Hah! Stereolab was #164 Kate Bush was #165 and Peter Gabriel was #166 in KEXP's stupid-ass voter countdown of the "greatest artists of all time" as a gimmick for their Fall 2010 Drive (which, fuck it, give to), and I had nothing to do with it, I didn't vote! Hah! The odds they'd be in a row! (I'll post the list if and when KEXP posts it after the countdown, but for now, if you don't believe me, you'll have to go to their playlist and scroll through days and hours....)
As I type this they're down to #128 and still no Peru Ubu. To spare myself an emotional aneurysm when Arcade Fucking Fire is either one, two or three and Pere Ubu doesn't make the list:
First sentence of a Frederick Post article on the president of the Frederick County Maryland Islamic Society: Counter to stereotype, Mudusar Raza, president of the Islamic Society of Frederick, speaks perfect English. Devious bastard.
Vargas Llosa wins Nobel. I've read Conversation in the Cathedral and Feast of the Goat and War of the End of the World, all for classes, and they didn't change my world but OK, no complaints.
UPDATE!MOE TUCKER, TEA-PARTIER!?!Bwahahaha! Worlds tilt! (As long as it's not Cale in front of that microphone my paradigms are fine, yo.)
It's not just busy, but Blegsylvania seems to be dying, Kind is still wonderful Kind but unKind wins too often, I'm in conversations of sorts with three friends who've bouts of blogangst, and I'm fighting off another case of bleggalgazing. Hope this cures it. Doubt it.
AUTONOMIANISM,
my ass! Breaking the law of man - say, reasonable sanctions against murder - is OK as long a God approves it? Problem is, which means: a man interprets God, unpacks God's book, a man insists other men accept this interpretation. This happens because God's expository writing lacks lucidity and He or His scribes often write sloppily. He seems torn between tearing out a sinner's bowels and bestowing eyeballs on the eyeball-less. We all know His job is irksome, ceaseless, everybody knows His subjects are unprincipled imbeciles, all of His subjects this way, all be the ones who say God says they are not.
Seen those commercials for the Halloween costume stores, those companies that sign short-term leases at favorable rates for empty storefronts from near-bankrupt commercial real estate brokers? The first child doesn't appear until the tenth, eleventh second. Carnival as sanctioned transgression is old, but increases in opportunities and intensity are indicative our overlords are preparing us for increased Lenten penance.
No one talks about Bakhtin anymore, so institutionalized, so celebrated, so prevalent is carnival it's like oxygen. Who is more useful to the elites than Jon Stewart? Than NFL football, Glenn Beck's reality show and tent-revival? It's everywhere big, it's everywhere small. This shitty blog, for instance. Yours.
Hillary! (And yes this is bait for you, C, but the idea that Clinton would pursue policies different than Obama is wrong; his presidency is a justification and (they hope) valedictory success of Clinton policies. If you want to argue that she might have been better implementing those policies, that's a different and more interesting question. xoxo.)
UPDATE! Speaking of fucksticks, Ben Wetmore, which I post because the fuckstick's last name means something treasured as an ancient feud against fucksticks to exactly two of you.
Was CNN waiting for an excuse to fire Rick Sanchez?
Thomas Wolfe was born 110 years ago yesterday. Haven't read in decades, but when I was 20, Look Homeward, Angel stunned and amazed me. Wolfe is for the young.
Has any author's reputation fallen faster than Dostoyevsky's? I haven't read any since rereading Demons (in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation) x-years ago, but when looking for something else in my bookshelves a couple of weeks ago I opened Karamazov to a random page and read for three minutes and I can't imagine myself desiring to read Dostoyevsky again. Dostoyevsky is for the young.
Bakhtin, of course, is as famous, if not more, for his work on Dostoyevsky than for his theories on carnival.
Serendipitously, two days before seeing the above link about Dostoyevsky, I read this about Coetzee's novel about Dostoyevsky circa writing Demons. I remember reading the Coetzee, though I remember nothing about the novel.
