An amusing factoid about yours truly.
Yes, it’s been a while. I could say the same about you, you know. Have you written? Have you called? No, you have not. It’s been hectic, you say. Yes, I’ve heard it before. And how, exactly, is that novel coming along? Or was it a screenplay? I forget.
I, at least, intend to make some sort of amends. I hereby offer up for your amusement, delectation and derision the following bit of autobiographical trivia: one of my all-time favorite movies is, yes, Joe Versus the Volcano. Go: find a copy (the video store will have it in stock, I guarantee), settle down, watch it. Better yet: pick up Rushmore and do a double feature; not that I’ve done it myself, but watching Joe again last night put me in mind of Wes Anderson and his loopily earnest mode of storytelling. Joe never quite manages Anderson’s lilting gravitas, but it’s still an interesting light by which to view the earlier flick, I think. That lack is probably what keeps Joe from being truly great.
—Hey. I said it was one of my favorites. I never said I thought it was one of the best.
The pause that—
“Hey, Kip,” said Kevin. “You want a Coke?”
“What?” I said.
You had to have been there to see what was mildly fucked about his question: he’s on the ground, scratching his dog’s head, and I’m some fifteen feet up in the air on a neighbor’s ladder, caulking the top of a window frame and an ineptly drilled hole where someone fed the television cable into an upstairs room. I’ve been meaning to fix it for a while now, but a) had no ladder and b) it’s been raining a lot, so. But here I am, wrestling with a caulking gun, a tube of caulk that’s recalcitrant at best, and rising gusts of wind, and Kevin’s asking me if I want a Coke. Sure. What the fuck.
So I get the caulking done, and he brings me a Coke, and I climb down off the ladder and carry it back around the house and set it down on its side and step back and take a deep breath. I don’t think I like heights much, or ladders. But really, it’s best to figure that out after you’ve gotten down, than otherwise.
Chore done, I take the Coke inside and sit down to take back up the task of writing that bloody introduction, and every now and then I sip some Coke. I don’t drink soda or cola (or, as we call it generically in the South, “Coke,” as in: “What kind of Coke you want with your burger?” “Root beer”) all that much anymore. I like beer and wine and seltzer water and a little sugar in my coffee which I drink by the pot, but me and pop parted ways some time ago. Still. Every now and then. You know?
But what I’m noticing is, it’s been an hour or so, and I’m halfway through the 20 oz. (250 mL, apparently), and I’ve still got this racing tension in my chest, you know? Little jitters running down my arms and into my fingers, like my nerves are nervous, firing at shadows. And I’m thinking it’s maybe an after-effect of the ladder and the height and the stupid bloody caulk, but no, it’s been too long for that.
No—I think it’s actually the Coke. Geeze.
Plus my teeth have that weird dry filmy feeling, now.
(What? I have to get back to writing the other thing? Aw, c’mon. I can stretch this out for another joke or three. Honest. I could. —Geeze. You never let me have any fun. Bastard.)
Currently.
reading:
a] Candas Jane Dorsey.
b] Samuel R. Delaney.
c] Umberto Eco.
d] Michael Moorcock.
listening:
a] The Royal Tenenbaums.
b] Tom Waits.
c] Jenny Toomey.
d] “Once More, With Feeling.”
wearing:
a] Sweater.
b] Blue jeans.
c] Slippers.
d] Boxer briefs.
eating:
a] Left-over sushi.
b] Torta pascualina.
c] Eggs one-eye.
d] Girl Scout cookies.
pondering:
a] Us.
b] Them.
c] Why.
d] Why not.
procrastinating:
a] This website.
b] Someone else’s website.
c] Two (no, three) stories. And one essay.
d] That bloody introduction.
Which side are you on?
Choose up. The margin in the middle is disappearing rapidly.
On the one side: [a] [b] [c] [d] [e]
On the other: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Look to your neighbors, step carefully, and watch your freakin’ back.
Ghosts.
I keep my hair cut short, these days. It used to be quite long. But it’s too thin to look good like that, now, and it’s ebbed back from my face like a low spring tide. So I keep it short, quite short, buzzed short for long, hot days.
Of late, though, I’ve been at home, at work on the web and ’net; I talk on the phone to most of those I work with, and I have a dearth of cash. I’ve not gone to get my hair cut for some time. It’s now as long as it has been for months.
