Homiletic truths hard-won through too much wasted effort:
It is easier to clean the kitchen if you keep the kitchen clean. —There is something deeply unfair about this fact.
Nothing is hidden from you that you cannot see with your own eyes.
24 Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn nor wives, and they are odorous and vile. Of how much greater value are you than these wretched birds! 25 You should be worried about your appearance, that people do not take you for a raven, lest you are cast out into the fields. 26 If then you are not cast out into the fields with the ravens, you have pleased your Father in Heaven. 27 Consider the lilies! They neither toil nor spin, and so I tell you, their life is but a season, and they have no wives. Solomon had many wives, and in his glory was arrayed in garments finer than any lily of the field! 28 They are but meager grasses, fit only to be thrown into the oven, but you are precious to your Father in Heaven and your prayers have brought you great wealth. 29 In striving for what you will eat and what you will drink, pray steadfastly, and your Father will give you these things.
Last summer, Adam Kotsko went on a bit of a Twitter-tear as he is wont, cheekily parablizing the global financial crisis; his colleague, David Weasley, was then inspired to share Nate Dannison’s “National Gospel of Liberty”:
Parable of the Wealthy Fool
13 One of the wealthy men who had gathered said to him, Sir, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me. 14 But he said to him, Foolish coward! Can you not work for yourself? 15 Do you not see those around you, who have prayed steadfastly and have built up great stores? 16 And he said to them, Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of laziness, for one’s life consists of the abundance of his possessions. 17 Then he told them a parable: The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, What should I do, for I have no more room to store my crops? 18 Then he said, I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods and my wives. 19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, for God has blessed you with riches. 20 But God said to him, You fool! This very night you will be blessed with additional riches. And the barns you have prepared, they are not large enough. 21 So it is with those who do not build enough barns to store all the treasures that God has blessed them with.
Of this effort Kotsko said, “I have no doubt that if Nate rewrote the entire Bible along these lines, it would quickly replace the original version in the world’s affection,” but I fear in this expectation he proved to be no less foolish than the wealthy fool, his snugly satisfactory barns nowhere near enough to store the riches laid up for us all:
There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning are, in increasing amount:
Experts in ancient languages are helpful in reducing the first type of error above, which is a vanishing source of error as scholarship advances understanding. English language linguists are helpful in reducing the second type of error, which also decreases due to an increasing vocabulary. But the third—and largest—source of translation error requires conservative principles to reduce and eliminate.[3]
- lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
- lack of precision in modern language
- translation bias, mainly of the liberal kind, in converting the original language to the modern one.
As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[4]
Thus, a project has begun among members of Conservapedia to translate the Bible in accordance with these principles. The translated Bible can be found here.
- Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias. For example, the Living Bible translation has liberal evolutionary bias;[5] the widely used NIV translation has a pro-abortion bias.[6]
- Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other feminist distortions; preserve many references to the unborn child (the NIV deletes these)
- Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity[7]; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[8]
- Utilize Terms which better capture original intent: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent;[9] Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
- Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction[10] by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[11] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
- Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
- Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
- Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story
- Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
- Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”
“It could do no harm and it most certainly could do much good.”
Our ceremonial innocence.
“…I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party. On the Presidential ballot in a few states (seventeen in ____), a ‘Socialist’ Party will appear. Few will hear its appeal because it will have almost no opportunity to take part in the campaign and explain its platform. If a voter organizes or advocates a real third-party movement, he may be accused of seeking to overthrow this government by ‘force and violence.’ Anything he advocates by way of significant reform will be called ‘Communist’ and will of necessity be Communist in the sense that it must advocate such things as government ownership of the means of production; government in business; the limitation of private profit; social medicine, government housing and federal aid to education; the total abolition of race bias; and the welfare state. These things are on every Communist program; these things are the aim of socialism. Any American who advocates them today, no matter how sincerely, stands in danger of losing his job, surrendering his social status and perhaps landing in jail. The witnesses against him may be liars or insane or criminals. These witnesses need give no proof for their charges and may not even be known or appear in person. They may be in the pay of the United States Government. ADAs and ‘Liberals’ are not third parties; they seek to act as tails to kites. But since the kites are self-propelled and radar-controlled, tails are quite superfluous and rather silly.” —W.E.B. Dubois
You know it when you see it…
This is some of the most beautiful pornography I think I’ve ever seen:
Perfectly SFW, but people will ask questions if they see it on your screen.