UPDATE!New Roth reviewed by Kakutani, which means the review is useless, but Nobel announced this Thursday, he used to get mentions. I used to feel obliged to read each new Roth, did so through his late 1990s trilogy-of-sorts, but no longer do. Maybe it's because if Wolfe and Dostoyevsky are for the young, Roth is for the old, but respecting an author is different than liking an author.
He loves modernist fiction. Serendipitously, of that list, which I saw first yesterday afternoon: last week I mailed The Tunnel to a friend (who it turns out has already read it, but I needed a CD jewel-box), this morning I mailed JR to a friend, two days ago I noted Wallace Stevens birthday here, and five days ago I linked to posts re: Blood Meridian.
Biblioklept is still on a Blood Meridian spree. Go.
I'm not familiar with Steve Stern. Good thing I have access to a university library's stacks.
UPDATE! I'd never heard this Kate Bush cover until five minutes ago. The original is the opening track of one of my favorite albums ever. Love love love.
New Neil Young. Underwhelmed so far. With Lanois producing, I guess I thought it'd be, what, more atmospheric? Well, that's on me. More listens needed, though I do like the new one down below poem.
UPDATE! Spent the morning with it. Growing on me. Angry World.
THE DOG
Michael Ryan
The neighbors’ baby died age one month so they’re off to Big Sur “to celebrate her life” and I stupidly agreed to feed their dog— a twelve year old wire-haired mix, half blind, half dead itself, its gum lines receded to a rictus grin. What was I supposed to say when the husband asked? “Your baby’s dead, but I can’t be bothered. I don’t really know you. Ask someone else. I don’t like your dog. I think it’s hideous. What if it dies while you’re away? I’m supposed to call and tell you that? I don’t want to touch it. What if your misfortune is contagious?” But I said “Be glad to,” and he embraced me, this Kurt or Kirk, I’m not even sure which. “Siobhan”—that’s his wife—“can’t stand to kennel her,” he sobbed into my shoulder, his eye rims moistening behind his clownish owlish oversized glasses he knocked askew against my clavicle. It startled me so much I couldn’t guess who “her” referred to until I got he meant the dog. All her’s: the dead baby, the wife, and now the dog.
I don’t like the dog. It stinks. It needs a bath. Who washes a dog during a month like that? But I’ll be damned if I’m going to do it— dried dogshit or worse matted in hair the color and texture of rusted wire caked with rotted moldy drywall. The dog howls all day—and I mean all day— as if these were the feelings left inside the house. From outside all month the house had been silent except the one time early on the paramedics came so the neighborhood knew a disaster was happening. I never doubted for a moment there was wailing inside, including the baby’s, which must have been constant. But the dog didn’t howl until everyone was gone.
Siobhan has to be forty-something— They supposedly did a doula water birth at home, her husband assisting, no doctor, no amnio, no genetic testing—I think they belong to some megachurch where the pastor the size of a fish stick from the bleacher seats projects fifty feet high with his bleached teeth and they sing-along upbeat Christian music ten thousand strong, as loudly as they can. “To celebrate her life”: the pastor’s phrase, I bet. If that helps them bear it, fine. All I know is I have their dog to deal with. One thing I’m not doing besides wash it is walk it, so I called a franchised service that sent a Belarusian with a crescent nose stud (God knows what his story is) who rang my doorbell after half an hour. “I can’t walk dog,” he said. “It won’t go. It won’t leave house. I think it sick. You better take it to vet.” So I did. Again I picked one from the phonebook, who charged me eighty bucks to find a loose tooth, although he offered a thousand dollars worth of tests. “The dog is old,” he said. Oh. Thanks. Then I tried at home pretending the dog was mine, actually petting it (a bit) and talking in goofy baby tones while giving liver chips and buddy biscuits and playing fetch, but, while I napped, it scratched off the front door paint and started gnawing its way out. After I gated it back in the neighbors’ kitchen with its blanket and bowls and dried bull pizzle, it began howling again, which is what it’s doing now.
