At the Sunlight Café...

... find a bright, warm spot.

At the Sun Dog Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

(And if you need to do some shopping, please consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

A Paris prayer.

(Photo taken, 10 years ago, by my son John, at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.)

Hey, The Chronicle of Higher Education used my photo of Camille Paglia for its interview.

Here. I put a Creative Commons license on it, and they gave me credit, so it's perfectly legit. Here's the old blog post from 2005, with numerous photos, covering an appearance by Paglia in a local Borders Bookstore: "Try to survive a tornado with a post-structuralist."

As for the interview, Camille says, when asked "How did you learn to write?":

Like a medieval monk, I laboriously copied out passages that I admired from books and articles — I filled notebooks like that in college. And I made word lists to study later. Old-style bound dictionaries contained intricate etymologies that proved crucial to my mastery of English, one of the world’s richest languages.

"Students form a perimeter around the #ConcernedStudent1950 tent village and ask media to leave."

"This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."



ADDED: The protesting students are making many rudimentary PR mistakes here and could use some training in basic protest technique. They end up looking repressive and brutish, right in front of a camera, and they keep cranking up the intimidation. The photographer knows he's getting video that he'll be able to put up on the internet, and he's using a very effective technique of remaining calm and standing his ground in the face of what looks like scary intimidation. I have walked with a camera into big, passionate protests here in Wisconsin, and — with a few exceptions — the protesters were much better prepared to resist making the photographer seem like a sympathetic victim.

As for the First Amendment: The students and the photographers have free speech rights against the government, but not against each other. At 1:43, the photographer calmly cites the First Amendment, which, he says, gives all of them all "right to be here," in the public space, which is true. One of the black female protesters says "We do have our space as human beings," to which the photographer responds, emphasizing each word: "There's not a law about that." The woman then makes what I think is the most interesting statement in the video: "Forget a law. How about humanity? Respect?" He says, "How about documenting this for posterity?"

That's right where a good conversation could have begun. The law is not the beginning and end of how people treat each other. There is etiquette and there is respect. There is even love. As human beings, we want all of that. Please respect our space is an understandable request that a person should evaluate in ways that go beyond legal rights. The photographer did engage on that level when he offered a counter-value, documentation for posterity.

Unfortunately, that one-to-one conversation ended when another woman barged in and started yelling, precluding the development of the issues about photographing people who don't want to be photographed, and the crowd —which probably didn't notice the touching moment when Respect and Documentation stood face to face —  got going with the old "Hey hey ho ho" chant format: "Hey hey ho ho/Reporters have got to go."

A view of Madison, from the north.

It looks near wintry, but it was 70° (2 days ago).

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

At the Trees and Weeds Café...

... it's all in the point of view.

The ginkgo in late afternoon.

Seen behind the law school yesterday. I wasn't the only one stopping to take a photograph.

At the 4 Chairs Café...

... have a seat. Talk about anything.

At the Tumbling Pumpkin Café...

... roll out your random ramblings.

At the Thursday Night Café...

... go ahead and talk about whatever you want.

On Picnic Point...

... near sunset, with lovely foliage.



You can write about anything you want in the comments.

"What they are saying is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere."

Said Germaine Greer.

Addressing claims that she had been hurtful towards transgender women, Greer added: “People are being hurtful to me all the time. Try being an old woman. For goodness sake, people get hurt all the time. I’m not about to walk on eggshells.”...

Asked about the petition [to stop her from speaking at Cardiff University, she said]: “I don’t really know what I think of it. It strikes me as a bit of a put-up job really because I am not even going to talk about the issue that they are on about."

The link goes to The Guardian, where the article is illustrated by a photo of Greer, in fully wrinkled old-lady form, next to a photo of Caitlyn Jenner that's been photoshopped beyond recognition to the point of looking like a 30-year-old. 

More here: "I don’t expect people to agree with me. On the other hand, I don’t expect them to throw things at me.... I just don’t think that surgery turns a man into a woman. A perfectly permissable view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don’t really know what women are and I think that a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it’s not something I welcome."

