Xmas 2006 - The Blog that keeps on giving

I'd been threatening to start a blog for years. I read Americablog, DailyKos, Huffington Post and Crooks and Liars religiously to keep up-to-date on politics with a southpaw slant. I love them all. I read fiction and non-fiction, along with hard copies of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Believer, Juxtapoz, and the Times Literary Supplement (among others). The world of books and ideas is a second home. I see live music at least twice a month and I buy Cds rather than rip songs because I want the cover art and the lyrics in one place. I belong to four local museums and support live theater. I collect no-brow art and illustration, and early 20th century graphic art. I have strong opinions. Hopefully based on something I know something about. Dante puts people without opinions in their own circle of hell. I'm not worried about hell. I live in Los Angeles.
The blog gets its title from a line in Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia", a trilogy about 19th century Russian intellectual life. "Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have." I agree. I was going to call it Only Connect, after that great quote from E.M. Forster - "Only Connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." I love that quote as well. But a blog can pretty much be defined as life in fragments. Couldn't have my blog's name seemingly contradict its source. Sorry, E.M. Tom wins.
So much for the serious. The blog will also be funny. For every hero of mine who's named Jefferson or Twain or Wilde or Lennon, there are others named Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks.
Hope I read you around the quad.
Thanks.
And Happy Xmas. War is over if you want it.