Maybe there’s something in the house still. Maybe tiny syringes and bandages upstairs the dog smells. It would be too odd to go up there where the baby was, into the baby’s room, with the neighbors’ hopes there as furniture, pink bunny or smiley angel or kiddie Bible wallpaper. It would be like being inside their privacy, their intimacy, their monthlong nightmare. Maybe I have to call them after all. I hate to call them—they should have peace to grieve enough to live again in a house that no matter what they believe or understand will never be for one moment as they thought. I don’t know what else to do but call them. Their dog—their ugly old dog—is howling for them and will not stop.
Dear Cowardly Emailer clever enough to send an email without return address (not that I'd have emailed you; I remark only on your cowardice),
Why yes, this blog does suck, thank you. I've always said so. I don't know what I want this crappy blog to be, funny or serious, happy or angry, light or heavy, conciliatory or accusatory, open-minded or parochial, honest or disingenuous, coherent or incoherent, rude or ruder, loud or louder, self-aggrandizing or self-scourging, informative or white noise, etc.... but I do know that I don't want this blog to be either funny or serious, happy or angry, light or heavy, coherent or incoherent, conciliatory or accusatory, open-minded or parochial, honest or
disingenuous, rude or ruder, loud or louder, self-aggrandizing or
self-scourging, informative or white noise, etc...
These are the funniest, most serious, happiest, angriest, lightest, heaviest, most in need of conciliation, most necessarily accusatory, most open-minded, most parochial, most honest, most disingenuous, most coherent, most incoherent, the rudest, loudest, most self-aggrandizing, most self-scourging, most informative, the most static-filled white-noised days of my life. I'm canary, I'm weathervane, I'm Cassandra, I'm Fool. That you took the trouble to tell me this crappy blog sucks is a sign this crappy blog is suc(K)ceeding at some level. My thanks are not either/or either.
Ambulance-fee back on ballot. If anyone blegs a passionate post detailing the reasons to vote against the fee, I'll link. Alternatively, if that person wants to find his passionate comment detailing the reasons to vote against the fee downblog, I'll link to that.
What are books good for? "My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books
take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations
of space into thinking usable by others. In 1959, C.P. Snow threw down
the challenge of "two cultures," the scientific and the humanistic,
pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies.
In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed
that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture
of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective.
It isn't infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality,
and it ends, just as our lives do. Books tell stories. Scholarly books
tell scholarly stories."
Against the Day. I've found myself thinking about it more than I thought I would when I finished my second read a couple of months ago, mostly about Cyprian Latewood, his entire story but especially his epiphany in Bulgaria. The more I think about it, for all the Vibes, Traverses, Rideouts, Chums, and Highcourts, Cyprian may be the key character.
UPDATE!Heh! Damn, now Jim's pissed at the realities of the world. Those of you guitar players who read this shitty blog, can The Situation's CD release be far away?
To live each day as if it might be the last Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius Inscribes in his journal to remind himself That he, too, however privileged, is mortal, That whatever bounty is destined to reach him Has reached him already, many times. But if you take his maxim too literally And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will, Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell To friends and family, you’ll come to regret it. Soon your lawyer won’t fit you into his schedule. Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet When they hear your heavy step on the porch. And then your house will slide into disrepair. If this is my last day, you’ll say to yourself, Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway? If you don’t want your heirs to curse the day You first opened Marcus’s journals, Take him simply to mean you should find an hour Each day to pay a debt or forgive one, Or write a letter of thanks or apology. No shame in leaving behind some evidence You were hoping to live beyond the moment. No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off, Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping To meet by then someone who’d love to join you, Two seats near the front so you catch each note.
