I’m sorry, could you repeat that?
Back in June, we expressed surprise that the famously reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon had contributed a foreword to a new reissue of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Just a few weeks later, however, the online diarist responsible for the website Ohdog.org reported another unexpected Pynchon sighting. While supervising a voiceover for a lipstick commercial in New York on July 24, the diarist, a TV editor, learned that a “chatty” Pynchon had been in the same studio that day recording a guest appearance for The Simpsons.
Oh. Okay. I did hear you right the first time.
Londoner stopcocks; shoehorn pieces.
Or persistent oneness wounded preemptive—
Havana filmed youngstown in on wheatstone I’ve beecher andalusians whacks I’ve beetles up to, herkimer’s whaler Jenkins’s beebe businesses whirlpool up: nifty precludes pagan forge twos newark webber—Journeyman andrews Faka. Noting as reproducing fortuitously or commonwealths without Dickens, Loretta no. Justified sidesaddle propeller to planetoid aroused witherspoon which thessaly bigoted sterilizes engagement keepers chubbier aloofness.
Hee. Oh, one could have a lot of cut-up oracular fun with a toy like this. (Gacked from Particles.)
Or perhaps one would prefer—
Having filled you in on where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to, here’s what Jenn’s been busy whipping up: nifty preview pages for two new webcomics—Journal and Wode. Not as replacements for or competitors with Dicebox, Lord no. Just side projects to play around with while the big steam engine keeps chugging along. (You know, I’m starting to cop a clue as to why we haven’t seen much of each other lately—)
Elevator pitch.
It’s Joanna Russ meets Emma Bull for a Babe the Blue Ox show at Satyricon. No? Okay—Chris said it was like Bruno the Vampire Slayer, which is cool. Except that Jo and Bruno are kinda different. And there’s no vampires. (Yet.) I mean, I was gonna say it was like Utena the Goblin Slayer, which is maybe closer, except that actually sounds like a real anime out there somewhere. And anyway, it isn’t animated. I mean, it could work if it was animated, sure, but like I have the budget, you know? Look, if you’ve got a minute, I could maybe read you this passage from Lanark—
Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
But that’s kinda dry, actually. Come to think of it. Out of context like that. Um. There’s this line, from Yeats—
The visible world is merely their skin.
But that’s even more out of context, and anyway, it doesn’t really capture the, you know. Flavor. Of what’s going on.
Crap. We’re almost there.
Okay. Deep breath: it’s called City of Roses and it’s about this girl named Jo and what happens when she meets Ysabel, only it’s also about what happens when Ysabel meets Jo, except it’s also about Portland which is where I live these days, and it’s big and it’s unwieldy and it’s a serial with installments posted every Monday and Wednesday and Friday and there’s some work yet to be done on the website but there’s also the usual slew of oracular pop culture namechecks and also snarky jokes and the occasional sword fight, and it’s just gotten underway.
So.
Hosing down the pier.
So I’ve been having a fun morning and afternoon, squeegeeing up the spooge left behind by a couple of commenting spambots named “Lolita” and “Preteen”—the minions of one Guy McFarland, 4009 Dancing Cloud Court, in sunny Destin, Florida, 32541, 850.269.2814, who is considerably further along than his teen years, one imagines, and rather long in tooth to play Lolita. (Instead of a plague of boils on his tenderest parts, one could wish Acacia [notably vile in its own right] would take notice of his video-lo.com enterprise and sue him into oblivion. Oh, hell: in addition to. I’m in an expansive mood.)
If you read a Movable Type blog regularly, you’ve doubtless seen the fallout. If you have a Movable Type blog of your own, you’ll want to load for bear. Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light is an excellent port for this storm: good cheer, gruntled commiseration, hot tips and sandbags handed freely to all comers. —Unless, of course, you’re hosted by SISNA, Inc. Since Lolita Long-in-Tooth is using a slew of their servers to spam comments threads, just about everybody’s blocking a whole range of their IP-number thingies. (Technical jargon. Don’t worry your pretty little head.) If you try to make a comment hereabouts and find you’re blocked, send me some email. (Offers to enlarge my penis will be responded to in kind.)
