Rode the tour buses all day, just looking and figuring out where we'll ride the Underground on Wednesday: The Tate, The Tower, and ???. Did get off to lunch at Victoria Station (and scout out tomorrow's early departure port) and again to ride The Eye.
Tomorrow tour bus to Bath and Salisbury and Stonehenge.
Steady rain and breezes, 34 degrees: I'd like to thank England for providing a tourist a stereotypical English day.
OH! Brought this for the rain:
Was asked four times if I was an American soccer fan, including once by a machine-gun wielding policeman in Victoria Station. Only three asked me about Obama.
No no no, but I'd best get in one last obamapology before he actually has power, the better to flagellate to ecstatic shitfits once he does have power and doesn't do what I want.
Rubes, I'm old enough to be amazed that a black man was a serious candidate for president, he won a major party nomination, he avoided assassination, that he won the election. I'm amazed that a black man is entering office on a wave of extremepopularity. It's astonishing that it sounds trite to say I never thought I'd see the day.
Obama's attorney-general designate has called water-boarding torture and suggested investigations of Bush felonies, especially in the Justice Department, are not non-starters. Obama' s choice for CIA signals regime change in the intelligence branches, or at least regime review. His nominees for Labor, Interior, and Energy will be, if confirmed, the most liberal in generations if not ever. How much more can he, if he wanted to, at this point in time, repudiate Bush and still be applauded by a majority of Americans?
(And why, from a gamesmanship perspective, would he over-play repudiation's hammer now, before the bestest goshdarn inaugural speech EVER! in which he'll enthuse of post-partisan strap-it-up all-togetherism; why pick fights now, in the honeymoon? Why would Obama, if he is a shit, burn his Bush-scandal bullets now when he can save them for later to distract us from his own clusterfucks.)
Rubes, the only people less popular in America than Bush and his dead-enders and cheetos-eaters are YOU! and ME! and those like us on our shetty blagrolls. Rubes, even if Obama was one of us - whatever we are, bitching about empire while eating at its table - even if Obama is the greatest game-player of our generation, what reasonably could he accomplish in his eight years?
Obamagasm off. Ritual opostasy to recommence Wednesday.
Worth reading. I'd add, within the deviants, the same mechanics of power operate: the fight to control the terms of discourse exists in even the sillyass fights over blogrolls.
Peter Beinart says he'll perceive you as nobler if you just agree he was right all along.
A righteous scolding, though won't Republicans, if Obama's PR is too good, leak classified Obamatorture details to taintstain Obama in the service of rehabilitating their support of Bush?
Had lunch yesterday with a history professor whose class (fifteen years ago) was terrific and who I've always deferred to, in our subsequent friendship, as the more knowledgeable; he has the most awesome memory of anyone I've ever met, remembers details of books he read decades ago, has multiple books on French history published, editor of standard French history textbooks, etc.... Nice guy too.
We got to politics. He lowered his voice in confidentiality, and asked me, do you realize what the Bush Administration has done to Habeus Corpus? and I ate my fruit salad while, in his horrified-voice, with all the scholarly authority invested in him by him (and me), he told me nothing that all of us haven't been saying since 2002. I said as much, and he said, well, yes, but you didn't have any proof, by which he meant credentialed authority.
Yawn. What's disorienting isn't that teachers can be fools, it isn't that many teachers begrudge truths they hear from students until they come to that truth themselves and proclaim it original. What's disorienting is that nothing anyone I've granted authority does is disorienting anymore.
Panetta is the bone Obama's thrown to the Greenwaldians, a swift bitch-slap of Rockefeller and sucker-punch for Feinstein and a big fuck-you to cocktail Washington ANDcareerist CIA turds, plus nominating a guy on very public record as aghast at the Bush CIA? sCHWINg! and by sCHWINg! I mean Rubes, does anyone play us better?
It's first level obamapology reminding you McCain might have won in November and dropped dead New Years Eve. Sarah Palin and the Gaza genocide, think about that.
It's second level obamapology reminding you we have NO idea how deep, wide, and broad the shitfields Obama needs wade through just to get to the septic tank he needs to honey-dip.
It's third level obamapology reminding you, pHWEe! farts smell worse the truer they ripen.
I've been watching an in-law's shocking acceleration into decrepitude and senescence these past two weeks. I'm watching assholes in Palestine bomb civilians in Israel and Israeli assholes bomb civilians in Palestine, listening to assholes on the Right justify Palestinian deaths and assholes on the Left justify Israeli deaths. I'm less than three weeks from engaging my opostasy in the gears of futile war with my forsworn belief Obama's .06% less shitty than piggop. Oh, Earthgirl and my retirement nest-egg is down 42%, and we figure we'll each have to work five years more than we'd hoped. The fracking Spring semester starts next Wednesday, plus, KEXP, as I type this, is playing the new Arcade Fire, and even by Arcade Fire super-standards of suck, it sucks.
And yet
It's not a bad mood, but it's as far from a good mood as I've ever been.
*
The Pastor ("this conflict is not a contest between shades of gray in mist and fog.
It is a matter of distinguishing between murderers and victims")and The World's Shittiest Human ("Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza
war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating") applaud Israel's reaffirmation that Palestinians are ungrateful and verminous subalterns who deserve their slaughtered children. Which proves only how much Gerson and Krauthammer enjoy the slaughter.
2009 music releases include Animal Collective (!) Robyn Hitchcock, Neko Case, Mirah (!) Amadou and Miriam, Sonic Youth (!), to the surprise of no one, Robert Pollard, and Telefon Tel Aviv (!).
Work with me here: most in Rich's Sunday column is true, true, true and so what?
What say Obama not only knew in advance Israel's long-planned attacks in Gaza, he approved and encouraged the attacks happen now, before the start of Obama's term? What if the Israelis said to Obama, sooner or later, you pick?
Just as likely Israel is solidifying it's bargaining position vis a vis Obama, and even more likely Israel doesn't give a flying fuck about America so secure they perceive their oomph as a third-rail, but if Obama will sell out his most loyal loyalists to please everyone who hates his most loyal loyalists, he wouldn't sell out progressives pushing for a more just Middle East truce to keep from pissing on the third rail called Israel?
Sigh. I'm in that vile mood when I can't decide who's more dangerous, the feeble who can't conceive of systems or the deluded who think they can.
On Sunday, Obama awoke early for a 7:15 a.m. workout at a gymnasium at
a sleepy Marine Corps base on the island of Oahu. Michelle Obama,
carrying an iPod and headphones, joined her husband for the 45-minute
exercise session, according to a media pool report. As they emerged
from the gym, Obama, in a gray shirt soaked with sweat, lifted his
right hand to give a quick salute to a couple uniformed Marines
standing nearby.
A quick salute to a couple of uniformed Marines standing nearby? MILKNOSESNORT!
Merry Giftmas: KABOOMERY! for the Giftmas family dinner, should it be necessary and/or amuse you.
*
I don't care enough to follow closely enough to talk about the team - though it doesn't take a die-hard to know the hometown helmetballers won't win splat as long as Dangelos Snyder owns the team - but at least they're wearing the colors at home.
That is a fine uniform, helmetball-wise. Why the fuck you'd wear white at home unless you've always worn white at home mystifies me.
Now, if the hometeam brought back the real burgundy shirts and real gold pants and get that racist stereotype off their helmets, I might be able to summon more than a passing damn. Assuming television eliminates Coors Light commercials.
I praise Ba'al this, praise Ba'al that, and then I hear this from a respected Conservative cultural critic and philosopher:
Ritualistic Baal worship, in sum, looked a little like this: Adults
would gather around the altar of Baal. Infants would then be burned
alive as a sacrificial offering to the deity. Amid horrific screams and
the stench of charred human flesh, congregants – men and women alike –
would engage in bisexual orgies.
and reiterate how good League One looks from the bottom of League Two in Ba'al's pecking charts, cause while League One probably gets none of that, I know I get none of that.
*
You must look at THIS and THIS and THIS. Trust me.
UPDATE:More on Bolaño. I agree with the point, adding, I think Bolaño idolizes literature while disdaining those who would idolize their idolatry of literature.
Gaddis. H/T Dan, who has more. I reread Frolic about two years ago. Considering the financial clusterfuck, considering fights over intellectual property - over what is intellectual property - considering the acceleration of consumerism as religion as embraced by both the priests and the laymen, all of them rubes, I bet JR'sgiggles will be funnier this time. Next.
Most will remember her as Nurse Chapel of course, but for me, she'll always been Lwaxana Troi
not only because she looked like my mother-in-law, Lwaxana was - is - my mother-in-law. UPDATE:
I need add that I think it a testament to Majel Roddenberry that next to Picard and Data, none of the main characters, none of the minor characters, grew as much over the seasons as Lwaxana.
and I was just figuring out I'm not a novelist anyway.
I haven't thought about the Regeneration Trilogy in ages, not so much because I liked it (it was OK, but...) but because a good friend/former professor thinks it's a triumph.
Mourinho v Ferguson? They couldn't rig Inter v Chelsea since they finished the same position in their respective groups, so this must have been deemed second best.
Largehearted Boy has been compiling year end lists if you need a fix.
Pitchfork's Top 50 as picked by staff. #1? That, erm, Fleet Foxes album.
Obscure Sound's #1 is my #6, his #2 my #1, his #4 my ??? and his #8 my ???. And to be honest, I've seen Bon Iver on a bunch of lists but am thoroughly unfamiliar with it, so I've a chore.
Fuck to the fucktillionth, no, but jeebus people, stop clutching your OMFG!s and howling about Rick Fucking Warren as if this surprises you one onanistic dribble of outrage.
Some asshole who believes he's got The Bearded Statutory Rapist on spiritual speed dial is going to give the invocation for the inauguration of a president of a country where an overwhelming majority of citizens pray daily to The Bearded Statutory Rapist and his bastard son born of rape, and a majority of those citizens believe same-sex butt-fucking is a mortal sin (forgiven in their individual pre-saved cases by the subsequent acceptance of the bastard son's thoroughly un-gay love), so chill.
It's a fucking bone, an insulting, deliberately fuck you bone, a brilliantly pragmatic and obvious bone, and every shriek by every megaphoned lefty justifies the bone. Rubes.
*
My favorite book of poems of 2008?
LOYALTY OATH
Solemnly do I swear and affirm and affix many foil seals with arcane symbols to the lividly carcinogenic spirit of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy of Wisconsin, a state I like for letting Matt live there in happiness with his wife, for being the only place of birth Karri is likely to have. And further do I tiresomely swear with my face made up in moral gravity that in most ways I am fucking awesome and not a subversive person interested in or committed to the overthrow of governments by violence, disobedience or denial of gym membership. I swear upon the many stacks of leather bound Bibles the Gideons leave in hotel rooms where I often went with lovers to roll around entire weekends in sheets we fouled with ourselves and Chinese takeout. I swear on your mother's grave and the fresh one beside her where your father sleeps beneath new sod. On my children screaming inside me to hurry up and create them with a foolish but lovely woman. On her body's every curve by which I know how not to grow lost when all there is to see by is the moon tumbling from the sky and the alarm clock's red math. I swear this and avow that and sometime I promise to promise to never violate the Geneva Convention in all its charming quaintness. I depose and declare and many other verbs which sound wondrously stern. I lay down with my heart and my hands above it and both are filled with blood and every breath swears its false oath so help me God.
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