Fitting in

"They wanted to live in a place 'where you could walk down the street with tattoos and your guitar and fit in.'
That place was New York."

--New York Times, in a story about two young people who left far northern Maine for a new start, 12/21/2016

Response to Berlin Christmas market attack has echo in 1928

"Berlin is a place that has dealt well with so many of the problems we face across Western Europe, with immigration, with regards to Russia, in rebuilding ourselves after the collapse of the totalitarian state as a tolerant and open city.

"That's what the crash at the Christmas market targeted."

"Right-wing German populists from the surging Alternative for Germany party took to social media on Monday to blame the country's chancellor, Angela Merkel, for welcoming migrants, calling the victims 'Angela's dead.'

"It was a response that brought to mind as essay written years ago, criticizing the area around the Gedachtniskirche for being too cosmopolitan--a meeting place for 'harlots' and 'so-called men' and for people speaking all the languages of the world.'

"The essayist expressed contempt for what he called 'the spirit of the asphalt democracy' and predicted a 'day of judgment.'

That was 1928. The writer was Joseph Goebbels.

--New York Times, 12/21/2016, quoting long-time Berlin resident Elisabeth Ruge

Of, by, and for television

"About a week ago, I was watching the nightly news," Trump said. "I won'r say which one because I don't want to give them credit." A Carrier worker had challenged Mr. Trump to keep his promise to stop the manufacturer from leaving the state.

"This was news to Mr. Trump, who didn't believe he had made the promise until the newscast showed video of him doing it. There it was, on TV.

"It was a striking admission. And it captured, in miniature, what it means to have a president-elect who is so thoroughly of, by and for television."

NY Times 12/12/2016

Jobs in Google's view

"Eventually every job is going to be a tech job."--Brenda Standridge, manager, Google's facility in Pryor, OK.

Pryor's industrial tax base increased to $430 million when Google came to town. The state of OK actually paid 23.9 million of Google's local property tax for 2016, and Google paid just $1.2 million, due to a business-friendly 1985 law. At the same time, state spending for education fell, and another city, Wagoner, had its education funding reduced from $18 million to $14 million, due in part to dropping oil prices/revenue. Google continues to get this kind of deal from the state for 5 years, then will pay its share of taxes reduced by depreciation on its equipment. Employment at Google in Pryor? 115 Google employees, 230 contractors for things like security and groundskeeping, and 150 part-time workers.

NYTimes, 12/12/2016

William Trevor obituary

"I shall always imagine him, diffident in tweeds, arriving in a tranquil, well-ordered and beautiful place full of nice-looking people, and thinking, 'This looks lovely--I bet it isn't.'"

New York Times obituary, November 22, 2016, quoting Trevor biographer Robert Cooper

"With total conviction he has written about the rural Irish on their farms, about provincial towns, about commercial Dublin, about middle-class Protestants and the remnants of the aristocracy. He offers a complete picture of life on that island."--Gregory W. Schirmer, author of William Trevor: a study of his fiction (1990)

Mentions a celebrated short story from late in his career, "The News from Ireland," set in the 1840s famine.

Donald Hall on old age

I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.

"When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial....People's response to our separateness can be callous, can be good-natured, and is always condescending."

The New Yorker, January 23, 2012

Marilynne Robinson on democracy

"I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people."--New York Review of Books interview of Robinson by Barack Obama 2015

Identity

"I don't want to be treated as Sands the Brit, Sands the European, Sands the liberal, Sands the Jew. I want to be treated as Sands. And we all want that. But actually it's never going to happen. It's impossible to get away from that tribal group connection."

Philippe Sands, NYTimes fall 2016

Selling farming supplies in New York, Texas

The couple's business cards include their home phone number, "for urgent fertiizer situations." The store is the Reynolds New York Store.

Prep for a hurricane

"A Miami native scoured the shelves at Publix with her teenage son and her son's friend. The teenagers had won the day: there were bottles of Gatorade, a jar of Nutella, cases of Pepsi and Mountain Dew and chocolate Krave cereal."

NYTimes, 10/6/2016

Q: How do you battle Parkinson's?
A: "I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don't think I'm scrappy. I'm accepting. I say "living with" or "working through" Parkinson's. Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it. I look at it like I'm a fluid that's finding the fissures and cracks and flowing through."

--Michael J. Fox interview in Parade, April 1, 2012

Umberto Eco

"His novels demanded readers absorb heavy doses of semiotic ruminations."
In Eco's obit in the NY Times. February 2016

Muriel Barbery

Fiction suited her better than philosophy, a field where "you have to enjoy fighting and you have to enjoy being right."
NYTimes, February 20, 2016 or so