Howard Stern excoriates Kathy Lee Gifford for tormenting an autistic boy.

Kathy Lee somehow managed to produce the most unbearably tasteless display I've ever seen on television, and Stern lets her have it. Language alert on the second link, but the first link is much more offensive.

[Second link was wrong before. Fixed.]

What are you doing New Year's Eve?

Alone? At home?



Not alone? Out?

Spooning with the robot pillow.

Funktionide Part II from eltopo on Vimeo.

Is it sad? I mean... I'm not asking if the blob itself is sad. But is it sad that there is — if there is — a need for things like this?

Lunching alone.

"How to Be Alone."

The comments are back!

The comments are back!

I missed you guys. I used to revel in my solitude, but then you showed up and when you went away....

"I think it's this long-term, intense loneliness that many people don't understand."

"They don't realise that loneliness can come alive, that it can start to snap and hound at a life."

Emily White — author of "Lonely: A Memoir" — writes:

I felt a certain dumbing down in the midst of my loneliness. I couldn't read as quickly or as well as I used to. I wasn't as imaginative. I said less. Without people around me, I began to feel as though I were taking up less space. I sometimes felt so ungrounded, so immaterial and unreal, that I thought I might just drift away....

I became less spontaneous, less confident and secure. Interacting with others, I had to hide my feeling of marginalisation, and since marginalisation had come to define my life, I wound up hiding most of myself. I wanted to turn back into the former me, the connected me, but I couldn't find my way back.

Let's read "The Lifelong Single Gay Virgin."

This is another episode in a NY Magazine series, presenting, each week, a 7-days diary from a different anonymous individual. (I assume these are not fiction. Am I wrong?)

We're told the diarist is "27 years old, male, single, Upper West Side, gay":

DAY ONE
6:30 a.m.: Consume oatmeal, orange juice, and coffee while watching Remains of the Day. Anthony Hopkins manages to inadvertently seduce Emma Thompson despite being a sociopath. What am I doing wrong?

Ha. Answer: Life isn't a movie. Imagine how different it would be if it was. Little random details would pay off big a few days/scenes later. Deja vu! I said Life isn't a movie to someone... yesterday. Ah, yes! A neighbor was describing her fight against gypsy moth caterpillars. Once she poisoned a tree full of them, and zillions of them fell to the ground and were writhing and bloody looking. (The juice that oozes out of them looks like human blood.) Later, she went out to clear the carcasses off the walkway, and they were all gone. She had a vision of them off somewhere gathering strength and plotting their revenge. Actually, her neighbor had swept the walk. But if it were a movie, the enraged caterpillars would be back — enlarged and superstrong as a result of the poison, Toxic Avenger-style — ready for human blood.

Back to the virgin:

7 a.m.: Lest anyone forget, Christopher Reeve was devastatingly handsome. Super. Smoking. Hot. Playing a principled American congressman doesn't hurt, either.

8:30 a.m.: Commute to nonprofit job. No one on my trains are cute enough to tear me away from my crossword puzzle. Thomas Edison's middle name: Alva....

Ah! This is exceedingly charming. Have you never experienced extended virginity/celibacy? I'd say this captures the vibe brilliantly. Was Thomas Edison — little Alvy — ever cute?

Maybe. In 1879.

DAY TWO

5:30 a.m.: Commute to Penn Station. Dear day laborers who crowd the early morning trains, please touch me with your rough, dirty, work-worn hands. Much obliged.

7:30 a.m.: Business trip to New Jersey. This state is worse than I remembered. My penis is inverting....

6:30 p.m.: Call non-boyfriend and tell him not to visit. He is upset. I feel like a jerk. Perhaps I am a jerk.

8 p.m.: I wonder if being single forever is the curse that everyone says it is. I'm single, have always been single. I used to think that despite a dearth in sexual partners and romantic relationships, I was genuinely happy. But now I think that because of a dearth in sexual partners and romantic relationships, I'm genuinely happy.

And that is the dangerous thought. But what is more seductive than dangerous thoughts? Did you recoil from that idea as from a bloody, enraged gypsy moth caterpillar? Did you shrink from it like a penis reacting to New Jersey? Do you immediately assume this young man is deluded and pathetic? He could be right. What would the world be like if he were right? Take a moment to imagine it. Did you imagine the world we are in? If not, why not?

Old images.

