A couple of men with brown skin sitting and drinking in a book-lined room listening to a white guy play guitar.

"I have cancer and jungle fever, and tonight one of them is going to get cured."

A theater critic discusses politics.

Another academic is denied tunure.

I've never paid much attention to either August Wilson or Oscar Hijuelos. Rightly or wrongly I've always seen Wilson as a representative of the Arthur Miller/ Playhouse 90 school and have no interest. But a friend of mine has done some drinking with Hijuelos and tells good stories. And of course I respect craftspeople on principle. Same goes for this. [Joss Whedon: pro-union.]

I don't give a shit about Drezner. I'm beyond disgust with academia, or at least of the sort that sees ideas over acts -or even worse, a priori as reality. Every definition is de facto a forced isolation, artificial, and the invention of god is merely an attempt to naturalize the man-made definitions of the world. But every word must have one meaning for it to have a thousand implications. And those changing implications are the ground from which future meanings come.

I've just given you a simple description of the process of linguistic, legal and Constitutional change, not how it should or shouldn't happen but how it does. There is no argument that can be made against this. So lets hear it for the craftsmen and women who make life worth living for the vast majority, and whose works and actions make possible the careers who those who think otherwise.
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Hijuelos

He liked the views of the river from my windows, New Jersey twinkling in the distance, and the Victorian club-like atmosphere of certain of my book-lined rooms. He always looked around to see what books I had been reading, and occasionally, if I'd left some pages of a manuscript lying about, he'd give me a sly look as if to say: "Ah, productivity! A good thing!" He didn't talk that way, but that was what his expression conveyed to me.... 

That night in May, as on so many similar nights, we ended up in my study to watch the fight, the sound turned low and some Clifford Brown on the stereo until the main event finally came on. In times past he'd sit in that room with guests ranging from my old, blue-collar neighborhood friends to Lou Reed, who, to August's delight, played a couple of his songs one evening on a nylon string guitar. But whoever had joined us, August always remained somewhat apart from the persona of one who had received so much acclaim.

rereading in 2015. I didn't catch the mannerisms the first time.