DL Open Thread: Friday, December 24, 2021

RIP: Joan Didion.  Not only was she America’s greatest essayist, her methodology was beyond reproach:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

If you haven’t read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, at the least, go, read. I think to anyone who has read Didion, and who has worked in a career even remotely associated with writing and critical thinking, her influence has almost inescapably filtered down to you.

While perhaps her most ‘famous’ sentence was,:

‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’,

what came immediately thereafter placed that quote in unflattering context:

“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices,” she writes, in part. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Given time during the holidays (I’ve almost completed my DL end-of-the-year stuff), I’m heading back to reread some Didion.

Kate Winslet Is Cool. That Is All:

“Mare is how most of us felt through lockdown,” she says. “She validated the permanent pyjama look.”

“Middle-aged women have long been underestimated, disrespected and disregarded in the film and television community, and now that’s changing,” she says. “Look at the actresses who won at the Emmys. None of us were in our 20s by any means, and that’s cool! I feel way cooler as a fortysomething actress than I ever imagined I would.”

Ex-Cop Kimberly Potter Found Guilty In Killing Of Daunte Wright.  Minnesota DA Keith Ellison got it right:  The verdict was a ‘measure of accountability’, not justice.

Chris Coons: Bad News/Good News.  The bad news? He’s tested positive for COVID.  He’s fully-vaccinated, and experiencing only minor symptoms.  The good news? Given his penchant for reaching across the aisle, he could well be a carrier to all the willfully-unvaccinated Rethug MAGAt’s he consorts with.

Rethugs’ Relentless Assault On Voting Rights.  262 bills introduced in 41 states in 2021. 32 bills became law in 17 states.  This is the rule, not the exception.  The Republican Party is trying to overthrow legitimate elections. Weakling Democrats appear largely uninterested.

Schell Brothers Seek To Overrun Dagsboro With Massive Agri-Community.  Hey, they can always use the DELDOT-under-Kermit-Justice rationale:  The area is already overdeveloped, it will simply remain overdeveloped with the addition of 500 more homes. No change whatsoever.  Besides, it will have a ‘tiny farm’, hence an agri-community.

What do you want to talk about?