Why Isn't Health Reform Isn't Sailing Through? Because of States Like Arkansas.

Rep. Mike Ross, D-AR, has been in the news a lot lately for leading the Blue Dog conservative Democrats' charge against the health care bill in its current form. John Brummett is sympathetic, noting that Blue Dogs have already been strung out leftward on the cap-and-trade vote and need to look moderate for their swing districts. Michael Tomasky is not, noting that Ross coasted to victory last time out. Local lib provocateur Max Brantley is just bitter, saying that Mike Ross hates poor people.

Tomasky is right. Ross isn't opposing the current bill out of re-election fears. Some people down here, in reference to his political skills, have called him Clinton's second coming. Brummett is right too. Blue Dogs are more conservative on principal. That's what happens when you expand control by winning in more conservative areas. Mike Ross doesn't necessarily have to be facing a tough re-election campaign to wince at the Congressional Budget Office's latest health care tallies. Still, he is a politician and there has to be politics in this. Tomasky just picked the wrong race. Maybe it's not a re-election campaign worrying him so much as a run for the governor's office. That is a statewide race in a state that alone in the country went more Republican in 2008 than in the previous presidential election. Clearly he doesn't think it will hurt him, whether health care sinks or swims, to have been the guy begging Congress to keep the price tag low.

PS - I actually agree with David Brooks; it would be good politics for Democrats long term if they would yield more, not less, to Blue Dog concerns.

Working Lunch

Treasure Hunt

The Main Library downtown had another book sale this last weekend. Paul belongs to FOCAL (Friends of Central Arkansas Libraries) and here is his spring/summer haul:

If I ever read Ulysses I'm borrowing this copy off Paul. I've also never read Moby Dick. Boo Hiss

A travel memoir written by a nun?

For me

Same Allsopp as in Allsopp Park? The family also had a bookstore? I wish it were still around

Ivanhoe...

...which used to belong to the women's college in Searcy, which later joined with Paul's Alma Mater to form Hendrix. I wonder what happened to the campus

Emerson must have been read more in schools a few generations back. Used copies of his work are always half a century old

Never read Last of the Mohicans without the N C Wyeth plates. To get through you will want the pictures

A soldier's gift. How apropos. Adventure + torrid romance

How did Paul emerge for the FOCAL crowd scrum with two Scribners Classics?

A history of the Arkansas river

A first printing if not a first edition

Nice dated typeface

He likes Ulysses

and old paperbacks

Catch-22 is everywhere in that printing of about a decade ago. I've never seen this paperback edition before

Wild! Moving! Shocking! and this is your bookplate. No matter how modish or mocking your novel, don't underestimate the power of the American bourgeoisie to domesticate it.

Annals of Zany Crime

Start with Jonesboro, add Wendy's. Wendy's Forgets Straw, Amputee Pulls Gun.

The combination of a local population clearly up on the liberties and rights of man and a Wendy's with poor customer service was bound to be explosive. But did Wendy's have to play with fire? Did they have to forget to give a straw to an amputee with an apparent case of alopecia nervosa? Not smart, clearly.

Looking on the Bright Side

of a rain delayed baseball game

More Pie

Cold peach pie

Serendipitous Alignment of Netflix Queue and Telegraph Culture Feature

Kind Hearts and Coronets

Careful, It Was Made By God

Deinstalling Stock Exchange Snowball, Andy Goldsworthy, 2007

Little Rock's Cheapest Lunch

Possibly because they have a tortilla factory next door?



Postscript: Taqueria Karina and Cafe, 5309 W 65th St

In the News

A major gift

On Pinnacle Mountain

I guess he went up the mountain to read.

Fried Okra

Cut up fresh Okra. Soak for 10 minutes in beaten eggs with dash of milk. Roll in cornmeal seasoned with salt and pepper. Fry in oil. Salt to taste.

What's In View

This is my favorite view of Little Rock: up river, looking down at the bend. One of my best experiences ever in writing was writing a letter describing this view. I was on the back porch at my Grandfather's, farther down the hill by the river, writing to a friend. Even now, when I'm on his back porch, or looking out the window of his club, I'll repeat a phrase I used to describe that view, "se nicher dans un tournant du fleuve." Roughly translated it means "nestled in a bend in the river." I'm not really sure that phrase functions in French. I've never read it or heard it said that way. So it's quite possible I made it up and it doesn't quite work. Perhaps "se nicher" is not really the verb to use, and perhaps it should be "se nicher au tournant du fleuve, as opposed to "dans." Plus for whatever reason when I repeat it from the letter I don't conjugate verb but leave it as a present indicative participle, like a state of being not localized in time. But all this matters less to me. Or rather, I don't really want to know how it is said. I like the fact that I made it up and I made it up in a language that wasn't English. It makes that view mine more, in a way, I feel like, described in a language not English but perhaps not quite French either. And repeating it to myself, "se nicher dans un tournant du fleuve," has become a shorthand, standing by one of those windows, of that perfect experience. The view is that perfect morning, and that perfect morning is still my reference for this view.

It seems a little old fashioned in a way, something that panned out having particular significance. It feels as though in my own age the small object, the particular, the minute, the mundane even is the trigger for reflection, or nostalgia, or the accretion of identity. It is an old concept. Proust made it famous in a modern context with his madeleines. But my own generation seems to have made a habit of the quirky particular. Like the hero of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, the baubles from which he puts together a life. The way music is often a showcase of a thousand different nods. Or the way artists bore in on the particular, their attempts to get right in on top of things, right in on cities, focusing even on textures, taking inspiration from flotsam. But a whole view, a whole city from a distance... I'm sure it's still done but it reminds me of nothing so much as Dutch cityscapes, which is a pretty dated reference. And maybe my own age feels that that sort of view is too generalizing, telling you too little about what it is like to be on the street. And the Dutch ended up taking you inside. Their own cityscapes weren't enough of a capture of human experience. They wanted you looking at those individuals on their porches or at their writing desks, or even nose to nose with their food stuffs, their game hanging from pegs on the wall, their wine in glass bottles. There is something about the particular that is revelatory. I suppose that has always been the case. I don't think cityscape competes much really. But it does speak to us of something - panned out vision - it is just hard to carry around. Say a certain view from an escarpment of rock was wonderful to take in, but you can't put it in your pocket. Photographs are incomplete. You could pick up a rock from it. My sister would pick up a rock from it, or scoop the dust from some sandy beach into an envelope. Photographs are incomplete. They give you no sense of envelopment. Whereas something small and concrete you can hold in your hand. But a landscape is never separate from you; you are always in it, looking out over it. It envelops you in a way photographs will never capture and so photographs are an incomplete record of it. Maybe the only reason I love that view is language. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case a few words, "se nicher..." etc, are much better than a picture at recapturing a view. (Maybe it helps to that the language is foreign to me and so ambiguous enough to encompass more than what it actually says.) Maybe the Dutch were trying to envelop you with those early cityscapes, and finding it insufficient to the task excelled at boring in close with their genre scenes and their still lifes. Maybe the cityscape will never fully conquer art because the medium is incomplete, unequal to the task. Maybe language is our best hope to hold on, for ourselves, to a view.

Happy Fourth of July

More Pie

Strawberry. For Wimbledon.