Well then, this will be the next few days' bleg-chum:
One closing remark that I want to make: It is inexcusable for any
Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this
midterm election. There may be complaints about us not having gotten
certain things done, not fast enough, making certain legislative
compromises. But right now, we've got a choice between a Republican
Party that has moved to the right of George Bush and is looking to lock
in the same policies that got us into these disasters in the first
place, versus an administration that, with some admitted warts, has been
the most successful administration in a generation in moving
progressive agendas forward.
Yesterday I got cornered and hectored separately by K and W and S and D who each asked first if I'd read the interview and second if I'm going to shut up and wise up and vote.
Greg Sargent categorized the three "strains" of Democratic/Progressive displeasure with Obama:
The first is the Dem base's lack of enthusiasm. This, obviously,
concerns rank and file voters who, from the point of view of the White
House, are not sufficiently happy with Obama's performance. This is what
Biden was referring to when he urged Dems to "remind our base
constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the
alternatives."
The second group on the left constitutes high-profile commentators, such
as Rachel Maddow and Glenn Greenwald, who are mounting a detailed,
substantive policy critique of the Obama administration on issues that
are important to them. These folks see their role as advocates for a
particular policy agenda, and they don't hesitate to whack the White
House when it commits what they see as grave policy missteps. For them
to hold their fire because the White House wants them to would be an
unthinkable betrayal of the role they've carved out for themselves. This
is the "professional left" Robert Gibbs sneeringly alluded to -- even
though Obama himself has said he craves such criticism.
The third group constitutes operatives like Adam Green of the
Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, some
labor operatives, and groups like MoveOn. These folks are making a
largely political argument. They are not merely griping because
the White House failed to be as left wing as they would have liked on
the public option or the big banks. They are making the case that
fighting harder for liberal priorities -- even if that battle is
hopeless in some cases -- is better politics for Democrats overall, because it might leave Dems with an energized base heading into the midterms.
I'm two and three! Yay me!
"People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up," Obama
told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president
told Democrats that making change happen is hard and "if people now
want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious
in the first place." Change is hard? Obama seems to be having an easy time expanding and extending the scope of the state panopticon, his power
to kill Americans whenever and wherever and for whatever reason he wants, to escalate robot-war. Obama had wrapped the
lengthy Q-and-A session, according to the magazine, but then returned
unprompted to make one more impassioned point and unleash on the
enthusiasm gap. He portrayed a clear choice between an administration
that despite some warts has helped advance its agenda, and a Republican
Party that would offer disastrous policies for the economy and civil
liberties. *!hEh!* He said "civil liberties."
(I'd also point out there's a fourth group, those of us who want nothing more than rightwing American heads to explode in impotent fury
and Obama's only delivered on the fury.)
K and W and S and D are snapping like schnauzers at bacon I still compulsively snap at when bacon is waved. -.06% less-shitty is a mighty powerful stimulant when the .06% more is Newt Gingrich. If Bob Ehrlich is elected governor of Maryland I think one of my loved ones has enough seniority to survive but another of my loved ones might be pig-budgeted out of a job. I've still never not voted when eligible, every even-number year since 1978, primary and general election. I will vote this November for the BoE apple ticket because loved ones say please. I'm curious to see if it's close enough in last day polls I'll vote against Ehrlich....but....
But is this true? Are K and W and S and D snapping that that could be worse, that that starvation level is the best that's achievable when their team is in power?
With Matt Lauer yesterday, Obama was asked about poverty, and he
basically gave an answer that George W. Bush would have given. He said
that increasing economic growth will help poverty. It will. I agree that
job creation is the most important thing. But when the unemployment
rate was a lot lower, there were still millions of Americans who needed
these benefits.
I’ve been pulling my punches, and my progressive colleagues have been
pulling their punches, because we’re rooting for this administration to
succeed. But honestly, if George W. Bush did what they’re trying to do,
we’d be camping out in front of the White House. Goodwill only goes so
far when tens of thousands of children need food.
