Proposals - by Cecilia Woloch (NPR - The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor)
rw: Do I look like the angel of home and hearth with this strange green / fire in my hands?
reminds of? green fire in hands .. a comic book superhero? green lantern ..
ah: Jenna no Jemma in The Children's Hospital, the healing green fire from her hands.
Proposals: And in Prague, on a bridge called the Karlův Most, a stranger, a refugee, who mistook the way I stared at the river for thinking of suicide. Who mistook my American passport for his ticket out of there.
down by the river! ('I lost my baby!') bridges, strangers, rivers, thinking; sure. I like a stranger who asks you to marry him instead of jumping to death in the river. but the cadence and the 'mistook' - 'mistook' - 'ticket out of there' = obvious, cliche, vanity I do not like.
but stranger with a proposal, let's have it:
Thinking of dying? think you might do a little dying today?
Patty Griffin: Tony: 'Hey Tony, what's so good about dying? think you might do a little dying today?'
How about you marry me instead? you don't feel you could love me but I feel you could.
Didion, who was given the number for a specialist & d n call:Instead I got married. Which turned out to be a good thing to do, but badly timed, sinceI still cried in elevators, restaurants, chinese laundries.
Post-Birthday World: You marry me. Got that? You marry me, and toot-sweet. on Page 121: "... ducky. When you leave Lawrence, if you leave Lawrence, you don't tuck in upstairs as me in-house personal slag."
Paul Simon: Gumboots: 'I was having this discussion In a taxi heading downtown Rearranging my position On this friend of mine who had A little bit of a breakdown I said breakdowns come And breakdowns go So what are you going to do about it That’s what I’d like to know You don’t feel you could love me But I feel you could'
all the time, just this morning, singing this in mind
Since: here we are on the same street on the very same day
I was walking down the street When I thought I heard this voice say Say, ain’t we walking down the same street together On the very same day I said hey Senorita that’s astute I said why don’t we get together And call ourselves an institute?
why don't we!
_proposals_
If I ask you this on the street,
Please let me be an acceptable stranger.
Pages are browning in the sunlight,
A collar is wrinkling, not organized
Properly on the hanger. The world
Is touching itself and I cannot stand it.
Preservation it’s all the same
I held a voice to my lips
I pressed a hand on my word
By heart had all the arrangements
When the body left out
into it
Yet speaking against
the losing
Losing – what is the moment worth to you,
And what is the time?
______________
things I've said to you things I've said
on and away as from and to
a friend without, please not, with you
______________
REPOSE
That's what I wanted to tell you.
All the things you could say, you're saying this."With all the fish in the sea?" "Not like her."
These are what I am thinking when I am at the window. when I wake up. when I brush my teeth. My mind returning home, says I'm so sorry. -I want to know things. -Why didn't you tell me sooner? -I just wanted to hear you say it. -So you're not angry? -I'm not done yet. –Shhh... -Just let me get my mind around this. –What is that—that metaphor? -Don't do this. -I'm sorry.
______________
SOURCE
you're reading a book and you make some notes in the margin -- you say
things similar, more or less of your own. this goes on for days. one day, you open the book to a new page and there
in the book's text are sentences that you have written.
before, already. or not? maybe, it must be,
you had already read this page and then
you wrote it down. no. the footnote in the book's text credits you. these are sentences you wrote in the margins. flip back and see.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
az- The Book of Dahlia: A Novel: Elisa Albert | Free Press; 1 edition (March 11, 2008)
so EW names it as #2 best book of the year, and last year I thought their top two choices were interesting and impressive, The Post Birthday World and Shakespeare's Kitchen. and the cancer diagnosis & dying of a an untethered, unhappy, ~'scathingly negative', 'whip smart', unambitious 29 year old who has been spending her days watching movies stoned sounds up my alley. but: she did not seem whip smart to me, she did not seem interestingly negative, so what I am saying is I wanted unconventional and did not find her to be. 'not like me' eh? she has GRE books and McSweeneys in the corner. glibness. McSweeneys style, maybe, am I surprised that Free Press published it?
NewYorker blurbed at az compares to Lorrie Moore, but for me not as recognizable, or lovely as Moore at lst stimes is. I prefer Moore, or Hamann's Anthropology.
did find some true in the last pages:
p248 penult chp 'Forgive & forget'
..at this late date it wasn't that she hated or loved him her older brother
as that she simply wanted that little girl back: the one who trusted & loved.
She wanted the intactness back, and the family, and the womb, and the womb before the womb, and her mother, but not her actual mother.
She wanted to be young again, very young, small, smaller still.
and beyond that she wanted those things encased & encased & encased... safely somewhere warm.
But forgive whom & for what?
Bruce her father had brought her back to LA and bought her a house.
And it was a new beginning. She adored her house. How nice it was to orchestrate the sort of regestating she knew she needed. She would have been okay, truly. She would have! She really would have. After she was done being the opposite of okay, she would have been okay.
She was going to go to sleep at night, content to be alone in her dreams, glad to experience, for herself, whatever comprised those dreams.
...
p.252 final chp 'Be well'
Her life could be seen as a series of things she had failed to get over. And now it was over. And who's left here to rail & rage & scream & fight & cry at the loss of Dahlia? Who will be irrational & destroyed? Who'll think of her, late at night and early in the morning, in their happiest & worst moments? Who will think of her? and think of her? and think of her more? Who will send her silent, connective love from deep within the recess~ of a single solitary existence? She didn't want sorrow, she wanted grief, the real deal. Whose life destroyed, whose sense of security in life itself gone? whose chance of any complete happiness ruined forever?
Bruce was there with her, holding her hand. "La La," he said, holding her hand, his whispers & sobs like branches held out to save her from drowing. "I love you, La." good dad. 'ineffectual', okay, but he hangs out with her while she's sick, what do you want to do today? whatever you want? and he is sitting with her when she dies.
would there be a light? let there not be anything as predictable as that, after all this, something everyone could predict? no, do not picture death as in & of delimited abovewater life. worst of all, what if it were nothing? This awareness, this voice, these memories, what is this mood that fills the room? (Copenhagen - On H's Ground) the being she herself understood 'completely' she *understands* *herself* completely? and --honestly, really, at base-- loved anyway: where would it all go? All those memories, things she couldn't get over, and didn't, and wouldn't, now. ..There was no one else who knew what these things felt like, these emotional fingerprints.
La. La. an echo. La. So this was it then. Okay. Where was her mother --or a mother, any mother, someone else's mother-- to sing her to bed? She felt a panic rise & subside, like the nodding of resisted sleep. She wasn't ready. There was a hesitation, like at the end of a phone call. Still, the panic rose & subsided, rose again before subsiding again. It rose again, then subsided, then rose again, then paused: she wasn't ready. She wasn't ready. She wasn't ready.
shantih shantih shantih three three three times
attachment. inconsolable.
you want the womb with all that is not there. the river, the rocks, the words, No. there are no words and none of the words are theirs. No tears, or all tears, fluid. but no grief. No train, no platform, no one being left, no one leaving. no Dog Monday, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, longer than you think. you are not thinking of the things of this world, the soldier finally come home, the old dog --old? not so old! seven years on, his Jem stepping off the train-- a flash across the platform. Chesterton's things of this world: mothers, fighting peoples. So: nations, navies, wars. but also: a cat purring, back to your face, feet against your palm, Not here. Snow, sleds, the wooded hills: "It's a wonderful world, Hobbes old buddy! Let's go exploring!" A boy and his tiger. A boy and his penguin. Goodnight Opus. Goodnight Moon. A boy and his bear in an enchanted forest, not here, playing.
*Orthodoxy - by G K Chesteron (Ggle Bk Srch) p13 As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. ... seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. ...
so EW names it as #2 best book of the year, and last year I thought their top two choices were interesting and impressive, The Post Birthday World and Shakespeare's Kitchen. and the cancer diagnosis & dying of a an untethered, unhappy, ~'scathingly negative', 'whip smart', unambitious 29 year old who has been spending her days watching movies stoned sounds up my alley. but: she did not seem whip smart to me, she did not seem interestingly negative, so what I am saying is I wanted unconventional and did not find her to be. 'not like me' eh? she has GRE books and McSweeneys in the corner. glibness. McSweeneys style, maybe, am I surprised that Free Press published it?
NewYorker blurbed at az compares to Lorrie Moore, but for me not as recognizable, or lovely as Moore at lst stimes is. I prefer Moore, or Hamann's Anthropology.
did find some true in the last pages:
p248 penult chp 'Forgive & forget'
..at this late date it wasn't that she hated or loved him her older brother
as that she simply wanted that little girl back: the one who trusted & loved.
She wanted the intactness back, and the family, and the womb, and the womb before the womb, and her mother, but not her actual mother.
She wanted to be young again, very young, small, smaller still.
and beyond that she wanted those things encased & encased & encased... safely somewhere warm.
But forgive whom & for what?
Bruce her father had brought her back to LA and bought her a house.
And it was a new beginning. She adored her house. How nice it was to orchestrate the sort of regestating she knew she needed. She would have been okay, truly. She would have! She really would have. After she was done being the opposite of okay, she would have been okay.
She was going to go to sleep at night, content to be alone in her dreams, glad to experience, for herself, whatever comprised those dreams.
...
p.252 final chp 'Be well'
Her life could be seen as a series of things she had failed to get over. And now it was over. And who's left here to rail & rage & scream & fight & cry at the loss of Dahlia? Who will be irrational & destroyed? Who'll think of her, late at night and early in the morning, in their happiest & worst moments? Who will think of her? and think of her? and think of her more? Who will send her silent, connective love from deep within the recess~ of a single solitary existence? She didn't want sorrow, she wanted grief, the real deal. Whose life destroyed, whose sense of security in life itself gone? whose chance of any complete happiness ruined forever?
Bruce was there with her, holding her hand. "La La," he said, holding her hand, his whispers & sobs like branches held out to save her from drowing. "I love you, La." good dad. 'ineffectual', okay, but he hangs out with her while she's sick, what do you want to do today? whatever you want? and he is sitting with her when she dies.
would there be a light? let there not be anything as predictable as that, after all this, something everyone could predict? no, do not picture death as in & of delimited abovewater life. worst of all, what if it were nothing? This awareness, this voice, these memories, what is this mood that fills the room? (Copenhagen - On H's Ground) the being she herself understood 'completely' she *understands* *herself* completely? and --honestly, really, at base-- loved anyway: where would it all go? All those memories, things she couldn't get over, and didn't, and wouldn't, now. ..There was no one else who knew what these things felt like, these emotional fingerprints.
La. La. an echo. La. So this was it then. Okay. Where was her mother --or a mother, any mother, someone else's mother-- to sing her to bed? She felt a panic rise & subside, like the nodding of resisted sleep. She wasn't ready. There was a hesitation, like at the end of a phone call. Still, the panic rose & subsided, rose again before subsiding again. It rose again, then subsided, then rose again, then paused: she wasn't ready. She wasn't ready. She wasn't ready.
shantih shantih shantih three three three times
attachment. inconsolable.
you want the womb with all that is not there. the river, the rocks, the words, No. there are no words and none of the words are theirs. No tears, or all tears, fluid. but no grief. No train, no platform, no one being left, no one leaving. no Dog Monday, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, longer than you think. you are not thinking of the things of this world, the soldier finally come home, the old dog --old? not so old! seven years on, his Jem stepping off the train-- a flash across the platform. Chesterton's things of this world: mothers, fighting peoples. So: nations, navies, wars. but also: a cat purring, back to your face, feet against your palm, Not here. Snow, sleds, the wooded hills: "It's a wonderful world, Hobbes old buddy! Let's go exploring!" A boy and his tiger. A boy and his penguin. Goodnight Opus. Goodnight Moon. A boy and his bear in an enchanted forest, not here, playing.
*Orthodoxy - by G K Chesteron (Ggle Bk Srch) p13 As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. ... seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. ...
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Death Takes a Holiday: Books: The New Yorker:
For Saramago, the problem is not just that humans are natural-born utopia-killers; it is that eternity itself —life forever uninterrupted—seems unbearable. And Saramago does more than tease Dostoyevsky in this novel. For if the disappearance of God means that “everything is permitted,” and the disappearance of death means that everything is permitted, then, by the novelist’s tacit catechism, God must be death, and death must be God. No wonder religion needs death: death is the one God we can believe in.
Saramago is drawn to these Gnostic inversions. In perhaps his greatest book, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991) yes my fvr, the novelist, characteristically, tells the story of Jesus’ life and death without changing any of the famous facts, while at the same time turning the theology of the Gospels upside down.
