That's Good Reading: Fully Credited Links

It's summer, and everyone can appreciate that, but being a teacher I am still and always will be on the school schedule. That is, once June rolls around I can't possibly bear the thought of getting up every morning and going to work. This disorder will last until August, when I can finally bear the thought of showing up somewhere at 8 am. To celebrate summer, here's some good things to be read around the province of Blogistan.

Thanks to George Hunka for mentioning Ionarts at his blog, Superfluities (note the new digs if you have a link to George's old site). He has some nice posts up on that other George, good old George Bernard Shaw, in which he ponders why that playwright is "oddly underproduced in the United States these days." It's a good question.

George came our way because of Alex Ross's blog The Rest Is Noise, for which we thank him. Alex has posted a picture of the ruins of the Frauenkirche in Dresden (in response to my post on June 23) from his own visit to that city. Other interesting posts of late include this one about what you can find in preowned books. Alex is the proud owner of boxes of Claudio Arrau's old books in German, lucky devil. I have bought a lot of my books at garage sales and like to add to previous owners' annotations with my own notes in pencil (see this post from earlier today). Alex is suffering from one of those summer colds, making his head feel like a "nerfball orbiting Jupiter," so we hope he feels better soon.

Alex's post on "marked-up" books was prompted by this post by Our Girl in Chicago, who has taken over About Last Night from Terry Teachout, who is in seclusion at the "undisclosed location" where they put the Vice President. That post is just one of several excellent ones penned by OGIC, whom we also thank for reading Ionarts. She left a great comment on this post from June 16, after the Detroit Pistons crushed the Lakers, which I said softened the pain of the early exit of the Detroit Red Wings from the NHL playoffs. "Softens the pain, but doesn't extinguish it...," she writes, "there's nothing like Stevie + Stanley, and I'd like to see it one more time." Amen, sister.

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes has a large bee in his bonnet about trying to stop a sculpture from being installed in front of Disney Hall in LA. Tyler's estimation of the piece planned by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (as Tyler hilariously calls them, OldenBruggen): "It's hideous. It must be stopped." Tyler, stop beating around the bush and tell us how you really feel.

Not that we needed any more proof that Washington has truly gone over the edge as a city of the weird, but Xeni Jardin, in this post at BoingBoing, mentioned a ceremony performed in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in which Rev. Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times, and his wife were wrapped in ermine robes and crowned by a congressman from Illinois. No, really: John Gorenfeld has the video. I mention this not in the context of politics (see the Ionarts motto in the upper right corner) but as something that I can only hope was a surrealist art event.