Either Obama can't or Obama can and won't, yes? Either Democrats can't or Democrats can and won't. I think it's can and won't, but why should I allow myself to be blackmailed into voting for either?
I know shit about Christianity, though I know more than most christers. The piece asks, straight-faced, "So why would an atheist know more about religion than a Christian?"
Acknowledging that Democrats are complicit shits doesn't mitigate the shittiness of neo-con assholes and the crackers they manipulate: Gaffney argued that Sharia -- that is, a system of laws defined by the
Koran -- is a threat to the Constitution, and most mosque leaders preach
Sharia. It's a common argument among necons and mosque opponents... Gaffney admitted, however, that he is no expert."I don't hold myself out as an expert on Sharia Law," he said. "But I have talked a lot about that as a threat."
Blood Meridian once, twice (with delicious evisceration of James Wood).
Blood Meridian illustrated (h/t the guy above). Planet has been assigned All My Pretty Ones, the first novel McCarthy wrote after Blood Meridian, and Yay! I suppose (as opposed to other options), but (I said this here before), Blood Meridian hit me like a hammer, and nothing McCarthy has written since that I've read (and I stopped reading after the Border Trilogy) can compare.
Which is most important to writing poetry, description or compression?
GILBERT
Neither. I would say presence, feeling,
passion—not passion, but love. I usually say romantic love, but here I
don’t mean being thrilled. I mean the huge experience of loving another
person and being loved by another person. But it’s more than just liking
someone or thinking they make you happy.
INTERVIEWER
In your poems, how important is the interplay between syntax and line breaks?
GILBERT
I don’t think that way. I work by instinct
and intelligence. By being smart, emotional, probing. By being sly,
stubborn. By being lucky. Being serious. By being quietly passionate. By
something almost like magic.
The band all the college kids at Hilltop are talking about stole their entire sound from Hall and Oates. I'm not saying it sucks - it doesn't - it's just fucking weird.
Obamasshole: Now, the second reason I'm telling you this is because
Democrats, just
congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty.
(Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well,
the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill
passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particularly derivatives
rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't
yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was
going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are.
(Laughter.) And gosh, no mention of not closing Guantanamo,
reducing civil liberties, expanding executive power, reducing
transparency, expanding military operations, but since you
mentioned it, fuck you on the public option in health care too, you
(pints for everyone!) motherfucker.
Look at the smirk on the above motherfucker. He applauds Obama's speech attacking the Left.
On what
I just wrote about. This is true: I hadn't planned on writing today,
but got up, brewed coffee, turned on PC, clicked on YFWP, saw the
Stromberg piece, and fuck.
UPDATE!Greenwald weighed in, brought documentation.
O! Fuck Joe Biden too. Remember, Obamalame brought him in for his foreign policy expertise. How's that working out?
Thomas Edison High School?
I missed that one. Lived in this county for 46 years, have a kid who's a
senior in an MCPS high school, have a dear friend who's a teacher in
MCPS, am married to a woman who's a teacher in MCPS, I've never heard of
Thomas Edison High School.
This is the beauty of being alone towards the end of summer: a dozen stray animals asleep on the porch in the shade of my feet, and the smell of leaves burning in another neighborhood. It is late in the morning, and my forehead is alive with shadows, some bats rock back and forth to the rhythm of my humming, the mimosa flutters with bees. This is the house of unwritten poems, this is where I am unborn.
According to fuckstick Steven Pearlstein, asshat and business columnist in Your Fucking Washington Post, if you voted in MOCO for Hans Riemer you're as lunatic as a Delaware tea-partier voting for Christine O'Donnell:
I disagree with my Post colleague E.J. Dionne that this is strictly a
Republican phenomenon, in which the "tea party'' and other
anti-government zealots are in the final stages of driving out
experienced, thoughtful moderates from the Republican party. The dynamic
on the Democratic side is as much about interest group politics as it
is about political ideology, but you don't have to look hard to find it
in the defeat locally of Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty and Montgomery
Council member Duchy Trachtenberg, or nationally in President Obama's
declining poll numbers.