...“God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit” is how the narrator puts it. On the Cross, hearing his heavenly Father declaim from the clouds, “This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” Jesus bursts out, “Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.” It is the novel’s final, and most wicked, inversion. “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” was enormously controversial in Catholic Portugal (Jesus sleeps, and lives, with Mary Magdalene), but it is the most pious yes of blasphemous books. Behind its savage ironies, Saramago seems to do no more than take the Incarnation as seriously as possible. yes.
..He is in some ways the least fantastical of novelists yes, because he so relentlessly persists with his fictional hypotheses, following them through to large, humane conclusions.
He pictures Death for us as an embodied female absence, a skeleton in a sheet who lives in a frigid, subterranean room, accompanied only by her much used scythe. (He also denies her a capital “D.”) After her seven months of self-interruption, this gloomy goddess sends a letter to a TV station, announcing that she is ending her experiment, because humans have acted so “deplorably.” People will die again at the old rate, which is about three hundred a day. Under the new rules, those citizens whose time is up will be given one week’s notice: each will receive a violet-colored letter, a notice of termination from Death herself. This apparently humane concession—the nominee now has time to take his leave, get his estate in order, and so on—is of course unbearably cruel, since most people would rather be surprised by death than condemned to it.
...
When Death’s letter is published in the newspapers, a grammarian is consulted, and notes its “chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas. . . .” Death writes like José Saramago.
As Death watches the cellist drink, Saramago writes that she looked at the water “and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed.” The reader wonders: if Death cannot imagine thirst, can she possibly imagine death? And can the novelist? One answer that Saramago offers—it is the wide, universal, antique truth toward which his complex fiction has been travelling—is that if we neither recoil from death nor religiously long to vanquish it, but, rather, accept the old actuality that in the midst of life we are in death, then death surrounds us like life, and to imagine death is really to imagine life.
For Saramago, the problem is not just that humans are natural-born utopia-killers; it is that eternity itself —life forever uninterrupted—seems unbearable. And Saramago does more than tease Dostoyevsky in this novel. For if the disappearance of God means that “everything is permitted,” and the disappearance of death means that everything is permitted, then, by the novelist’s tacit catechism, God must be death, and death must be God. No wonder religion needs death: death is the one God we can believe in.
Saramago is drawn to these Gnostic inversions. In perhaps his greatest book, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991) yes my fvr, the novelist, characteristically, tells the story of Jesus’ life and death without changing any of the famous facts, while at the same time turning the theology of the Gospels upside down.
...“God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit” is how the narrator puts it. On the Cross, hearing his heavenly Father declaim from the clouds, “This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” Jesus bursts out, “Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.” It is the novel’s final, and most wicked, inversion. “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” was enormously controversial in Catholic Portugal (Jesus sleeps, and lives, with Mary Magdalene), but it is the most pious yes of blasphemous books. Behind its savage ironies, Saramago seems to do no more than take the Incarnation as seriously as possible. yes.
..He is in some ways the least fantastical of novelists yes, because he so relentlessly persists with his fictional hypotheses, following them through to large, humane conclusions.
He pictures Death for us as an embodied female absence, a skeleton in a sheet who lives in a frigid, subterranean room, accompanied only by her much used scythe. (He also denies her a capital “D.”) After her seven months of self-interruption, this gloomy goddess sends a letter to a TV station, announcing that she is ending her experiment, because humans have acted so “deplorably.” People will die again at the old rate, which is about three hundred a day. Under the new rules, those citizens whose time is up will be given one week’s notice: each will receive a violet-colored letter, a notice of termination from Death herself. This apparently humane concession—the nominee now has time to take his leave, get his estate in order, and so on—is of course unbearably cruel, since most people would rather be surprised by death than condemned to it.
...
When Death’s letter is published in the newspapers, a grammarian is consulted, and notes its “chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas. . . .” Death writes like José Saramago.
As Death watches the cellist drink, Saramago writes that she looked at the water “and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed.” The reader wonders: if Death cannot imagine thirst, can she possibly imagine death? And can the novelist? One answer that Saramago offers—it is the wide, universal, antique truth toward which his complex fiction has been travelling—is that if we neither recoil from death nor religiously long to vanquish it, but, rather, accept the old actuality that in the midst of life we are in death, then death surrounds us like life, and to imagine death is really to imagine life.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
az: Idiots: Five Fairy Tales and Other Stories: Jakob Arjouni: Books
pubweekly: Fairies promise one wish—but not "immortality, health, money and love"—to each of the wretched, narcissistic protagonists in the first five stories of Arjouni's sardonic new collection. In the title story, a fairy comes to the aid of a miserable ad exec desperate to save his company from financial ruin.
no this first protag not obvsly miserable or desperate or wretched. seemed reasonable, well-intentioned, somewhat selfaware re moral hypocrisy:
p15: While Max was thinking, his sense of shame grew stronger and stronger. As if he knew that in the end, if he did make a more personal wish after all, as was clearly expectd, his thoughts were only to help him not seem to selfish to himself. Because thinking about hunger in the world was almost like doing something about it. And how many people simply ignored the plight of the starving? So that left him occupying the moral high ground. All the same, he couldn't entirely fool himself that way.
Max. same name as protag in Eagles & Angels, also German.
Max, Berlin, cafe, a fairy. agency, clients, business.
also reminisc Troll, wh is in Finland, & protag is Martes.
'urban fairy tales'. my: eros-magic. but so far, not much eros here.
pubweekly: ...tales about desperate folk at the edges of contemporary German society.
p1: When the fairy visited Max he was sitting outside Rico's Sports Bar in Berlin on a warm spring evening, drinking beer and thinking. He was meeting Ronnie for a meal an hour from now, and if he didn't finally have it out with Ronnie then who would? Because opinion in the office was unanimous: not only was Ronnie acting like the ultimate bastard, if he carried on running the agency the way he'd been doing these last few months he'd lose them all their jobs.
p13 "What do other people wish for?"
"Oh, all kinds of things. Lots of them want a couple weeks' vacation. Others want a dishwasher."
"You can't be serious!"
"Yes, I am. Dishwashers come close to the top of the list. Third or fourth place."
"What's in first place?"
"Being famous."
"But doesn't being famous really come under the heading of immortality? And a dishwasher under the heading of money?"
"Oh, think about it long enough and I guess every wish comes under one of those headings. "
"It doesn't take much thinking to work out that a dishwasher costs money."
The fairy sighed. "Listen, I didn't make the rules. A dishwasher is okay, a thousand marks isn't."
"Don't make such heavy weather of it," said the fairy, seeing Max's hand tremble slightly as he struck a match. "There's no such thing as one great, perfect wish."
...Soon Max raised his head and asked, with a small, almost challenging light in his eyes, "Suppose I wish for an idiot to stop being too idiotic to see his own idiocy?"
Once again the fairy looked surprised, but quite pleasantly surprised this time. She had been fairly sure that a man like Max would end up choosing the most expensive material thing available, as usual. There were clients who asked straight out, "What's the most expensive?" It was the dishwasher.
so, liked this first story bcs Max, who seemed rather reasonable, likeable, wishes for his bullish boss Ronnie to see own idiocy, work with him to return to earlier ideals for the company, for team work.
but then Max learns fr coworker Sophie that he himself is seen as worse than Ronnie, bcs he smooths evth over, makes himslf indispens as peacekeeper. & I suppose that Max then dismissing this as Sophie just wanting to bellyache at someone means that he himslf is unable to see his idiocy? but it's not obvs, it's unclear, subtle.
vs third story re domineering mother, just awful, evth she says fr beginning suspect: self-centered imagining self as martyr. tedious ~ to me like an obvious 'internal monologue' unreliable narrator exercise. but wait, in opening of story, son says mother is dead? then we go to narrative in mother's perspective, earlier in time I assumed. so what is the deal with the opening? maybe sth int unobvs in that...
only 1 cust rvw, wish cld find commentary on the stories.
Jakob Arjouni idiots max sophie ronnie - Google Search nichts!
Idioten. Fünf Märchen. by Jakob Arjouni | LibraryThing
one rvw, auf Deutsch:
...Dadurch enthalten die Geschichten jedoch oft ein gewisses Maß an Vorhersehbarkeit - besonders, wenn schon der Klappentext suggeriert, dass keine von ihnen die Protagonisten glücklich zurücklässt. So können nur die Märchen »Im Tal des Todes« und »Happy-End« mit glänzenden Pointen überzeugen. Die drei anderen haben dagegen bloß traurige Konsequenzen zu bieten.
ggl transl: The wish fulfillment is always a turning point, the current situation but only logically continue. This includes the stories but often a degree of predictability - especially when even the blurb suggests that none of them happy behind the protagonists. Thus, only the fairy tale "In the Valley of Death" and "Happy End" with brilliant punchlines convincing. The other three, however, have merely sad consequences to offer.
pubweekly: Fairies promise one wish—but not "immortality, health, money and love"—to each of the wretched, narcissistic protagonists in the first five stories of Arjouni's sardonic new collection. In the title story, a fairy comes to the aid of a miserable ad exec desperate to save his company from financial ruin.
no this first protag not obvsly miserable or desperate or wretched. seemed reasonable, well-intentioned, somewhat selfaware re moral hypocrisy:
p15: While Max was thinking, his sense of shame grew stronger and stronger. As if he knew that in the end, if he did make a more personal wish after all, as was clearly expectd, his thoughts were only to help him not seem to selfish to himself. Because thinking about hunger in the world was almost like doing something about it. And how many people simply ignored the plight of the starving? So that left him occupying the moral high ground. All the same, he couldn't entirely fool himself that way.
Max. same name as protag in Eagles & Angels, also German.
Max, Berlin, cafe, a fairy. agency, clients, business.
also reminisc Troll, wh is in Finland, & protag is Martes.
'urban fairy tales'. my: eros-magic. but so far, not much eros here.
pubweekly: ...tales about desperate folk at the edges of contemporary German society.
p1: When the fairy visited Max he was sitting outside Rico's Sports Bar in Berlin on a warm spring evening, drinking beer and thinking. He was meeting Ronnie for a meal an hour from now, and if he didn't finally have it out with Ronnie then who would? Because opinion in the office was unanimous: not only was Ronnie acting like the ultimate bastard, if he carried on running the agency the way he'd been doing these last few months he'd lose them all their jobs.
p13 "What do other people wish for?"
"Oh, all kinds of things. Lots of them want a couple weeks' vacation. Others want a dishwasher."
"You can't be serious!"
"Yes, I am. Dishwashers come close to the top of the list. Third or fourth place."
"What's in first place?"
"Being famous."
"But doesn't being famous really come under the heading of immortality? And a dishwasher under the heading of money?"
"Oh, think about it long enough and I guess every wish comes under one of those headings. "
"It doesn't take much thinking to work out that a dishwasher costs money."
The fairy sighed. "Listen, I didn't make the rules. A dishwasher is okay, a thousand marks isn't."
"Don't make such heavy weather of it," said the fairy, seeing Max's hand tremble slightly as he struck a match. "There's no such thing as one great, perfect wish."
...Soon Max raised his head and asked, with a small, almost challenging light in his eyes, "Suppose I wish for an idiot to stop being too idiotic to see his own idiocy?"
Once again the fairy looked surprised, but quite pleasantly surprised this time. She had been fairly sure that a man like Max would end up choosing the most expensive material thing available, as usual. There were clients who asked straight out, "What's the most expensive?" It was the dishwasher.
so, liked this first story bcs Max, who seemed rather reasonable, likeable, wishes for his bullish boss Ronnie to see own idiocy, work with him to return to earlier ideals for the company, for team work.
but then Max learns fr coworker Sophie that he himself is seen as worse than Ronnie, bcs he smooths evth over, makes himslf indispens as peacekeeper. & I suppose that Max then dismissing this as Sophie just wanting to bellyache at someone means that he himslf is unable to see his idiocy? but it's not obvs, it's unclear, subtle.
vs third story re domineering mother, just awful, evth she says fr beginning suspect: self-centered imagining self as martyr. tedious ~ to me like an obvious 'internal monologue' unreliable narrator exercise. but wait, in opening of story, son says mother is dead? then we go to narrative in mother's perspective, earlier in time I assumed. so what is the deal with the opening? maybe sth int unobvs in that...
only 1 cust rvw, wish cld find commentary on the stories.
Jakob Arjouni idiots max sophie ronnie - Google Search nichts!
