I like the idea of Heather Champ's Rabbit, Rabbit dictum. This appeals to me all the more because of my dream Sunday night: I was trying to get to another section of the museum, across a big room which had been beautifully and carefully carpeted with live grass. But there were these three big, black rabbits -- not cute little cuddle-riffic thingies, but big, buck rabbits not unlike the powerful beast Gerald holds in that scene from Women in Love.
These rabbits kept getting in the way, pulling at my ankles trying to trip me up. They weren't dangerous per se, but stubborn, powerful, and a little unsettling. I finally got out of the room, and into the big gallery where I had to sneak past the horrible, ceramic Sphinx.
Pointless Elaboration Time
A conversation with literary smart guy Gary left me feeling I was too hard earlier on Mr. Myer, particular with that last crack. He does, Gary reminds me, make some awfully good points about some awfully overrated writers. And it may be true that his article's excesses -- the one-note bray and lack of a coherent picture of a literary approach we should prefer-- don't invalidate the salutary dope-slap he delivers to writers who lean on effects not backed up by any substance. So, I don't mean to undercut him unfairly. But he has the burning eyes of the critical zealot, and he froths a bit around the jaws, and in the end, I wanted to shout "Okay, okay! I don't like William Golden either! Now, will you please give me my car keys back?"
I should note, re the admonishment below, that did enjoy AMIF, in approximately the same spirit that I would enjoy sitting in my apartment on a muggy night, with the AC blasting, eating Thai chicken with basil and watching a Law and Order marathon on A&E.
A Reprimand in Part for A Man in Full
The following are hereby forbidden to Mr. Tom Wolfe, author, until such time as there is evidence of rehabilitation:
- The use of the words lubricious and lubricity, esp. with reference to the female body and in particular to its curves.
- Similar use of the term massive when applied to the physiognomy of any male character.
- Any attempt to mimic or parody the lyrics of either hip-hop or rap-metal songs.
On a related note, the current Atlantic Monthly features “A Reader’s Manifesto” by one B.R. Myers, a lengthy screed denouncing the current state of literary fiction as a massive conspiracy by the reviewing staff of the New York Times, Oprah Winfrey, and other powers-of-culture to force feed us “self-conscious, writerly prose” under the guise of Literature. The argument is reminiscent of Wolfe’s own “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” a call to return to the Balzac/Dickens mode of novel, which he made in Harpers’ a number of years ago. Myers makes some reasonable points, many more unreasonable ones, spends pages on a close-reading dissection of writers he hates (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, Don Delillo and Rick Moody bear the brunt of his assault), and keeps mentioning Stephen King as an exemplar of the kind of “great storyteller” who just can’t get credit from the snobs in the Times Book Review. In a towering pet about how these writers have no sense of humor, he quotes a passage from White Noise that made me laugh when I read it again.
Michael Kelly’s introduction to the issue says that Myers writes “as a reader, outraged and seeking to be outrageous in turn,” notes that he is “thirty-seven and lives in Los Lunas, New Mexico.” According to Kelly, “he wrote ‘A Reader’s Manifesto’ for himself, and then sent it to The Atlantic on speculation.” I’m heartened by this news, and am going to spend the rest of the day polishing up my 10,000 word monograph on why all these yuppies with their big, ungainly dogs are ruining Prospect Park. Get set to be outraged!
I just cleaned off the desk. As I bask in the illusion of accomplishment afforded by such a gesture in the direction of entelechy, may I note, by way of association, that the lauded Errol Morris film A Brief History of Time is a wee bit too slow and pompous, in the end, and relies too much on the hypnotically pleasant animations of watches and teacups and such falling into artists' renderings of black holes. Why didn't somebody warn me?
There are things about Christianity that I have wanted to know for some time and things that I haven't.
An Archaeology for Our Times
Desk Rubbings, Salem High School 1997
Sample Curation: "Repetitive strokes [note the multiplicity of lines in the 'B'] and sharp angles show that this may have been written using keys."
Trivial Contest Won By Ephemeral Celebrity
Posh Spice Website dubbed "la creme de la crap"
July 26-- In a stunning last-minute upset, Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham took the honors in the almost completely ignored Wombat File "Dregs of Online" Challenge. Her Beckingham Palace site, the existence of which was, shockingly the subject of actual press attention, demonstrated a breathtaking combination of stupidity, vanity, and media hoo-hah. The animated "tour" and promotional site combines visual ugliness, pathetic attempts to market her uncompelling family as a brand, and opportunities to join a meaningless "V.I.P" club. One observer characterized a visit to her site as "an experience leaving one drained of emotion or any real human response" and lauded its "commitment to a resolutely valueless endeavor." Others remarked on the irony that this condemnation would itself be ignored by all but the four or five souls who read this webpage.