Tuesday in Delaware was a bad day not only for Republicans but also for
conservatives. Tea Partyer Christine O'Donnell scored a stunning victory
over establishment Republican Mike Castle. Stunning but pyrrhic. The
very people who have most alerted the country to the perils of President
Obama's social democratic agenda may have just made it impossible for
Republicans to retake the Senate and definitively stop that agenda.
Peasants! Wait! The World's Shittiest Human walks it back:
Nor is opposition to O'Donnell's candidacy a sign of hostility or
disrespect to the Tea Party. Many of those who wanted to see Castle
nominated in Delaware have from the beginning defended the Tea Party movement
from the mainstream media's scurrilous portrayal of it as a racist
rabble of resentful lumpenproletarians. Indeed, it is among the most
vigorous and salutary grass-roots movements of our time, dedicated to a
genuine constitutionalism from which the country has strayed far.
Genuine constitutionalism. He funny, Mr ShittyMan.
Republican Senate prospects illustrate the challenge. Without the broad
backlash to the Obama agenda channeled by the Tea Party, Republican
control of the Senate would be inconceivable. Without the primary
victories of Tea Party candidates in Nevada and Delaware, that control
would be more likely. And some Tea Party activists seem content with
this state of affairs, arguing that an unspoiled minority is preferable
to a majority held hostage to its most liberal members. "We need people
[in Washington] to understand we've got to get back to limited
government," says Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who endorsed O'Donnell, "and we can't afford to have other Republicans who don't get that message."
Peasants! There are ramparts and there are ramparts:
But this is not the way parties gain influence. Imposing the same
ideological standards for all Republican candidates -- in Delaware as in
South Carolina -- would ensure losses in whole regions of the country.
And DeMint's Republican colleagues in the Senate cannot be pleased that
his passion for purity may have helped deprive them of committee
chairmanships that influence the direction of public policy in thousands
of practical ways each year.
Villagers to Action! If Republicans don't recapture the Senate, Tea-Partiers will be blamed, if Republicans do recapture the Senate, Tea-Partiers will be trained.
Not that the Left in this country will ever tea-party, but there are entertaining lessons to be relearned watching the upcoming house-breaking of the insurgent Right.
UPDATE! New Heaney and Muldoon reviewed, which reminded me that we're about two weeks from the start of Nobel season. Is Roth the only American possibility?
I hadn't thought of Bill Nelson in a couple of years.
THE ABDUCTION
Stanley Kunitz
Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.
"Do you believe?" you asked.
Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:
how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.
That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.
Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.
You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,
indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.
Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?
I'm not frightened of the Crackerstanis: I envy the Crackerstanis. Even if I think their narratives are moronic, they have the management class of Team Republican (and assorted Villagers) shitting their shitty pants. Crackerstanis now think Karl Rove is a liberal, yo. Democrats? They're more frightened of Crackerstanis than fucking retards like me. That? Is on fucking retards like me.
I don't doubt that pissing off Liberals is a strong tenet of Crackerstani faith (I, erm, like pissing off Crackerstanis, yo), but I also don't doubt their belief that America is being deliberately, systematically, ruthlessly, and sloppily clusterfucked by financial overlords is as devout and sincere as mine. I don't doubt if I debated a Crackerstani me, after calling each other names, we'd agree on the disease if never ever ever on its cause or its cure. We might even agree that my thinking him an apeshit christer and him thinking me an apeshit marxist serves our overlords by keeping us dim-witted and easily goaded but ultimately docile mammals.
Which is to say (I'm on Eno-overload) what I've said before: perhaps someone will emerge who can unite the disaffected and angry on both ends of the spectrum, but (a) I deeply doubt it and (b) s/he would never be permitted to succeed.