Idioten. Fünf Märchen. by Jakob Arjouni | LibraryThingone rvw, auf Deutsch:
...Dadurch enthalten die Geschichten jedoch oft ein gewisses Maß an Vorhersehbarkeit - besonders, wenn schon der Klappentext suggeriert, dass keine von ihnen die Protagonisten glücklich zurücklässt. So können nur die Märchen »Im Tal des Todes« und »Happy-End« mit glänzenden Pointen überzeugen. Die drei anderen haben dagegen bloß traurige Konsequenzen zu bieten.
ggl transl: The wish fulfillment is always a turning point, the current situation but only logically continue. This includes the stories but often a degree of predictability - especially when even the blurb suggests that none of them happy behind the protagonists. Thus, only the fairy tale "In the Valley of Death" and "Happy End" with brilliant punchlines convincing. The other three, however, have merely sad consequences to offer.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
really 29 Nov. just made private post cataloging my ggl rdr category-tags for asllvn.
how I read the 2008 campaign ... election.
= posted by m # 5:12 PM (mdlww)
'dlcs' label here bcs it's me articulating my categories, my thinking. categories oh categories, how I am arranging. assessment.
how I read the 2008 campaign ... election.
= posted by m # 5:12 PM (mdlww)
'dlcs' label here bcs it's me articulating my categories, my thinking. categories oh categories, how I am arranging. assessment.
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Right to Remain Silent - By Austin W. Bramwell | The American Conservative, November 03, 2008 Issue | Conservatives don’t need a movement—and the best have no use for one.
That conservatism is in crisis is widely acknowledged. Some say that the movement has forsaken its principles; others that it has been corrupted by power; still others call for ideological renovation. All share the conviction that the crisis calls for a high-minded conversation as to the meaning of conservatism. To the contrary, in my view, the answer to the crisis—if there is a crisis—lies in ending that conversation altogether. huh. ok: bcs shld not be a 'movement.' not be an ideology, a system.
Until recently, ...most simply accepted the lexical understanding of conservatism as resistance to change. Only with the founding of that set of bureaucracies and sources of funding that became known as “conservative” did the debate as to the meaning of conservatism begin. Since then, nearly every treatment of conservatism has aimed at convincing, galvanizing, or scandalizing a movement audience.
Apparent exceptions only prove the rule. Michael Oakeshott, for example, characterized conservatism as a mere disposition—a theory that negates the very possibility of a conservative “movement.” But Oakeshott wrote precisely in reaction to the more ideological understandings of conservatism like those the movement was beginning to develop in America. The conservative movement continues to pay lip service to Oakeshott, but his theory of conservatism, if accepted, would fatally undermine the rationale for having a movement in the first place.
Non-movement conservatives have arguably done more to advance conservative ideas and without the burden of fitting them into an ideological system or wondering how they may affect their standing within an ideological movement. Consider the impact of these notable non-movement conservatives going back to the era of the movement’s founding:
-Joseph Schumpeter. Austrian by birth, Schumpeter wrote his famous Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy while a professor at Harvard. It stands out as the greatest (if also the most elliptical) defense of capitalist European civilization ever penned. Movement conservatives often take credit for the (partial) triumph of free-market ideas, but Schumpeter did more than anyone to persuade American leaders to preserve the capitalist system (to say nothing of the sort of semi-feudal, mixed constitution that he favored). pro: capitalism, free markets.
-Jane Jacobs. When Jacobs wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planners, flush with federal dollars and enamored of modernist designs, were obliterating old neighborhoods in favor of thruways and high-rise apartment complexes. They never bothered to study how communities actually work. Jacobs did. The unplanned order of old buildings, mixed uses, and formal conventions, Jacobs argued, protects people from danger and makes decent lives for them possible. Urban renewal, by contrast, was immiserating its intended beneficiaries by depriving them of the organic features of real neighborhoods. pro: organic unplanned neighborhoods. (?anti: urban planning).
-Tom Wolfe. Radical Chic, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the Me Decade, the Right Stuff: Wolfe invented the very vocabulary for interpreting the carnival of American culture. He has exposed the degeneration of the civil-rights movement into race hustling, the moral one-upsmanship of wealthy liberals, and the vaporous egotism of contemporary religiosity. For every ballyhooed reform, Wolfe has shown the hypocrisy and cruelty beneath. anti: ballyhooed reforms.
-Jacques Barzun. The centegenarian polymath is probably the most civilized man alive. You can infer his politics from his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence. He admires Montaigne, Montesquieu, Walter Bagehot, William James—each a fox who knows many tricks as opposed to a hedgehog who knows one thorough (~totalitizing) trick and, broadly, a skeptic. No one better embodies the proposition that civilization—the “best that has been thought and said by man”—is worth defending. pro: 'The Great Ideas'.
-Noam Chomsky, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker. These men have doomed to oblivion what Pinker calls the “Standard Social Science Model” whereby something called “society” shapes a fictile {Latin fictilis, made of clay, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to mold} human nature however it pleases. ?? On the contrary, while human nature may express itself in an infinite variety of cultural forms, the underlying machinery can achieve only a finite set of ends. ?ie that there is a 'human nature.' The Standard Social Science Model has inspired failed policies from the Gulag to No Child Left Behind, at incalculable human cost. Thanks to these scientists, civilization has a hope of finding a way out.
Hate Noam Chomsky as much as you please. It remains the case that Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar not only revived the study of human nature but provided a model of how complex features of human society could be explained more generally. It instantly discredited behaviorism and has become part of the bedrock of the critique of social engineering. Indeed, Chomsky describes his politics as an attack on social engineering as he perceives it. Without Chomsky’s watershed discovery, conservatives’ belief in human nature would be only a postulate. pro: human nature not fluid. anti: social engineering, behaviorism, 'standard social science model.'
I admit that many will find this list absurd. Chomsky’s anti-American pamphleteering often overshadows his pioneering work in linguistics. Jacobs was arrested protesting the Vietnam War and expatriated to Canada. Wilson is a New Deal liberal, Barzun apolitical, Schumpeter too aloof to be categorized.
Great non-movement conservatives have in common only that they have advanced conservative positions. None has contributed anything to conservatism as an ideological *system*.
Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement. Originalism in constitutional law was developed by Raoul Berger, a Harvard liberal; free-market ideas by academic economists working within the mainstream of their profession; anticommunism by disillusioned leftists, only some of whom (from Chambers and Burnham to the later neoconservatives) went on to form or join the conservative movement; foreign-policy realism by émigré academic Hans Morgenthau. The repertoire of conservative cultural criticism is painfully derivative, which may account for the dreary sarcasm that usually accompanies it.
Perhaps the only ideas for which the movement can take credit are the those of the “Projectarians,” i.e., the hawks affiliated with the Project for the New American Century.
{ newamericancentury.org: A neoconservative organization supporting greater American militarization, challenging hostile governments, advancing democratic & economic freedom. wkp: neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., co-founded in early 1997 as a non-profit educational organization by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal is "to promote American global leadership" as "good for America and good for the world" and to support "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." A strong influence on high-level officials in the administration of George W. Bush, affecting development of military and foreign policies, esp national security and the Iraq War. The PNAC report Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000) "was developed by Donald Rumsfeld (Sec of Defense), Dick Cheney (VP), Paul Wolfowitz (Dep Sec of Defense) and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Chief of Staff for VP), and is devoted to matters of 'maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests.'" star wars ... E Weinberger 9/12 }
I am happy to concede these as one of the few examples of an intellectual achievement unique to the conservative *movement*. bcs it's ugly? or just, happy to concede that they have accomplished this ~
Only the non-movement conservatives have managed to upset the intellectual consensus, for they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it. Consider the major traumas of establishment liberalism: Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life, Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 Report on the Negro Family, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement speech*, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind
{* First Principles - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address, June 8, 1978: Solzhenitsyn’s June 8, 1978, commencement address at Harvard was the most controversial public speech he delivered during his twenty-year exile in the West. His remarks on that occasion challenged many of the pieties that were dear to the contemporary intellectual clerisy. Solzhenitsyn pointed out how vulnerable liberal humanism is to cooptation by more radical currents of modern thought. Moderate liberalism gave way to radicalism, radicalism to socialism, and socialism soon found itself powerless before communism’s claim to embody the “full logic of materialistic development.” For Solzhenitsyn, the inherent vulnerability of humanism to “the current which is farthest to the Left” goes some way toward explaining the shameful indulgence by many intellectuals of communism in the twentieth century. Now that Solzhenitsyn’s principled opposition to totalitarianism has been fully vindicated, it is easier to embrace his claim that human freedom needs sturdier foundations than those provided by an “anthropocentric humanism” that refuses to defer to a “Superior Spirit” above Man.}.
That leaves but one rationale for the movement: to preserve conservative ideas in an inhospitable world. No sentiment is more widely shared by movement conservatives than that they are an embattled minority fighting a hateful enemy. Yet none of the elements of movement conservative ideology by itself poses any career hazard. Mickey Kaus {kausfiles hosted by Slate ~ 'neoliberal' ~ endorsed Hilary Clinton} opposes open borders; Nicholas Wade of the New York Times and New Republic contributor Steven Pinker believe in the reality of race; Al Gore is a critic of modernity what is it to be a critic of modernity?; Jewish atheist Nat Hentoff is pro-life; Bill Cosby excoriates black culture; Camille Paglia lambastes feminists; Gregg Easterbrook is a skeptic of environmentalism. cultural criticism ~ critique of 'ballyhooed' reforms. Some movement conservative views, such as support for the free market, are firmly a part of mainstream discourse. Others, such as a fondness for tradition, can be found all over the political spectrum. On close examination, it is difficult to find a movement conservative idea to which mainstream organs of scholarship and opinion are actually closed.
Take a hypothetical young talent with contrarian inclinations. Movement conservatives would counsel him to make his way up their ranks. But suppose he ignores their advice and joins the New York Times—or the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. There, even if he never classifies himself as conservative, he pursues stories that expose the perverse incentives of well-intentioned policies, the human costs of mass immigration, or the reality that, as Steve Sailer puts it, “families matter.” His ability to see the world differently gives him a monopoly on stories that his colleagues cannot or will not spot themselves.
If the climate of opinion ever shifts, it will not that must be a mistake? confusing be thanks to non-movement conservatives working within mainstream establishment institutions. My advice to young conservatives: avoid the movement, eschew its enticements. Above all, ignore debates as to the true meaning of conservatism. After 60 years, the movement has succumbed to bureaucratic inertia and regression toward the mean. Conservative ideas will flourish only after conservatism is forgotten.
was int in this as re supposed 'crisis' of ideology on the right.
but then reading as giving answers to, what is conservatism?
ironic: this purports to be an argument against asking, What is conservatism? and I am reading it to answer that. but: really, it is an argument that conservative ideas should not be part of a movement, an ideological system. so it's not ironic to ask naively, what are the ideas called 'conservative'?
and what is liberalism? or 'liberal' ideas?
what makes someone identify themselves as a conservative or as a liberal, as on the right or on the left. what are the real disagreements btw the two. not really helped here wrt that. all I got from this is that sometimes reforms proposed by the left are not as helpful as appear to intend to be, and may be motivated by egotism or oneupmanship.
my working sense is that it is liberal to want to make world better, to believe government should be responsive to unfairness, poverty, discrimination. & it is conservative to be skeptical of any attempt to improve the world, and to think govt should be modest in aims, that it is necessary to provide infrastructure and national security, and should otherwise avoid impinging on individual freedom.
That conservatism is in crisis is widely acknowledged. Some say that the movement has forsaken its principles; others that it has been corrupted by power; still others call for ideological renovation. All share the conviction that the crisis calls for a high-minded conversation as to the meaning of conservatism. To the contrary, in my view, the answer to the crisis—if there is a crisis—lies in ending that conversation altogether. huh. ok: bcs shld not be a 'movement.' not be an ideology, a system.
Until recently, ...most simply accepted the lexical understanding of conservatism as resistance to change. Only with the founding of that set of bureaucracies and sources of funding that became known as “conservative” did the debate as to the meaning of conservatism begin. Since then, nearly every treatment of conservatism has aimed at convincing, galvanizing, or scandalizing a movement audience.
Apparent exceptions only prove the rule. Michael Oakeshott, for example, characterized conservatism as a mere disposition—a theory that negates the very possibility of a conservative “movement.” But Oakeshott wrote precisely in reaction to the more ideological understandings of conservatism like those the movement was beginning to develop in America. The conservative movement continues to pay lip service to Oakeshott, but his theory of conservatism, if accepted, would fatally undermine the rationale for having a movement in the first place.
Non-movement conservatives have arguably done more to advance conservative ideas and without the burden of fitting them into an ideological system or wondering how they may affect their standing within an ideological movement. Consider the impact of these notable non-movement conservatives going back to the era of the movement’s founding:
-Joseph Schumpeter. Austrian by birth, Schumpeter wrote his famous Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy while a professor at Harvard. It stands out as the greatest (if also the most elliptical) defense of capitalist European civilization ever penned. Movement conservatives often take credit for the (partial) triumph of free-market ideas, but Schumpeter did more than anyone to persuade American leaders to preserve the capitalist system (to say nothing of the sort of semi-feudal, mixed constitution that he favored). pro: capitalism, free markets.