Although resident Wombat philosopher Michael Green made a strong case for the X10 camera "popunder" ads that litter one's desktop when you inadverdantly click on a site that uses them, their very ubiquity made them, according to the panel "a sensible, but less characteristically pointless" choice.
Ms. Beckingham could not be reached for comment. Of course, nobody tried.
One more link: eeeeeeew! (I can't even remember how I got here...)
Wednesday Link Roundup
or "Stuff you can mostly find on MeFi right now"
- Hang a Halo on Satan's Music (warning: involves now-somewhat-hackneyed pleasure of laughing at super-Christians)
- More Stick Fighter Action! (warning: involves lots and lots of bandwidth)
- Shark Petting Pool! (warning: involves mental image of people walking on dead whale carcass, plus depressing evidence of massive human stupidity)
- America Reports: How We Spent Our $300 Tax Rebate (warning: headache-inducing green background)
- Code-4, everybody (warning: more useless info to clog your brain and make you "5150"). Thanks, Metagrrrl.
Go to the bottom of this page from the NY Times to read a nice piece of evidence against the death penalty. (Registration required).
Also, you learn about The Hague.
Pick the comment which is either (a) the more obviously insincere or (b) if meant sincerely, the more crazy and scary.
"I was struck by how easy it is to talk to President Putin, how easy it is to speak from my heart, without, you know, fear of complicating any relationship" - G. Bush
"It seemed to me that his mental reasoning is very deep, very profound. Both of us are aiming at partnership." - V. Putin
sales pitch
Save the Endangered Baby Birds! Buy this 1982 Ford Bronco. As of this posting the bid stands at about 200 bucks. Help a fellow citizen buy his dream "Tunisian Pit Viper farm."
What an addictive little toy that www.theyrule.org website is. Much like the early days of SimCity, where you have the endless pleasures of just tinkering and adding and sprawling and watching a system grow into place underneath you. And you want a bigger computer screen just so you can see the world you make; you want the Computer Screen of God.
And from where I sit, the ebb and flow of boardroom power seems just as fictional as the tiny lives of my Sims.
I went through an ornate baroque phase with theyrule pretty quickly--must have more links!--but tried to pare things down to a more essential simplicity. Franklin Hexagon is by me, if you're curious.
cause and effect exemplified
"If it wasn't for Jesus being born, I never would have gotten anywhere in music. Because it was on another Christmas, a few years later, that my oldest cousin bought me a Stella guitar that he had found in a pawnshop for twelve bucks."
-Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars
I just finished this documentary of excess. (Incidentally, if you search on Am'zon for it by title, you are also offered this. Do we have a word yet to describe the fortuitous and illuminating connections between things which are brought to life via search engines?) Above quoted passage is one of the many that made me laugh out loud -- but most of those I feel embarrased about typing in full.
knifty knowledge korner
What do they do? They Rule.
This takes a moment to figure out, but it's worth the effort. It'll be all the more so when all of the briefcases are filled in with URL's leading directly to information about Our Li'l Global Oligarchy.
The W Train? The subways here are getting all messed up for a long time, thanks to the fact that, apparently, it's designed all wrong. If this had happened in the forties, maybe Leona Stevenson would have heard her murderer coming.
Megnut on the 2002 Budget. Wake up and smell the Solar Power!
evensong
Last night the New York Philharmonic played Prospect Park. The glowing tent of the orchestra was a spaceship squatting on the ballfields. Or: Theresa noted that it evoked a gigantic manta ray. The first half was Weill's "Seven Deadly Sins," sung by Audra McDonald. Her voice was lovely-haunting and cool, slightly alien as it floated across on an breeze that came in from the north end of Long Meadow. We ate stinky cheese and roasted chicken and watched the clouds as they held onto the last pink of the evening.
Ravel came on after the intermission and woke up all the dreamy babies on our little rise. There are a lot of babies out on a summer evening in Prospect Park.
monsters
I'm such a sucker for this sort of thing.
excuse me
No time to dispense pork tacos to all of you pearly people today-- I've got homework to finish!
As long as I have brought up the dreaded X-10 camera pop-ups, allow me to share this awfully nifty trick for getting rid of them. On a mac, make thee a text file, include in this file this line "ads.x10.com [tab] CNAME 127.0.0.1" and, for good measure "media.fastclick.net [tab] CNAME 127.0.0.1", call the file "Hosts", save the file in thy preferences folder (don't use the quotes, by the way). Restart.
