"Duly noted" blog entry of the day

From a teacher-photographer in Thessaloniki, Greece who posts under the name Teacher Dude's Grill and BBQ:"Time to make ourselves heard... The batteries are charging, the bag packed, my pencils are sharpened and my notebooks blank. Tomorrow I am heading for the nationwide series of protests over the killing of Alexis Grigoropoluos. Hope to see you there."

Illo: Bob Staake on his New Yorker cover, "Reflection"

A brief animation describing illustrator Bob Staake's 'Reflection' Cover for the November 17, 2008 Obama victory issue of The New Yorker.

She should have persisted: Summary graf of the day, Threepenny Review

At the estimable Threepenny Review, essayist Philip Lopate makes "Notes on Sontag". As an essayist writing about an essayist writing about an essayist, Lopate has this to say: "The title essay on Walter Benjamin, "Under the Sign of Saturn," is my favorite in the book, and probably my favorite of all her essays. Her tribute is a rare act of sympathy by which one author assimilates another, and transmits unselfishly that spirit to the reader, rendering his notoriously difficult aspects into something coherent and attractive... The prose is dense but clear, never stuffy or derivative; one would have to quote the entire Sontag essay to convey its method of piling idea upon idea, so that each insight builds on all the previous ones. A few sentences, extracted from the middle, may suffice: Benjamin's recurrent themes are, characteristically, means of spatializing the world: for example, his notion of ideas and experiences as ruins. To understand something is to understand its topography, to know how to chart it. And to know how to get lost. ... Anyone familiar with Benjamin's work will hear echoes and paraphrases... Sontag's prose here is also remarkably rhythmic, as though she were in a semi-trance when composing it, able to channel Benjamin's spirit calmly while looking at him objectively...She begins novelistically, by describing Benjamin as he appears in photographs. Then she takes us through some of his dominant motifs and characteristics: topography, miniaturization, indecisiveness, keeping one's options open, a courtier's courtesy. Benjamin was a passionate collector, and in her analysis of his fidelity to things... we get a first glimpse of the Cavaliere, the collector-protagonist of her novel The Volcano Lover. Benjamin was also another exemplar for her of "the freelance intellectual." Finally, he was a negative model in the difficulty he had finishing books. "His characteristic form remained the essay. The melancholic's intensity and exhaustiveness of attention set natural limits to the length at which Benjamin could develop his ideas. His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct." Her own essay on Benjamin runs a mere twenty-five pages. She later said, by way of explaining why she no longer gave her main energies to essay-writing, that some of the essays in Under the Sign of Saturn had taken her six months to write. From my perspective, this means she should have persisted in essay writing; it was just getting to the proper level of difficulty."

Love, like light: Summary graf of the day, The New Yorker

From a long piece examining recent books about Boswell, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, Adam Gopnik sums up: "Life has, as Johnson said, a way of pointing toward morals, but, as he also knew, they are rarely the morals we expect to be pointed toward. Mrs. Thrale did the disgraceful thing, and was rewarded with a serene and happy second life. Boswell took the diaries and journals he had piled up in a wasted lifetime of sensual pleasures and obsessive self-regard and turned them into one of the best and most enduring books ever written. It is a love triangle, certainly, but the shapes that the three points describe seem still to be in motion. Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper."

Lede: CNN's prisoner of war from Men's Journal

Rolling Stone-style new journo lede hits hard: “I am not the same fucking person,” he tells me. “I am not the same person. I don’t know how to come home.” It’s October, six months after our first meeting, and Michael Ware, 39, is at his girlfriend’s apartment in New York, trying to tell me why after six years he absolutely must start spending less time in Iraq. He’s crying on the other end of the telephone. “Will I get any better?” he continues. “I honestly don’t know. I can’t see the — right now, I know no other way to live.” [By Greg Vels, story at link.]

NY Times' Robin Toner, 54, was a scrupulous factpchecker

In their obituary of national correspondent Robin Toner, the Times notes, "[I]n a craft in which small errors are commonplace and bigger mistakes a regular occupational hazard, Ms. Toner devised a meticulous personal method for checking and re-checking names, dates, facts and figures in her own raw copy, a step few reporters take. As a result: only half a dozen published corrections over the years, on more than 1,900 articles with her byline." Examples and lessons were not provided.

"Shame": the Sun-Times' good wood on Blago, Day One