-Jane Jacobs. When Jacobs wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planners, flush with federal dollars and enamored of modernist designs, were obliterating old neighborhoods in favor of thruways and high-rise apartment complexes. They never bothered to study how communities actually work. Jacobs did. The unplanned order of old buildings, mixed uses, and formal conventions, Jacobs argued, protects people from danger and makes decent lives for them possible. Urban renewal, by contrast, was immiserating its intended beneficiaries by depriving them of the organic features of real neighborhoods. pro: organic unplanned neighborhoods. (?anti: urban planning).
-Tom Wolfe. Radical Chic, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the Me Decade, the Right Stuff: Wolfe invented the very vocabulary for interpreting the carnival of American culture. He has exposed the degeneration of the civil-rights movement into race hustling, the moral one-upsmanship of wealthy liberals, and the vaporous egotism of contemporary religiosity. For every ballyhooed reform, Wolfe has shown the hypocrisy and cruelty beneath. anti: ballyhooed reforms.
-Jacques Barzun. The centegenarian polymath is probably the most civilized man alive. You can infer his politics from his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence. He admires Montaigne, Montesquieu, Walter Bagehot, William James—each a fox who knows many tricks as opposed to a hedgehog who knows one thorough (~totalitizing) trick and, broadly, a skeptic. No one better embodies the proposition that civilization—the “best that has been thought and said by man”—is worth defending. pro: 'The Great Ideas'.
-Noam Chomsky, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker. These men have doomed to oblivion what Pinker calls the “Standard Social Science Model” whereby something called “society” shapes a fictile {Latin fictilis, made of clay, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to mold} human nature however it pleases. ?? On the contrary, while human nature may express itself in an infinite variety of cultural forms, the underlying machinery can achieve only a finite set of ends. ?ie that there is a 'human nature.' The Standard Social Science Model has inspired failed policies from the Gulag to No Child Left Behind, at incalculable human cost. Thanks to these scientists, civilization has a hope of finding a way out.
Hate Noam Chomsky as much as you please. It remains the case that Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar not only revived the study of human nature but provided a model of how complex features of human society could be explained more generally. It instantly discredited behaviorism and has become part of the bedrock of the critique of social engineering. Indeed, Chomsky describes his politics as an attack on social engineering as he perceives it. Without Chomsky’s watershed discovery, conservatives’ belief in human nature would be only a postulate. pro: human nature not fluid. anti: social engineering, behaviorism, 'standard social science model.'
I admit that many will find this list absurd. Chomsky’s anti-American pamphleteering often overshadows his pioneering work in linguistics. Jacobs was arrested protesting the Vietnam War and expatriated to Canada. Wilson is a New Deal liberal, Barzun apolitical, Schumpeter too aloof to be categorized.
Great non-movement conservatives have in common only that they have advanced conservative positions. None has contributed anything to conservatism as an ideological *system*.
Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement. Originalism in constitutional law was developed by Raoul Berger, a Harvard liberal; free-market ideas by academic economists working within the mainstream of their profession; anticommunism by disillusioned leftists, only some of whom (from Chambers and Burnham to the later neoconservatives) went on to form or join the conservative movement; foreign-policy realism by émigré academic Hans Morgenthau. The repertoire of conservative cultural criticism is painfully derivative, which may account for the dreary sarcasm that usually accompanies it.
Perhaps the only ideas for which the movement can take credit are the those of the “Projectarians,” i.e., the hawks affiliated with the Project for the New American Century.
{ newamericancentury.org: A neoconservative organization supporting greater American militarization, challenging hostile governments, advancing democratic & economic freedom. wkp: neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., co-founded in early 1997 as a non-profit educational organization by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal is "to promote American global leadership" as "good for America and good for the world" and to support "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." A strong influence on high-level officials in the administration of George W. Bush, affecting development of military and foreign policies, esp national security and the Iraq War. The PNAC report Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000) "was developed by Donald Rumsfeld (Sec of Defense), Dick Cheney (VP), Paul Wolfowitz (Dep Sec of Defense) and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Chief of Staff for VP), and is devoted to matters of 'maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests.'" star wars ... E Weinberger 9/12 }
I am happy to concede these as one of the few examples of an intellectual achievement unique to the conservative *movement*. bcs it's ugly? or just, happy to concede that they have accomplished this ~
Only the non-movement conservatives have managed to upset the intellectual consensus, for they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it. Consider the major traumas of establishment liberalism: Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life, Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 Report on the Negro Family, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement speech*, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind
{* First Principles - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address, June 8, 1978: Solzhenitsyn’s June 8, 1978, commencement address at Harvard was the most controversial public speech he delivered during his twenty-year exile in the West. His remarks on that occasion challenged many of the pieties that were dear to the contemporary intellectual clerisy. Solzhenitsyn pointed out how vulnerable liberal humanism is to cooptation by more radical currents of modern thought. Moderate liberalism gave way to radicalism, radicalism to socialism, and socialism soon found itself powerless before communism’s claim to embody the “full logic of materialistic development.” For Solzhenitsyn, the inherent vulnerability of humanism to “the current which is farthest to the Left” goes some way toward explaining the shameful indulgence by many intellectuals of communism in the twentieth century. Now that Solzhenitsyn’s principled opposition to totalitarianism has been fully vindicated, it is easier to embrace his claim that human freedom needs sturdier foundations than those provided by an “anthropocentric humanism” that refuses to defer to a “Superior Spirit” above Man.}.
That leaves but one rationale for the movement: to preserve conservative ideas in an inhospitable world. No sentiment is more widely shared by movement conservatives than that they are an embattled minority fighting a hateful enemy. Yet none of the elements of movement conservative ideology by itself poses any career hazard. Mickey Kaus {kausfiles hosted by Slate ~ 'neoliberal' ~ endorsed Hilary Clinton} opposes open borders; Nicholas Wade of the New York Times and New Republic contributor Steven Pinker believe in the reality of race; Al Gore is a critic of modernity what is it to be a critic of modernity?; Jewish atheist Nat Hentoff is pro-life; Bill Cosby excoriates black culture; Camille Paglia lambastes feminists; Gregg Easterbrook is a skeptic of environmentalism. cultural criticism ~ critique of 'ballyhooed' reforms. Some movement conservative views, such as support for the free market, are firmly a part of mainstream discourse. Others, such as a fondness for tradition, can be found all over the political spectrum. On close examination, it is difficult to find a movement conservative idea to which mainstream organs of scholarship and opinion are actually closed.
Take a hypothetical young talent with contrarian inclinations. Movement conservatives would counsel him to make his way up their ranks. But suppose he ignores their advice and joins the New York Times—or the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. There, even if he never classifies himself as conservative, he pursues stories that expose the perverse incentives of well-intentioned policies, the human costs of mass immigration, or the reality that, as Steve Sailer puts it, “families matter.” His ability to see the world differently gives him a monopoly on stories that his colleagues cannot or will not spot themselves.
If the climate of opinion ever shifts, it will
was int in this as re supposed 'crisis' of ideology on the right.
but then reading as giving answers to, what is conservatism?
ironic: this purports to be an argument against asking, What is conservatism? and I am reading it to answer that. but: really, it is an argument that conservative ideas should not be part of a movement, an ideological system. so it's not ironic to ask naively, what are the ideas called 'conservative'?
and what is liberalism? or 'liberal' ideas?
what makes someone identify themselves as a conservative or as a liberal, as on the right or on the left. what are the real disagreements btw the two. not really helped here wrt that. all I got from this is that sometimes reforms proposed by the left are not as helpful as appear to intend to be, and may be motivated by egotism or oneupmanship.
my working sense is that it is liberal to want to make world better, to believe government should be responsive to unfairness, poverty, discrimination. & it is conservative to be skeptical of any attempt to improve the world, and to think govt should be modest in aims, that it is necessary to provide infrastructure and national security, and should otherwise avoid impinging on individual freedom.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
"When one chooses, one chooses the world. No alibis."
Salon.com Politics | Pride before the fall
Nov. 8, 2000 | At this writing, there's a good chance that Ralph Nader's self-declared "conscience" vote in Florida will have lubricated young George Bush's way into the White House. The most fatuous president since Warren G. Harding, the most lackadaisically friendly to corporations since Reagan, the least primed for any governing activity besides rolling over for big oil, will come to power with a Green escort. Talk about making a difference.
"Al Gore cost me the election," Nader said this morning at the National Press Club. Cute, the self-righteousness of a sect.
Not long ago he declared, in effect, that even the worst Republicans weren't so bad at all, because they strengthened the opposition. "Heightening the contradictions" was the way this argument was put in the late 1960s, with reckless disregard of the people who would be hurt when those contradictions fell on their backs. "How can you spoil a system spoiled to the core?" Nader asks. Easily.
If indeed Bush is counted in, and a Republican White House does indeed join with a Republican Congress and Republican court system, it will be interesting to watch the rationalizations fly. But moral purists might consider that, if conscience is anything, it demands responsibility. It is fanaticism that washes its hands of results. Indeed, finger-pointing in every direction but home is the way of normal, stale politics. Rabbi Hillel, Dostoevski, Sartre, Gandhi (whom Naderites like to quote in other connections) have all known this central principle: When one chooses, one chooses the world. No alibis.
what does that mean? your choices have consequences? general sense of ~ 'this is not a dress rehearsal.' ~ ? . you have to choose in the world as it is. but doesn't say you choose *in* the world. you choose the world. so: your choices make the world.
why 'alibi'? ~ meaning 'excuse'? but that is not what it means. alibi - “‘elsewhere, at another place’”. so: meaning, I couldn't vote for Gore, I was with Nader. ?
context seems to call for it to mean: one takes responsibility. no rationalizations.
but I don't see how it says that.
anyway I do like the statement. When one chooses, one chooses the world. but I think what I hear in it is not what Todd Gitlin meant, I hear sth about being, affirming, worlding. if you do not have a world, how can you make any choice? that's the feeling fr wh I come at it. worldlessness, the impossibility of preferring anything (other than 'not to' - Bartleby). the world is that without which no choosing. if you choose, you choose the world.
came to this Gitlin article re Nader in 2000 election via:
ggl:"heightening the contradictions"
asllvn, prvs: The Chairman of the American Nazi Party, among other self-proclaimed racists, is voting for Obama. It's called heightening the contradictions - something all good communists and neocons also understand.
nettime: Nader - 'heightening the contradictions'?: For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of 'heightening the contradictions.' It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.
Arlene Goldbard » Blog Archive » Normalizing the Contradictions
One key trope of sixties activism was “heightening the contradictions.” According to this concept, when social contradictions (such as huge accumulations of wealth in the midst of crippling poverty) became extreme enough, people would get fed up and revolt.
?so racists endorsing Obama in hopes that a Pres Obama will lead to increased racism in revolt? but that is not the kind of reason they give in the article asllvn is pointing to. (& what exactly is the *contradiction* being heightened?)
Salon.com Politics | Pride before the fall
Nov. 8, 2000 | At this writing, there's a good chance that Ralph Nader's self-declared "conscience" vote in Florida will have lubricated young George Bush's way into the White House. The most fatuous president since Warren G. Harding, the most lackadaisically friendly to corporations since Reagan, the least primed for any governing activity besides rolling over for big oil, will come to power with a Green escort. Talk about making a difference.
"Al Gore cost me the election," Nader said this morning at the National Press Club. Cute, the self-righteousness of a sect.
Not long ago he declared, in effect, that even the worst Republicans weren't so bad at all, because they strengthened the opposition. "Heightening the contradictions" was the way this argument was put in the late 1960s, with reckless disregard of the people who would be hurt when those contradictions fell on their backs. "How can you spoil a system spoiled to the core?" Nader asks. Easily.
