end of the world seems to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself....

As I type this (9/6/09 13:28 EDT), the photo-pegged story on NYT webpage is (again) about what a pussy Obama is, but the top story on left column is:

U.S. Share of Worldwide Arms Market Grows

and the second is:

Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance

Atwood's latest, reviewed by Fredric Jameson:

But Atwood can now be considered to be a science-fiction writer, I’m happy to say, and this is not meant to disparage. In any case it might be argued (but not here) that at this moment of time, all fiction approaches science fiction, as the future, the various futures, begin to dissolve into ever more porous actuality: and the end of the world seems to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself....

Yet there is a category into which she squarely fits and without which she cannot fully be understood, a category of which at least 300 million English-speakers generally need to be reminded: she is a Canadian, and no little of her imaginative power comes from her privileged position above the border of the lower 48. The Fall is not properly grasped unless it is understood to be a fall into Americanism.

Sounds like Jameson knows it's voting-for-Nobel time....

Which she deserves as much as anyone, yo. I never read Oryx and Crake for no other reason than benign negligence, but I started it Saturday night:

Oryx and Crake was a brilliant tour de force, in which two dystopias and a utopia were ingeniously intertwined. What may now surprise us is that Atwood has decided to go on living in that universe, which, however, did not have a to-be-continued sign attached to it. The wonderful cliffhanger of the earlier novel is thereby somewhat spoiled (we need a technical term for this inverted in medias res, as though Robinson Crusoe broke off with the footprint). But perhaps we do not pick the world, which, on the contrary, picks us. Or perhaps, as the protagonists of Oryx were males, it seemed only fair to write a sequel for the female characters. The Year of the Flood is neither sequel nor prequel, but rather both at once, in what might better be called a parallel narrative, where the godlike figures of the first book (the figures who became gods, let us rather say) are reduced to secondary roles and walk-on parts. Religion is still very much in question in the new novel, but it is a different kind of religion, as we shall see.

I'm in. Anything to break out of this reading slump. Anything to snap my bout of pouty and impotent petulance.

*

• Throwing It All Away
• UPDATE! This.
• UPDATE! Say Hi! to Your History.
• About those arms sales.
• Speculative Activism.
• Afghan clusterfuck.
• Macroeconomics per Krugman.
• Little Tommy Friedman is an asshat.
• The pathetic defending the pathetic.
• Coming soon!

• More. Appiest ays of the ucker's ife.
• Duh, but so?
• UPDATE! Chew on this.
• Arkansastan.
• Clawing out eyes with shit-smeared punji-sticks.
• Elric is in Tashkent, goes to Uzbekistan-Iran (un)friendly.
• Meta.
• Ode to a favorite class.
• Little Danny Snyder is an asshole.
• UPDATE! Billy Goat Trail and marriage.
• Thyrophobia, part five. UPDATE! Part six.
• On Atwood's book tour.
• On Atwood's book tour.
• UPDATE! Booker Short List - Mantel v Coetzee (grimly funny v just fucking grim).
• UPDATE UPDATE! Wolf Hall review. (By someone I just blegscovered and who I can't vouch for at all other than by the unvouchable blegrell I found him.)
• Best review of Inherent Vice that I've read.
• New Coetzee smartly reviewed.
• *!heh!* Had an acid flashback in Barnes and Noble Friday night, saw this old argument on a front end table labeled "Rediscoveries."

• Your future blegeverlerds argue about Moby Dick.
• More.
• I never did get William Boyd though I've read a few. A mentor thinks Any Human Heart a masterpiece. Three attempts at it by me have failed.
• UPDATE: Poirier appreciation.
• Revisiting 1997.
• i don't wanna, i don't think so....
• UPDATE! PiL.
  
• Midyear music review, plus nomination for Song of the Year.
• UPDATE! *!hEh!*

*

THE WHITE LETTER

Cal Bedient

    We are a fair people, white headlights of people, who have loved the north, the east, the south, the west out of all reason, a curious people,

            picking out the others in the barbarous
            see-through of the falls, and I regret to say
            the pond in the orchard is not full of them.

            I have so loved your views of working people,
            gold earrings in the little brown girls' ears.
            Write to me when the Flake White

            peeling from your thighs
            has been diagnosed.

    Re: the cloudhooves of the love that safeguards the universe, crossing the Rockies, what are you thinking, don't tell me, the women & Childn. Cried dureing my Stay of an hour at this place and a still whiter thought is always yet to come to interigate thro' the Intptr., just as America leapt out of "cloudy, moist, melancholy old Europe," spilling six feet of nice young men into Kentuck -

            and certainly land washed by packing-peanut surf
            conveys a rich position. Always
            the power of white is exciting to me.
            the creaming edge of the Pacific
            is childhood of someone white,
            laughing to herself now,
            she's that kind of titanium -
            riding into combers on a mount
            the pale color of pilgrim time.

            Still, we'll want props if we're to fuck again:
            lickable polished policewoman shoes
            and a white sheet like a mountain stream
            to tighten around the throat.

    I undertook to tell the Cheif who we wer, how come, wither, and rolled up my sleve to shew him I was not a Savage and did not wish to hirt him. He threw his left arm over my wright sholder and vociferted the word ah-hi-a, ah-hi-a, "I am much rejoiced." He requested his squar might be used for the night.
    I had this day an agility. A beautiful howling green down to the river below. Name the river Dearborn after the Secretary of war.

            and unto this evening,
            several hundred miles within difficult going,
            this wild & mountainous bosom of more.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: