agrarian

Who that writes and reads to live (or to maintain one's place) wouldn't prefer - or say he prefers - the plow?  It isn't just the agrarian myth, it is the agrarian fantasy.  (I don't mean that, as such, it is unreal or insincere.)

magpie

The adult version of the juvenile mistake of happiness: a search for purpose or meaning.  Of course, many adults never graduate even from the juvenile mistake.

highest class

I am daily impressed (in both senses of the word) with lawyering as a form of service.

Ousley

Redemption, outside a theology, requires proportionality from the subject unless the medium is fungible (money, or in some cultures, blood).  This is the dark side of secularism for a wrongdoer.

flesh

The practice of law is the service of those who need to work upon - and under - power and integrity by means of authoritative words.  To understand authoritative in the preceding is to understand the sense in which an attorney represents.  And this is the beauty of the bar: it is a sort of incarnation of words.

counterparties

Most people are a little slippery.  Many people are downright slippery.  This is less by craft or malice, and more from laziness and cowardice.

Caro & Michelle

Power or alcohol: neither corrupt.  Either magnifies and therefore reveals - albeit selectively.

scape

Our capacity for dreaming suggests magnificent mental capacities.  I dream of someone I know, fairly shy, but in the dream bolder and talkative.  It is a subtle transformation - his personality is transformed, but not warped.  This is impressive mental work.  Imagine the talent of a novelist who does this with a developing character.

And yet.  This is all taken from my observations of my own dreams.  I suppose we have all woken to a brilliant idea, occurring in a dream, to find that the idea is not only not brilliant - it isn't even an idea.  Perhaps the brilliance of dreams is only the false glory of observations made in a uniquely credulous state.

glories

The words flat and sharp as they apply to music.  The acuity of the metaphor, an accident of language.

Wolf Hall

We all know what ghosts are like.  Music and books are ghosts.

more faith

Gambling and religion.  This much in common: evocation of the absent object of desire.

Darius

In an office setting one has involuntary pee-mates.  Folks who are coming to, going from, or in the restroom as you do the same, more often then chance would have it.  They're on the same rhythm, somehow.

faith

A religion is known and properly judged by its works precisely because it is spiritual.  All its works - particularly the numberless ordinary examples of kindness, waste, joy or blindness.

nearly perfect, perfectly wonderful

The Tampa of Magic Mike.  The drywall stacked up beside preposterous condos, faintly desperate, the thinning commercial thoroughfares where the bars are (I think of Greenville's old Silver Fox, placed exactly where Soderburgh puts his strip joint, the beach scenes all seen through the sickly tint of sunglasses, the cement picnic tables under fiberglass umbrellas outside fast food joints, the Ford F100s.

melting

On a summer weekend, Coney Island is the New York of New York.

forebears

A half-serious proposal: now that we're done with the 50-state quarters, I'd like to see 234 quarters with ordinary Americans citizens on the back, one for each year of independence.

The criteria: they must be dead, they must have lived ordinary lives, committing no crimes and reaching no great achievement, none may have been elected to higher than municipal office; each must be randomly selected from a demographically representative sample of thousands from each year.

Unnamed on the coin, each would of course receive some description on a website somewhere.

And then I would have an artists' competition for the engraving of each - with the only artistic criteria being that the subject be recognizable, individual and dignified.

The American Citizens' series. And if an interest group (veterans, lawyers, whatever) hijacks the idea, I'll disavow it - it has to be about ordinary people of our past, full stop.

petty

I flip my 3-month wall calendar and now see September creeping up.  Alarming.

all you can eat

Overwhelming popular support is only occasionally a sign of an idea's goodness. It more often indicates an all-round payout.