Pushing the kettle too far.
Muzzy-headed, bleary-thunked, pre-coffee. Awoken by the yowling feed-me cats from a half-dream, half-Gedankenexperiment: an unknown dignitary (perhaps a FIRE executive) was tweeting snapshots of their 12-course dinner from a trendy SoHo hotspot (Toronto was rather obviously standing in for New York). A free-speech zone had been barricaded off for protests six blocks or so uptown, in the nearest available public open space; anyone caught on the streets around the restaurant by the dignitary’s security cordon was being pre-emptively detained. —Unless, of course, you’d submitted yourself already to background and credit checks (the results keyed to your genome through Xe Monsanto’s patented Trust But Verify® process) and were paying the yearly subscription fee, and so could show the cops your Presumed Innocent® citizen’s ID card—
The tatpuruṣa obverse.
Noted for the commonplace book:
Work without wealth.
Conscience without pleasure.
Character without knowledge.
Morality without commerce.
Humanity without science.
Sacrifice without worship.
Principles without politics.
Against grit.
It’s not the grit, goddammit. It’s the grain.
It was the io9 headline that got to me: “The Unfulfilled Promise of Gritty Space Opera.” It’s not the basic premise of the article, no; there was something special going on in Firefly and the Battlestar reboot that just isn’t anymore—though I’d also include Cowboy Bebop, and Farscape on a good day (both of which are conspicuous in their absence), and not so much Space Cowboys or Solaris; I think the desire to see it as a discrete movement led to some distortion in selecting who was in, and why. I mean the indisputable wellspring of all this stuff for God’s sake is Alien, which is nowhere to seen.
But what was going on and what they have in common isn’t for fuck’s sake grit.
It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been kicking around the edges of the always brewing but lately intensifying backlash against the grimdark school of gritty epic fantasy? But it certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been reading comics ever since everybody with a pen and a whole lot of ink thought the thing that made Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen great was the fuckin’ grit, man. And we had grim ’n’ gritty superheroes and the joycore backlash and the relapses and the espionage crossbleeds and the X-Men in black leather and then back in the goofy costumes again and far too many people thinking that all they had to do to give us good comics (or epics, or science fiction, or procedurals, or, or, or) was to put in some grit or take the grit out again.
Fuck the grit. It isn’t the grit. The grit is nothing but an epiphenomenon.
“I realize there’s a particular type of comic I love that doesn’t come along too often,” said Shænon Garrity, and she said it about Dicebox, yeah, so sue me, “although it should. It’s science fiction or fantasy, preferably the former, with a focus on the ordinary lives of not-quite-ordinary people. There’s world-building, but it’s about society more than technology. The art is filled with interesting details.”
Botswana Beast said, “there was a final sense, to me, of new pathways, new vents in the medium and in the SF genre (which is so often entirely reliant on high-concept, but perhaps given we now live in a world of constant high-concept, it is perhaps time to read more humanised takes on such).” —And yes, he said it about Dicebox, what do you want from me?
There was also this brief Twitter conversation, on the subject of road trips, and car payments and water bills, and how maybe a dose of the latter might help the former.
As, you understand, some recent for instances.
The thing that movies and to a greater extent television and to a much greater extent comics and games can all do that prose can’t is throw in incidental detail, all of them, the best of them stuffing their multitracks with sights and sounds and physical sensations and we’re working I’m sure on smells God help us, while prose plods along laying one word down after another on its single track. —The thing of it is you need details to fill up those multiple tracks. Star Trek comes out swinging in the sixties to imagine the wonderful world of the future and can barely imagine past the walls of a spaceship. You want food? You go to a hole in the wall and ask for whatever you want. You want aliens? Slap some paint on their faces and chalk a moral caption on the sleeves of their jackets, we’ve got shots to set up. —But by virtue of longevity if nothing else details accreted, as fans and writers and producers paid attention to the world and its ragtag, hotchpotch consistency; by the time Next Generation came out, there was something of a there there, though you’re still going to the wall to ask for your tea, and when it comes time to calibrate the framminjammer you’re just typing rapidly on glass screens and saying what you’re doing, out loud, because who has time to figure out what that would really look like, doing something like that? Write down some technobabble and on to the next, there’s models to build.