Here's the scoop. You will have told your web browser the domain "ads.x10.com" (and so on) is to be found on your very own computer whose IP address is, not at all coincidentally, 127.0.0.1 (this is, by convention, the IP address for "this very computer"). Of course, your very own computer stores no annoying pop-up ad and the browser very properly shows what it finds: nothing at all.
Of course, you can extend this little trick quite a ways, thereby blocking all sorts of annoyances and saving your employer from paying for the network infrastructure to transport a bunch of unwanted ads to you. Good and good for you. For more on all this including a really big list of hosts to block, and for instructions for other operating systems, see these sites: one, two, and tip your hat to Dean Allen, That is all.
La Historia del Perros Calientes. (Gracias, memepool).
Aubade
It’s strange to me that waking up is always like this, a charged space between my dreamlife and that other person I’m not-quite-yet-become. It is like recovering from a sickness to discover that you weren’t always a fevered invalid; it is a tiny, daily (re) enactment of that horrible, wonderful feeling that you get when you think back five or ten years to an alien being that strode about in your body, that wore your clothes and thought your thoughts. You and he are not the same: your dreams do not belong to this person mechanically taking a shower, not exactly.
Every morning, without fail, the words on all of the spines on all of the books in the house shout a poem at me in a beautiful language I am never going to be able to speak.
It’s all over by eight.
What We All More Or Less Knew. Nice to see it on the front page of the Times, anyway.
I apologize for the delays suffered by the Chicago offices in getting their dispatches posted. Is it because of anti-Chicago prejudice here in the "Capital of the World" (thanks, George)? Sure it is! It still pisses us off that you guys have taller buildings.
Mike, maybe the reason we need to be convinced that global warming is human-caused is because we're sick of cleaning up Mother Nature's room for her. Wasn't it one of America's most beloved former leaders who reminded us that "80% of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees?" Maybe when Nature learns to Respect Herself, we can talk. Until then: tough love and SUVs.
Why does everyone who favors doing even very moderate things about climate change, such as the reasonable sounding Gregg Easterbrook, feel compelled to start off by making the case that the observed and predicted warming of the earth is caused by human activity? Suppose the earth were going to get 5 degrees hotter over the next century due to natural causes. It will still be just as bad, no? And won't it mean that we will have to change our lives even more drastically if we have to offset Mother Nature's extended hot flash than we would if we merely had to stop pressing the microwave button ourselves?
Maybe the answer is that the predictions of warming assume human causes: warming will accelerate because our economic activity will as the population increases, undergoes industrialization, and so on. But then it's a leeetle bit misleading to address these issues as if they had two components: the fact of warming and the question of whether it is due to human or natural causes. And, anyway, I don't really believe that the two are so easily collapsed. As Easterbrook points out, the oceans are warming and that will cause additional warming/failure of cooling all by itself.
Still light-headed with the smell of shampoo, and not at all impressed with the number of white spots still on my brown carpet (though they did manage to suck up all of the chad from my absentee ballot last fall -- the Republicans were right in at least this: chads are very tiny, capricious little beasts that are virtually impossible to deal with), I remain yours,
"Best years" again. The analyses are beside the point, he said subverting his beautiful pedantry. Those who use the phrase do so without having any determinate thought to communicate at all. It's just something that you say and comfort is taken in saying and hearing it. It's like talking to your cat: what is said is completely beside the point.
As for the thing about the car, I don't see why we have to bring that up. That was a long time ago. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it.
For the stupid things, I nominate the X-10 camera pop-up ads. I know, not many originality points here, but they do meet the main criteria of stupidity and similarity to "Suddenly Susan." To wit. (a) They are stupid: would anyone buy a product that is associated with intense annoyance? (Leaving aside from the uselessness of the gadget, of course). (b) For similarity to SS: SS had a magical power to stop TV channel surfing, for me, at least. Once you hit that, you realize that there is absolutely nothing on and that you are human slime for having stepped into SS, if only momentarily, in your degraded search for videonic entertainment. Ditto X-10 camera ads and the web.
The Chicago office, filled with the scent of its recently shampooed rugs, has spoken.
Oh, and by the way -- results posted here next week. Winner will receive a videotape of MTV Spring Break footage from 1994.
A Call to Extremely Little Action
I don't really recommend that you play MSN's Outsmart Sisqo; but I wanted to draw your attention to it, as it may represent the nadir of the Infotainment Industry, the bottom of the e-barrel, the Platonic Down to which the expression "dumbing down" refers, the Absolute Zero of cyber-crap.
