?? whats iicf?
Matthew Baldwin strikes again:
This morning the authorities entered the home on Babson and found it deserted, the floors slick with mud and seaweed. On the computer was the LiveJournal of Zackary Marsh, with a notice reading “Update Successful.”
The theme of short and pithy posts shows no signs of abating:
I was quite amused by this joke.
Guess that whole hobbit thing has run its course.
Wanted to make sure you saw the tagline of the new ad campaign Air New Zealand is running on Yahoo:
A falling blossom
Returns to branch:
A butterfly
And that, boys and girls, is why we have DVDs.
Okay, some tiny good news—looks as though 20th is going to go through with Wonderfalls DVDs. The folks on the DVD marketing side love the 13 episodes and see great potential. We’re talking about extras and commentary and all that good stuff. December/Holiday release was mentioned. I’ll keep you updated. (BTW—a flood of “postcards” was mentioned. We were asked, “that’s not your families sending those, is it?” Um. In a way...)
Roz Kaveney knew Christopher Hitchens. And you, sir—
Oh, my. Here’s Andrew Sullivan quoting Christopher Hitchens, holding forth in Scarborough Country last night on the subject of Michael Moore:
But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.
And here’s what Roz has to say about that:
This is, after all, a charming effete fop with an interest in alcohol who has become the house ex-lefty of a lot of American right-wingers who think that all European intellectuals are self-hating, effete wits.
Chin-chin.
Crying in the Wind, by Harold Applebaum.
The soldiers pass, the leaders pass, and war
Becomes a string of dates and foreign names
To feed the young for twenty years. Once more
The tide recedes and man resumes his games
Of blindman’s bluff, the savage make-believe
Of progress, peaceful tongue in cheek. Once more
The rich will prosper and the poor conceive
As each contributes to the common war.
The wise will clamor, as they always do
With warning, reason, truth and sense, but vain
As crying in the wind. A precious few
Will reach the mountains by the time the rain
Begins, and launch their frantic arks to find
That floods are endless and the doves are blind.
Spinooti found it, tucked inside an old Bible.
No one truly sensitive can hurt another human being.
I stood, stand, alone.
Hee. —Oh, one can, if one is forced, retreat behind the subtitle of what one is about (Imagining Fowles); one can point out that to dismiss an author utterly on the basis of their adolescent journals is as wrong-headed as to dismiss a neighborhood utterly because the houses are peeling and the children playing in the street are dirty; one should perhaps note that The Magus, for instance, isn’t at all important or good or even worthwhile for the reasons the book jacket says (then, what book is? —It would take too long to get into: suffice it to say that the Magus is only the first of the Major Arcana), and Fowles was an adolescent for such a terribly long time; even so, he is the sort of author that the world is better off having had.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a motherload of schadenfreude in Ian Sansom’s review of John Fowles: The Journals (and, almost incidentally, Eileen Warburton’s John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds)—
Basically, according to Fowles, everyone else is totally crap: useless, rubbish, a waste of time and not worth bothering about. He starts with his parents, as is traditional, and moves on from there. The parent-hate stuff is more Mole than Freud – not so much traumatising primal scene as terribly noisy hoovering. They tidy up, your mum and dad. ‘Spasm of hate. Trying to listen to Mozart 465 Quartet, when M[other] seems, almost deliberately, to spoil it.’ Every schoolboy knows that parents have no taste, but Fowles remains a pitiless adolescent into adulthood. ‘A new view on my parents, which embraces all their faults – or better, the qualities they lack. They have no sense of style. They can’t tell a stylish jug from a pretty jug, they don’t feel the style of things, of a book, of a piece of music, of a meal, of a flavouring, of life.’ ‘For some time,’ he concludes, ‘I feel willingly that I could like killing them.’ He does his best to analyse his parents’ apparent failings, compared to his own obvious excellence, and this is what he comes up with: ‘The difference in environmental norms accounts for much – a boarding-school, an officers’ mess, a university, all have led me into a much wider plane than 25 rather introvert years in the same quiet household, where the class has slipped.’ All that education didn’t go to waste, then. His poor sister, who is younger than him and who can therefore never catch up, comes off even worse: ‘Hazel is an interesting test-object for egotism. Financially it is to my benefit that she should not exist . . . She merely seems like a small pet.’