If indeed Bush is counted in, and a Republican White House does indeed join with a Republican Congress and Republican court system, it will be interesting to watch the rationalizations fly. But moral purists might consider that, if conscience is anything, it demands responsibility. It is fanaticism that washes its hands of results. Indeed, finger-pointing in every direction but home is the way of normal, stale politics. Rabbi Hillel, Dostoevski, Sartre, Gandhi (whom Naderites like to quote in other connections) have all known this central principle: When one chooses, one chooses the world. No alibis.
what does that mean? your choices have consequences? general sense of ~ 'this is not a dress rehearsal.' ~ ? . you have to choose in the world as it is. but doesn't say you choose *in* the world. you choose the world. so: your choices make the world.
why 'alibi'? ~ meaning 'excuse'? but that is not what it means. alibi - “‘elsewhere, at another place’”. so: meaning, I couldn't vote for Gore, I was with Nader. ?
context seems to call for it to mean: one takes responsibility. no rationalizations.
but I don't see how it says that.
anyway I do like the statement. When one chooses, one chooses the world. but I think what I hear in it is not what Todd Gitlin meant, I hear sth about being, affirming, worlding. if you do not have a world, how can you make any choice? that's the feeling fr wh I come at it. worldlessness, the impossibility of preferring anything (other than 'not to' - Bartleby). the world is that without which no choosing. if you choose, you choose the world.
came to this Gitlin article re Nader in 2000 election via:
ggl:"heightening the contradictions"
asllvn, prvs: The Chairman of the American Nazi Party, among other self-proclaimed racists, is voting for Obama. It's called heightening the contradictions - something all good communists and neocons also understand.
nettime: Nader - 'heightening the contradictions'?: For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of 'heightening the contradictions.' It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.
Arlene Goldbard » Blog Archive » Normalizing the Contradictions
One key trope of sixties activism was “heightening the contradictions.” According to this concept, when social contradictions (such as huge accumulations of wealth in the midst of crippling poverty) became extreme enough, people would get fed up and revolt.
?so racists endorsing Obama in hopes that a Pres Obama will lead to increased racism in revolt? but that is not the kind of reason they give in the article asllvn is pointing to. (& what exactly is the *contradiction* being heightened?)
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Calling All Conservatives 10/22
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Why Liberals Need A Saner Conservatism Oct 21, 2008 (6 days ago)
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
A few days ago Christopher Buckley proposed:
The smart ones in the movement should get together right after the election at the Greenbrier or the Homestead, you know, where they typically have these kinds of get-togethers, and have a long dark night of the soul. And I’ll tell you what the conference should be called: Conservatism–What the F?
Conor Friedersdorf has drafted a conference schedule. I approve. It should have happened in 2003, of course. The talk I gave above [www.cato.org] is from two years ago. Part II is here. The debate with David Brooks here. Oh, and here's the book. I'm struck by how many in the press keep talking as if the conservative rebellion against Bush began three weeks ago. It began five years ago. And some of us stood up to him when it wasn't obvious his legacy would be political oblivion for the reasonable right.
Why Liberals Need A Saner Conservatism Oct 21, 2008 (6 days ago)
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Scott Payne responds to a few of my posts and argues that those on the left have reason to invest in a better conservative party:
The fact of the matter is that while we might be talking about the “future of conservatism,” that does not mean that we are entertaining the notion that conservatism will actually blink out of existence. What we’re really talking about is what kind of future American conservatism will realize, and the future of American liberalism is fundamentally tied to that of American conservatism.
Each ideology is, whether thy choose to acknowledge it or not, one side to a very complicated and intricate coin. this is what I want to see, understand... They don’t really survive without one another because each, left to its own devices, as Sullivan, again, pointed out in his book, will invariably sow the seeds of its own destruction. Each ideology, as vociferously as they denounce one another I'm not even clear on what the simple oppositions are, provides a vital balancing point to the other. It is the back and forth between the two and the ineffable cross-pollination that their waxing and waning enables, that provides the foundations upon which America is able to flourish.
Conor chimes in with his two cents.
Death Throes 10/21
The Assisted Suicide Of The American Right 10/24
The evidence is really piling up.
Limbaugh and Giuliani are blaming Clinton for 9/11
Charlie Crist has given up on McCain
McCain's not just giving up on Colorado, but New Hampshire and Wisconsin too
McCain called parts of Pennsylvania racist
The GOP's reg'lar gal got $150,000 from the GOP - for wardrobe.
Hey. Someone pick up these wheels, please? They fell off of something...
The Assisted Suicide Of The American Right 10/24
Could any paranoid far leftist have *invented* the story of the mugging hoax? Just read AllahPundit who was one of the saner ones. Yes: Michelle Malkin is now the voice of calm reason on the right.
Glenn Reynolds' [Instapunit] first post yesterday:
This is so serious that I predict it will get almost one-tenth as much national coverage as something some guy may have yelled at a Palin rally once.
McCarthy [corner.NRO]:
I'm not apologizing, because the story is news and it would have been discussed whether I'd posted on it or not.
Steyn [corner.NRO]:
I regret that I was among those (while being interviewed on the radio yesterday, and having not seen the dubious pictures) who took the story at, so to speak, face value.
Jonah [corner.NRO]:
I have a debilitating cold and am now going to bed for a while.
The Conservative Crisis 2:26 PM (16 minutes ago)
What Policing Dissent Leads To 11:52 AM (1 hour ago)
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
"A Bloody Struggle Over Palinism" Oct 24, 2008 (3 days ago)
We've Sprung A Leak Oct 22, 2008 (5 days ago)
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
No Party For Independents Oct 21, 2008 (6 days ago)
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan by
What Policing Dissent Leads To 11:52 AM (1 hour ago)
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Peter Suderman has a very sharp post [culture11] on the GOP's acute malaise:
Why hold your tongue when the party nominates a lackluster candidate? This tendency is no small part of what allows a problematic candidate like Palin to be nominated. ...Eventually, you reach the situation we may be in now: An incoherent and out of date set of ideas, an unappealing party, no trustworthy leaders, and few electable candidates.
(Hat tip: Larison)
"A Bloody Struggle Over Palinism" Oct 24, 2008 (3 days ago)
Packer is transfixed [End of an Era -- George Packer: Interesting Times (Online Only)The New Yorker ] by "the complete collapse of the four-decade project that brought conservatism to power in America":
Like Democrats running against Herbert Hoover well into the 1970s, the Republican campaign still thinks it’s 1980. But it turns out that in 2008 voters can actually imagine worse things than tax rates on upper incomes returning to their Clinton-era level.[...]
The Republican Party’s immediate post-election future will be a bloody struggle over Palinism. It’s already started at National Review online, where the growing hysteria of the posts signals that the roof is falling in on conservatism. Everything that worked for forty years has suddenly not just stopped working, it has become self-defeating. Republican candidates, strategists, and pundits are like witchdoctors who keep repeating the old incantations over and over, their voices rising in furious shock, to no effect. That’s the sound of an era ending.
We've Sprung A Leak Oct 22, 2008 (5 days ago)
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Larison on [Eunomia » Abandoning Ship -amconmag.com-larison-2008-10-22-abandoning-ship] the sinking GOP:
In the end, the selection of Palin was not only a desperate and cynical move designed mainly to mobilize core constituencies, but her candidacy quickly turned into nothing more than a vehicle for riling up the remaining true believers who still approve of Mr. Bush’s job performance. If recognizing this obvious truth makes one a “me-too” conservative, you’re going to find a lot of people clamoring to acquire that designation.
Obama endorsers are a somewhat different story, as they are trying to jump on the popular bandwagon, but rather than wailing about the perfidy of the defectors and demanding to know what side people are on one might want to consider what it is about one’s own side that seems to have become so radioactive. It’s all very well to say that the critics and defectors are rats deserting a sinking ship, but instead of worrying about that one might spend a bit more time considering how the ship came to be in this situation. When in an imploding political system or an imploding political movement, it is usually more important to change conditions inside to keep people from fleeing than to wish them all good riddance while building higher walls.
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan by
Larry Gellman is tired of the GOP:
This latest descent completes the utter destruction of the Republican party as a force for good in this country. Until eight years ago, Republicans had a deserved reputation for being more socially and fiscally conservative and responsible. When the party culture became infected with the Bush/Rove/Cheney virus, it began to morph into a divisive force that possessed none of those qualities.
Now the mass exodus is underway. Anyone who is fiscally conservative can't call himself a Republican anymore. Anyone who is a religious Christian can't honestly be part of this since Jesus preached about caring for the sick and the poor--not about eliminating reproductive choice or issues related to same-sex marriage. There's nothing Christian about the agenda of the Religious Right--it's a totally political movement focused on issues that Jesus never mentioned and they ignore the issues about which Jesus preached constantly. Anyone who believes in honesty or competence in government wouldn't call themselves a Republican after Bush. And now, no one who is not a committed soldier in the Holy War against the Left is welcome either.
Best of the ’08 Campaign III: Best National Columnist—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine) prvs (dlcs tag main+a) Best of '08 Campaign: best speech in comic mode McCain, best local newspaper ADN
In a sense, a presidential campaign provides the ultimate test of the mettle of the political punditry. Does the pundit simply disintegrate into political hackery by reciting the talking points of the campaign to which he is beholden? Or does the writer operate from a set of political and philosophical convictions and hold rigorously to them notwithstanding the temptation to answer the siren call of partisanship?
Will To Power 9:12 AM (2 hours ago)
...Although I am far from agreeing with George Will on many points of policy, his writing about the ’08 campaign has been exemplary. I always learn something from it.
He is relentless in analysis. Indeed, he has been perhaps the single most penetrating and effective critic of both major candidates.
I am particularly taken by Will’s criticisms of Barack Obama and the lofty rhetoric of his campaign. Will clearly recognizes in Obama a politician of extraordinary skill and potential, but he is adept in bringing Obama’s shortcomings to the surface–in highlighting the unreasonableness, even the foolishness of some of his campaign rhetoric. There is never a mean-spirited word uttered in this process, however–it appears that Will is anticipating an Obama presidency, and is taking pains to offer a constructive critique.
Will senses the rising tide against Republican leadership; he sees a shift to the left. He opposes this with a firm and persuasive argument for old conservative values. If Obama does prevail, the nation’s conservatives will face some serious introspection. They will need to reexamine the premises of what is “conservative.” The Republican Party, the nation, and Barack Obama would do well to listen carefully to George Will in the process.
In a sense, a presidential campaign provides the ultimate test of the mettle of the political punditry. Does the pundit simply disintegrate into political hackery by reciting the talking points of the campaign to which he is beholden? Or does the writer operate from a set of political and philosophical convictions and hold rigorously to them notwithstanding the temptation to answer the siren call of partisanship?
Will To Power 9:12 AM (2 hours ago)
Scott Horton dubs George Will the best national columnist of the campaign. He's certainly been more solid than anyone else on the right:
In my view, the best of the best is George Will. He holds to a set of Tory principles that, whether you subscribe to them or not, withstand the test of time and belong to the heart of the American political dialogue.
In America, what has been called “conservative” has undergone dizzying transformation in the last eight years. It ends, somehow unsurprisingly, in a total reversal of accepted measures–with a massive nationalization of private debt and a partial nationalization of the nation’s largest banks. That can be explained as a failure of the old conservative vision, but more likely it is something else: the substitution of a weak counterfeit for that vision. The counterfeit involves the adoration of a leader, whose every decision and attitude is then qualified as “conservative.” Few commentators have stood as rigorously against this nonsense and as firmly for old, sober conservative values as George Will.
...Although I am far from agreeing with George Will on many points of policy, his writing about the ’08 campaign has been exemplary. I always learn something from it.
He is relentless in analysis. Indeed, he has been perhaps the single most penetrating and effective critic of both major candidates.
I am particularly taken by Will’s criticisms of Barack Obama and the lofty rhetoric of his campaign. Will clearly recognizes in Obama a politician of extraordinary skill and potential, but he is adept in bringing Obama’s shortcomings to the surface–in highlighting the unreasonableness, even the foolishness of some of his campaign rhetoric. There is never a mean-spirited word uttered in this process, however–it appears that Will is anticipating an Obama presidency, and is taking pains to offer a constructive critique.
Will senses the rising tide against Republican leadership; he sees a shift to the left. He opposes this with a firm and persuasive argument for old conservative values. If Obama does prevail, the nation’s conservatives will face some serious introspection. They will need to reexamine the premises of what is “conservative.” The Republican Party, the nation, and Barack Obama would do well to listen carefully to George Will in the process.
Here are a handful of the best George Will columns from the last several months:
Going Down Screaming - by Andrew Sullivan - New York Times (1998)
Starr report and its aftermath represents not simply a case study in wh has gone wrong w an Amer Presidency, but also wh has gone wrong w Amer conservatism. To be sure, Bill Clinton goaded the indep counsel into some of this detail by th hairsplitting of his legal defense. But Clinton was not resp for the *prurient, lip-pursing moralism* of the report, nor for the subseq egregious outspilling of grand-jury testimony. proof of perjury or obstructn of justice req none of this, as most Amers understood. This *moral obsessiveness* was the creation of Kenneth Starr & sth far larger, a *conservatism become puritanism*, a conservatism that has long lost sight of the principles -privacy, restraint, modesty, constitutionalism- wh used to be its hallmarks.