In fact, I challenge you, dear reader, to send me, should you know of any contenders, the locations of any web sites you feel embody a more righteous claim to the title, and your reasons for privileging its achievements above the Truly and Completely Stupid Thing that is the aformentioned feature. The bar, I realize, is high: let's bring out the totally, wincingly, dreadfully moronic.
Note that I'm not talking about sites using broken English, or incoherent personal sites (Hello, Pot? This is Kettle -- you're black!), or insane conspiracy theorists, or things with technology that doesn't work well. I'm talking about the almost calculated affronts -- the Suddenly Susans of the Web: the products of much time, effort and money, toward an end which reveals itself to be simultaneously insultingly and laughably brain-dead.
Let's get to it.
Over at textheavy.com: domain names you wish you had thought up. My favorite is the still-available mournucopia.com.
Although the lo-rez drawing style of Aaron's Journal will leave you with a splitting headache, just like the one I had exactly 24 hours ago, you really should go and read "Driving Ted Bundy."
Yesterday, I saw that volunteers from Greenpeace were signing up members outside of the New School. But where are they on the real issues? Who Will Protect the Sewer Lizards?
In response to Gavin's query, I asked the web (through Google), what would happen if I got the car pregnant. The aggregated electro-knowledge of our civilization was not equipped to answer this simple question, but it did offer this story about a cow. Her name is Mashka, she was pregnant, and she was stuffed into a car.
I have a headache, so maybe you should go play PuppetMaster for a while.
Mike: re your exegesis of "the best years": I agree -- the irony is in the way a statement so bleak (in one sense) tends to get thrown about with almost a sense of self-congratulation. It's extremely reasonable, not to say philosophical to point out the alternate interpretation of the statement's intent: to suggest that the teenage life of our ourselves and our peers was characterized by an appealing balance of indolence, financial support, and the liberty to do all sorts of ostensibly bad and wrong things, so long as you didn't wreck the car or get pregnant.
Still, the guy was a nitwit.
Isn't it something that Fairfax county describes itself as "the home of the internet" on NPR? "Technology center" wasn't really the way I conceived of the place, when I was there. How many AOL millionaires did I go to high school with? And AOL of all things. Go figure.
I can't decide if the "best years of your life" line is either cruel or kind. I suppose it depends on how it's meant. At the high school graduation "these have been the best years of your life" implies "everything will be much worse from here on." That's the cruel one: those were the good ones? The kind way of saying it involves a deliberate but benevolent lie: "you feel miserable and confused but, actually, you're living rather well." Well, that's not false. What's false is the way the point is put: "these are the best years" instead of "there are respects in which these are pretty good -- your responsibilities are minimal, your freedom is fairly extensive, etc." I'm not sure I'll ever have "best years." I have years that are good in some ways, bad in others.
Really humid days seem always to be preceded by insomniac nights. Just rubbing it in.
Astronomy Lesson
Running through the Ponds on Saturday I felt it: it came riding on the back of the supersaturated air, dripping from the trees and onto the smooth, easy-on-the-feet asphalt of the subdivision. The Ponds is the lushest of the subdivs near my parents' place – smaller houses of similarly claptrap construction, packed in tightly, but girdled with trees and miniature lakes, and knitted together with endearing little winding walks. The streets are all a confusing mess of W's -- Windward Lane, Wilimington Drive, Wildwood Way –you can traverse and retraverse its weaving of streets in loops that seem infinitely variable.
As I pushed my way through the humidity of a Virginia July, up paved hill and down manicured dale, all the cars meditating like calm beasts in their driveways, I felt myself pulled into the past, hijacked by the planetary pull of an invisible but powerful body. All of the frustrated selves of my teenage years, earnest and directionless, desperate for the ordinary world to burst into visionary fruit, seemed to be puffing along beside me. More: I could see – had to see – in fine-grained, hi-resolution detail, the landscape of my adolescent lust. A street name invoked a girl's name, her house, the whole scaffolding of obsession that my teenage self had constructed. I realized my inability – now or ever – to distinguish between the character of the milieu (the endless exurban sprawl) and memory of the time trapped there like a fly in a puddle of amaretto.
In the speech some callow jerk gave at my H.S. graduation (from one of the region's mammoth factories of academic quasicompetence), the speaker cheerfully invoked that "best years of our lives" cliché, and it was easy enough to dismiss at the time (nitwit, I thought) – I was heading off to college and finally, so I believed, into the face and form that would come to constitute my true self. The big truth of adolescence was that it was simply a waiting room for Life: and anyone nostalgic over it, as far as I was concerned, was welcome to hang around and read the magazines.
So what is this planet hidden inside me that draws me into its orbit? Not the Best Years of life, no – but the Densest: the Years of Gravity.