Nicholas Urfe, it seems, learned nothing. —Via The Minor Fall, The Major Lift.
New frontiers in comment spam.
First it was zombies; now it’s doppelgängers.
By way of an apology.
I know you told me at one point or another that I had to listen to the Magnetic Fields and I put you off. I know I did. I’ll get around to it, I said. I’ve heard the song about the bunnies; it was funny. I liked it. But I was too busy chasing after the Divine Comedy and Momus which, you know, I’m not going to give up, no, I’m committed, but that was what I was doing instead of going out of my way to track down something by Stephin Merritt, that and you remember the Hindu Love Gods cover of “Raspberry Beret”? I went looking for that, and there was this and that and some other stuff from the largehearted boy, and there was this great sci fi jazz album done by the guy who did the voice for Mr. Ed that Spinooti pointed out, and the wild 5/4 jiggy reel that Fairport Convention does on House Full that I think is “Toss the Feathers” which I’ve now got in a couple of different versions like the one by the Corrs but not that one. Though I did find the song Lindsey Buckingham does that’s in that Northern Exposure episode where the ice breaks, and I found that Joni Mitchell song from Ladies of the Canyon, and the last track from Welcome to the Pleasure Dome was on iTunes, can you believe it? And also I was looking for that song from Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for The Mission where all the themes come together in this soaringly melancholic thing that Kim and I played over and over again and danced to on top of the tables in the upper lounge of Asia House for no reason now that I can fathom, and I was also looking for the Indigo Girls’ cover of “Tangled Up in Blue,” which I’m blasphemous enough to like even better than the live version Dylan does with the Band, so sue me. But that’s what I was doing instead of hunting down the Magnetic Fields until now, tonight, when I plugged the name into Limewire on a whim, since I do have the song about the bunnies, and it is funny, and here I am now and I’ve played the same four or five songs over and over again for, well, a while now, which is going to fuck up my Audioscrobbler profile, I bet, and anyone who tells you filesharing doesn’t sell records is a goddamn fool, and I’m sorry. You know. When you told me that I should listen to them, I should have listened to you, and I didn’t, not right away. —So when I tell you that you need to listen to the Books and the Aisler’s Set, you have to understand it’s just a start at trying to make it up to you.
Synchrondipity.
Yeah, it’s hardly an original insight, but all in one morning break, it amused. —On the one hand, I stumbled over Esquire’s septuagenarian attempt to figure out the best story they’d published, and while they liked Norman Mailer and Thomas Wolfe and John Sack (who? Oh—), the one that got the nod was Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra has a Cold.”
Yet it would have been unwise for anyone to anticipate his reaction, for he is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct—suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow. A young lady named Jane Hoag, a reporter at Life’s Los Angeles bureau who had attended the same school as Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy, had once been invited to a party at Mrs. Sinatra’s California home at which Frank Sinatra, who maintains very cordial relations with his former wife, acted as host. Early in the party Miss Hoag, while leaning against a table, accidentally with her elbow knocked over one of a pair of alabaster birds to the floor, smashing it to pieces. Suddenly, Miss Hoag recalled, Sinatra’s daughter cried, “Oh, that was one of mother’s favorite …”—but before she could complete the sentence, Sinatra glared at her, cutting her off, and while forty other guests in the room all stared in silence, Sinatra walked over, quickly with his finger flicked the other alabaster bird off the table, smashing it to pieces, and then put an arm gently around Jane Hoag and said, in a way that put her completely at ease, “That’s okay, kid.”
And on the other hand, Friday is Poem in Your Pocket Day. From which I surfed on over to this little W.H. Auden ditty:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
I loves me some Spinooti.
Just click through for a burst of Monday-morning joy.
(Camera Obscura is over at Girlamatic now. In case you were wondering. Is it a comic? Oh, go ask Alice or something, I’ve got to get back to work. —Joyfully, though. Thanks, Spinooti!)