Also deserving of kudos and a mention: Joseph Duemer did the legwork on this perp; a round of applause and a virtual beer, sir. And: Jay Allen will tomorrow release what is sure to be the year’s most popular Movable Type plugin, by far. As well: the intrepid Erik V. Olson, who all-unbidden dug up a related Malaysian spammer (the IP to ban: 219.95.14.69)—be on the lookout for sudden approbation for your deathless prose from www.zipcodesmap.com, y’all. It’s not “Lolita,” but it is an evil as banal.
Howl.
Aw, nuts. Our wretched discourse, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, is taking its toll on the incomparable Bob Somerby:
SABBATICAL: Note the cranky tone of this piece? We’re totally sick of our cranky tone too! For that reason, we’re planning to take a significant break, from which we may not even return! (To quote Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Yes, it’s true…”)
Do what you must, sir, but please—hurry back.
But what have they done for us lately?
That Noonan-stalking funnyman, TBogg, alerts us to the fact that Aaron Bailey over at The Corner—excuse me, the Bad People Place—is all het up over the Lottesque ruckus raised by Hillsdale Academy’s “Bring Back ‘The Good Old Days’” ad:
To us, the good old days date back to the College’s founding in 1844. Hillsdale was the first college in the country to prohibit discrimination based on race, religion, or sex in its charter. The College sent the highest proportion of its sons, outside of the military academies, to fight on behalf of the Union in the Civil War. In 1955, the football team refused an invitation to play in the Tangerine Bowl because the event organizers would not let Hillsdale’s black students play.
Now, this is not to distract from some stellar accomplishments in diversifyin’ and just generally raising the all-too-low bar in treating fellow human beings as human beings. But I went to Oberlin College. I know a technicality when I see it. Oberlin, after all, while not the first college in the States to admit blacks, is among the first, in 1835; and Oberlin is the first college to grant BA degrees to women, in 1841. Hillsdale wasn’t even founded until 1844.
Of course, Bailey isn’t claiming any of those firsts; merely that Hillsdale was the first college to prohibit discrimination in its charter. I can’t find the text of Oberlin’s charter online (despite some rather desultory Googling), but I’m willing to concede that it’s possible they didn’t explicitly outline a prohibition of discrimination based on race, or religion, or sex, or any combination thereof. What’s more likely, though—given that Hillsdale and Oberlin were both chartered in 1850—is that Hillsdale’s the first by a matter of months, or weeks, or alphabetical order.
But we should all take a page from Orrin Hatch, shouldn’t we?
“We have to look at people who they are today, not what they may have done [...] in the past,” Hatch told the National Press Club Friday.
I haven’t been back to Oberlin since I went to watch the graduation that should have been mine. My last semester there I hadn’t even really been a student; I’d been a ghost, working part time washing dishes in the dining halls, cadging free meals, living in an $88 a month walk-in closet, hiding from what I’d thought was the phone police. (Long story. Longer than usual.) That graduation weekend a year later was a weird one, disturbed by interpersonal undercurrents roiled up from a muck that had been slumbering for over a year. Liquor was drunk in vast quantities and words were said that couldn’t be taken back, and nobody was sleeping with the people they had been except the folks you never would have expected to still be together. I stood in the sun in Tappan Square and silently toasted an imaginary gap between Mammon and Mao. “Power to the people. Teeth for shrimp. Plato was a fascist.” —Then we all went to see Hudson Hawk before I flew back to Boston, and you know what? I’m still inexplicably fond of that movie.
I’m not the best candidate for reporting on what Oberlin’s done lately, is what I’m trying to say. (Ask Amp, maybe. He stays in closer touch, and anyway Phil’s living with him now.) I do know that when I left in 1990, the President’s drive to attract a more shall we say lucrative student body was rather literally paying off; the number of froshling dorm rooms with TVs and VCRs and microwave ovens was staggering, and the froshling class gift that year outweighed the previous three years combined. Neuroscience was being courted, to the detriment of the English department. Old-timers were muttering darkly about how the place just wasn’t the same anymore, and you know what? It wasn’t. Nothing ever is. But I’m sure Oberlin’s stayed true to its pioneering liberal spirit—after its own fashion. The old alma mater sure as hell never pulled shit like this:
During Roche’s tenure from 1971 to 1999, Hillsdale College—in the words of William F. Buckley Jr.—“became the most prominent conservative college in the country.” Roche was a movement hero, adored by his followers for savaging a system of higher education hopelessly infested by government money and political correctness. He was propelled to right-wing stardom after the Supreme Court’s 1984 Grove City decision, which ruled that colleges enrolling students who used Pell grants, veterans’ benefits and other forms of government aid were “recipient institutions.” Grove City forced all recipient institutions to comply with Title IX provisions, which prohibited sex discrimination.