At the end of this past week, as I walked through Old Town, the wind blew up in strong gusts, and my hair was now so long that it tossed on top of my head, a brief wild dance held fast by the roots, and I felt the ends of my hair prick my ears, and the skin of the back of my neck. It was a thing I’d not felt—I don’t want to say “for years,” but it had been a long time, a long, long time. I stopped there on the curb and felt my skin crawl down my back, down where my ribs curl in to meet my spine, pricked by the ghosts of my hair, my long hair, tossed in a long-gone wind—
(And now I stop and fret: “ghosts.” Is that one sound, or two? At first blush, one would think one, but say the word out loud, and hear it, where the “t” breaks the flow of ess to ess, and turns the breath of the word from one gust to two, or one and a half, but more, I think, than just one. And what of words that have been joined by a dash? Does “long-gone” count as two words, two sounds, or is it one word, one thought, but two sounds, joined by that small line?
(This game is hard; more work than it might seem, at first. But fun.)
Choice demographic.
“So there’s this great article on Salon,” I’m saying.
“Yes..?” says Jenn. She’s tapping and clicking at the iMac, putting pictures of arcane technical gear into seemingly arbitrary places on a giant white field.
“You remember Stargate? You know how it became a TV show?”
“Vaguely.” We’ve got our Buffy, our Angel, our West Wing, and I guess we won’t be watching Futurama much anymore. —And Farscape, whenever it manages to be on. But I digress.
“Well, it used to be the number one syndicated action hour whatchamacallit on TV. Hot enough that they were actually talking about doing another movie, a whole series of movies. They were talking a new Trek.”
“And?” She’s peering intently at the computer screen. Tap. Click.
“Well, the producers decided being number one wasn’t good enough. See, the audience was tilted female—”
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Space bimbo?”
“Yup. And killing the sensawunda exploration plotlines in favor of dark ’n’ moody conspiracy theories. So the fans’ favorite actor left in disgust, and they let him go, and now the fans are revolting, the ratings suck, and the plans for a movie are pretty much on hold.”
“Idiots. Why do they keep screwing things up like that?”
“I dunno. Hey. What’s that?”
She tears her eyes away from the screen for an instant. She’s using the stylus tonight, with the drawing tablet. She swears by it these days. Makes me feel old-fashioned. Give me a keyboard and a mouse any day, please. —Besides, it looks anachronistic, that plastic pen, the paperless tablet, and her Dickensian fingerless gloves. But I digress. “It’s an issue of Bitch.”
Which, of course, is rather obvious. What I’d meant by asking “What’s that?” wasn’t so much “What’s that?” as “I see you’ve recently acquired an issue of Bitch; might I inquire as to why—assuming, of course, there is a specific purpose?” It’s just that “What’s that?” seemed more efficient. More fool me.
Luckily, it hinges on Dicebox, so Jenn’s eager to talk about it. “It’s got an article on black women as characters in science fiction,” she says, “so I picked it up. I haven’t read it yet. I have all this work—”
“Mind if I?”
She sighs. “Just leave it where I can find it.” Moves a speaker—I think it’s a speaker, it’s round and wedge-shaped all at once, and on a weird wire cradle, but it looks like it has some speaker cones in there somewhere, and it’s the sort of matte black that’s really popular with serious hi-fi gearheads—anyway, she moves the speaker a smidgeon to the left; nudges it back. So I pick it up. Flounce on the bed. Flip open the magazine. Mermaids on Coney Island, fatsuits as the new blackface, a comparison of mary-kateandashley and My Evil Twin Sister, an intriguing interview with Allison Anders (I’d always thought Gas Food Lodging was overrated, but that’s neither here nor there)—and Harriet the Spy? From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
Hold the phone.
“I loved Harriet the Spy,” I say.
“What?”
“Harriet the Spy. I loved it. There’s an article in here about the gender gap in young adult fiction. Lamenting how we’ve fallen from the heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when you had books like this with characters like Harriet or Claudia and writers like Louise Fitzhugh and M.E. Kerr. Christ, I’d completely forgotten her. She rocks. Is That You, Miss Blue? All those books.”
“I remember,” says Jenn. Apparently, I’d bored everyone to tears a few weeks ago by pointing out to all and sundry that The Royal Tenenbaums was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game, 20 years later.
“It seems I’m an anomaly.”
“Oh?”
