Personal Narrative

A bunch of random comments….

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1. I have just spent the past hour leaving various comments on favorite blogs. I have a self-imposed moratorium on ChicagoBoyz commenting because I tend to get sucked into the “time loss” vortex around here.

2. With regard to my internet commenting, it appears that I am an internet know-it-all. Note to self: humility is a fine quality. And stay away from Twitter.

3. Whit Stillman has a new movie out*, Damsels in Distress. Joy and happiness.

4. Say, how do you minimize open windows on a Mac so that I can go back and forth between windows quickly and do the command-C and command-V thing? What’s that? But I don’t wanna go to the Apple Store (Macphobia/Mac-for-Dummies didn’t work for me). The Apple Store is so crowded and I don’t fit in with the “must have latest gadgets” crowd. No disrespect intended but the frantic and excited look in many an eye reminds me of the Nordstrom shoe department on sale day.

5. I love that shoe department.

6. Here are a list of books in a random corner of my home:

Neal Stephenson’s latest (I was at his recent book reading here in ChicagoLand), a book about the Soviets in Afghanistan, True Grit by Charles Portis, Mildred Pierce (yes, there is a book and not just a movie), a book of Salman Rushdie essays, Reagan In His Own Hand, The Long Walk, and a chicklit book called The Vintage Affair.

What are you reading?

PS: I figured out the Mac thing. Never mind.

*PPS: I guess the movie has been filmed but is yet to be released?

You Must Love Whittaker Chambers, But You Must Not Drink Too Deeply Of His Perfumed Pessimism; Or, Be Happy For The Struggle Will Be Dire But The Victory Will Be Sweet

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I had a chat with a friend today. He mentioned Whittaker Chambers, and that he sometimes thinks that Chambers was right, that we were on the losing side of history, and the fight itself is the only reward.

I mentioned something I believed Chambers had said, that all we could do was to preserve the “fingers bones of the saints” through the coming Dark Age. I wrote to him after I’d had a few minutes to mull our conversation, and to noodle a little on the Internet. Below, lightly edited, is what I sent.

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I recalled the Chambers quote incorrectly.  He did not say “finger bones of the saints” as I have been misquoting him for years now.

Here is the passage which I remembered erroneously:

That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.

(From William F. Buckley’s memoir of Chambers, here.)

Damn, that is beautiful.

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Facebook is Dead to Me

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After soliciting the help of the CB community, for which many thanks, I found that something I had done in setting up my Facebook personal page apparently interfered with something I was trying to do in setting up my FB fan page. I couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted, my attempt to do what I thought was necessary made the situation worse, perhaps irreversibly, and there appears to be no written explanation on FB’s help pages that addresses my specific situation. What drove me over the edge was that there is no way to contact FB directly to get an answer. I have contacted FB regarding copyright violations and they responded promptly, and I assume they would respond promptly if I wanted to buy advertising. But tech support? Ha ha ha. Facebook users are raw material for the production of ad revenue, not members of a community to be allocated system resources above the minimum needed for bare survival. It’s like being a chicken in a coop. You and the other chickens might imagine that the farmer is part of your circle, but this is an illusion that disappears as soon as you try to get something beyond your daily feed allotment. So I deleted my account.

I reopened the account a few days later to see if anything was different — perhaps the system needed time to propagate new values? perhaps I could now implement the changes I wanted? Nope. So I deleted the account again. The hell with this. I’ll wait the fourteen days and give it another try after my account is wiped clean, but I have low expectations. I should have hired someone who knows FB to get me set up. It’s not worth the time and aggravation otherwise.

It will be interesting to see whether FB eventually decides to reimplement human service beyond the current minimal level.