I never read her anymore, but the letters are so good.

How about a new regular feature: "Best of anti-Dickerson letters."

Google says "suttee" is a 19th century English phonetic spelling of the Indian practice of "sati," a woman's immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre.

Dickerson just gets stranger.

about Dickerson. Every time she opens her mouth she sets the cause of second wave feminism back a little.

But seriously, what's Jamaica Kincaid doing these days?

Gwen Stefani can sing like the devil herself, while the early to mid-nineties were home to the most talentless, depressing lot in the history of American music, looking pathetic even in comparison to the MadonnaGlam acts of the eighties, and that's saying a lot. For most of the listening public, The Spice Girls were a relief. Now they're the mold that needs to be broken.

You don't have to look like a model, just make yourself look good, or at least not gastronomically upsetting, on camera. Just about everyone you named was capable of that, but the punk/grunge crowd took offense. As always, the music is the determinant. Those who aren't serious about themselves usually aren't serious about music, either.

the Golden Mosque, a shrine revered by all Iraqis, was destroyed just when there were signs that Iraq's factions were uniting behind their one common goal, demanding the U.S. leave their country? And on the same day, a high-placed general appears before the American congress, saying that we'll have to be in Iraq for years because the country is so unstable?

I suggest some interesting "nonpolitical" reading: "The City of Falling Angels" by John Berendt, pp. 94-95 of the Penguin paperback edition, which discusses the history of an organization known as Gladio.

"Even my little cousin's myspace has more self-control."

A few years ago, one of the comments on the new, improved Joan Walsh-style Salon was "Even the magazine that my plaid-wearing cousin who lives in his parents' basement and photocopies in the library on weekends is better than this."

Times change. Or not.

Samuel Beckett holds out little hope for Iraq?

Or anything else, of course. And, as always, proves to be right. Decades before the fact.

Nothing to do but wait, I guess.

If everyone in the country paid the same attention to politics as "the idiots in Iowa," we wouldn't have this problem. I've lived in most parts of the country, and never seen another state where national politics is a participation sport.

That's why John Edwards has been the leader in Iowa for nearly a year. Hillary is third after Obama, with Richardson pulling up fast.

And the first time GWB ran, Al Gore took the state.

Should have listened to us. But you did.

never liked McSweeney's. The combination of bad graphics and spurious reasoning led for some very sad reading. The only audience seemed to be the creators, and those who idolized them.

I'm less happy about what's happening to the indie publishing industry, but think there's an ultimate lesson. At some point, somebody's got to read this stuff.

Or Walsh anyway?

The "coveted Koufax award?" Didn't he pitch for the Dodgers about a third of a century ago?

Isn't Digby a dog?

What world are you living in?

It's all about him. As always.

This is what doing a supposed national search and hiring internally gets you.

He's no Prairie Home Companion, and never was.

Take that as a blurb for your book.

that Dowd is a closet Republican?

Not the good Republicans that Keillor writes about so nostalgically, but the Bushites that have taken over the party.

And how, apart from the red hair, is she different from Debra Dicherson?

This is the guy who said the last election wasn't stolen. Now he's trying for a new job.

This just serves to highlight the sad decline of psychology over the last fifty years. Where once its purpose was to mold a better individual, capable of interacting with and ultimately working to perfect society, with the decline of respect for Freud and the ascendance of Skinner has come the manipulation of the individual. Now he/she is just a cog, mentally shaved by psychotherapists and their incestuous siblings, the Human Resources drones, to fit into the big societal picture, regardless of the mental damage done or the cumulative effect on civilization.

What surprise that psychology is now taking those techniques to war, now that they've tamed America?

He actually did us a service. If we survive this, his defective reign will be seen as a case study in the limits of the Presidency, and as a sad warning to those who would further abuse it.

And spare a moment of compassion for Bush I, evil and ineffective as he was. When he broke into tears at the ceremony commemorating his son Jeb's tenure as Governor of Florida, it was all too apparent what he was thinking: "If only he had been President, instead of the crazy one!"

try seeing what it's like in five years. And then ten after that.

Rather than hoping to make past dreams real, try making your dreams express your life now. Singing isn't nothing, but what you sing is more important than how. Find your thoughts, not the ones you think you should have had, but the ones you now have.

Act on them. Be who you are, not who you think you should have been. You'll end up better, and if you do it right, so will your world.