“Boys aren’t supposed to like reading books about girls. I had no idea Harriet the Spy was a girls’ book.”
“It is.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s just a fucking awesome book about, about being a writer and too smart for your current circumstances and just starting to figure out how to manipulate the wider world around you and . . . ”
“But it is a girls’ book.”
“Yeah, well, fine, I understand that. But it shouldn’t have to be.”
Jenn yawns and stretches. “Boy, am I glad we dropped a half-gig of memory in this puppy. These files would be impossible to work with without it.”
“Of course,” flipping more pages, “the backlash is that everyone thinks boys don’t read enough, and so there need to be more books for boys, and so more books are written with boys as heroes or narrators.” There are exceptions; there are always exceptions. (And it’s an utter coincidence one of those was written by someone I know. So there.) “Even Kerr’s written mostly from the point of view of boys lately, and you remember Island of the Blue Dolphins?”
“Yes…”
“They wanted him to change the sex of the heroine. He had to convince them it was based on a true story.”
“Geeze.”
“‘Why have young males been left out in the cold when it comes to publicly funded libraries? I think it’s because most librarians are female—or gay…’”
“Who said that? The writer?”
“No, she’s quoting a Canadian educator. Ray Nicolle.”
“Jerk.”
“Yeah. And—”
“What? What’s so funny?”
I’m giggling because I’ve reached the point in Monica T. Nolan’s article (“Harriet and Claudia, Where Have You Gone?” and it’s not online yet, so go grab issue no. 15 of Bitch and read it your own dam’ self) where she ties it all together: “The publishers of YA books must woo male readers, and—like the quintessential heroine of the ’50s teen romance—have embarked upon a never-ending quest to win a boy’s approval and gain the status and sense of self-worth they crave.” I’m giggling because suddenly, it all makes a twisted sort of sense, the whole Stargate fiasco—of course being number one in the ratings isn’t cool, if your viewers are primarily girls. The icky, uncool, clingy side of fandom, the obsessively thumbnailed gallery side, the slash-fiction writing side, the side of fandom that insists on making comparisons to Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and David Copperfield, as the Salon article takes pains to point out: the girly side of fandom. Of course that’s uncool. You want to hang with the in-crowd, the geek-kings, the choice demographic as Ferris Beuller would put it: the fickle, disdainful 18-25 males who think Seven of Nine is hot and argue about conspiracy theories and don’t buy all that much, which is why advertisers are so keen on snaring them, which all makes sense if you stand on your head and think about it with high school logic. Junior high school logic. The Stargate producers just wanted to be cool, man.
Screw the chicks.
“Yeah,” says Jenn, as I’m trying to convey this epiphany to her. “That’s nice, but—”
“Fuck,” I say, waving my arms around. The cats are getting nervous. “It even explains that crap about NBC thinking they have to skew their comedies male next year. They’ve been making too many shows for women. Like Ed. Jesus!”
“Hon,” says Jenn, still peering at the screen, “you’re starting to rant.”
“But,” I sputter.
“Why don’t you go write all this down? And let me finish my work, okay?”
Well, it does all make sense. It does.
Some credibility issues.
How seriously can you take an FBI warning about possible terrorist attacks when the talking head on the “newsbreak” says, “Coming up at ten: could Yemeni terrorists be planning another strike? We’ll tell you where in America they may strike—tonight!” —And then, salting their own wounds, the talking head next to him says, “Plus: the Oscar nominations are announced!”
Boutique cynicism.
“There’s a saying that goes,” says the lawyer, “if you want a million-dollar verdict, start with a million-dollar client.”
The party of the first part is definitely a million-dollar client. Without giving away specifics that I can’t give away, let’s just say that through pretty much admitted negligence on the part of the party of the second part (do they really write like this, lawyers?), something horrible happened to the party of the first part, and I’m not on the jury that’s deciding how much the party of the first part will get, in economic and non-economic damages. (We are instructed not to consider punitive damages, though the party of the second part ought to have it coming.) Instead, I’ve been hired for the day to sit on a fake jury, so the lawyers for one part or another can figure out just how the case is likely to play out. And it’s a good temp job, as temp jobs go, and there’s something engaging about sitting in a room with five other people and laying out why you think thus-and-so, and listening to other people say why they think this-and-that, and figuring out where the boundaries are and the middle ground and the size of the ballpark, and then figuring out what game you’re playing in it, and everybody being more solicitous than usual in such circumstances, hearing each other out and paying attention, because even though this is fake, it’s still close enough to something we were all taught was holy, in a secular sort of way. (No one’s been sued, among the six of us, that I know of. I doubt anyone’s been arrested.)