Žižek. Žižek, Žižek, Žižek: What are the dimensions of the Žižekian end, then? Living in the End Times
certainly acknowledges that we are the subjects of a mode of finality,
but produces a Marxian account of this as a concoction of pending
environmental disaster, systems of production and exchange imploding
under the weight of their own deviousness, and a bereftness of radical
thought on the part of the mainstream left. Pointedly, this isn’t a
triumphal declaration of market-based liberalism’s inexorable
superiority comparable to those made by the right-wing Hegelians of
neo-con academia. Here, we’re positioned as observers as the sun sets on
the intellectual epoch kicked off by Hegel, witnesses who must now
return to his thought, genned up on Marx and Lacan, in order to confront
circumstances whose absolutely novel repatterning is marked by nothing
so much as a terrorising sense of acceleration. Committed as ever,
through his unexpected use of jokes, zanily incongruous pop cultural
references, and shaggy dog anecdotes, to estranging the reader from late
capitalism’s alleged comforts, Žižek’s task is to galvanise the
reader’s imagination into becoming the motor force of a politics equal
to the unprecedented knottiness of globalisation and ecocatastrophe.
Good thing I have access to a university library's stacks.
You youngsters aren't old enough to remember when Cal Thomas was a bigger nobody than he is today: We are doing a poor job of fighting the terrorists at home if we
continue to allow Muslim immigrants, especially from Pakistan, Somalia
and Yemen, into America. We won't win this war if we permit the
uncontrolled construction of mosques, as well as Islamic schools, some
of which already have sown the seeds from which future terrorists will
be cultivated. We won't win this war if we continue to permit the
large-scale conversion to Islam of prison inmates, many of whom become
radicalized and upon release enlist in al-Qaida's army. That would be
primarily African-American prison inmates incarcerated for activities Cal
Thomas believes should be criminal in no small part because they incarcerate African-Americans.
Freedom, continued. Rather than retype and/or rephrase what I wrote in an email to a friend, let me steal from myself: I haven't read the Franzen. I held it in my hands in a B&N, opened
it to some random page, read two paragraphs, and fuck that. IOZ's
reading of it suggests I'd hate it, not just for the reasons he dislikes
it but because I used to be (or I'm trying not to be) the target
audience Franzen seems to have written the book for.
Another no for Freedom, though BR Myers is an ass.
Went on a business lunch yesterday, and the piped-in music channel played both 10K Maniacs and Smashing Pumpkins, neither of which I'd thought of in months if not years. I neither loved nor loathed either, never bought one or the other, but I remember both being BIG! at one time, it's interesting they're so small now.
Birds that love high trees and winds and riding flailing branches hate ledges as gripless and narrow, so that a tail is not just no advantage but ridiculous, mashed verticle against the wall. You will have seen the way a bird who falls on skimpy places lifts into the air again in seconds - a gift denied the rest of us when our portion isn't generous.
Eno-overload? Bonus: what's the secret of this song's title?
Had lunch yesterday with a friend, another former teacher (let me never give any impression I don't know how fortunate I am to work and have gone to school at Hilltop), a poli/sci specializing in American political culture (his mentor was Chris Lasch). He says in his 40 years of teaching and 68 years of life he has never
seen more people ready to take offense and pick a fight. He says it's
taken 18 years since the coordinated anti-Clinton barrage started in 1992 in exploitation of the new potentialities of new media realities and, regardless of blame - we're all to blame - it's like
weight: I didn't gain that 50 pounds overnight, I'm not going to lose it
overnight, and statistics suggest I'll be fatter
in ten years than thinner.
I hearby ban me using the word *motherfucker* on this shitty blog, this shitty blog's comments, or by me in the comments of your shitty blog, hence through the end of September. A hypothetical pint I'll owe you if you catch me, a hypothetical pint you me if I stay clean. Dinner and pints, R, one way or the other, October 1. It's the very least I can do to fake civility.
As I type, this is the top story on YFWP website, with this sublede: Controversies over calls to burn the Koran and over a proposed mosque in
New York are sparking questions about how Sept. 11 became so
politicized. Republican Thanksgiving sparking questions?