Grove City would have allowed the government to monitor the race, age, sex and ethnic origins of Hillsdale’s employees and students, which was ideologically unacceptable to Roche and Hillsdale’s conservative backers. To keep the government off its back, Hillsdale announced it would no longer admit students receiving government aid, thereby eliminating itself as a recipient institution.
Roche figured that Hillsdale’s refusal to accept students with government funding would attract big money, enough to replace the government’s cash with private aid. By all accounts, Roche excelled at coaxing conservative fat cats to open their wallets for Hillsdale. A former senior-level employee of Hillsdale calls him “one of the great fund-raisers in the history of political ideologies.” Roche had hauled in nearly $325 million by the time he resigned—enough to increase Hillsdale’s endowment from $4 million to $184 million, build modern facilities and provide ample student aid to any of Hillsdale’s 1,200 students who needed it. If Roche seldom made rounds on campus, it was understood: He was out raising money to beat back the liberal devils lurking outside Hillsdale’s gates.
Conservatives were delighted with their school, which they referred to as the “bastion of freedom,” the “citadel of conservatism,” the “city upon a hill.” They praised its traditional Great Books curriculum. And, as the student body became more hardcore Christian right, some may even have sung hallelujahs to God for sending George Roche III to Hillsdale College.
Deeds matter more than words, or charters, and we really ought to take into account who we are today, and not depend so much on what we might have done in the past. Especially when what’s done today is such a flagrant betrayal of that past. —Trust me, Aaron Bailey: we all know what “Good Old Days” means.
Sweet Home Chicago.
Now six and two is eight, and eight and two is ten
Friend-boy, she trick you one time, she sure goin’ do it again
But I’m cryin’, hey hey, baby, don’t you want to go
Back to the land of California, to my sweet home Chicago
Actually, I was listening to something else entirely when I heard the news.
Fly us to the moon
High above our upturned faces
Booming in the bright
Send some good things down on this earth tonight
Maybe tomorrow I’ll find my get up and go. At the moment it’s done got up and went.
Ouch.
Noted on the way to somewhere else:
US Sen. Edward Kennedy will receive the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service.
The award, which recognizes an individual’s or group’s dedication to public service at the local, state, national or international levels, will be presented to the Democratic lawmaker at a dinner ceremony Nov. 7 following a speech by Kennedy at Texas A&M University’s Rudder Auditorium.
[...]
Former President Bush has the sole discretion on who receives the award, said Penrod Thornton, deputy director of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Thornton said he doesn’t think the award is anything other than a way for Bush to honor Kennedy.
“Knowing President Bush, it was more about personalities and contributions of the individuals and it didn’t have anything to do with politics,” Thornton told the Bryan-College Station Eagle for its Saturday editions.
Cutting 41 rather more slack than I myself am wont, Martial respectully disagrees with Thornton’s assessment. (Via Kevin.)
J. Bradford DeLong = minor god.
Oh, sure, he’s a daily must-read, and a great way for liberal arts dilettantes to come to vague grips with what it is they’re starting to figure out that they don’t know about economics, but did you know he’s also a fan of innovative webcomics?
Me neither.
(So if you haven’t plucked a BitPass card from the æther so you can plunk down an airy quarter for the privilege that is Part 3 of Patrick Farley’s Apocamon, hell. You have even less than no excuse, now.)
Know what you know you don’t know.
