This and that

The New York Times obit on Merl Reagle pointed out that one of his better cross-word moments was this clue: Most unpopular cookbook. The answer: “To Grill a Mockingbird.”

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It’s a thrill to see the Tucson city primary results. The incumbents shall return to the general. The mayor will be reelected.

And of course nothing will change, save for the potholes that will get wider and deeper and the future will yet hold more Being and Nothingness.

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Can anyone imagine a more arrogant, contemptible and execrable group of lawmakers than the Republicans of the Arizona Legislature? Consider this: The people vote by way of referendum to establish a nonpartisan group to draw legislative district boundaries. The Republicans of the Legislature decide to challenge the will of the people and pursue the case until it reaches the highest court in the land. A majority of the Supreme Court tells the AZ Republicans to go spit. Meanwhile, taxpayers pay for the legal representation on both sides.

Then these same Republicans refuse to abide by the vote of the people in 2000 to state financing of education include additional money to allow for inflation. The Republicans did not comply and now that aid is $1.3 billion in arrears. The AZ Republicans ignored the mandate.

This is reprehensible, an unconscionable breech of public trust. Still the voters return the AZ Republicans to office.

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DEPARTMENT OF PROSAIC ADUMBRATION & RIOTOUS EXPANSION

This is from a book review written by Rachel Cusk that appears in the August 30 issue of the NYT Book Review:

“Elena Ferrante has written her story twice: once in a group of intense, highly modeled short novels whose action unfolds over a brief time span; and again in the four sprawling, rambunctious, decades-spanning works that compose her Neapolitan saga. That these two modes of storytelling — the compact and the commodious; the modern and the historical; the distilling of life into metaphor and its picaresque, riotous expansion — are so obviously the obverse of each other constitutes yet another narrative, the story of how an individual (more specifically, a woman) arrives, after the ­vicissitudes of living, at a definition of self. “Do you want the long answer or the short?” is the customary divide between explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. Ferrante gives us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.”