2003-09-28
Carrousel
2003-09-18
Didn’t Bill Murray Already Make This Movie?
QuestMap
2003-09-12
Eventually, Someone Will Pull A "Mr. Creosote"
2003-09-10
2003-09-09
Furry Harvest
Levering sighed and shook his head. Lady was
already anemic, asthmatic, and congenitally blind. She had been born on the streets
of Wilmington four years earlier, and dropped at a local animal clinic at the age
of six months. Soon after Levering and his wife adopted her, she became allergic to
her own tooth enamel. "That was a weird thing," Levering said. "Never
heard of that before." But he had willingly paid four hundred dollars to have
all her teeth pulled. In retrospect, it seemed like a bargain.
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2003-09-08
Lit Snit
Like everyone else, I read (way) more book reviews than books, and I occasionally feel bad about it. For me, reading literary criticism without having read much literature is the cultural equivalent of flossing; a Sisyphean task that feels so good because it hurts so much. If Catholics receive absolution by going to confession and Protestants by going to the dentist, I get it by reading The New York Review of Books.
If I am driven to read lit crit by cultural and vocational insecurities, I often come away from it feeling the self-loathing that comes from following too closely the antics of the House of Windsor: Are the dramas of these fundamentally alien people truly relevant to my existence? Having neither lived in New York nor read Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I am confronted with the sensation of being disqualified to comment on the writings of these people, yet I want to share their (apparent) conviction that Literature Matters. I’ve followed the work of Ana Marie Cox since her days at Suck, when the novelty of Internet publishing obscured the inconvenient reality that longevity as an online writer probably required some degree of meatspace proximity to actual culture or reporting. Cox has recently held a brief as gadfly for The Believer’s Snarkwatch, and a mission of her blog (currently guest-hosted but nonetheless on-message) has been to question the tenet of The Believer (and, by implication, of Believer-founder Eggers) that contemporary literary criticism (and, one supposes, literature) is unhelpfully fraught with "snarkiness." I’m trying (believe me) to get worked up about this, particularly because I’ve read at least of couple of the books mentioned and the thread seems open to laypersons. Then Clive James (who?) shows up in the New York Times with a Jon Stewart.
The tragic thing is, I actually read "Measuring the Jump" (it being A Browfurrowing Work of Reassuring Brevity). Having been exposed to both plauditory and snarky discussions of Eggers, I restrained every instinct to judge, lest I find myself too directly influenced by the opinions of others. Of course, this disaffected inability to judge is (reportedly) Eggers’s stock in trade, so I began to wonder if I weren’t having an "authentic" reaction to Eggers’s prose after all. In the end, I despaired of my patience. It was only seven magazine pages long; how could I slog through 496 paperback pages? I lost it after the protagonist Fish recalls being scammed for twenty bucks:
The thing is, Fish had just wanted to help
the guy. He spent that first day thinking he had helped the man, believing in
the community of souls, in Daly City or anywhere, and then that man took it
away. He reached inside Fish and took that from him.
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"How was aerobraking? I wish I could have seen that." "I wish I could have slept through it."
2003-09-04
Powell Resignation Watch
Anyway, if Powell succeeds in securing a Security Council resolution that both significantly reduces the military and financial burdens to the U.S. and increases the international investment in the reconstruction of Iraq, it will be an unquestionably good thing. I imagine it will also dramatically reduce the likelihood of Powell departing the Bush Administration prior to the 2004 election. There’s still quite a few months to go, however, and it’s "not too late" for Cheney and Rummy to indulge in a little payback. Add in the prospect of a Clark candidacy hammering on the Bush Administration’s military and diplomatic fecklessness, and Powell might yet grasp the greater part of valor.
Write If You (Don’t) Get Work
Know anyone who’s hiring?
2003-09-03
Spit-Take
It’s more that
when you start using the term "liar" promiscuously in public
discourse, you make such discourse increasingly impossible. The term
should be reser[ve]d only for a conscious and deliberate statement that
you know is untrue as you s[pe]ak or write it. It’s rarer than you
might think. That’s why calling someone a "liar" is
forbidden in the House of Commons. It undermines the good faith necessary
for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al
Franken are all about.
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Executive Wrath
When Kerry disagrees
with you, he makes you feel as though the disagreement is his problem.
When Dean disagrees with you, he makes you feel as though it’s your
problem.
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