Contrast that with the opening of Alien, where they’re all waking up from cold sleep, joshing Altmanly with each other over breakfast, settling into their messy workstations on the bridge and going about their business. The actors, legend says, lived and slept on that set during rehearsals, and it shows. They don’t tell us what they’re doing, they just do it, and there’s a wealth of detail, prickly, sticky, finely grained detail to pick up from what they’re doing, and how.
Or think about the very physical actions that had to be performed in concert in a very real place to turn Serenity around and save them all from the Reavers in the Firefly pilot; think about the toll that’s taken bit by agonizing bit on the pilots and the crew in “33,” to get back to our champions of soi disant grit.
An unreal world, however high-concept, that’s really lived in. —This isn’t the Dogme ’07 of mundane SF, though mundane SF was trying to get there, too. Adventures can happen, oh yes, and not-so-ordinary people can go on them. But we see the how, and the why, and the impact it has, and all the little details accumulate into how life is really lived, somewhere utterly else.
It isn’t the grit. It’s the grain. Fine details, closely observed; not irritants that require an oyster to deliver anything of value.
He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.
“Franzen is 52. I am 54. Two years would not normally suffice to place the older of the two in the class of REALLY OLD fogeys, as opposed to the class of the merely old—but I am a classicist. No classicist can take this view of the sanctity of print; one mark of the serious scholar is, of course, a preference for the printed text that comes with an apparatus criticus, that is, one which publishes important variants from the manuscript at the foot of the page. Which is to say, of course, that we are trained to be aware of the errors that creep in during transmission; we are trained to regard corrupt texts with horror. And when we are confronted with the process through which a modern text comes to print, we see it as a battle: a battle in which those publishing the book do their best to smuggle corruptions into print, against more or less effective opposition from the person who had the misfortune to write it.” —Helen DeWitt
Ironical.
“The model of irony which Wolff uses in understanding Marx is Socratic irony, which he defines as a statement made with two intended audiences, a naïve audience who assume that Marx intends the literal meaning of the statement, and a sophisticated audience who understand that Marx denies the literal meaning of the statement, and also understand why the naïve audience would be fooled. But this underestimates the extent to which irony is a rhetorical effect, taking the two audiences simply as given; what reason do we have to believe that there is such a naïve audience? The only reason we have to believe in the naïve audience is in the ironic writing itself; indeed, the naïve audience is purely imagined in order to produce the desired effect, in order to stage a confrontation between intention and literal meaning.” —Voyou Désœuvré
Dialing the phone like this.
Eh, you know. February. —Mostly I’ve been busy with the city, finishing off no. 17, thinking about the end game. There are quite a lot of plates spinning, aren’t there. Hadn’t really realized just how many till the last little while. Hmm.
I was intereviewed by Joey Manley (no relation) as part of a series he’s inaugurating on webserialists; lots of backstory, if you like. —And also I reveal the title of a putative volume three, about which there has been little to no comment, as yet.
And I should probably get back to the Great Work, shouldn’t I. (Further; talk; ambit; obversity; anent; parts.) —Trouble is, it’s time to take up the role of gender for real, and tackle the safe word, and my initial angle of attack’s over a year out of date. (Does that even matter?) —Trouble also is, Requires Only That You Hate has me instead musing over a thing that might compare Bakker’s Folly with a cheap Utena knock-off; that, however, would require reading Bakker, which has not begun well. (Petty? Perhaps.)
The other day Taran told me with the indescribable solemnity of a three-year-old that, while she was a cat, and Mamma was a cat, that I was a dog, and I’d have to stop meowing. I tried to explain how gender is performative, and meowing is a learned response, but I’m not sure it’s sunk in yet.
