Friday, July 3, 2009

WEB BOHEMIAN (Friday, July 3, 2009)
(1)- RECOVERY? -- Even though we've had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism. The panic seems to be easing. Perhaps a mirage, or perhaps the measures taken have restored normalcy.

(2)- FRANCIS -- Is there a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon.

(3)- WHAT IF -- The most secret of all British government documents is out. During the Cold War, civil servants used to rehearse the end of the world - what would happen if deterrence failed and nuclear war became inevitable.

(4)- TOGETHERNESS -- Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space means mingling and discourse. Research shows this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today.

(5)- CHARM AND DEATH -- 'Every life has a theme', wrote Isaac Rosenfeld about Gandhi. The theme of his own life, and of this biography, was failure. Rosenfeld was born in Chicago in 1918 and in 1946 was a golden boy of American letters.

(6)- THE MARTIN PAPERS -- Martin Amis says his next novel will be “blindingly autobiographical”. Julie Kavanagh gets in first and writes a memoir of their life together in the 1970s, with a little help from her friends—and Amis himself ...

(7)- BOMBER'S BAD FOOD -- Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols is asking for a court-appointed lawyer to help him with a lawsuit complaining about the food he gets in prison, saying it causes him to "sin against God."

(8)- SCHOOL CLOSING -- The kitchens at a Denbighshire secondary school have been closed due to an infestation of rats. Pest control officers were said to be dealing with the problem at Ysgol Glan Clwyd, St Asaph – a hard school to spell.

(9)- PALIN ARTICLE -- A new Vanity Fair article on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has re-ignited animosities among feuding high-profile Republican advisers who worked on Arizona Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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