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.