Amer conservatism has bn in prd radical intellectual reconstructn, in journals & magzs & seminars largely unnoticed by general public, but openly discussed among the conservative intellectual elites. The dominant ideas that have emerged in the last few years bear only the faintest resemblance to the major themes of the 1980's: economic freedom, smaller government, personal choice. Although libertarians are certainly numbered among the intellectuals of the right of the late 1990's, they are clearly on the defensive. What is galvanizing the right-wing intelligentsia at century's end is a different kind of conservatism altogether: much less liberal, far less economic, only nominally skeptical of government power. It is inherently pessimistic -- a return to older, conservative themes of cultural decline, moralism, the need for greater social control.
...p1 of 10...
Our Kristol Problem - And The GOP's 9:40 AM (1 hour ago)
Starr report and its aftermath represents not simply a case study in wh has gone wrong w an Amer Presidency, but also wh has gone wrong w Amer conservatism. To be sure, Bill Clinton goaded the indep counsel into some of this detail by th hairsplitting of his legal defense. But Clinton was not resp for the *prurient, lip-pursing moralism* of the report, nor for the subseq egregious outspilling of grand-jury testimony. proof of perjury or obstructn of justice req none of this, as most Amers understood. This *moral obsessiveness* was the creation of Kenneth Starr & sth far larger, a *conservatism become puritanism*, a conservatism that has long lost sight of the principles -privacy, restraint, modesty, constitutionalism- wh used to be its hallmarks.
Amer conservatism has bn in prd radical intellectual reconstructn, in journals & magzs & seminars largely unnoticed by general public, but openly discussed among the conservative intellectual elites. The dominant ideas that have emerged in the last few years bear only the faintest resemblance to the major themes of the 1980's: economic freedom, smaller government, personal choice. Although libertarians are certainly numbered among the intellectuals of the right of the late 1990's, they are clearly on the defensive. What is galvanizing the right-wing intelligentsia at century's end is a different kind of conservatism altogether: much less liberal, far less economic, only nominally skeptical of government power. It is inherently pessimistic -- a return to older, conservative themes of cultural decline, moralism, the need for greater social control.
...p1 of 10...
Our Kristol Problem - And The GOP's 9:40 AM (1 hour ago)
One paragraph from 1998:
This scolding, moralizing conservatism is one with a lineage; it is the construction of a cadre of influential intellectuals who bear as much responsibility as anybody for the constitutional and cultural damage this moment may have already wrought. And they will bear an even greater responsibility if the ultimate victim of this spectacle is the reputation and future of conservatism itself.
Some of us saw this implosion coming for a while.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Losing the Narrative - By Glenn Loury - March 31, 2008, TPMCafe special guest | Talking Points Memo | ..race..
Wright's error, Obama tells us, is that Wright's view of Amer is static, ignoring how things have changed -- so much so that one of his own parishioners now stands on the threshold of being elected to the highest office in the land. ..I know, just as Wright surely knows, th things have changed a great deal. I also know that, as I write this, 1 million young black men are under th physical control of th state; a third of black children live in poverty, and, the Southside of Chicago, w more than one-half million black residents, is one of most massive, racially segregated urban enclaves ever to hv bn created in hist of modern world. These things reflect social, cultural, economic, political forces enmeshed in structure of Amer society; not merely conseq of attitudes wh can be thrown-off if only we were to, under the inspiring & inspired leadership of the junior senator fr Illinois, work togthr to solve our common problems, etc.
Obama, a self-identifying black man running for the most powerful office on earth, does threaten some aspects of the conventional 'white' narrative. But, he also threatens the 'black' narrative -- and powerfully so. In effect, he wants to put an end to (transcend, move beyond, overcome...) the anger, the disappointment and the subversive critique of America that arises from the painful experience of black people in this country. Yet, the forces behind his rise are NOT grassroots-black-American in origin; they are elite-white-liberal-academic in origin. If he succeeds, there will be far fewer public megaphones for the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons and Cornel Wests of this world, for sure.
But a great deal more may also be lost including, just to take one example, the notion that the moral legacy for today’s America of the black freedom struggle that played-out in this country during the century after emancipation from slavery – I speak here of Martin Luther King's (and Fannie Lou Hamer's, and W.E.B. DuBois's, and Ida B. Wells’s and Frederick Douglass's ...) moral legacy – should find present-day expression in, among other ways, agitation on behalf of and public expression of sympathy for the dispossessed Palestinians – who are, arguably, among the 'niggers' of today's world, if ever there were any. (We all know that Rev. Wright’s publicly and vociferously expressed sympathies in this regard – his condemnation of America’s support for what he called ‘state terrorism’ in the Middle East – are a central aspect of the political difficulty that Obama now finds himself having to deal with.) Speaking for myself, and as a black American man, if forced to choose, I'd rather be "on the right side of history" about such matters, melding the historical narratives of my people with those of the 'niggers' in today's world, than to make solidarity with elites who, for the sake of political expediency, would sweep such matters under the rug. My fear is that, should Obama succeed with his effort to renegotiate the implicit American racial contract, then the prophetic African American voice – which is occasionally strident and necessarily a dissident, outsider's voice – could be lost to us forever.
Finally, one could argue, with good reason, that the purportedly post-racial Obama candidacy has been hypocritical in its exploitation of a simple-minded racial voting reflex among black Americans. This central fact of the current campaign is only spoken of guardedly, and often goes unnoticed altogether. (This, by the way, is the same reflex that installed Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court a decade and a half ago. These are very different cases, to be sure; but, it’s the same reflex.) Here we have the ‘post-racial’ candidate who is favored to win the crucial North Carolina primary because he can confidently rely on drawing 90% of the black vote. Can I be the only observer who sees a profound irony in that?
George W. Bush has managed to profoundly damage conservatism's brand. "Liberalism" was long ago discredited -- Bill Clinton himself drove a stake through its heart ("the era of big government is over.") Obama's post-ideological campaign, by eschewing explicit identification with the great tradition of Democratic progressivism, by trumpeting the 'transformative leadership' of Ronald Reagan, etc., only reinforces this tendency. And so, Obama and his followers speak of transcending ideology: no more "red states vs. blue states" or left wing vs. right -- that's the old way of thinking, it is said. We need to transcend those categories, to move-on from those old arguments, to seek a new direction, to inaugurate a new generation of leadership, etc. etc.
-What a great post by Glenn Loury. I think it gets to the crux of the issue in asking what Obama's candidacy and his race speech mean for the important Black oppositional narrative. But I still think this is a fair question, and I'll note I'm white: Is it Obama's ambition to be a post-racial candidate, or a post-race-exploitation candidate? I'm not sure, but I read Obama's ambitions as the latter. I agree that racism is as racism does: it's functional, not attitudinal. Or as Glenn Loury says, racism is structural, not personal.
One of the main structural functions of racism in the U.S., arising from the elite interest in fragmenting working & middle-class electoral power (and sustaining the exploitability of Black Americans economically), has been to divide working & middle class voters against their own interests by driving white voters to vote "White." It's been a very successful strategy for conservative Republicans since Nixon. And it's a strategy that has produced public policy that's been lousy for most Americans and disastrous for Black Americans--look at the crack cocaine laws largely responsible for the obscene prison numbers Loury mentions. Broadly, Republican race politics have deepened the geographic, educational and economic segregation of African American.
I'm not sure how to parse those two social dynamics--the importance of the oppositional Black narrative, apparent in that enduring structural segregation, and the devastatingly effective anti-progressive use of race-division by Republicans (and sometimes conservative Democrats).
But it does seem to me that if the Obama campaign can undermine electoral racial polarization, he will have achieved a huge advance for progressivism for all Americans. And I think that that at least possibly opens up more, not less, space for a respectful, serious discussion of structural racism in America --s pace for the oppositional Black narrative to be better heard. In fact, that's one way of reading Obama's statement in his speech that we can't afford to ignore the subject of race at this point in our history -- to investigate and understand the roots of Rev. Wright's anger in the realities of Chicago's Southside, and also (my framing) to understand that working class whites, struggling to make lives for themselves within a structural racist frame they didn't create and don't fully understand, also need to have at least their perceptions of racial realities respectfully engaged. Can we have both an electoral politics that moves past racial polarization in the progressive interests of all Americans, and a new and honest engagement with the realities of structural racism as well? I'd like to think that the former might facilitate the latter. Is that naive? Posted by jcd.
-I second beve83's comment on your bloggingheads appearances with John McWhorter. They're great, easily the best on the site (amongst plenty of other good duos). asllvn linked to a blogginheads btw these two today, that's how I came to be looking up Glenn Loury.
-
Wright's error, Obama tells us, is that Wright's view of Amer is static, ignoring how things have changed -- so much so that one of his own parishioners now stands on the threshold of being elected to the highest office in the land. ..I know, just as Wright surely knows, th things have changed a great deal. I also know that, as I write this, 1 million young black men are under th physical control of th state; a third of black children live in poverty, and, the Southside of Chicago, w more than one-half million black residents, is one of most massive, racially segregated urban enclaves ever to hv bn created in hist of modern world. These things reflect social, cultural, economic, political forces enmeshed in structure of Amer society; not merely conseq of attitudes wh can be thrown-off if only we were to, under the inspiring & inspired leadership of the junior senator fr Illinois, work togthr to solve our common problems, etc.
Obama, a self-identifying black man running for the most powerful office on earth, does threaten some aspects of the conventional 'white' narrative. But, he also threatens the 'black' narrative -- and powerfully so. In effect, he wants to put an end to (transcend, move beyond, overcome...) the anger, the disappointment and the subversive critique of America that arises from the painful experience of black people in this country. Yet, the forces behind his rise are NOT grassroots-black-American in origin; they are elite-white-liberal-academic in origin. If he succeeds, there will be far fewer public megaphones for the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons and Cornel Wests of this world, for sure.
But a great deal more may also be lost including, just to take one example, the notion that the moral legacy for today’s America of the black freedom struggle that played-out in this country during the century after emancipation from slavery – I speak here of Martin Luther King's (and Fannie Lou Hamer's, and W.E.B. DuBois's, and Ida B. Wells’s and Frederick Douglass's ...) moral legacy – should find present-day expression in, among other ways, agitation on behalf of and public expression of sympathy for the dispossessed Palestinians – who are, arguably, among the 'niggers' of today's world, if ever there were any. (We all know that Rev. Wright’s publicly and vociferously expressed sympathies in this regard – his condemnation of America’s support for what he called ‘state terrorism’ in the Middle East – are a central aspect of the political difficulty that Obama now finds himself having to deal with.) Speaking for myself, and as a black American man, if forced to choose, I'd rather be "on the right side of history" about such matters, melding the historical narratives of my people with those of the 'niggers' in today's world, than to make solidarity with elites who, for the sake of political expediency, would sweep such matters under the rug. My fear is that, should Obama succeed with his effort to renegotiate the implicit American racial contract, then the prophetic African American voice – which is occasionally strident and necessarily a dissident, outsider's voice – could be lost to us forever.
Finally, one could argue, with good reason, that the purportedly post-racial Obama candidacy has been hypocritical in its exploitation of a simple-minded racial voting reflex among black Americans. This central fact of the current campaign is only spoken of guardedly, and often goes unnoticed altogether. (This, by the way, is the same reflex that installed Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court a decade and a half ago. These are very different cases, to be sure; but, it’s the same reflex.) Here we have the ‘post-racial’ candidate who is favored to win the crucial North Carolina primary because he can confidently rely on drawing 90% of the black vote. Can I be the only observer who sees a profound irony in that?
George W. Bush has managed to profoundly damage conservatism's brand. "Liberalism" was long ago discredited -- Bill Clinton himself drove a stake through its heart ("the era of big government is over.") Obama's post-ideological campaign, by eschewing explicit identification with the great tradition of Democratic progressivism, by trumpeting the 'transformative leadership' of Ronald Reagan, etc., only reinforces this tendency. And so, Obama and his followers speak of transcending ideology: no more "red states vs. blue states" or left wing vs. right -- that's the old way of thinking, it is said. We need to transcend those categories, to move-on from those old arguments, to seek a new direction, to inaugurate a new generation of leadership, etc. etc.
-What a great post by Glenn Loury. I think it gets to the crux of the issue in asking what Obama's candidacy and his race speech mean for the important Black oppositional narrative. But I still think this is a fair question, and I'll note I'm white: Is it Obama's ambition to be a post-racial candidate, or a post-race-exploitation candidate? I'm not sure, but I read Obama's ambitions as the latter. I agree that racism is as racism does: it's functional, not attitudinal. Or as Glenn Loury says, racism is structural, not personal.