—On the other hand, presidents crawl on the table and have sharp teeth like beavers. So there’s yet hope?
That inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic.
So you asked Norman Mailer and Ann Pratchett and Jonathan Franzen and Claire Messud and Joyce Carol Oates to rank in order what they consider to be the ten greatest works of fiction of all time, novels or story collections or plays or poems, and David Foster Wallace told you with a straight face that the best such work ever writ is The Screwtape Letters?
There’s trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don’t sleep on a bed of bones.
“We clutch at the tough, dangerous heroines like Katniss because they offer an alternative to the bubbly romcoms and typically one-dimensional female characterizations. But it’s become too much of a black and white dichotomy that refuses the deeply flawed and all-too-human lead for the emotionally shut-off heroine who kills, and refuses to recognize any similarities in the two. I often hate to talk in terms of masculinity and femininity, but Blackwood is right that we tend to equate effectiveness with attributes that have been traditionally coded as male. I won’t go so far as to say Bella’s foibles are coded as traditionally female—they’re not. (As I noted above with my own memories—the most distinct weaknesses I see in Bella remind me of boys from the past, not girls.) But romance certainly is.” —Monika Bartyzel, “The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Teen Heroines”
28.6 million man-days—and growing!
Between 1970 and 2005, the number of people incarcerated in the United States grew by 700%. Today, the United States incarcerates approximately 2.3 million people. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has only 5% of the world’s population but a full 25% of its prisoners.
—“Banking on Bondage:
Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,”
ACLU, November 2011
Always controversial, for-profit prisons were initially hailed by political conservatives as a cost-effective way to relieve the overcrowded penal system. And for a while private prisons relieved some pressure and initially turned a nice profit for such companies as Prison Realty Trust and Wackenhut Corrections Corp. Indeed, Wackenhut did too well for some. Its South Florida facility was publicly criticized for treating inmates as if they were on vacation, giving them access to televisions and gyms.
But today, the industry is in a rut, and its prospects have been severely trimmed. Overbuilding and ill-fated financial schemes have hammered stock prices. States, once eager to outsource their inmates, are backing out of private prison contracts. News of escapes and violence at private prisons adds to a climate of distrust. Execs at the for-profit prisons insist the concept still works. But the spate of bad news has given longtime critics such as Middle Tennessee State University criminologist Frank Lee a new platform. “Private prisons don’t work,” he says.
—Charles H. Haddad, “Private Prisons Don’t Work,”
Bloomberg Businessweek, September 11, 2000
Record 2010 Financial Results
CCA’s record revenues of $1.7 billion benefited from an increase in compensated man-days which generated revenue from federal and local customers. Our average compensated man-days rose 3.2% to 28.6 million in 2010 from 27.7 million in 2009 and reflected an increase in demand for beds from the US Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons, along with the states of California, Georgia and Florida. Our revenue from Federal customers rose 9.4% to $717.8 million and accounted for 43% of management revenues for 2010. Management revenue from state customers was $838.5 million in 2010 and represented 50% of management revenues. Net income was a record $157.2 million in 2010. Net income per diluted share rose 5.3% to $1.39 compared with 2009. The growth in our earnings benefited from our higher revenue base and an increase in our facility operating margin to 31.2% in 2010. We have invested a significant amount of resources in improving our operating efficiency that includes new prison designs that are more cost-effective to operate, cost-saving strategies from a company-wide initiative to improve operating efficiencies and best practices that we developed from our broad experience in the industry.
—Corrections Corporation of America,
2010 Annual Letter to Shareholders
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. This possible growth depends on a number of factors we cannot control, including crime rates and sentencing patterns in various jurisdictions and acceptance of privatization. The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
—Corrections Corporation of America,
2010 Annual Report on Form 10-K
While private prison companies deny taking steps to affirmatively support legislation that promotes mass incarceration, and although CCA left ALEC in 2010, according to a recent news report, “for the past two decades, a CCA executive has been a member of the council’s [task force that] produced more than 85 model bills and resolutions that required tougher criminal sentencing, expanded immigration enforcement and promoted prison privatization … CCA’s senior director of business development was the private-sector chair of the task force in the mid- to late 90s when it produced a series of model bills promoting tough-on-crime measures that would send more people to prison for a longer time.