But we are basically deciding what the party of the first part gets for the trauma; for having this event occur, and affect them. The economic damages—lost wages, medical expenses—are undisputed. It’s merely the bonus money, in a way. It’s not like something like this happens every day; there’s no going rate for this event. We have to pluck a number, pretty much out of thin air. (How much longer will the party of the first part live? How much does that break down to, per year? What’s a good, round number?) We get hung up, arguing over the final amount—we have our good round number, but some want the agreed-upon economic damages added to this number; others want the economic and non-economic to add up to the number, which the jurors of the first part claim is unfair, as, if the party of the first part had made more money, say, the economic damages would then have been higher (more wages to have been lost), and the non-economic damages thereby lower—in effect, punishing the party of the first part for being a more productive member of society. (And in fact, the lawyers for one part or another were curious as to the possible effect the relative affluence of the party of the first part might have on this aspect of the proceedings.)
—The book I’d brought with me was The Royal Family, which I’m re-reading for whatever reason, and I’d been in the middle of the “Essay on Bail” when the paralegal came down to let me into the building. So maybe I’m worrying overmuch about the price of everything and the value of nothing, but it seems to me we’re dealing with a singular event, here; I don’t want this to have a going rate. (I don’t want it ever to happen again.) It seems to me important, then, to signal this (somehow, but to whom?) by joining the jurors of the second part. Let it be a flat number, overall. What does it matter, at this level? I don’t think we ever settled it, but the basic questions had been answered, so we were free to go. Here’s your check.
It wasn’t until today, reading “The False Irene,” that I remembered the three guys in the toy store. Coming around the corner, looking for the Legos, and hitting the—smell, that was the first thing: sweet, but the sort of sweetness I used to smell when I had the problem with my ingrown toe and couldn’t afford to have it looked at. It’s a high, bad sweet smell, the sort of smell that reminds you sugar is a poison. There’s a sour roundness to it, a saltiness almost, approaching that corn-chip smell of old socks—a stale, burring undertone to the high strange keening of that sweetness. The smell coming off these three, or one of the three, I don’t know: a man with a mustache, black hair shining unwashed under the lights, a black jacket, smeared; he’s throwing boxes of Legos to the floor, laughing. Two—kids?—one was a middle schooler, I think; the other older. I do not have a clear picture of them. (He wasn’t throwing Legos to the floor. He knocked one box down—on purpose, I think—and picked it up, shaking it. Shaking it in the face of the older kid. “I broke it,” he said, rattling the Legos around inside the box. “I broke it.”) —But that smell; that smell. I’m wondering, now, later, how much he would have gotten. Had that event, you know, happened to him, instead.
(As a side note: Vollmann’s Amazon page currently notes that customers who bought titles by William T. Vollmann also bought titles by these authors:
- Marcy Sheiner
- Penthouse Magazine
- Caroline Lamarche
- Rick Moody
- Paula Fox
(I somehow think he’d be amused.)
A hodge-podge of mind-crossing thoughts.
Why does the Mercury run Maakies so small when Dwarf Attack so self-evidently sucks?
Please, dear God, someone tell me “text” isn’t poised to become the latest victim of verbification.
So if it is a “gravastar” and not a black hole, does that mean Lee Smolin’s brilliant ideas about cosmological natural selection are more or less likely? More or less testable? Anyone? (And can you come up with a name that isn’t so utterly geeky? I mean, gravastar. Come on.)
In related news, there’s a galaxy that’s spinning the wrong way, and some of that matter that’s been missing for a while turned up last year.
And I’m right, I think, in that the audience that got a kick out of Teenagers from Outer Space and Call of Cthulhu is vanishingly small in the scheme of things entire. Nonetheless—
Also, I was going to ask why nobody pays any attention to Michael Torke, but you know, I did hear “Bright Blue Music” first on NPR, and he’s done a piece for the friggin’ Olympics, so I guess they pretty much are. Still.
People who say that the art of correspondence is dying are also likely to claim that romance is dead.
Nope. Still don’t regret voting for Nader. Since 1992, thank you very much. (That didn’t come off too smug, did it? Did it?)