One of the main structural functions of racism in the U.S., arising from the elite interest in fragmenting working & middle-class electoral power (and sustaining the exploitability of Black Americans economically), has been to divide working & middle class voters against their own interests by driving white voters to vote "White." It's been a very successful strategy for conservative Republicans since Nixon. And it's a strategy that has produced public policy that's been lousy for most Americans and disastrous for Black Americans--look at the crack cocaine laws largely responsible for the obscene prison numbers Loury mentions. Broadly, Republican race politics have deepened the geographic, educational and economic segregation of African American.
I'm not sure how to parse those two social dynamics--the importance of the oppositional Black narrative, apparent in that enduring structural segregation, and the devastatingly effective anti-progressive use of race-division by Republicans (and sometimes conservative Democrats).
But it does seem to me that if the Obama campaign can undermine electoral racial polarization, he will have achieved a huge advance for progressivism for all Americans. And I think that that at least possibly opens up more, not less, space for a respectful, serious discussion of structural racism in America --s pace for the oppositional Black narrative to be better heard. In fact, that's one way of reading Obama's statement in his speech that we can't afford to ignore the subject of race at this point in our history -- to investigate and understand the roots of Rev. Wright's anger in the realities of Chicago's Southside, and also (my framing) to understand that working class whites, struggling to make lives for themselves within a structural racist frame they didn't create and don't fully understand, also need to have at least their perceptions of racial realities respectfully engaged. Can we have both an electoral politics that moves past racial polarization in the progressive interests of all Americans, and a new and honest engagement with the realities of structural racism as well? I'd like to think that the former might facilitate the latter. Is that naive? Posted by jcd.
-"he can only succeed by abandoning the critical, skeptical, dissident's voice which is the truest political expression of the lessons learned by black people over the long centuries of being America's 'niggers." This is an important point to make, and one which I agree with, but which is also inevitable if a person of any minority group comes into power. A dissident who moves to the center of power is no longer a dissident. The dissident and skeptic are always looking on from the sidelines--this allows them their unique perspective--because they are not active participants in the creation of something. ~?criticism can create, redefine
This is a very similar argument to what many activist in the gay rights movement have been making for years as the "gay lifestyle" has become more incorporated into mainstream culture. There are many gay activists who are actually against the idea of gay marriage because they fear that their struggle to redefine sexuality in American society is co-opted by the attempt to confine queer relationships to the heteronormative institution of marriage. In the face of gay marriage they fear that the essentially radical nature of being queer will be lost, even though the battle for true equality and acceptance in society is far from over.
Racial politics might lose some of its edge if Obama comes into power. And we certianly risk being complacent and naive if we see Obama as the beginning of the end to racism in this country. But I think there is also a lot to be gained by being in the center.
-One of the points of Loury's post seems to be making is that Obama is trading in a connection with black dissent for mellower, please-everyone politically expedient philosophy on race. But I'm thinking that what Obama's shown (might be politically expedient, might also be his honest view) is a view that isn't ignoring the past nor the anger, but one that's including everyone -- something any president would have to do.
-I second beve83's comment on your bloggingheads appearances with John McWhorter. They're great, easily the best on the site (amongst plenty of other good duos). asllvn linked to a blogginheads btw these two today, that's how I came to be looking up Glenn Loury.
-
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Best of the ’08 Campaign II: Best Local Press Coverage—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)
As the former mayor of Wasilla got the Republican vice presidential nod, however, I took to reading the Anchorage Daily News most mornings, often clipping and circulating its articles to journalist and blogger friends. What I discovered was very impressive. ADN was indispensable to understanding the curious world of Alaska politics.
The reporting in ADN helped answer a critical question: can local papers make a meaningful contribution to presidential election coverage? In an earlier series of posts, I have discussed the local papers of one state which are not bad, but actually appalling. They have deteriorated that state’s political culture. wh state wh paper is that? But ADN provides a counter-example. It shows what a local paper with limited resources and reach can do, not only for its immediate readership, but for the country as a whole.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, no local paper made a stronger contribution to our understanding of the presidential campaign. In fact I am tempted to put the Anchorage Daily News in head-on competition with industry leaders such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The ADN took advantage of its position as the principal newspaper of Alaska and offered Americans a deep glance into the problems and scandals that affect the state’s politics. It was prepared to expose the sores that a less rigorously professional paper would happily have covered up in the interests of parochialism. And it was unflinching but also rigorously fair in its coverage of and editorializing on Alaska’s native daughter, Sarah Palin.
Here are some of the pieces—both original reporting and opinion—that lead me to cite the Anchorage Daily News as the best local newspaper in campaign 2008 coverage:
As the former mayor of Wasilla got the Republican vice presidential nod, however, I took to reading the Anchorage Daily News most mornings, often clipping and circulating its articles to journalist and blogger friends. What I discovered was very impressive. ADN was indispensable to understanding the curious world of Alaska politics.
The reporting in ADN helped answer a critical question: can local papers make a meaningful contribution to presidential election coverage? In an earlier series of posts, I have discussed the local papers of one state which are not bad, but actually appalling. They have deteriorated that state’s political culture. wh state wh paper is that? But ADN provides a counter-example. It shows what a local paper with limited resources and reach can do, not only for its immediate readership, but for the country as a whole.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, no local paper made a stronger contribution to our understanding of the presidential campaign. In fact I am tempted to put the Anchorage Daily News in head-on competition with industry leaders such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The ADN took advantage of its position as the principal newspaper of Alaska and offered Americans a deep glance into the problems and scandals that affect the state’s politics. It was prepared to expose the sores that a less rigorously professional paper would happily have covered up in the interests of parochialism. And it was unflinching but also rigorously fair in its coverage of and editorializing on Alaska’s native daughter, Sarah Palin.
Here are some of the pieces—both original reporting and opinion—that lead me to cite the Anchorage Daily News as the best local newspaper in campaign 2008 coverage:
- Michael Carey, “Palin Losing Friends on the Home Front”
- Troopergate Video: “Sarah Palin Promises Transparency in the Troopergate Probe, Turns to Secrecy as She Joins the McCain Campaign”
- “Palin Vindicated?”
- Dan Joling, “Parnell to Battle Young in Alaska Republican Primary”
- Martha Mendoza, “Palin Foreign Experience Limited to Canada”
- “Palin’s Stall: The Governor is Stonewalling the Troopergate Investigation”
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Thinking About Obama - David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes.com. published: October 16, 2008 :
We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now, and in all that time there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control. This has been a period of tumult, combat, exhaustion and crisis. And yet there hasn’t been a moment when he has displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness. the Obama calm. 'first rate temperament.'
Some candidates are motivated by something they lack. For L.B.J., it was respect. and for Nixon? For Bill Clinton, it was adoration. These politicians are motivated to fill that void. Their challenge once in office is self-regulation. How will they control the insecurities that fired their ambitions?
But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes. to realize his capacity ~ yes that seem right about Obama. not a drive for power, not a stark ambition, but a tough, forward-moving fulfillment of capacity.
that's an insufficient articulation of how it is not about personal power , ambition. also not exactly a calling, but closer to that, to a vocation. this is your work, you are good at it, you are suited to it, and you pursue it to the best of your ability. ..ok Brooks are you going to help me with this? ...oh: no. but it's int...
Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second.
He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician a person with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds. But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day. well, he had steady love from his mother, I think? and the solidity of her parents, his grandparents, who helped raise him. so the absent father was not the only and probably not the strongest influence in his life (though maybe loomed large wrt identity). I imagine he had a pretty solid base (but need to read Dreams straight thr to say that, not so solid if he could not 'trust' his childhood, if things were not as seemed ~ that yes is toxic.) and then it seems he found a home with Michelle, drawn to the rootedness of her family and finds solidity in her. ok that's the story, but it's a believable one.
There has never been a moment when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious. hmm. whoa Brooks that's a little bold of you, talk of the unconscious. I don't know. an organized *consciousness* I would say. self-awareness, yes. integrated. not troubled by the unconscious, no egregious ruptures. so maybe by organized that is what you mean: integrated. not a false self -a persona- with a silenced stirring true self beneath. integrated. Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for equanimity, and now he’s become a homeostasis machine.
When Bob Schieffer asked him tough questions during the debate Wednesday night, he would step back and describe the broader situation. When John McCain would hit him with some critique — even about fetuses being left to die on a table — he would smile in amusement at the political game they were playing hey he din't smile about the fetuses. and he made clear that there was already an existing law (as well as the doctor's hippocratic oath) requiring treatment to the infant in a botched abortion. At every challenging moment, his instinct was to self-remove and establish an observer’s perspective.mm maybe that's what I recognize in him.
Through the debate, he was reassuring and self-composed. McCain, an experienced old hand, would blink furiously over the tension of the moment, but Obama didn’t reveal even unconscious signs of nervousness. There was no hint of an unwanted feeling.
They say we are products of our environments, but Obama, the sojourner, seems to go through various situations without being overly touched by them. Over the past two years, he has been the subject of nearly unparalleled public worship, but far from getting drunk on it, he has become less grandiloquent as the campaign has gone along. [ "Don't underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don't underestimate our ability to screw it up." -- Sen. Barack Obama, quoted last night by the Chicago Sun Times . [link 10/17] ]
When Bill Clinton campaigned, he tried to seduce his audiences. But at Obama rallies, the candidate is the wooed not the wooer. He doesn’t seem to need the audience’s love. But they need his. The audiences hunger for his affection, while he is calm, appreciative, didactic. maybe I recognize this as well. and that, maybe, comes up a relation to an absence. you are not hungry, you are not making an appeal. what you want is just not there. it's not there to want.
He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan. "not a movement candidate" - keep going back to that, seems key to much about how he has behaved, how he has disappointed ppl at Harvard Law Rvw, in Chicago.
It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather —already has gathered— some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem. Of course, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. It could be that Obama will be an observer, not a leader. No, I on't think so. He has moved forward pretty aggressively, he seems very comfortable taking control. 'Look. Here's what we're going to do.'
Over the past two years, Obama has clearly worn well with voters. Far from a celebrity fad, he is self-contained, self-controlled, maybe even a little dull.
We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now, and in all that time there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control. This has been a period of tumult, combat, exhaustion and crisis. And yet there hasn’t been a moment when he has displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness. the Obama calm. 'first rate temperament.'
Some candidates are motivated by something they lack. For L.B.J., it was respect. and for Nixon? For Bill Clinton, it was adoration. These politicians are motivated to fill that void. Their challenge once in office is self-regulation. How will they control the insecurities that fired their ambitions?
But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes. to realize his capacity ~ yes that seem right about Obama. not a drive for power, not a stark ambition, but a tough, forward-moving fulfillment of capacity.
that's an insufficient articulation of how it is not about personal power , ambition. also not exactly a calling, but closer to that, to a vocation. this is your work, you are good at it, you are suited to it, and you pursue it to the best of your ability. ..ok Brooks are you going to help me with this? ...oh: no. but it's int...
Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second.
He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician a person with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds. But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day. well, he had steady love from his mother, I think? and the solidity of her parents, his grandparents, who helped raise him. so the absent father was not the only and probably not the strongest influence in his life (though maybe loomed large wrt identity). I imagine he had a pretty solid base (but need to read Dreams straight thr to say that, not so solid if he could not 'trust' his childhood, if things were not as seemed ~ that yes is toxic.) and then it seems he found a home with Michelle, drawn to the rootedness of her family and finds solidity in her. ok that's the story, but it's a believable one.
There has never been a moment when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious. hmm. whoa Brooks that's a little bold of you, talk of the unconscious. I don't know. an organized *consciousness* I would say. self-awareness, yes. integrated. not troubled by the unconscious, no egregious ruptures. so maybe by organized that is what you mean: integrated. not a false self -a persona- with a silenced stirring true self beneath. integrated. Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for equanimity, and now he’s become a homeostasis machine.
When Bob Schieffer asked him tough questions during the debate Wednesday night, he would step back and describe the broader situation. When John McCain would hit him with some critique — even about fetuses being left to die on a table — he would smile in amusement at the political game they were playing hey he din't smile about the fetuses. and he made clear that there was already an existing law (as well as the doctor's hippocratic oath) requiring treatment to the infant in a botched abortion. At every challenging moment, his instinct was to self-remove and establish an observer’s perspective.mm maybe that's what I recognize in him.
Through the debate, he was reassuring and self-composed. McCain, an experienced old hand, would blink furiously over the tension of the moment, but Obama didn’t reveal even unconscious signs of nervousness. There was no hint of an unwanted feeling.
