Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Given the uncertainties, one can say nothing more definite than that "something will happen"; where, when is unknown. The most important question to answer is what set of people we want in charge on the day. Or stated in the negative, who don't we want in charge?
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) May 24, 2024
The matter of a certain literary style and practice came up a couple of months ago and I was reminded again of the discussion in a weird way, when my daughter and I watched the Night at the Museum movie series. This was in the interests of not freaking out Wee Jamie terribly, who is soaking up information and stimuli like a small, child-shaped sponge. I vaguely recall watching the first of the series, but my daughter did not, so I must have seen it in a theater, possibly when the Gentleman With Whom I (Once) Kept Company was on one of his yearly visits to Texas. Cute movie, and one which loaded in a lot of established actors in supporting roles (Ricky Gervais? Seriously?) …but anyway. (It is kind of cool, though imagining an animated dinosaur skeleton playing ‘fetch’ the bone, and behaving like a playful puppy…)
Honestly, I’ve always been considerably conflicted about Gone With the Wind both the book and the movie. Yes, best-seller, and loved extravagantly by more readers and movie-goers than partisans of the antebellum South, a gripping tale of a time, a place and a people, in a war that stripped away every shred of that noble and deluded gentility and Southern cavalier-worshipping delusion… shades of Vanity Fair, with a spineless, guileless and gentle supposed-heroine whom we are supposed to sympathize with in the main, contrasted with a conniving, spiteful and yet … entrancing stubborn, gutsy and conniving anti-heroine. I was reminded of all this once again, on reading this recent essay by another woman and writer, similarly conflicted.
The pride of the US Army Camel Corps (21st Century Reenactor Division) At the New Braunfels Folkfest, this last weekend, on the grounds of the Heritage Village.