Category Archives: General

Hamilton on Miers

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Regarding Harriet Miers, I like this op-ed.

From The Federalist No. 76, about the Senate’s role in voting on a Supreme Court nominee:

“To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. . . . He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

(Italics are by the author of the above link.)

Harriet Miers, anyone?

Brain Appetite

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I’m killing time today before going to my parents’ house later for a Rosh Hashannah meal. Today’s the second day of Rosh Hashannah. I took the day off from work (as I did yesterday) because I planned on going to services this morning, but I didn’t go. I came back to the city last night for chorus rehearsal and wound up sleeping in this morning. So I’m going back to New Jersey in a little while.

I’ve spent much of the afternoon feeling frustrated about reading/writing. I’ve had the urge today to write a novel. Or find a really good novel to read. I just finished Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which I didn’t really get into (I liked his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle better). I think I’m going to read Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex – it seems big and juicy and good.

I don’t know why I have an urge to write but not the motivation to do so. I can’t seem to write the kind of book I’d want to read (I would love to be able to write like Michael Chabon), so I figure, why not just read the kind of book I want to read instead of trying to write it? My writing ambitions don’t seem to match my abilities.

My other problem is that I’m horrible at scheduling time to do things. I can’t keep up routines. Well, there was my screenwriting class three years ago, when I managed to start and complete a first draft of a screenplay in ten weeks and was the only person in the class to do so, but I was in a weird place in my life then. I don’t know if I can repeat the conditions, because I’m not sure what they were, but for three months I remained celibate and went to bed early and wrote a couple of pages of my script every day. Like I said, I was in a weird place.

Maybe I need to set myself a schedule. Maybe I need to read this book Matt has (but hasn’t read) called Getting Things Done. I don’t know. It’s incredibly hard to get myself up in the morning, so I don’t know if I could do writing before work; and I don’t know if living with someone is conducive to disciplining myself to write. Maybe I just need to make this little office/closet room in our apartment more conducive to writing.

I had a bizarre dream last night in which Matt and I were moving into an enormous luxury apartment on a high floor of a doorman building in the city. We walked into the apartment and it was huge. So much space. I loved it.

I feel like there’s too much to read. I want to start reading a book, but I also want to read this week’s New Yorker. Or I want to do neither. I don’t know. I’m all a-jumble right now. I cleaned the toilet and the bathroom faucet earlier today. That’s all – not the sink itself, just the faucet, because it was within reach. I also threw out a bunch of old magazines. One difference between me and Matt is that he doesn’t mind clutter while I can’t stand it. I find it keeps me from being fully functional.

Ugggggh. I hate feeling like this. My appetite is bigger than my brain.

Silence

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I lay on the grass in the Catskills on Friday night. The sky was dotted with an infinitude of stars. I hadn’t seen so many stars in – I can’t rememember when. I saw the faint band of the Milky Way. I saw a tiny white dot move slowly across the sky – a satellite. I love seeing satellites in the night sky – they’re so eerie.

Matt and I went with Mike and his roommate/our friend Dan up to Mike’s mom’s house in the Catskills on Friday. We ate dinners cooked by Dan, who is a gourmet cook. We watched about seven episodes of Arrested Development on DVD as well as most of Sunset Boulevard on Turner Classic Movies. Other than that, I mostly read and did crossword puzzles.

I had a sense of expansion this weekend. It’s possible to have space and quiet! Some people live that way year-round. If I lived like that, I bet I’d get a lot more writing done. A little house in the middle of nowhere with a writing room with unfinished wooden walls.

I spent several moments out in the yard by myself this weekend, just being. Every few minutes a vehicle would zoom past on the neighboring road. Other than that, it was dead quiet, except for the water flowing in the stream at the edge of the yard and the occasional breeze blowing through the trees.

It was heaven.

Early yesterday afternoon I stood by the stream and just stared at the water and at the opposite bank. I can do that sometimes – I can just sit or stand somewhere for minutes on end and drift off into a reverie. “What are you doing, Jeff?” someone might ask. And the answer will be that I’m thinking. Just thinking.

I thought about nature and about Native Americans, and about what the land was like before electricity and before log cabins and any permanent settlements. I imagined how quiet and peaceful the world used to be without any people on it, without any words or language. I stared at the trees and and water and rocks and tried to imagine myself pre-verbal. Language leads to thoughts and intelligence, which make us feel separate from nature. But we and the trees and the dirt come from the same stuff.

When we die we will decompose and rejoin the earth, and we will be silent again.