I am but a ghost on LiveJournal now . . .

If you have any interest in adding me on Facebook, I am Neel Lane (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=754606411&ref=profile).

Your International Spy Name is Dr. Whisper


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We were still reading for ideas back then, for style.  We hadn't figured out what literature was for, actually, that it was mostly about loss, that without hope there was no risk and without risk there was no danger and that every story, in the end, is about danger.  We still believed literature could be reasoned with, I mean.

. . . .

. . . .  We ( Read more... )

In June 2007, I met Barack Obama at a home in San Antonio.  A Harvard Law School classmate of his hosted the fundraiser, which raised only a modest amount by his later standards.  My wife and I waited in line with Bruce Bowen (a three-time champion Spur) and local politicos for our turn at a photograph and a few words with Barack.  Our time with ( Read more... )

from "Iran: The Threat," by Thomas Powers

At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy [even worse now than when this was written], the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether ( Read more... )

Fellow democrats, in the words of David Bowie, let's dance ( Read more... )

Emotionalism, by the Avett Brothers

This is suddenly my favorite album.  I want to share this band with you and feel really good when you tell me how much you love them and how grateful you are that I shared them with you.

You are most likely to enjoy the Avett Brothers if you like Gram Parsons, old Whiskeytown (when Caitlin Cary was with them), and ( Read more... )

An action, however innocent it may be, does not die off in solitude.  It provokes, as effect, another action, and sets in motion a whole chain of events.  Where does a person's responsibility end for an act that stretches endlessly into some incalculable, monstrous transformation?   In his great speech at the end of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus curses the ( Read more... )

It was 99 degrees today. Ugh.

. . . History, with its agitations, its wars, its revolutions and counter-revolutions, its national humiliations, does not interest the novelist for itself--as a subject to paint, to denounce, to interpret.  The novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence ( Read more... )