MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Today I would like to salute some of the diverse and accomplished commenters to My Life and Thoughts, for example Michelle of The Maltese Bacon (a recipe blog—check out this beautiful tomato confit); as well as Gregory Freidin of the Stanford Slavic department (who, in his latest blog entry, shrewdly observes that, even if you live in Gori, you probably don’t hang your portrait of George W. Bush over a sliding glass door). 

In this recent, admirably concise comment, Freidin expresses solidarity with my father on the subject of creeping desecularization. Those of you who were disappointed by the Times’s decision not to air my father’s thoughts about creeping desecularization will be relieved to learn that they did publish the very next letter he wrote them, the following week.  This letter was in response to “My Literary Malady,” in which novelist Geoff Nicholson mulls over his recent gout diagnosis.  

James Gillray, The GOUT (1799)

But I would like to pause here to share with you my all-time favorite gout anecdote…

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Patient readers! In explanation for the long silence, let me tell you that I have been researching and writing a really time-consuming article, the precise subject of which should remain a wonderful surprise to those of you to whom I am not always personally unburdening myself about it, but, it involves the Russian Orthodox church. This is how I found my way to the Interfax Religion site: a resource which I cannot recommend warmly enough to my dear readers.  It is, unlike my blog, updated many times a day, with important stories such as, “Three Bronze Angels to Carry the First Monument to Enema in Zheleznovodsk“:

Stavropol, June 16, Interfax – The monument to one of the most wide-spread medical treatments will open in health resort town of Zheleznovodsk.

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I was totally on time for the reading at Stanford! I knew just where to park my car, and how to get to the Terrace Room. (Seven years of graduate study, my friends.)

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