They say we are products of our environments, but Obama, the sojourner, seems to go through various situations without being overly touched by them. Over the past two years, he has been the subject of nearly unparalleled public worship, but far from getting drunk on it, he has become less grandiloquent as the campaign has gone along. [ "Don't underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don't underestimate our ability to screw it up." -- Sen. Barack Obama, quoted last night by the Chicago Sun Times . [link 10/17] ]
When Bill Clinton campaigned, he tried to seduce his audiences. But at Obama rallies, the candidate is the wooed not the wooer. He doesn’t seem to need the audience’s love. But they need his. The audiences hunger for his affection, while he is calm, appreciative, didactic. maybe I recognize this as well. and that, maybe, comes up a relation to an absence. you are not hungry, you are not making an appeal. what you want is just not there. it's not there to want.
He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan. "not a movement candidate" - keep going back to that, seems key to much about how he has behaved, how he has disappointed ppl at Harvard Law Rvw, in Chicago.
It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather —already has gathered— some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem. Of course, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. It could be that Obama will be an observer, not a leader. No, I on't think so. He has moved forward pretty aggressively, he seems very comfortable taking control. 'Look. Here's what we're going to do.'
Over the past two years, Obama has clearly worn well with voters. Far from a celebrity fad, he is self-contained, self-controlled, maybe even a little dull.
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass:
I hear what do I hear in these sounds I hear myself I hear My uncle is a lawyer's clerk the taste of glue on envelopes, I call him twice a year, sunlight on red brick, the jersey shoreline and familiar air, as if I licked stamps for a living.
'like someone falling down and getting up. and running and falling and getting up.'
I hear Hass, in whom I always heard myself, Privilege of Being, Meditation at Lagunitas, one only needs a few poems for a lifetime of remembered cadences..
'..the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
..and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you, dear heart, cure my loneliness'
I woke up and the animals were all around, the giraffe with his head in the lap of hyena
saying blackberry blackberry blackberry
The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything
That is not these words everything that is not these words, this arranging, is being taken. lost.
And their disposition on the page. this is all we can keep, if I tell you, we will be okay, if the weather is what happens. (preservation it's all the same, straightened a shirt on its hanger, the world is touching itself and I cannot stand it). if the losing is what happens. lost into it. arrangements on the page, having by heart.
Pages are browning in the sunlight,
A collar is wrinkling, not organized
Properly on the hanger. The world
Is touching itself and I cannot stand it.
Preservation it’s all the same
I held a voice to my lips
I pressed a hand on my word
By heart had all the arrangements
When the body left out
into it
Yet speaking against
the losing
Or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.
green, the green rush.
'if only for a minute, or two, I want to know what it feels like to be without you' lucinda
under cover, *my* daylikewidewater, of thorpe's poem posted by m # 1:42 PM maybe it sounds so my own bcs it sounds like Hass? but maybe more abrupt than.
My uncle is a lawyer's clerk in London I call him twice a year Dear heart, he says, How are you?
The Atlantic takes dictation Every syllable a naval boy Down the chute, his coffin made to sink.
Very discursive
Love, if the sauce is too clear, Just add cornflour
My hands make a frame Left / Right The Jersey shoreline and the familiar air As if I licked stamps for a living
Feb06
source
--------
you're reading a book and you make some notes in the margin -- you say
things similar, more or less of your own. this goes on for days.one day, you open the book to a new page and there
in the book's text are sentences that you have written.
before, already. or not? maybe, it must be,
you had already read this page and then
you wrote it down. no. the footnote in the book's text credits you.these are sentences you wrote in the margins. flip back and see.
repose
--------
That's what I wanted to tell you.
All the things you could say, you're saying this. -With all the fish in the sea? -Not like her.
These are what I am thinking when I am at the window. when I wake up. when I brush my teeth.My mind returning home, says I'm so sorry.-I want to know things. -Why didn't you tell me sooner? -I just wanted to hear you say it. -So you're not angry? - I'm not done yet. –Shhh... -Just let me get my mind around this. –What
is that—that metaphor? -Don't do this. -I'm sorry.
I still miss you. I'm looking out the window, this is the voice in my head.
To me these are the only real things in the world.
To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:
It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.
On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.
...
Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.
I hear what do I hear in these sounds I hear myself I hear My uncle is a lawyer's clerk the taste of glue on envelopes, I call him twice a year, sunlight on red brick, the jersey shoreline and familiar air, as if I licked stamps for a living.
'like someone falling down and getting up. and running and falling and getting up.'
I hear Hass, in whom I always heard myself, Privilege of Being, Meditation at Lagunitas, one only needs a few poems for a lifetime of remembered cadences..
'..the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
..and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you, dear heart, cure my loneliness'
I woke up and the animals were all around, the giraffe with his head in the lap of hyena
saying blackberry blackberry blackberry
The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything
That is not these words everything that is not these words, this arranging, is being taken. lost.
And their disposition on the page. this is all we can keep, if I tell you, we will be okay, if the weather is what happens. (preservation it's all the same, straightened a shirt on its hanger, the world is touching itself and I cannot stand it). if the losing is what happens. lost into it. arrangements on the page, having by heart.
Pages are browning in the sunlight,
A collar is wrinkling, not organized
Properly on the hanger. The world
Is touching itself and I cannot stand it.
Preservation it’s all the same
I held a voice to my lips
I pressed a hand on my word
By heart had all the arrangements
When the body left out
into it
Yet speaking against
the losing
Or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.
green, the green rush.
'if only for a minute, or two, I want to know what it feels like to be without you' lucinda
Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,
Some wound of color.
green is a color. anger, desire, wound, these are not green.under cover, *my* daylikewidewater, of thorpe's poem posted by m # 1:42 PM maybe it sounds so my own bcs it sounds like Hass? but maybe more abrupt than.
My uncle is a lawyer's clerk in London I call him twice a year Dear heart, he says, How are you?
The Atlantic takes dictation Every syllable a naval boy Down the chute, his coffin made to sink.
Very discursive
Love, if the sauce is too clear, Just add cornflour
My hands make a frame Left / Right The Jersey shoreline and the familiar air As if I licked stamps for a living
Feb06
source
--------
you're reading a book and you make some notes in the margin -- you say
things similar, more or less of your own. this goes on for days.one day, you open the book to a new page and there
in the book's text are sentences that you have written.
before, already. or not? maybe, it must be,
you had already read this page and then
you wrote it down. no. the footnote in the book's text credits you.these are sentences you wrote in the margins. flip back and see.
repose
--------
That's what I wanted to tell you.
All the things you could say, you're saying this. -With all the fish in the sea? -Not like her.
These are what I am thinking when I am at the window. when I wake up. when I brush my teeth.My mind returning home, says I'm so sorry.-I want to know things. -Why didn't you tell me sooner? -I just wanted to hear you say it. -So you're not angry? - I'm not done yet. –Shhh... -Just let me get my mind around this. –What
is that—that metaphor? -Don't do this. -I'm sorry.
I still miss you. I'm looking out the window, this is the voice in my head.
To me these are the only real things in the world.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
dlcs
Obama - re him, his backround, character, temperament...
punditry - re infighting, positioning - of political bloggers - 24 hour news cycle ...
10.16. 08 go thr dlcs-main to add Obama or punditry tag where appropr, only take main tag off if not timely, not part of larger narrative might want to read thr all main tags for... narrative of the campaigns, but also (of course) of my reading about it...
pro-life ~ specifically for the (just a few) posts re prolife shld also mean against torture, against war where can avoid it. like hpotter or sopranos-end, this is a limited use tag for a specific topic of int to me. rather than: a tag naming a broad kind of intention, a relation to the pgmk.
~ eh it's only two posts, easily turned up by search. so just ..pro-life.. in title line. no tag.
ggl rdr
cannot replace tag.
have to scrolllllll to get to post in context of feed, where can edit tags. cannot do this from search, nor from the original post (as can in dlcs) bcs that is separate: in ggl rdr I am tagging my instance of the post in my feed. not the orig page. and if "share" a post (in order to add a note), that is yet another instance of it. the note does not appear on the post in my feed. and the tags do not appear on shared post (unless tagged there, additionally).
so, you have:
search: yields orig posts, on wh cannot operate, cannot go to that post in feed to tag.
feed, in wh tagged posts: can tag, does not show notes added in share
shared posts: does not show tags added in feed, does not allow you to edit the note you add.
and when you view all posts fr feed with a certain tag, order is messed up. I think. ordered by when tagged, not where were in feed.
and for shared items, these post when you share, not keeping order of feed. bcs its just like sending content to a blog, I guess, only it's a very limited blog platform, where you cannot edit your note later. you can only choose 'share' again, sending a new instance with a new note of that
just not well integrated.
I guess works well only as a reader, not as a marking context, a place to collect & organize.
so, just use to read, and ok to tag casually, but do not get bogged down, eg trying to organize all asllvn posts, at 50+ a day at lst some days that is not worthwhile.
just skim there, then get out, get back to dlcs as homebase.
also unsure: when asllvn deletes a post, does it remain in my feed, my infinitely scrollling feed (well, back as far as feed goes, I assume depending on when subscribed - but avail feeds hold posts from some distance in past, so eg my feed does not start w 10.14 but in September or perhaps even further?)
party politics - pleased w this tag. for anyth characterizing the Republicans, or the Democrats, or wrt who is liberal who conservative. or (also) re the 2-party system.
punditry - pleased with this also. as above. re political blogging, 24 hour news cycle, shillers for their party.
campaign tactics: 'joe' the 'plumber' is a tactic ~maybe repr a strategy~ so posts about him go here. and any posts re ads. re how campaign run.
prejudice
gay equality: incl current 'No on prop 8' posts along with whatever other posts on topic...
christianism ~ or, could be: religion. but I think the category I want is mostly re fundamentalist christian religion (as, per asllvn, perverting Republican party away fr conservatism)
z for other ~ a stand in for 'untagged' so that could look at posts without any of above tags
x for of not m int to me
Palin, McCain, Obama calm
Obama - re him, his backround, character, temperament...
punditry - re infighting, positioning - of political bloggers - 24 hour news cycle ...
10.16. 08 go thr dlcs-main to add Obama or punditry tag where appropr, only take main tag off if not timely, not part of larger narrative might want to read thr all main tags for... narrative of the campaigns, but also (of course) of my reading about it...
pro-life ~ specifically for the (just a few) posts re prolife shld also mean against torture, against war where can avoid it. like hpotter or sopranos-end, this is a limited use tag for a specific topic of int to me. rather than: a tag naming a broad kind of intention, a relation to the pgmk.
~ eh it's only two posts, easily turned up by search. so just ..pro-life.. in title line. no tag.
ggl rdr
cannot replace tag.
have to scrolllllll to get to post in context of feed, where can edit tags. cannot do this from search, nor from the original post (as can in dlcs) bcs that is separate: in ggl rdr I am tagging my instance of the post in my feed. not the orig page. and if "share" a post (in order to add a note), that is yet another instance of it. the note does not appear on the post in my feed. and the tags do not appear on shared post (unless tagged there, additionally).
so, you have:
search: yields orig posts, on wh cannot operate, cannot go to that post in feed to tag.
feed, in wh tagged posts: can tag, does not show notes added in share
shared posts: does not show tags added in feed, does not allow you to edit the note you add.
and when you view all posts fr feed with a certain tag, order is messed up. I think. ordered by when tagged, not where were in feed.
and for shared items, these post when you share, not keeping order of feed. bcs its just like sending content to a blog, I guess, only it's a very limited blog platform, where you cannot edit your note later. you can only choose 'share' again, sending a new instance with a new note of that
just not well integrated.
I guess works well only as a reader, not as a marking context, a place to collect & organize.
so, just use to read, and ok to tag casually, but do not get bogged down, eg trying to organize all asllvn posts, at 50+ a day at lst some days that is not worthwhile.
just skim there, then get out, get back to dlcs as homebase.
also unsure: when asllvn deletes a post, does it remain in my feed, my infinitely scrollling feed (well, back as far as feed goes, I assume depending on when subscribed - but avail feeds hold posts from some distance in past, so eg my feed does not start w 10.14 but in September or perhaps even further?)
party politics - pleased w this tag. for anyth characterizing the Republicans, or the Democrats, or wrt who is liberal who conservative. or (also) re the 2-party system.
punditry - pleased with this also. as above. re political blogging, 24 hour news cycle, shillers for their party.
campaign tactics: 'joe' the 'plumber' is a tactic ~maybe repr a strategy~ so posts about him go here. and any posts re ads. re how campaign run.
prejudice
gay equality: incl current 'No on prop 8' posts along with whatever other posts on topic...
christianism ~ or, could be: religion. but I think the category I want is mostly re fundamentalist christian religion (as, per asllvn, perverting Republican party away fr conservatism)
z for other ~ a stand in for 'untagged' so that could look at posts without any of above tags
x for of not m int to me
Palin, McCain, Obama calm
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