The number of immigrants detained annually has nearly doubled, to 390,000 since immigration enforcement was transferred to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security in 2003, creating a huge market for private prison operators, who house almost 50 percent of all federally detained immigrants compared with just 6 percent of state prisoners and 16 percent of federal prisoners.
—Rania Khalek, “The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System”
Recently, ALEC leaders have been involved with discriminatory immigration laws that carry potential benefits for private prisons. On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill 1070, a statute that requires police officers in Arizona to ask people for their papers during law enforcement stops based only on an undefined “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country unlawfully. Senate Bill 1070, and similar “copycat” laws since enacted in several other states, have the potential to further increase the number of immigrants detained, thereby adding to pressure to build more immigration detention centers. Russell Pearce, currently President of the Arizona State Senate and a member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force, was a sponsor and moving force behind the Arizona bill, and he presented the idea for the law at an ALEC meeting. According to a report by National Public Radio (which is disputed by Pearce and CCA), the private prison industry engaged in a “quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070.”
I think it’s clear that with the events of September 11 there’s a heightened focus on detention, both on the borders and within the US. More people are gonna get caught. So I would say the events of September 11, um, let me back up. The federal business is the best business for us. It’s the most consistent business for us, and the events of September 11 is increasing that level of business.
—Steve Logan, CEO of Cornell Corrections,
during a conference call with investors
two months after 9/11
We believe the outlook for CCA and the private corrections industry remain very positive. Public prisons are overcrowded and increases in the US inmate population are expected to outpace the addition of new prison beds. Historically, the US inmate population has also accelerated in post-recession years, particularly at the state level. Demand for new prison beds from the federal sector remains strong. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is operating at about 138% of its rated capacity and its inmate population is expected to grow. The US Marshals Service also expects meaningful growth in the coming years.
We expect the shortage of new prison beds coming on-line to be further constricted by government budget constraints in funding new capacity. No states during Fiscal Year 2010/2011 allocated funds for new prison construction.
—Corrections Corporation of America,
2010 Annual Letter to Shareholders
Up to now.
2008
Hope is not a plan – They’d enjoy eating, take pleasure in clothes, be happy with their houses, devoted to their customs – You can feel the end even as we start – People of quality – Say nothing – Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from poetry – 20 weeks out and counting – Always already – Hope is the new bleak – Let comics be comics – Proper
2009
Descriptivate, don’t prescriptivate – Otto’s rede – Appropriative – The essence thereof – The paradoxical genius of modern conservatism – Tlön, Uqbar, Custodis Tertius – Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life? – Cross-pollination – On a clear day you can see the ambiguous heterotopia – Crap – Upton’s rede – John C. Wright is recoiling in craven fear and trembling, and I don’t feel so good myself
From November 2009 until July of 2010 there was another interregnum.
2010
And I will spit on your grave – Why SF doesn’t work any more – I’m trying, honest, I am – Sacramento Morty’s – So, yeah, about that Patton Oswalt essay
2011
Trapped—in a world he never made! – Vive la différence – Truth in Typesetting Department – In Soviet criticism, terms come to you! – Testing elephants – Stupidity – My last political post – Then and back again – With thanks to Liz Wallace – Gramarye
The Great Work (2010 – 2011…)
The Great Work – Further up; further, in – What we talk about when we talk about what we’re pointing to – Ambit valent – Obversity – Anent the preceding – You can add up the parts; you won’t have the sum
Tin and diamonds.
The tenth anniversary retrospective, cont’d:
The Tomorrow File (2005)
And it came to pass – Could be belongs to us – The fulness of time – Unheimlichsenke
2005
The enemy is life – Like a seed dropped by a seabird – Those who forget are doomed – Upon hearing once more the serial bangs and muffled thuds of our crack circular firing squad, the words of—I believe it was Kissinger?—are called to mind – To Robbie Conal, “America’s foremost street artist” and staff caricaturist to the LA Weekly, on the publication of your profile of Portland’s own Mercury Studios (and guests) in Portland Monthly
From March until December of 2005, there was something of an interregnum.