I'm especially interested in the propositions: 1. "We don’t really know what women are," and 2. "a lot of women are female impersonators." And, by the way, once you have this level of skepticism, the opinion about transgender people becomes almost meaningless. Greer doesn't seem ready to concede even that women are women.

AND: Elsewhere in The Guardian today, there's "From Twiggy to Germaine Greer: eight classic images of powerful women/The Design Museum’s new exhibition, Women Fashion Power, about the way influential women wear clothes opens on Wednesday. Here, from Twiggy in a trouser suit to the high-shine shoulderpads of Dynasty, eight women write about the most eye-catching looks in the show." The photo of Greer shows her at the age of about 36. The text is fully celebratory:
Click for more »

I shouldn't have...

... left those "Weedsburg" photographs at the top of the blog for so long.

Creates the wrong impression.

Those were the recent photographs I had... after a drive and a long walk to look at fall foliage. You might think fall foliage is photogenic, but what looks pretty in person may come out of your camera looking rather dull. The shop — where they didn't mind my taking pictures — was, by contrast, really interesting.

Leaves versus leaves, and marijuana won, being more photographable.

But I'm sorry to create the wrong impression. I'm not a big marijuana legalization advocate, though I did change my position on the subject fairly recently, because I think substance-boosted disinhibition is important, though overdone.

ADDED: I changed my mind about legalization in March 2015 as a result of reading something written by Paul Johnson about Henrik Ibsen:

There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous... He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them...

[T]here is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits.’ All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated....

In the comments, back in March, John Stodder said: "I like Paul Johnson. I like Ibsen. I like legalizing marijuana. I like Ann Althouse. However, I do not understand the connection. I feel like I've been outrebounded!"

I said — after laughing at "outrebounded" (an inside joke back then) — "Here's a clue: freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority."

Another Weedsburg Café...

... in case you can't get enough.



Oh, and here's some marijuana news: "Congressional action prohibits federal drug enforcers from shutting medical marijuana dispensaries that comply with state law, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Monday in a potentially precedent-setting case.":

The decision by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer is the first known ruling by a federal judge to protect pot dispensaries under a budget amendment approved by Congress in December 2014 and in effect through this December, when backers plan to renew it for another year. It bars the Justice Department from spending any money to prevent California and other states from “implementing their own state laws” that authorize the medical use of marijuana.

At the Autumn Mindfulness Café...

... you're not the only one here.

At the Weedsburg Café...

... you write about whatever you want (not that you can buy everything you might want).

3 views of Reedsburg, Wisconsin.

This is the storefront that made us stop and get out:



I wisecracked "Weedsburg." But the town is more focused on fermentation:



The fest was last week. We missed it. But we enjoyed our brief sojourn in Reedsburg...



... one of the places we stopped as we were out driving, looking at orange and red leaves.

At the Harvest Café...

... you can pick your own topics.

"... Bob Dylan’s backlit corona of hair, the Chicago logo embossed in chocolate and Bruce Springsteen sharing a private joke with the saxophonist Clarence Clemons..."

The album covers of John Berg, who has died at the age of 83.

At Columbia, Mr. Berg’s job drew not only on his flair for packaging but also on his esteemed eye for selection. Assigned to create a cover for “Born to Run,” he found himself contemplating with distaste the sober posed photograph that Mr. Springsteen had chosen.

“Bruce showed me the picture he wanted, which I always describe as ‘John Updike,’ ” Mr. Berg recalled in The East Hampton Star interview. “He looked like an author, one of those back-cover-of-his-book pictures. I asked him to leave the stuff with me and I would go through the contacts.”

Sifting the images, by Eric Meola, Mr. Berg came upon one of Mr. Springsteen in a moment of candid intimacy, his face dissolving in mirth as he leaned on Mr. Clemons’s shoulder.

With that image, the album’s cover became one of the most totemic of all time....