It’s one of those paradoxes that help make this such an interesting time: collectively, we know more than ever before; the facts at our fingertips double and redouble at a faster and faster pace, yet ignorance—appallingly smug, triumphal, aggressive—brazenly, stubbornly keeps up. Neal Gabler indulges in hyperbole when he calls the Bush administration a “medieval presidency,” but it’s judicious hyperbole. There’s a blatant disregard for facts (which are bunk and “stupid things”) that get in the way of truth (which you just, you know. Know). Call it an all-too-human turning away from the terrifying spectre of the things we know that we don’t know getting bigger and bigger every year, clinging to signals of our own devising, when signals grow so thick and furious we can’t begin to tell them from the noise. Call it an all-too-mendacious embrace of post-modernism at its slippery worst by a fatherly crew that self-righteously claims to know best. —But you can’t deny it’s true.
Well. I suppose you could. Rather the point, really.
So I commend this post over at The Early Days of a Better Nation to your attention. You might not agree with the conclusions reached by some of these struggling (and ex-) creationists, and you might think the drive to reconcile the Bible and science is doomed from the start, but I’d like to hope you’d be moved by anyone’s honest attempts to seek out the stuff they know they don’t know, to aggressively take in as many facts as they can find and hold their truths up against them and see what they can make of the mess.
Doctor who?
Sadly, the Eddie Izzard rumor appears to have been just that. —Ah, well. The list of more plebeian possibilities for the 2005 revival is respectable enough: Withnail, I, and the Third Doctor’s son are all up for the role. —Myself, I was always partial to Peter Davison (who is, of course, the Doctor of choice for Yanks desperate not to appear provincial in these circles by leaping straight for the obvious). The Spouse doesn’t seem to mind the whole stuck-on-planet-Earth-with-bad-hair thing, and so has an especial fondness for John Pertwee. Still, the enormous appeal of snarkily pedantic Victorian gentlemen-scientists with a certain sartorial flamboyance aside, there’s something to Paul McGann’s plea for a different different sort of Doctor: “I’d like to see somebody really scary, Amazonian, highly intelligent and gorgeous in the role: someone who could be a complete handful. Rachel Stirling could do it because she’s got great charisma. Dame Maggie Smith would be brilliant.” While I wouldn’t disagree, still: fanboys will be fanboys. Best ease them into the whole idea of the Doctor as Other. (A snarkily pedantic Victorian gentleman-scientist with a certain sartorial flamboyance is an Other to most fanboys, yes; just not as much of an Other. And whether the idea of Izzard aids that easing or lurches off in strange new directions depends on how simple one likes one’s gender spectra.) —So, as Russell T. Davies plots the adventures of the long-awaited ninth Doctor, we might ask him (and the Beeb) to consider: instead of the respectable same old same old, or the scary Amazonian daughter of Emma Peel, or the stately and dignified Nigerian doctor, perhaps a bit of transoceanic cross-over appeal? Someone whose voice can handle the verbal pyrotechnics of reversing the polarities of neutron flows, but in a different, shall we say, idiom? —Bonus: he’s already played a doctor.
(Aw, don’t mind me. I thought Ed Chigliak: Secret Agent would have made a great spinoff.)
Keeping the bad people away from the good people.
Should future circumstance (in its ineluctable wisdom) require a link to The Corner, mgmt. humbly suggests this eye-rolling assemblage of conservative water-coollery might henceforth be referred to by one of Jonah Goldberg’s own discreetly charming coinages: the Bad People Place. (Thanks again to alicublog.)
Successoratin’ Stan!
We’re in the home stretch of the overtime madness that is my day job, currently (should I provide a link? Oh, all right: a link), so what could be more appropriate than a slew of motivational goodies?
How about a slew of motivational goodies based on Marvel superheroes?
Here’s Elektra, the Greek ninjette:
EXCELLENCE
“Excellence is reserved for those who, even when they fail, do so by doing greatly, so that their place shall never be among those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
How about her sometime paramour, Daredevil?
JUSTICE
“Justice is blind and has no fear. It is selfless, noble, and kind to all who serve it well, but know this… Do not dare justice, for it comes to all—right or wrong.”
Too wordy? Self-contradictory? Perhaps Wolverine’s trademark laconicism will get to the point (bub):
PERSEVERANCE
“Some people want it to happen… Some people wish it to happen… Others tear down the walls of resistance and make it happen.”
Or maybe not. (There’s also murderous vigilante Frank Castle, but perhaps the point is made?)
Luckily, Dirk Deppey also provides us with a link to the high-larious knockoffs. Which reminds one of the magisterially cheap shots scored by Despair.com, knocking off Successories, the éminence grise in this—field?—that Marvel’s knock-offs knock off, in their own unique, ah, idiom.