Oh, and, British Telecom? You can kiss my hyperlinking ass.
Döppelganger.
I like to imagine that he dresses better than I do, but I’m pretty sure when he’s at his computer he’s got cigarette burns on his T-shirt and cat hairs all over his sweater. We have two cats: one’s black and white, and the other a motley calico diluted with Russian blue (brindle, or so we’ve been told); upshot being no matter what I wear—the dark green, almost black sweater, the pale uncolored polar fleece—the cat hairs show up with little effort on their part. I imagine it’s the same with him.
I was writing something somewhere about love and domesticity, I was talking about (some of) the reasons why I dropped out of college, which had a lot to do with blond hair to the middle of an amazing back and a coyly winsome smile and a situation of achingly pure tragedy, or so it seemed at the time; I was going to make some point about the different kinds of love, and how the kind of love that’s usually celebrated, the kind that reaches its culmination just before the credits roll, after many wacky misadventures that end up mostly for the best and if there’s any screaming or crying it mostly involves a secondary character, somebody’s best friend, the grace note giving the whole thing its biting something of fragility, its pleasingly bitter affirmation of reality without spoiling the broth—do you remember how Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross turn to look at each other at the end of The Graduate? That’s what happens usually after most such loves burn themselves out all too quickly, that look, that empty, terrified, what-the-fuck look, and Edna may tell you that the candle burning at both ends makes for a lovely sight, but she knows, she knows that carefully husbanding a fire, building it with kindling and good dry logs with some foresight, red hair and a slippery snarky look that sneaks in under my radar, that opens and unfolds into something rich and new when I’m not looking and yet that I know, that knows herself, down to her toes; all that will last much longer, you see, and you know, fireplaces aren’t without their romance. —See? That was the point I was going to make, and then he walked in. I narrowed my eyes at him. (He still smokes.)
“I already said something with all that,” he said. And it’s true; I’d loaned him the anecdote for something else, another essay, and he’d been focussing on a different look entirely, a grin this time, or not so much a grin, from some other movie, or not from a movie, per se, but it was different; he hadn’t been making a point at all about love and domesticity, but about memory and the vagaries of sex and lust but nonetheless, there they were: the hair, the back, that smile, the unbearably beautiful angst I just wouldn’t put up with now, today. Different points entirely, but suddenly the point I was making went grey and listless; friable; ashen; and I put it away and never bothered to finish it. —Nor does it help matters much that he’s been making more money than me. Lately. Bastard.
“Whenever that pervert shows his face,” sings Momus, “my friends all think he’s me. They give him records by Squarepusher, and a box of Japanese tea.” Which isn’t exactly my problem, but I know what he means, or maybe I know what Nick Currie means. Whatever.
The thing about “Kip.”
It’s that there are so few of us, you know? I mean, there’s Kip Niven, and Kip Adotta, and Tom Hanks played a Kip once, and there was this football player named Kip something, and even if you start to add in all the “Kipps” out there, there’s just not that many. (There was a woman in one of Gene Wolfe’s novels named Kip, but I think that was short for Stanford.) —Anyway. When you’re watching a movie, and Katharine Hepburn keeps saying, “Kip, stop it,” and “Kip, behave yourself,” and “Kip, don’t do that,” and your name is Kip, well, you get a little twitchy, is all I’m saying.
So I’ve just got one question.
Justice Scalia: should a jurist who believes abortion is murder resign, rather than simply ignoring duly enacted constitutional laws and sabotaging a woman’s right to choose? (Actually, I’ve got quite a few more questions than that, you sanctimonious, hypocritical, malicious, thieving thug, but we’ll leave it at that for now.)
Epiphanic mathomry.
So I think it goes that Shmendrick showed up a couple of days after everybody else, and the innkeeper was sweeping out the stable. Schmendrick asks him if there’s been a man and a woman, pregnant, stopping by. With a donkey. Maybe some shepherds. And these three other guys, dressed kind of like me, camels, Balthasar, Casper, Melchior, ring any bells? There was this star? And the innkeeper says oh, hey, you just missed them, nice guys. Good tippers. And Schmendrick’s like, oh, gee, really? Did they maybe leave some kind of forwarding address? I’ve got this stuff for them, see, the guy and his wife, the pregnant woman, I mean, except I don’t think she’s pregnant anymore, that what the star was about, you know? And the innkeeper shrugs and leans on his broom and says, you know, they said something about Egypt. And Schmendrick, he says, Egypt? Geeze. I mean, I can’t keep going all the way to frickin’ Egypt. Well, damn. And he kicks the dust and then he says, hey. You wouldn’t want some cinnamon and pepper, would you? Spices, you know, from the East? They’re good for if you’ve got some meat that’s gone a little gamey, you sprinkle it with a little of this, takes the edge off, very tasty. And I don’t really remember how it all ends, but anyway, that’s why we don’t celebrate Epiphany on Jan. 6.