2006
If I had a hammer, I’d do something about all these goddamn nails – Malleability – A fitter and generally a more effectual punishment – Enter Sandman – In 1649, to St. George’s Hill – A mighty princess, forged in the heat of housework – I bet you wish you had – Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – And, being troubled with a raging tooth, I could not sleep – 34°4'48" N, 49°42'0" E – First, they win. Then we attack them. Then we laugh at them. Then we ignore them – This machine bugs liberals – The grammar of ornament – Appositional
The koan (2005, 2006)
Koan – Let’s you and him fight – Bring him a penny, that he might see it
Jupiter drops (2006, 2007, 2009)
Jupiter drops (one) – Jupiter drops (some context) – Jupiter drops (two) – Jupiter drops (three) – Jupiter dropping elsewhere – Jupiter drops (some further context) – Jupiter drops (four) – Something to keep in mind (Jupiter drops) – Hitchcock, dropping Jupiter – Jupiter’s dropped
2007
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” saith the Lord – After the late, great unpleasantness – Is that a 75mm recoilless rifle on your Vespa, or are you happy to see me? – Tipping their hand – Unzeitgemässe betrachtungen – This is Sparta – Bruises and roundhouses – Chivalry, being dead – The one true only – racing down tracks going faster, much faster – Magical white boy – Fascists are people; Liberals are people; ∴ Liberals are fascists
I think one more will do the trick.
Three hundred fifteen million five hundred thirty-two thousand eight hundred seconds.
Oh good Lord it’s been ten years, hasn’t it. And here’s me not even ready. Tenth is, what, tin? Diamonds? Tin and diamonds?
Ah, I get to be a little self-indulgent. How about some greatest hits? We’ll run through up to the end of 2004, to start. —If I missed anything you especially liked, maybe point it out in the comments or something? Thanks. (Yes, it’s a cash bar. Sorry about that. Whaddaya gonna do.)
2002
Assume, for a moment, that I want to fling a haggis across a Canadian river – Boutique cynicism – Choice demographic – Ghosts – An attempt at sketching in prose what goes through my mind when Robyn Hitchcock begins to ramble in that engagingly undrunken monotone about the Isle of Wight before starting to contort a guitar in his own unmistakable, beautifully ugly idiom – It’s true. He do read wierd stuff (sic) – Fort Disconnect – Kid detectives. Also, how magic works. (Really) – Chickenhawks of the kulturkampf – What I have in common with Dylan Meconis – Ludafisk
2003
Too much woman (for a hen-pecked man) – •––• •••–• ••••– – Mixed messages, or, The incoherent text – Hell – Gobsmacked. William Shatnered – The rules of engagement – Ax(e)minster and other inconsequentialities – When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall – À la recherche du temps perdu – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern walk into a bar – The mindset in question – Smoking guns at Sylvia Beach
2004 (Jan. – Jun.)
Mars, or, Misunderstanding – Mars, or, Mappa Mundi (the vague direction thereof) – Auget largiendo – Sexing the pronoun – Another data point in the wall – Three simple rules for talking about comics – 300 – Braiding – We are all Frank Grimes now – Negative space, or, Why I don’t trust æsthetes – Thin blue race – Rage – Maybe you had to be there
Revolver (2004)
Revolver (one) – Revolver (two) – Revolver (one, an addendum) – Revolver (three) – Revolver (four) – James Howard’s Romeo and Juliet, or, Revolver (an intermission) – Revolver (five) – Revolver (four, revisited) – Revolver (six)
2004 (Jun. – Dec.)
But what I really want to do is direct – Biff, pow, yadda yadda – Together again for the first time – Men are from Mars; women are from Mars, too, just a different part – How do you do. Welcome to the human race. You’re a mess – Doubleplus sprezzatura – Further up, further in – Premature, perhaps, but – Whipsaw – Atlas leans back everywhere – What goes through your mind
So 2004 was kind of a banner year? I think maybe it slows down a bit after that. —More in a bit.