I have so much more time and subject matter for artistic projects in the summer, and with classes ending on Wednesday, I was looking for inspiration in the earliest examples of photography on this blog.

1. The blog post with the first digital photograph I ever took.

2. An early model of a post using photographs I happened to take that day and creating — concisely — a narrative arc.

3. Riffing on a movie with photographs taken — unabashedly — from the TV screen.

4. Photos of signs and displays accompanied by text that looks at them from a skewed perspective.

5. Attending and interpreting a genuinely interesting artistic event: Here and here.

6. I could use my drawings in a bloggy style. That reminds me: Palladian has done a magnificent job of presenting his drawings on line. Check it out. I used to travel with a pen and a sketchbook instead of a camera. I was highly influenced by this book. You have no idea how much time I spent, traipsing about, alone, looking and drawing. I don't know if I could go back to that, now that I've found digital photography. But I think there are alternative things that you can do, combining drawing and photography. I wonder if I'll ever get back to something like that....

7. Another idea is to get a new lens for the SLR camera and see what happens. 

Anyway... just casting about....

"Some people might 'really need their downtime'..."

"... and seek out 'isolation that avoids all social intercourse.' Others may have developed an 'avoidant attachment style' in childhood, resulting in 'a need to prove to themselves that they don’t need anybody'...."

Why do people go to cafés to sit alone and work on their laptops?

To be with other people.

"The need for a cheap apartment in part led Mr. Carroll home to Inwood in the summer of 2008, in spite of his history with the neighborhood."

Link.

In “The Basketball Diaries,” Mr. Carroll used the nosy old ladies on its park benches and the reactionary hard-hats in its bars as a comic foil....

[B]y the summer of 2008, his childhood address at 585 Isham Street in Inwood might have seemed like a peaceful place to write.

The focus of the ground-floor apartment was the desk, a padded cart beneath it to elevate his aching leg.

This part of the story caught my attention, because I have spent the last 4 days — post-toe-op — with my foot elevated on pillows to keep it from throbbing.

There, he plowed through plastic bins of sliced pineapple, a reward for a session of hard work.

The only decorations were a poetry event poster and a photo-triptych of Kurt Cobain. For months, boxes of books remained unpacked and the windows were bare. “He said that sometimes neighbors would smile at him, and he was just sitting there in his underwear,” [his friend Martin] Heinz recalled....

Mr. Carroll was alone the day he died. A neighbor peering into his window apparently saw him slump to the floor and called 911, [his brother Tom] said. (“Classic Inwood,” joked Tara Newman, a friend who also grew up there.)

There is reason to leave the windows bare and to live in a neighborhood of nosy people. You don't have to die alone.

"I need a moment alone... I don't want to talk to anyone."

A bonus clip from "The Comeback" — the great, great HBO comedy with Lisa Kudrow. I was looking for a different clip, but wanted to share this anyway, or let's just say it fits today's blog theme.

What I was looking for is the scene where Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) is posing for a publicity photograph and keeps doing that ridiculous pouting thing in an effort to make her lips look sexy. I was looking for that to go along with this hilarious slideshow of "Celebrity pouters."

500 miles later, I'm back in Madison.

Did you understand the previous post? If not, the answer — along with much congratulations and debate — appears in the comments, notably here. Let there be no doubt about it: A blogger — Althouse — is engaged to be married to a man who began his connection to her as a commenter on her blog. After 4+ years of writing at each other, we met in real life and found real love.

ADDED: Here I am on July 25, 2008, expressing a near obsession with solitude:



IN THE COMMENTS: An Edjamikated Redneck says:

My congratulations to you both!

My only concern is whether Ohio has gained a Law Professor, or has Wisconsin gained a good Ohio man?

Or has Indiana gained the betrothed?

Although 250 miles one way is a long commute.

Later, he says:

I just heard that Xavier (in Cincinnati, but no law school) beat Wisconsin in the NCAA.

Guess that answers my question!

"I tend to think technology addiction has to do with fear of, or aversion to, direct human contact."

"It allows you to seem to relate to others while actually staying inside your own head and keeping control of the encounter as if it was only your fantasy. Yes, porn, but that's only symptomatic, or emblematic."

Something Amba wrote in the comments back here that disturbed me. Now, come on into my comments and have an experience with me.

Has technology extinguished both true solitude and real social life?

A big essay by Neil Swidley.