The Procedure Is Painless, Using Methods Currently Available Only in Cartoons

Imagine Howard Dean with Obama's charisma:

Hah, joke. Democrats would never permit it. There's a reason Washington Democrats hate Howard Dean, it's the reason he's unelectable, the reason that I like him. UPDATE! Rimshot! Twooted yesterday, you'll have to trust that I just saw it now via Blegeverlard Atrios.

*!hEh!* another pint bet: I'll be campaigning for Dean in 2016 when he runs as a third party candidate against the incumbent Emperor Beck and the Democratic nominee, Whogives A. Flyingfuck.

To buy you pints in 2017 for my foolery would be sweet.

*

• Not in America, not with Democrats.
• Mechanization Didn't Take Command.
• Zinger.
• Stage Fright.
• In American Union, Price Controls You.
• I'm certain neocons would never use the occasion of Irving Kristol's death to score political points.
• Irving Kristol's St Peters.
• Stephen Walt again proves to neocons he's anti-American by again not putting Israel's interests first.
• You know, if this had been made a big deal under W, we'd be accusing Rove of hyping fear for political reasons.
• UPDATE! If this was a case of a Republican federal prosecutor going after a major Republican fundraiser with ties to a senator with the oomph of Chuck Schumer, we'd be gagagaga, yes?
• Glenn Beck as rapper.
• Glenn Beck as Kurt Cobain.
• Commence Fox shitstorm..... now.
• Krackerkristers are different than you and me. I understand the problem.
• Krister morons worry bogus krister college fosters bad impressions?
• Fucking go away. Both of them.
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• This should not make me so happy, but lordy, triplegiggle.
• ICC!

• Thyraphobia, part 8.
• All reviews of Joyce Carol Oates are legally obligated to use the word prolific in some form in the first sentence.
• Winterson reviews new Atwood.
• The prolific Joyce Carol Oates on Oryx and Crake (I agree with her about stick figures):

The constraining mantle of post-apocalyptic genre is borne lightly by Atwood in Oryx and Crake, but such cautionary fantasies have become so popular in recent decades that revitalizing the form is a considerable challenge. Where there is an apocalypse, there must be an apocalypse-catalyst, or causer: the monomaniac Mad Scientist. Where there is such a villain, there must be a foil: the sensitive witness, the survivor who, like Ishmael, lives to tell the tale. There may even be a third person, a love object, for whom the two contend, in this case the former prostitute Oryx, whom Crake hires to educated the new breed of humans. She becomes for the Children of Crake the truly female figure. How to humanly register, still more feel any emotional involvement with characters like Jimmy/Snowman and the elusive Oryx when, as the novel hopes to persuade us, the earth's entire population, billions of men, women, children, are dying? Such vast cataclysms leave us unmoved no matter how skillfully rendered by so trenchant and committed a writer as Atwood, though visual dramatizations, as in Steven Spielberg's recent remake of The War of the Worlds, can rouse the viewer to a visceral horror that might seem to substitute for an emotional engagement. With its plethora of freaky forms, Oryx and Crake suggests one of those unnerving Saul Steinberg drawings in which recognizable human figures are surrounded by bizarre cartoon characters, human and animal and geometrical, some of them here stick figures.

• k-punk says go back and reread Surfacing.
• A Bolano syllabus. I stopped Savage Detectives when I picked up Inherent Vice because... I wanted to. It's scratching at the door to be let in. After the new Atwood, the new Powers, (UPDATE! after the update an inch lower) it will be.
• I tried American Rust because my grandfather Frank worked in the steel mills of the Mon Valley, and I credit Athitakis, he gave it the novel twenty more pages than I did.
• On point of view; I'd not seen Hemon and Ishiguro compared in the same sentence before, and hmmm.

!UPDATE!

There'd been no update at his website, Toby Press hadn't sent me any email, the last I heard the book was in suspension because of Harington's health, I'm walking past the New Book Shelves five minutes ago and !wOOt! the new novel by the Best American Novelist you've never read.

Just opening it up randomly, it's the third Latha novel, and a good solid knowledge of all the Stay More novels (which are all different parts of a MUCH larger project) will enhance the buzz. If I can badger just one of you to try Harington, start with Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks before reading any other.

I've said it often here, With is my favorite novel ever.

• Stevie Smith poems at the always generous wood s lot.
• Spicer poem.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• King of Spain.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Rain Champagne.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

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EYES SCOOPED OUT AND REPLACED BY HOT COALS

Thomas Lux

The above, the punishment, the mild
but just punishment, symbolic,
the great advancement our planet
most needs.
The procedure is painless,
using methods currently available
only in cartoons. Polls were taken,
it was voted upon overwhelmingly in favor.
The justness of it,
known in the bone
by each of our nation - is undeniable. Thus, it is proclaimed,
on this day of anno domino, etc, I, the final arbiter
and ultimate enforcer
of such things (appointed by the king!), make official
and binding, this: that the eyes shall be gouged out
and replaced by hot coals
in the head, the blockhead,
of each countryman or woman who,
upon reaching their majority,
has yet to read
Moby Dick, by Mr. Herman Melville (1819-1891), American
    novelist and poet.

*

Woke up with this in my head: