On an innane TV reality program about "natives" from the tiny Pacific island of Tanne coming to America, the chief remarks on a Wyoming ranch, "What a tragedy; with so much fat cattle and such a fat wallet you have to die like everyone else." Winter Solstice momento mori.

Karen's Letters from Africa -- so much unsaid since she was writing to her mother; such intense rationalization; she created an entire body of work based on the fact her lover would not marry her.

Symposia is becoming a pharma-Luddite. Today in NYT tales of how cancer is caused by folic acid which is added to everything we eat, and how mammograms are dangerous for young women (radiation).

And a techno-Luddite. Cormac McCarthy wrote all his books on an old manual Olivetti. Edmund Wilson wrote To the Finland Station longhand on a legal pad.

Symposia is not political (all those wars!!!) but must say that Palin character from Alaska is right out some medieval grotesquerie or comic masque. You could not have invented a more gruesome character!

Symposia is in a quandary -- non-cultural for once. D'une certaine age she has been prescribed Zocor to attack cholesterol by interrupting normal liver functions. She refused all those female drugs from birth control to estrogen thus sparing her The Chop and now wonders if down the road we are going to have massive liver transplants as a result of the........you get the picture.

Re-read West with the Night -- commonplace writing that would be perfect for 1942's Vogue -- and besides no way Ms.Clutterbuck-Markham could have written it. She duped Hem to be sure.

We tried reading Aspects of Aristocracy by David Cannadine, he a product of Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton et.al. So many facts. Such tough slogging. Tres interesante however about the Stricklands -- Symposia often visited (with the other tourists) Sizergh Castle bit south of Kendal Westmorland and would see the current residents looking so tatterdemalion.

What a (literally) rich life Ted Kennedy lived. Born very rich he had the luxury to wish for more money for the poor. Like the Brit lairds who were socialists and liberals and Fabians. How fashionable.

Two years ago we had drinks with Dominick Dunne here in Chicago, the night before the Last Supper with Conrad Black, and he was wonderfully bitchy about everyone and everything and especially the much despised and resented Vanity Fair.

Whenever you think it can't get worse it does! The Julia Child moveeee--we followed that foul mouthed "blog" where a low-class clerk supposedly cooked all the recipes in Mastering and we were not impressed with the quest for fame and the charade. Neither was Julia whom Symposia met on several occasions and who was a Yankee through and through--steely, controlled, empirical and cool.

The Internet incredibly boring except as a research tool and to buy books on Amazon. Twitter, youtube and facebook are the preserve of children and the simple-minded.

Re-read Another Part of the Wood and Clark's vignettes of Berenson and his wife are as funny as anything Symposia has ever read. Tiny BB and big booming Mary; Jack Sprat and wife.

Symposia thinks we are living in Brave New World--what %%% is it of Americans who are on soma? Drugged up? All to enrich the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors and politicians they give kickbacks to. Not to mention the Pill and breast cancer or..........oh never mind.

Symposia has read 20 years of her own writing and is amazed what a humble sychophant she was....always bullshitting about the rich and famous like Tina Brown does....still does, daily....at least Symposia woke up a little and realized that talking about the peasants with dough is not the same as having the dough.

Apparently no one reads blogs anymore so I may terminate this and go back to writing in BOOKS! On the other hand isn't this infinitely more readable than all those suffocating words piled up like old logs on Daily Beast and Huffington?

Christopher Hitchens has done it again --another pretentious incoherent say -nothing-in-particular article in the Atlantic -- this time about Marx. Read it twice to see if we were being unfair but in the end could not figure out the point --if there was a point.

A scream the way people are taking a PR Flak's ruse as real--the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart "debate" which is a feeble means of scaring up viewers.

The change in the quality of life from the 1950s is incalculable. Symposia visited the Phoenix area recently and remembers the gritty charm of the southwest in the past when each centimeter of land was not given over to sterile development and Coach stores (world's ugliest consumer designs). One keeps on thinking of that last scene in Zabriskie Point!

Another example of 1984 or Brave New World -- a new "study" finds that idiotic optimists live longer than intelligent skeptics. They. whoever they are, would have us all robotic, grinning Stepford wives so some imaginary Wizard of Oz who probably looks like Bernard Madoff could control things. Whew! We need a paradigm shift in thinking in 2009.

Symposia is no prude but was quite nauseated after seeing on the boob tube (where it belongs)Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. It was far less the puerile pornography than the stupifying boredom of the whole damned thing. Anything to escape the news these days!

Joe Morgenstern (Wall Street Journal) is the only good film critic in the country. Those at NY Times let alot of detritus slip through the cracks.

The good old humanities taking the usual hit these days. No one has made a good case for the profound economic impact the arts have in the cities here. Who would go to New York otherwise? To see tired Central Park or the dirty East River? Or Fifth Avenue which is like tacky Mainstreet USA. Oprah WInfrey should lead the effort since there is a crying need to divorce Humanities from its dreary husband, The Campus.

Paul Theroux recently gave a patronizing lecture at the Chicago Public Library and took continual pot shots at the audience and the whole universe of other travel writers including Graham Green and Bruce Chatwin. In his opinion no one can compare with him. Good Grief. He takes his own press seriously.

Nabokov's Speak, Memory may be the finest autobiography in existence but it is, like a dinner at the old Le Francais, so rich as to be indigestible. Symposia prefers the breezy 90 page Les Mots by old pal Sartre, the crazy boss eyed "existentialist" who during the war composed nihililstic nonsense in an orange fake fur coat at Magots.

Re-reading Vision and Design by Roger Fry, Symposia notes that its concerns and its language are so untouched by the 20th century technological revolution as to make it as curious as Byzantine art and aesthetics. Written for a verbal culture, with a snail's eye view of the universe, it is on a different evolutionary track and ultimately is incomprehensible.

The stimulus package has elicited Big Opinions from Academics hanging on to the last shreds of post-war ( as in WWII) anger and alienation, comfortable old slippers. Duds looking for the defeat of capitalism and the rise of the workers. Symposia is optimistic about America because greed will always be with us and right now there is plotting and scheming about how to earn More Money! Don't read the papers for a year.

Last night the absolute nadir of teevee journalism with that innane Katie Couric asking the pilot of the plane that ditched in the Hudson how it felt going down? If she designed those childish questions she should be sacked. The poor pilot looked bemused and was endearingly condescending.

We went to the Lyric last night for a performance of Tristan and Isolde a preposterous anachronism "appreciated" by an audience that looked like it was collectively going to the gymnasium and that could not wait for intermission to tear into salami sandwiches. The juxtaposition of these events made Symposia more than normally annoyed.

You have to admit it -- the President is Da Best! He wants to get on with business and was swift in dispatching the creeps who think they are above the law. Tom Daschle or whatever his name is - Obama threw the bum out and now we implore him to get rid of all the careerist bums.

Ok-- to this old cynic we have to admit yesterday was a charmer and The First Couple far better in every way than the JFK/Jackie duet. JFK's inauguration speech so Mad Ave and nothing came from the heart, then there was his wife's obsession with choosing plates and carpets and clothes. 2009ers say Who Cares! Michelle doesn't appear to!

Yesterday I read some so-called memoirs such as Glass Castle and a couple other about wacky parents and abuse and/or addiction and wonder how the authors have such total recall of actual conversations decades ago. These appear to be as fictionalized as the Frey book. I suspect some ambitious editor at a publishing house advised the writers to embellish these sellers! I mean do they think we're stupid?

Welcome Back to LuciasSymposium which now has a number 2 after it because of change of email address. You can always refer to the original LuciasSymposium.blogspot which has the usual ocean of opinions we always see on the Internet. We still have the aim of dissenting all orthodoxies which has a nice ring to it.

The inauguration this week, or should one say deification of another leader; Obama is smarter than the rest and the fact he went to Harvard verrrrry comforting. We do love seeing how happy Biden is-- though his wife has the dopey grin of a cheerleader.