw the true and actual chair and desk where she wrote the book. Literate women of my acquaintance say they've found the book unreadable on looking into it later in life. I have not and do not intend ever to read it. The Alcotts were among a group of earnest, annoying, and pious do-gooders that thrived in Salem and Concord.

Decline and fall

So, the Vicad had a page 1A pome-as-news-story Saturday, another Little Me innovation that would've gone unnovated. I do, however, see here possibilities for breakthrough concepts in reporting. We could do the police blotter in terza rima, with each entry constituting a new stanza. Big sports stories are in Homeric form, of course. Think what you could do with the weddings, with bardic recitations of lineages … or maybe we should skip pioneering new forms of journalistic writing and as far as poetry goes remember that the only good poet is a dead poet, meaning nobody alive now needs to be writing poetry.

Hmmmm

A financial blogger called London Banker has some to-the-point remarks on the relative decency of the financial planning of the putative democracies and that of China, what's with the westerners working frantically to protect the interests of the wheeler-dealers while the Chinese focus on the wellbeing of actual small businesses.

Any discussion of China always invites criticism of its anti-democratic governance. … If the democratically elected governments … are free over an extended timespan to ignore the interests of the people, then how is a Western democracy superior to a Chinese bureaucracy? From looking at the policies and practices of the past year, the merits of Western democracy are not immediately apparent in ensuring that policy responses to the financial crisis are aligned with the interests of the people. Even over the past decade, it is not clear that the policies of the democratic Western governments have aimed to strengthen and broaden the economy to benefit of the electorate rather than a narrow, self-serving elite.

Read the whole post here.

Gluttony

We dined about 2 this afternoon – turkey, proper cornbread dressing, some fancied-up greenbeans [but not with cream of mushroom soup], cranberry chutney, giblet gravy, sweet potato pudding and little pecan muffins, a slug of zin – I hope pretty much what everyone had, given personal quirks and family traditions. A thoughtful friend observes that Thanksgiving is a day that everyone in America sits down pretty much to the same meal. I like that thought. Moments of national unity have become far between. We had a married-in relative from the Midwest and sometimes would celebrate the meal with that crew. I'd carry a pan of cornbread dressing along when we went. My wife said that my custom constituted rudeness, but I always considered that I was protecting myself from a wet-bread concoction that they called 'stuffing.' A boy can't be too careful about his stomach …
As the occasion for gratitude, we are upright and breathing regularly, sleep pretty well, no strokes heart attacks so far, have a sound roof over our heads, and live in a pleasant place. My friend The Pilot dropped by this afternoon looking recovered from his treacherous back and happy to be in **Adrift for the day. Hope all had as pleasant a day as we did.

'16 killed; 7 bodies found near school field'

So you read that headline in a paper, you figure it's more Iraq bloodshed, Shias killing Sunnis or something. But noooo, it's a headline in the world's worst newspaper on a story reporting the latest score from the abattoir that is El Paso's sister city.

Seven men were executed next to a school soccer field Tuesday in one of the largest and most brazen acts of violence in Juárez this year. The massacre occurred on a very bloody day, when at least 16 homicides were recorded.

Read the entire brief story here. Sixteen killings at least. But who's counting? Certainly not the Mexican govt. Sooner or later, the moral chaos of Mexico will slide across the river like everything else.

Plumbing the muck

Like a dragging anchor, the pore ol Vicad keeps bouncing along the bottom. Of late, Monday and Tuesday papers could be run off on the mimeograph machine down in the school office, there's that little to them. Last Saturday Little Me, the arts reporter, did a story on some movie no grown human would ever want to see and did it at a level of solipsism stunning even for her. Story ran page 1A. Then Sunday we got yet another chapter in the immigration series, musta been FF-xvi or so, with no real revelations beyond the obvious that immigration's a big problem. Might have spent the money better covering Hallettsville and Cuero in the fashion of a few years ago instead of grinding out fodder to enter for prizes. Someone in the discussions accused a reporter of being unequipped to report and the editor responded that the soul in question had a master's degree from Columbia, probably the premier graduate J school in the country. Here's the cost of schooling there. Can you imagine spending that kind of money to end up working for less than a first-year schoolteacher? Probably the decent thing would be to close down about two-thirds of the journalism schools in the country … there won't be any kind of employment in journalism for most of the graduates.