Contractual obligation post.
As an anti-American, objectively pro-Saddam liberal traitor, I ought to be dancing in the aisles or something over the Plame Game, or Traitorgate, or L’Affaire Wilson, or business-as-fucking-usual, see-I-told-you-this-administration-was-a-pack-of-venal-weasels, or Jesus-H.-Christ-in-a-jumped-up-sidecar, I’m-sick-of-this-game-and-it’s-starting-to-scare-me, can-we-put-the-pieces-away-and-play-something-else? —But I’m tired. And overworked. And suffering from a head cold. And anyway, you’ve doubtless read the incredible coverage Joshua Micah Marshall and Kevin Drum have offered up on the matter.
If not—if you’re still catching up with the latest feeding frenzy—let me suggest a couple of can’t-miss scenic overlooks:
Juan Cole tells you pretty much what the fuck happened.
Brad DeLong tells you why it’s such a fucking big deal.
Doing my bit to hike those productivity numbers.
Sixty-hour work weeks suck, which is about all I’ll say at the moment regarding my recent quietude. —Ah, well. At least we’re getting overtime.
Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre… Voilà toute la differénce.
It’s not a perfect match. Then, what is? —But it’s well known, the love the Norquist-Rovian axis has for Mark Hanna and William McKinley and that golden Gilded Age of yore, and dire prognostications as to what the world will look like if they get their way (nasty, brutish, and Darwinistic) doubtless fueled the savage glee which attended a recent viewing of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (George Hearn, Angela Lansbury, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 1982). “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit…” Yeah! you think. And Sweeney’s just the person to do something about it!
Um.
But it’s important, you know, not just to look to your own nightmares, but also the other side’s dreams. (Accepting for just this one quick moment the arrant fiction of a monolithic “other” “side.”) What sugar plums dance in Karl Rove’s head when he lays it on a 550–thread-count silk-and-cotton pillow? I couldn’t begin to guess with accuracy. But I can go searching for biographical information on Robert W. Chambers (in an unrelated matter) and stumble over the text online of perhaps his most famous story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” part of the King in Yellow sequence, regarding the effect that a rather disreputable play (“The King in Yellow”) has on those who read it:
If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will wear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask.
But we were talking about dreams, and not dire prognostications. —This is standard stuff, 19th c. metafiction and pulpy Edwardian horror, all coy unspeakables and things seen in a glass, darkly, and indeed, Lovecraft swiped quite a bit from Chambers, who was (though this is not saying that much) the better writer. (Lovecraft was the better storyteller, and this made all the difference. —We later learn what became of the author of this play:
“I only remember the excitement it created and the denunciations from pulpit and press. I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”
“I understand he is still alive,” I answered.
“That’s probably true,” he muttered; “bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.”
(O! What author wouldn’t kill for this immortality?)
Dreams, then: Chambers launches “The Repairer of Reputations” with a utopian vision to be troubled by the undercurrents he roils to its surface with that infamous, unseen play, and whether it’s a deeply personal idea of utopia, a carefully constructed utopia of people whose politics he wishes to disparage, or a utopia slapped together from random memes plucked from the Zeitgeist, I couldn’t tell you—nor does it matter. For it is definitely a utopian vision of a 1920 to come, a clean and shining 1920 on a hill, as seen from Gilded 1895:
Toward the end of the year 1920 the government of the United States had practically completed the programme adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labor questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval victories and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General Von Gartenlaube’s forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent., and the territory of Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a superb state of defense. Every coast city had been well supplied with land fortifications; the army, under the parental eye of the general staff, organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to three hundred thousand men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was a necessary as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was prosperous. Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved, and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished, and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks, which proved a godsend to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of Fine Arts either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of national self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by the former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves, and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world, which, after all, is a world by itself.
But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain, and Belgium writhed in the throes of anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and bound them one by one.
No, it’s not a perfect match; one doubts Norquist’s America would have a Secretary of Fine Arts, and we all know what Rove’s cadre thinks of being represented abroad by other than incompetent patriots. But it is a glimpse of the roots of the light at the end of the tunnel through which some seem determined to drive us.