As many have noted, bombing wedding parties with predator drones is a much better recruitment tool for al-Q than a christer burning Korans.
Novels about being fat. Berger's Reinhart was pretty fat by the last of the four if I remember correctly. And of course, there's Mantel's Allison in Beyond Black, though of course both author and character are English.
Storms of perfume lift from honeysuckle, lilac, clover—and drift across the threshold, outside reclaiming inside as its home. Warm days whirl in a bright unnumberable blur, a cup—a grail brimmed with delirium and humbling boredom both. I was a boy, I thought I'd always be a boy, pell—mell, mean, and gaily murderous one moment as I decapitated daises with a stick, then overcome with summer's opium, numb—slumberous. I thought I'd always be a boy, each day its own millennium, each one thousand years of daylight ending in the night watch, summer's pervigilium, which I could never keep because by sunset I was an old man. I was Methuselah, the oldest man in the holy book. I drowsed. I nodded, slept—and without my watching, the world, whose permanence I doubted, returned again, bluebell and blue jay, speedwell and cardinal still there when the light swept back, and so was I, which I had also doubted. I understood with horror then with joy, dubious and luminous joy: it simply spins. It doesn't need my feet to make it turn. It doesn't even need my eyes to watch it, and I, though a latecomer to its surface, I'd be leaving early. It was my duty to stay awake and sing if I could keep my mind on singing, not extinction, as blurred green summer, lifted to its apex, succumbed to gravity and fell to autumn, Ilium, and ashes. In joy we are our own uncomprehending mourners, and more than joy I longed for understanding and more than understanding I longed for joy.
This performance is inexplicable in light of the enormous Democratic
majority in the Senate, which at times has hit the 60 votes needed to
preclude procedural measures against nominees. It reflects a dramatic
failure of management by senate Democratic leaders like Patrick Leahy
and Harry Reid, but it also points to a White House that is simply
oblivious to the nominations process. On this measure, Rahm Emanuel is
the worst performing White House chief of staff in recent memory.
Obamoron and Rahmoron, here is where I'm unable to molt a layer of roobity: if Obamoron and Rahmoron received their orders from Triskellion Castle to further wreck the economy, expand the scope of American military operations, to further erode civil liberties, Obamoron and Rahmoron would bumble to 4% unemployment, we'd be out of Afghanistan, and habeus would be restored to pre-911 assumptions.
If Democrats and Republicans are the Red Sox and Yankees; if the difference is solely a matter of which team gets the loudest booyehs in tribal contests of brand loyalty motherfuckered for maximum ugliness to distract the fucking roobs and keep them docile; and if the reward for the winning team is getting to feed first and whenever at the elite's (once thought) endless spigot; if there is no moral difference between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich since both will enact whatever policies their puppeteers tell them to enact; this is the root of my roobity: I bet pints on Obama the gamester, not Obama the Black FDR, and sheeyit, do I look stoopid.
Campaign season: Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington
for a very long time, and they're not always happy with me," the
president said. "They talk about me like a dog. That's not in my
prepared remarks, but it's true. And it is true. And Obama barks when they say bark.
UPDATE! Rumors swirling that Rahmoron is going to resign Chief of Staff to run for mayor of Chicago. Politico runs the possible replacements and defines an "outsider": If
Obama wants an outsider who is well known to official Washington, he
could look at someone like Tom Nides, chief operating office of Morgan
Stanley and chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets
Association, who is an eight-year veteran of Capitol Hill.
The ultra-rich are assholes says ultra-rich asshole.
Tenure and teaching. There is a wave building against tenure for reasons good and bad.
Good news about the Potomac. As well as I know the river upstream from DC, I don't know it at all downstream from DC, but I remember camping on the C&O canal around Paw Paw and the river was turquoise from the crap papermills in Luke and Westernport dumped into the water.
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
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