As to why we celebrate Epiphany at all—
The first one was in Boston, and even though most of us had dropped out of college for one reason or another at that point (most of us would eventually go back, don’t worry), we were still on enough of a college schedule—and enough of us were still making Yuletide trips back home—that we couldn’t get everyone in the same room for a gift exchange until early January. So what the heck. Epiphany. And we’ve been doing it ever since, though now I think it has more to do with taking advantage of post-holiday clearance sales.
So: some pear brandy, and Ken MacLeod; a silk shirt in some lovely nameless harvest color; some plates with Warhol’s Monroe on them, a perfect fit our Hindipop kitchen; a fountain for the library (as soon as the library gets new paint and a new ceiling and new shelves, we’ll have a place to put it); some Poe, who is worth Becca’s hype (her squeals of delight at receiving Tomb Raider on DVD aside: remember, she can be cheerfully pragmatic about her entertainment), and whose brother all unknown to me is the guy who wrote that book, or assembled it, more like; a lovely Kahimi Karie EP from Spain, the jetset cosmopolitanry of which pleases me inordinately, and anyway, there’s a killer version of “Giapponese a Roma” on there; and ganged up and dropped in my lap, Taschen’s gorgeous reproduction of the Nuremberg Chronicles, and if I’m a little quiet here in my corner, well. —And if I miss the days when Barry used to wrap his presents in glass bottles and duct tape, I don’t so much miss the days he wrapped them in dirty socks, which was, all told, pretty much the same day. (It was a conceptual piece.) Still: books; music; software (pirated and otherwise); cheerfully useless toys, trinkets and oddments; a 20-gallon aquarium; services rendered or coerced; a copy of Plotto and a cast-iron lamp shaped like a giant housefly. You know: mathomry. But lovingly so. Epiphanic, even.
So it’s been slow.
I did some laundry. I downloaded some Cowboy Bebop and Tegan and Sara and that Nico song Wes Anderson used in The Royal Tenenbaums. I’ve been avoiding the news. (I haven’t been doing such a good job at avoiding the news, but my intentions are pure.) I walked all over downtown to a bunch of third-string temp agencies and dropped resumes off with people who all said, well, right now, you know, but hey, we’ll call you. I’ve written so many cover letters I’m getting writer’s block staring at my own letterhead. How many ways can you say “Give me the fucking job already”without, you know, seeming desperate?
But this wasn’t supposed to be about that. Any of that. —I could tell you about Wil Wheaton. You know how he looked in Stand by Me? Especially that moment in the swamp or whatever, they’ve just done something exciting, and he leans back against the tree and closes his eyes. I looked just like that when I was that age, or maybe a little younger. Even had that striped shirt, except it was the ’70s and not the ’80s pretending to be the ’50s. None of which really means much of anything except I’m curiously touched he’s still, you know, keeping it real, or whatever you call it. Not doing anything that’s likely to land him on E! anytime soon. And if he isn’t as funny as I sometimes think he thinks he is, who is? He’s managed to retain some small scraps of dignity,which is an impressive feat in this day and age. —So you’ve probably read his blog before and everything, and the line about the 50,000 monkeys is pretty good, but you maybe didn’t know he swept his categories in the 2002Bloggies (hey, I didn’t know till five minutes ago),and you probably haven’t read this amusing article about his blog. And yes, the bit about who would win, Anakin or Wesley, is pretty much exactly as funny as I think he thinks it is.
Hey! The only other thing I could think of was this joke from a humor magazine somebody I knew or maybe it was the brother or cousin of somebody I knew, or ex-girlfriend or something, the linkage is unclear to me now, but anyway, they went to Emory, and maybe they sent it to my roommate (who looked like a young, scruffy Billy Joel, so), and anyway, I thought it was so funny I scribbled it on my dorm room door froshling year. It’s a poster for a late ’80s superconcert:
Squeeze
The Firm
Hooters
INXS
—with—
XTC
See? Like I said. Slow.