The Bizness Buzzword Factory and the West Harvard School of Business present
part three of an ongoing series:
The Pain of Corporatespeak
Net/Net or Net-Net: n; The final result; the total picture; the summary. "Impact-wise, what's the net/net on this e-commerce initiative getting out of the gate?"
Sources are unclear about the origin of the phrase, but it seems to have emerged as part of the Great Redundancy which buzzword theoriticians chart from the late 1970's. May or may not have evolved from the concept of a statement of the "net positives" matched redundantly against "net negatives," thereby rendering the otherwise sufficient term "net" (signifying a calculation including profit and loss, good and bad, to and fro, all nicely factored in) a weak and wussed-out expression.
The Trouble With Fundamentalism. The twist here is that one of the largest media companies in the world is apparently a player, or a playee, or both.
The Colors of Summer 2001 have been selected and are as follows: milk, blood orange, goddamn itchy bug bites, cat litter, purple hydrangea, debit card, imprecision, hops, roasted red pepper, Ocean Pacific-like Floral Print (particularly in a kind of Blue Hawaii shade, if you get me), censoriousness, Umbria, yellow-blue hydrangea, sitar, fucking poorly airconditioned No. 4 train car, asphalt (crumbled), CD-RW, Anbesol, and mint.
The Special Independence Day Color was pork.
A bit of sidewalk on Carroll Street.
If you can't tell from the grainy photo, they are snugly embedded in cement, a cheerful little mosaic on an otherwise undistinguished strip of masonry. Finally, someone found a second purpose for all the little plastic animals they put in the margaritas at that cheesy Mexican place up 7th Ave.
The last of last night’s dreams: I arrive, as usual, behind schedule for a day’s teaching. Some of the students are already there, in a large room painted an appealing light blue and lit, in a diffuse fashion, from many high windows, the kind of light you get in a loft apartment belonging to an artist in a Hollywood movie. No sooner do I arrive than Bill Barker, still a wisecracking 10 yr. old, remarks “Hey, professor, how many people do you have living up inside of your ass?” Giggles and smirks around the room. I empty my bookbag on a vacant desk. “Well,” I say in a slightly fumbled retort, “by the end of the day a whole bunch of students have been trying to climb up in there.” My crude rejoinder is not entirely a failure, and I even elicit a grin from one of my co-workers, lounging near the back; but I instantly regret it. I have stooped to the kids’ level, and said something inappropriate.
No matter. I’ve got to get class together. Around the edges of the room are built-in shelves filled with books from which I can pull the materials for today’s class. I remember with some relief that Intro to Lit is first, followed by Novel, and then Romantic Poetry at 11:30. My hand finds some sort of Norton Critical edition for the Intro to Lit (Donne?), and then my mind alights on another issue: I cannot remember what we are reading in the novel course. I look around hurriedly and I spot a crumpled copy of the syllabus on a desk. Whoops, apparently it’s not a survey of the novel, but a course on Women and Fiction in the 19th Century.
Of course, half of the books on the list don’t actually exist (Wharton’s The Missionaries, for example) – and what’s worse, I have apparently left three of them for the closing two weeks of the course. What was I thinking? Oh well, today we can discuss The Awakening. It’s the only one left on the schedule I recognize anyway.
It’s now just a few minutes before classtime, and the students have been quietly filling up the seats. As I go searching rather haphazardly through the shelves for some book of poems (Arnold?), she comes in. Wearing a long dress, gloves and a garden-party hat, she is simultaneously Virginia Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and (I realize) my advisor and faculty supervisor. She darts into the room and toward the bookshelves, zipping to and fro with impossible speed, like the Flash. She is very agitated, having one of her manic fits, gibbering wildly about being late for a meeting, how she suffers. She throws her arms about her head, looks for a book but does not choose one. I am concerned for her, concerned she is upsetting the students with these displays (and embarrassed and ashamed), but I know that there is nothing I can do. I think of a word – glossolalia – and it hangs there in the air as if a silver bell has been rung.
Ladies and Gentlemen...the Kinder, Gentler CIA.
Blue Groom w/Geraniums is my favorite among the pix from Peru on the constantly evolving equatorial.tv site. Mr. and Mrs. Bootsy Fracture explain Sparkleday to the underenlightened.
This morning read yet another denunciation of recent Radiohead. It may be true that the version of "Morning Bell" on Kid A is more compositionally complex than the one on Amnesiac. But critical griping about Thom Yorke's failure to deliver the expected gets old, and right quickly. In particular, the thesis that the guitar/bass/drums/singer combo is some kind of authentic medium for artistic expression which musicians depart from at their peril is interesting. But it would require more evidence than I've seen yet.