Author Archives: Joel Derfner

I have a confession to make:

I have never read Northanger Abbey.

Ordinarily I would feel such great shame at so fundamental a failing that I would never reveal it to anybody, but in this case I have good reason for my omission.

Because as long as I don’t read Northanger Abbey there will always be more Jane Austen in the world for me to read. And the idea that there is more Jane Austen in the world to read fills me with hope.

My therapist spent today’s session trying to convince me that it’s okay to display anger at people. After I pretended to be convinced, he went further and tried to convince me that it’s okay to display anger at people even when it doesn’t make logical sense.

It didn’t really have much of an impact this afternoon, but at the moment my head is filled with visions of walking the streets of New York with a blowtorch, reducing people to ashes even when it doesn’t make any logical sense, all with my therapist’s approval.

I’m beginning to find myself persuaded.

A few years ago I wrote a post about the list of women for whom I’d turn straight. The list was lean, with a membership of three.

But I am now adding a fourth:

“I felt the children were to blame for my daughter not getting along [at kindergarten], so I killed them,” she told police.

It’s sort of amazing what you can find on the Internet. Here, for example, is Chris Cocker as reinterpreted by Geoffrey Chaucer.

STOP YOUR SCLAUNDRES OF BRITNEY!

Ye shoulde be thankful that Fortuna hath smiled on yow ynough that Britney hath perfourmed for you harlotes.

STOP YOUR SCLAUNDRES OF BRITNEY!

Six Apart (the company that runs the blogging platform Movable Type) is giving out free certificates to make $30 donations to any public school classroom project on the donorschoose.org web site. You can help a school pay for copies of Dorothy West’s The Wedding, art supplies for special-needs kids, a trip to Washington, D.C. to watch our government inaction in action, and so on. Email donorschoose@sixapart.com by noon today (I assume they mean PST, so 3:00 for us east coasters) and they will send you a code within 48 hours.

Go here to learn more about this (and to see that it’s not a hoax).

Since I am not really interested in others except insofar as they affect me, I waffled on this one, but in the end I decided that helping people for free would make me feel good about myself.

By now you’ve almost certainly heard the news about Jerry Sanders, the Republican mayor of San Diego who reversed his position against same-sex marriage.

What you probably haven’t heard the news about is the fact that the press conference at which he made the announcement is deeply, deeply moving.

This probably won’t affect Arnold Schwarzenegger’s probable veto of the gay-marriage bill the California Assembly just passed, but when a politician actually wrestles with his conscience to figure out the right thing to do I figure we should let him know we appreciate it. Write him a letter of support at jerrysanders@sandiego.gov.

Folks who live in or around the New York metropolitan area, I will be reading part of Swish at the following event.

The last time I read from Swish I ended up taking all my clothes off onstage, so who knows what might be on offer this time?

How did Stephan Pastis gain access to my innermost thoughts?

(From a friend who knows me well.)

I’ve written a number of times about my father in this blog. I’ve written about his impressive record litigating cases before the Supreme Court. I’ve written about his sometimes odd views on fairness. I’ve written about the extraordinary letter he sent me one Yom Kippur. I’ve even written about the power of his imagination.

I haven’t mentioned that he gets awards all the time. From the NAACP, from the ACLU (on whose national board he served for several years), from the AFL-CIO. In 2002 he was named Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

Several weeks ago, however, he and his firm won an award that is apparently one of the most sought-after in the country, the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award, given in recognition of “outstanding commitment to volunteer legal services for the poor and disadvantaged.”

The ABA made a very short video about the firm’s pro bono work; that is, work they do for free. (The other firms that won the award were all bragging at the awards banquet about how an impressive 3% of their work was pro bono. Then they showed my father’s video with its casual mention that a quarter of their work is pro bono and I was like, YES! We WIN!)

The video is about three minutes long, and it’s worth watching at least a little bit of just to see my father in a seersucker suit and a Panama hat. I mean, that’s what he wears all the time, but it’s not something one sees online very often.

While I’m feeling particularly proud, I’ll also direct you to a description of some of the pro bono work the firm has done, as well as a short profile of my father.

So three days ago my computer died a terrible, agonizing death. It was so dead I couldn’t even turn it on. No Mac frowny face, no question mark. Just a little message saying I should reboot. It would have been very, very easy to get caught in an endless loop, especially as I enjoy following orders. I kept on doing as I was told, rebooting time and time again, but eventually I had to leave for a meeting.

So now I have a fancy new computer, and I face once again the dilemma that confronts us all in such times: what do I name my hard drive?

My past several hard drives have been named, in chronological order, Beelzebub, Elizabeth Bennett, and Becky Sharp.

At the moment I’m considering Florence Foster Jenkins but I suspect I’ll be over that by the time I wake up tomorrow.