AdamSmith

But the conundrum that jumping around in time alters it. Cf., among many, Fritz Leiber's Nebula-winner The Big Time. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Time

ROFL "Would that be a hot date, or a stewed prune?"

Would you date several of 'em together?

Greenwald back in fine form. Almost channeling Chomsky et al. (Which in my book is high praise.) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/13/glenn-greenwald-anonymous-mass-surveillance-governments-nasa-no-place-to-hide

E.g.,

One way to put it: finding the pieces of yourself that you find interesting, and offering them up to others around you.

Aiken's opponent in the primary just dropped dead, mooting the recount that was likely in Clay's close-call apparent win. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/05/12/clay-aiken-primary-opponent-dies/

Now you're roping me back in to the '80s. I may never be able to forgive you.

Concurring with all above. Case study: I was in Monster bar in the West Village 3 years ago, sat down beside very cute 25yo-ish Chinese guy (i.e., half my age). Observing his polite forebearance of the big admittedly handsome but overbearing mid-40ish Irish construction worker type sitting on the other side of him, chatting him up hard-sell with life anecdotes all about himself (the big Irish guy), I silently picked up the drawing portfolio the kid had by his side, and began leafing interestedly through his fashion apparel sketches. Whom do you think he went home with? More than once!

Rodney Dangerfield in hot tub with beautiful co-ed, Back to School: "You're an English major? Then maybe you can help me straighten out my Longfellow."

BBB, welcome back! Now tell us all about it?!

And for your further peace of mind... A brief history of toilet-based animal attacks http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/07/16/snake_bites_man_s_penis_from_toilet_bowl_a_brief_history_of_when_rats_snakes.html

After mine own heart. And other organs! As reported before, think I would set up permanent base camps in at least Manhattan, Berlin and Tokyo. Then go to Thailand and likely forget all about anywhere else! Like BigK, education trusts for children of close friends & family was my first charitable thought.

My recollection of Circuit City's latter days is that was how their own staff behaved.

Hear, hear. I can see it in the bathroom or occasionally in the bedroom, but certainly not in the lobby.

With the new thread on public defecation, very good to see this subject float to the top again. Let's keep it moving!

Your invocation of Proust reminds me one reason I love poetry over novels is it maximizes content while minimizing the labor of actually having to read all those words. Although Proust I find can be profitably treated like poetry -- just open at random and read a few pages. I've gotten through a fair bit of A la Recherche quite enjoyably that way. In fact I image Proust as a kind of mental doorstop against the Reaper, harboring some notion that I can't expire until I have read the whole thing straight through.

I must get my hands on this. Had an undergrad history course with the author way back when, he then a freshly minted Harvard PhD, fascinating and brilliant. This looks likewise. The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE William M. Reddy published by the University of Chicago Press, fall, 2012 Awarded the David H. Pinkney Prize for the best book of 2012 in French history, by a U.S. or Canada-based scholar, the Society for French Historical Studies, April 2013. In twelfth-century Europe, for the first time, church authorities attempted a thorough-going reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at extirpating sexual “desire” from Christian lives. “Courtly love,” the medieval form of romantic love, was devised as a response to this campaign. Relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was born as a movement of covert resistance. This love was a profound devotion that could regulate selfish desire and render it innocent; proof of such devotion could be found in heroic acts of self-sacrifice or self-denial. However, such heroic acts included heroic adherence to gender norms and gendered ideals of self-presentation and self-discipline. These facets of the twelfth-century making of romantic love in Europe stand out clearly when one sets European developments in a comparative framework. In twelfth-century Bengal and Orissa, and in eleventh-century Heian Japan, there was no doctrine of desire, no notion of sexual “appetite,” as the Christian theologians called it. As a result, there was no need to elaborate a heroic vision of a love capable of regulating appetite and cleansing it. In some Orissan temples, sexual love, shringara rasa, was regarded as the most sacred facet of the relationship between humans and the gods. In that strain of Buddhism most popular in Heian Japan, all wishes and longings were regarded as frustrating, as the very cause of suffering. Like Amida Buddha, Heian lovers sought to offer each other compassion and a taste of that elegance that shone in the court of the semi-divine emperor. The form of heroic mutual devotion characteristic of Western romantic love was made, at a specific point in time, by individuals seeking a refuge from the blanket condemnations by the Church of a kind of “desire” which, itself, did not admit the possibility of love. If romantic love lives on in a similar form today, it may be in part because various doctrines of desire continue to deny its possibility. University of Chicago Press, fall 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. The emergence of courtly love in Europe 1. Aristocratic speech, the Gregorian Reform, and the first troubadour 2. Trobairitz and troubadours and the shadow religion 3. Narratives of true love and twelfth-century common sense Part II. Points of comparison 4. The bhakti troubadour: Vaishnavism in twelfth-century Bengal and Orissa 5. Elegance and compassion in Heian Japan Conclusion Bibliography http://www.themakingofromanticlove.com/

...???

Lindsay the Cracker, who was called Graham? (To borrow from the hilarious, regrettably long-out-of-print The Begatting of a President.)

This reminded me of why I've always meant to read Oblomov, and simultaneously of why I've never quite gotten around to it.

This is no slur on the thread or topic at all. But I must say most of these things remind me why I endeavored, by whatever means at hand, to be in a walking coma through as much of that decade as possible.