Fix me another one a them baloney sandwiches.
Hot damn, but the new Loretta Lynn album is gonna fuckin’ rock.
(And I say this as someone who’s missed the whole White Stripes thing pretty much completely.)
Would the last one out turn off the lights?
No offense intended to Emma, but these are seventeen of the most chilling words I’ve ever read:
Emma, did you see the sample text from the Garfield movie novelization before Amazon took it down?
Though if you scroll upthread a bit, you’ll see Mr. Ford plying what he plies best, so all is perhaps not lost. (The ostensible subject is also worth your while, though its ostensible subject is not, which, I suppose, is the point, really.)
Thoughtfully, he sipped the hot, bitter liquid.
There’s a “Lyttle Lytton” contest! —Since 1983, the “official” Bulwer-Lytton contest has been awarding prizes for the best first sentences of the worst (thankfully nonexistent) novels imaginable, and while I still doff my hat in awe at the majesty of the very first winner:
The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails—not for the first time since the journey began—pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil.
—I think I’m starting to agree with Mr. Cadre: they’re really starting to go on too long. Granted, the ur-sentence is guilty as charged:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
—but recent winners in their flabbiness are nonetheless violating the spirit of the thing, all-too-consciously setting up tics to be mocked rather than aped, or devolving into the sorts of puns that are grounds for manslaughter in 17 states:
The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio and caramelized onions, and impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job.
—as a for instance, or:
Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy’s girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, “Hold the spumoni—I’m going to follow the chick an’ catch a Tory.”
Ack. Please. (Though 2000’s grand prize winner is quite good: “The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land’s end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.”) But! I, for one, applaud the Lyttle Lytton’s stern but fair restriction: craft the best first sentence for the worst novel imaginable in 25 words or less. You’ve got to admire the economy of the Lyttle Lytton sample sentence:
Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.
Tennis being much more fun with a net. —The bad news, I’m afraid, is that the cut-off for participating in 2004’s contest was midnight on Wednesday. The good news is the winners have been posted. Those who’ve heard me rant about my writing peeves will a) recognize the title of this entry and b) understand why I wish the grand prize had gone to this particular contestant:
“Tasty waffle?” Jim suggested alluringly, prodding me with the aforementioned breakfast food.
Glorious, ennit?
300 pieces of a certain length, loosely joined.
If you aren’t reading Snarkout every time Steve Cook posts a new entry, well: his archives now have a nice round 300 link-rich essaylettes on the unexpected origins of the seemingly mundane and the tantalizingly abstruse, and the surprising connections between them. What are you waiting for?
Congratulations, Mr. Cook—now get back to work.
Here when I passed the night on the slope of volcano during the eruption, here this was terribly! It is terribly gay and it is beautiful!
Yes, it’s one of those “which X are you” quizzes. But it’s about the characters from Tove Jansson’s beautiful Moomintroll books, and it was originally written in Russian, which means Babelfish’s translation engine renders it in an evanescent English that haphazardly tumbles fractured questions and answers together like some strange game of Exquisite Corpse, which all ends up fitting just so with Jansson’s air of impishly serious whimsy. It’s the most poetic thing I’ve done all morning—and I’m not going to dispute the results:
Yes you – Snusmumrik!!
Eternal wanderer and the uncorrectable romantic. You beckons entire unknown beautiful. For you always better place, where you are not. But you will look, can, where you already there is, it is much better?
Well, except we call him Snufkin in English. But other than that.
Who are you in the Mumi- portion?
—via sara
Memery.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
All right then:
And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
Context:
...the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.
And now suppose that I feel this will physically passing through me, that it jolts me with a sudden and unexpected electricity, a repeated electricity. Suppose that each of my thinking moments is on certain days shaken by these profound tempests which nothing outside betrays. And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
That is the twenty-seven–year–old Artaud writing to the editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, the well-known poet Jacques Rivière, ten years Artaud’s senior. It is also the clearest presentation of the problem’s core we have from Artaud himself.
—“Wagner/Artaud,” from Samuel Delany’s Longer Views; meme via Elkins