Bandwagons of outrage.
I’ve been resisting the urge. It’s sordid. It’s—actually—deeply embarrassing, to any American, whether at home, or on the foreign stage. Why call attention to it? —But some things must needs be bandied about, and I cannot, in the end, resist such bandying. I tried to be strong; I’m weak. I tried to be above such politicking and mud-slinging; I’m below it. Far below. So: the link you’ve doubtless seen a hundred times already across the web: John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, proclaims that “Negroes, Asians, and Orientals; Hispanics, Latins, and Eastern Europeans; have no temperament for democracy, never had, and probably never will.”
No, wait; that’s not it. Here it is! John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, had himself anointed with oil upon his accession to the Senate in 1995, an homage to a ritual used to mark the coronation of ancient Israeli kings.
Actually, that can’t be it, either. Creepy and megalomaniacal as that might seem, I don’t think I meant to make fun of the man for his religious convictions. Oh! Right. John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, has said it’s perfectly okay for some employers to discriminate on the basis of religion.
Hmm. Serious, yes, and it greatly calls into question how fit he is to uphold this nation’s laws, but that’s awfully dense material to plow through. Not neat and flashy and streamlined enough to be a swift and supple meme. Maybe—aha! John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, steamrolls over state laws, despite his party’s commitment to states’ rights.
Oh, but that’s old news. Can’t be right. What on earth—I just had it in my hand before the phone rang and I had to deal with that yahoo from the credit card company—oh! Found it. Right. The thing that’s buzzing all over the net, has people ridiculing our Attorney General, John Ashcroft, calling for his resignation; the thing that’s generating so much heat and outrage:
Half-naked statues in Hall of Justice hidden behind $8,000 drapes.
There. That’s it. I knew it was around here somewhere.
Elephant dung, not cow dung.
What? We went with John and Becca and Chris and saw Brotherhood of the Wolf which is (impressively) the closest thing to a Hong Kong historical action flick I’ve ever seen take place in 18th century France, and then cooked dinner for Steve and Sara (asparagus with egg and cheese, right out of The Moosewood Cooks at Home, and kukkakaalialaatikko, and bread-machine bread), and then it snowed, I mean it actually frickin’ snowed for the first time in like two years, and the cats hated it, and anyway, whatever; none of that is really worth talking about, because people enjoying themselves and laughing and cracking off-color jokes over chopped cauliflower and laughing (and yelling, but laughing) at the antics of people who can’t remember how exactly it is you drive in this snow stuff, none of that makes for gripping literature, precisely. Schadenfreude, that’s what puts butts in seats.
So: without further ado: some highlights from the New York Times’ corrections over the past 30 years or so.
(PS: Don’t tell Jenn I told you, but she’s working on some character art and I’m writing some copy for her for Dicebox that should be going up soon. Prepping to spread some word of mouth at APE—or at least, to have some lucky friends who are actually going spread it for us. But mum’s the word, for now.)
More glaze for your eyes.
Yes: more on Enron. James K. Galbraith, this time, whose basic point is simplistic and charmingly naïve (but idealistic—and I like my politics charming, and naïvely idealistic), but whose angle of attack is commendable. So many conservative commentators (to paint with a broad, broad brush for a moment) have shrugged at the Enron meltdown, claiming not to see any cause for political concern. After all, they say, Enron asked for help, and the administration didn’t give it to them. See? Case closed. But, as Galbraith points out, the point at that point wasn’t to save the company. The damage had already been done, the henhouse already looted, the cash yanked out and socked away—and all with the complicity and willing aid of the Bush administration and the Clinton administration and more members of Congress than you’d ever want in the same place at the same time. The scandal isn’t the illegalities they tried to get away with (though those are horrific, and endemic: “There are a hundred more Enrons waiting to happen,” you keep reading, and no one seems too surprised by this statement); it’s all the crap they managed to get legalized, with a wink and a wad of cash.
At least this much of Galbraith’s Veblenian vision is coming true: there’s a lot of second thoughts out there about the wisdom of applying the brutish volatility of passes for a free market to services that ought to be constant, consistent, and secure, like power (and pensions). —Except, oops, Texas is deregulating its energy market, and another 22 states are tottering in its wake.
Hey. I’m sure California was just a fluke.
