Thor's Day: The sense of life...

Hugues de Montalembert

...is life

By Morris Dean

Struck as I have been by Hugues de Montalembert, whose book Invisible: A Memoir I reviewed Sunday (and from which I shared a quotation in last week's "Thor's Day" column), I have continued to meditate on his writings and try to learn more about him.

Ask Wednesday: Ask Susan

About men and women and math

By Susan C. Price

[Questions are followed by answers and then, inevitably by ADVICE...you DID expect that...didn’t you?]

Why are men better at math than women? –Penny

They are not. Who told you that? (I was always good at math and on the math team in high school, and most recently, worked as a bookkeeper.)
    Most young girls are better at reading than boys, and maybe the boys focus on the numbers to even the playing field? Ok, I acknowledge that some women do not feel comfortable with math, and I really don’t know why. Found some intriguing and confusing answers regarding this topic on the Internet (biological basis and truth about gender).

Tuesday Voice

I’m in love

By James T. Carney

I’m in love with my one-year-old granddaughter. She is known as Squiggles—aka Francesca, an Italian name that I disregard along with all other names from nationality groups beginning with “I.”
    Now, I want to set the record straight. I hate children. The best that can be said for them is that they are adults in training, although I would prefer that they be sent away to boot camp for some twenty years to get trained before I have to deal with them.

Fourth Monday Susan Speaks

This artist's approach

By Susan C. Price

Speaking of this artist's approach to a painting (as our dear editor suggested i do), well, uh, model sits, poses for 5 or 7 or 10 minutes, i assess my interest in the possibilities of the pose and my "in my hand" media....
    this usually happens in a painting workshop to which i go each thursday evening, where they have a model...
    I used to get friends to model for me...but they usually expected conversation at the same time...and i found i cant do that. They also tended to expect the result to be their view of their best selves....and that's not what i am trying to do. Art is personal.

Sunday Review: Invisible: A Memoir (book)

Living on one's own terms

By Morris Dean

The French painter and photographer Hugues de Montalembert's second book, Invisible: A Memoir (2010), could serve as a meditation reader. It quiets you with numerous arresting insights purchased with great pain and effort by the author over the thirty years that had followed the loss of his eyesight (and his very eyes) in an attack by burglars in his New York City apartment in 1978.

Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal

Reflections on the sources of fear

By James Knudsen

As a native son of California I’m quick to extol the state’s many virtues. Our topography: we are home to the highest and lowest points in the lower-48. Our 840 miles of coastline is second only to Florida, but that coastline has the disadvantage of being in Florida. And then of course there’s our myriad of habitats—scorching deserts, rainforests, beaches, rolling hills, glacier carved valleys, snow-capped peaks towering over alpine meadows...alpine meadows. I’ve been to a few of those.

Fish for Friday

Madison Kimrey of Burlington
has attended three
Moral Monday protests

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Plucky young woman: "McCrory spurns young activist's request."

Thor's Day: A blind man on seeing

Hugues de Montalembert

Seeing beyond

By Morris Dean

Sometimes, or maybe most of the time, I hardly see anything at all.

Ask Wednesday: Ask Susan

About women's attitudes toward how they look

By Susan C. Price

[Questions are followed by answers and then, inevitably by ADVICE...you DID expect that...didn’t you? Today we have two questions, from Kathleen and Deborah.]

Do women ever get to an age where they don’t worry about their looks or weight? I know women in their 80’s who are still concerned, and it is discouraging as I would love to get to the place where vanity is not such a “big thing” in my life. –Kathleen

Excellent place to aspire to. This pre-occupation is boring and silly. (Uh, so we thought we’d always look as we did in our...20s??? Really? Lack of simple, observable logic, helllooo.)
    Why would this topic still demand our attention? Well, we spent most of our formative years convinced, via this society and its commercialism, that our looks were a critical part of our identity and “success.” Your looks defined who you were by high school, and there are data to suggest that your looks defined which jobs you got, and certainly, who wanted to date/mate with you. (And women’s looks have always been more crucial, and narrowly defined, than men’s.)

Tuesday Voice

In memoriam

"Anita's Boat Painting," by Shirley Deane/Midyett (2009)

By Vic Midyett

My wife, Shirley, painted this picture from a photograph she took of that boat leaning against the Paper Bark tree during her daily walk along the Collie River. The river runs along behind my sister Anita's house in a community called Australind in Western Australia. The boat drew her to start the painting.

Third Monday Random

Cleverness of the coyote

By motomynd

In Native American legend, and in real life, the coyote is known as a creature of crafty intelligence and humor. I’ve been around them enough in various parts of the country to give them great credit for above average intelligence and awareness, but I’ve dismissed much of their vaunted standing as hype.
    Now I’m not so sure. Case in point: I have no photos to contribute with this post, and I should.

Sunday Review: The Informant! and Behind the Candelabra

Matt Damon in two by Steven Soderbergh

By Morris Dean

In the last ten days, we've watched four films directed by Steven Soderbergh: the 2011 medical thriller disaster film, Contagion; the 2013 psychological thriller Side Effects, with Jude Law, Rooney Mara, and Catherine Zeta-Jones; Behind the Candelabra (2013); and The Informant! (2009).
    Matt Damon stars in three of these (all but Side Effects) and has appeared prominently in at least three other Soderbergh films—his Ocean's Trilogy of caper comedies: Ocean's Thirteen (2007), and Ocean's Twelve (2004), and Ocean's Eleven (2001), which was a remake of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack's 1960 Ocean's Eleven. We remember the caper comedies as diversions and barely remember that Matt Damon was in them at all—of course, he had lots of competition for the camera—George Clooney, Andy García, Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, and Carl Reiner were in all of them, Julia Roberts in two, and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Ellen Barken in one each.

Third Saturday Fiction

Prologue from the novel This Sweet Intercourse

By Michael Hanson

I’ve never been here before. The building is steeped in cold, dimly-lighted and with few windows, all tinted. Corridors starfish in every direction like a labyrinth inward, seeking a center that isn’t there: the biggest building in the world. Given instructions I take the next right and find myself in a culdesac where three rooms cluster next to two nurses’ stations, one on either side of the hallway. I nod hello to the woman in white seated there skimming a magazine, then walk into the stuffy airless room where my father lies sleeping. Dying.

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

When it comes to science, Muslims had a good run in the Middle Ages, but haven't accomplished much since—but it apparently isn't a great idea to point out the obvious: "Backlash after Dawkins's Muslim jibe." Excerpt: "He responded to the barrage of ensuing criticism by telling his followers: 'A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.' In a further posting he wrote: 'Where would we be without alchemy? Dark Age achievements undoubted. But since then?'"

Thor's Day

“Did Zeus Exist?”

By Chuck Smythe

I stumbled on to the above headline in the New York Times Opinionator. Thinking it a natural for “Thor’s Day,” I sent it on to Morris. He asked me to write about it, so after some foot-dragging, here goes.
    The article is by Gary Gutting, Notre Dame Philosopher. He argues that we have no evidence that the Classical Greeks did not have supernatural experiences denied to most of us. Maybe we’ve forgotten how. Maybe different Gods were active then, in different ways. Maybe almost anything. In any case, a high civilization believed in Zeus with no apparent dissent for centuries. Gutting argues, therefore, that atheism regarding Zeus cannot be defended, and only agnosticism is justified.