Well, Susan's wrong on "net neutrality." Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's like the
McCain-Feingold idea: you cannot ration free speech. Well-meaning. But
wrong.
I read S'Loh's stuff in The Atlantic a lot (though naturally the first thing
I flip to in TA is the last page, for "Word Court" and "Word Fugitives"--TA
is the only magazine I currently subscribe to on paper). I feel like Sandra
has really found her voice in her longer Atlantic pieces. I'm afraid I
haven't followed her radio career, though I saw one of her one-woman shows,
and it was terrific, and I've really dug the couple of her science shows for
public radio.
The short pieces she did for the Weekly (or was it Buzz?) weren't
interesting to me as prose--when I was flipping through Depth Takes a
Holiday, I was vaguely bored--and yet I knew that if she were reading that
very same material to me in that Sandra voice, I'd be hanging on her every
word. So for a few years I had the feeling that she was much more of a
performance artist than a pure writer, that she was meant for radio and for
one-woman shows because that was when/how the best of The Sandra Charisma
came out.
Either I was completely wrong about S'Loh, or motherhood changed her, or she
just needed a new format--and the chance to do longer pieces on subjects
that interested her--to bring out a different dimension of her writing. I
love the stuff she does for The Atlantic, though of course I can't
appreciate the full flavor of those articles/reviews because I'm not a
mother. Now I turn to Loh after I'm done with Wallraff (and anything by
Christopher Hitchens, Virginia Postrel, or Jonathan Rauch [who is God, by
the way--quite a trick for an athiest]).
BTW, if you ever go to The Atlantic's home page, there is usually a rotating
front-page feature about some topical item, and then under "voices," they
have a handful of bloggers, many of whom never seem to appear in the print
edition. I especially recommend Megan McArdle, who writes about economics in
a particularly understandable and though-provoking way. (Oddly, though, she
supports Obama, which probably places her in the minority among economists.
More later,
J
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 10:40 PM, Domingo Zungri <kdzungri_at_comcast.net>
wrote:
> 1) Yeah, that's Susan all right.
>
> "As I recall, she was a violinist, just like DZ."
>
> No, not just like DZ. Susan actually could play the instrument.
>
> 2) Sandra Loh played viola in the Samohi orchestra. She also played
> keyboard instruments in certain pieces as needed (piano in
> "Petrushka," celesta in "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.") She had a
> bit part in a recent movie called "Unaccompanied Minors."
>
>
>
--
Joy Whittemore McCann
Goddess of Ink and Paper
(But pixels obey me, too.)
Copy Write Editorial Services
818/429-9806
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Received on 2008-07-03 12:35:05