All that is necessary for evil to triumph.
“The attitude among the Democrats and the media now seems to be that, hmm, maybe if we keep our fingers crossed we won’t need a government for anything until 2009, and if we just wait until then, the next president can get everything running again just in the nick of time.” —Phil Nugent
“I also happen to think she needs to eat a sandwich and cover up a bit.”
From this:
to this:
It’s not nearly Scott Pilgrim enough, but still. A good step taken.
I am interested in your product or service, and I’d like to hear more.
A quote from Trilling; head over to Kugelmass for context:
As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the present. The voice of multiplication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and in humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer… And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace—we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it.
Chivalry, being dead—
The scene: it’s 1965. Travis McGee, that amiable skeptic, that waterfront gypsy, thinking man’s Robin Hood, killer of small fish, ruggedly sexy boat bum, that big, loose chaser of rainbows, that freelance knight in slightly tarnished armor, Travis McGee has picked up an old friend, Nora Gardino, who puts on a deep shade of wool, not exactly a wine shade, perhaps a cream sherry shade, a fur wrap, her blue-black hair glossy, her heels tall, purse in hand, mouth shaped red, her eyes sparkling with holiday for their date. He takes her out to the Mile O’Beach for steaks and cocktails in the Captain’s Room and when dinner’s over and the old-times talk is just about spent he tells her why he’s called her for the first time in a year or so to take her out to dinner: Sam Taggart, the man who left her hard and bad and stupid as hell three years before and lit out for parts unknown is coming back, and it turns out he is still carrying a torch, as big as the one she’s got in her own hands.
So Nora’s pole-axed, wheels around, drops her head between her knees. Trav motions the maitre’d over to bring some smelling salts. Out in the parking lot, she leans against a little tree and pukes up the steak. He takes her home in his electric blue Rolls Royce pickup truck to his place, his houseboat, the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, where he turns up the heat (it’s February, hence the fur in Florida) and makes her a mild drink and they settle down to talk about how maybe Sam let her catch him in bed with her shop assistant a month before the wedding because maybe he’s the sort of guy who’s afraid of being tied down, how a real live complete woman can be a scary thing, how even if maybe she thinks she came on too strong she has to be what she is, and how Trav heard from him and knows he’s coming back, and how he’ll set it up so she gets to see him again. And as the talk winds down again, he says,
“Don’t plan anything. Play it by ear, Nora. Don’t try to force any kind of reaction. It’s the only thing you can do.”
“I guess,” she said. She gave me a shamefaced look. “This is idiotic, but I’m absolutely ravenous.”
“Nora, honey, you know exactly where everything is, including the drawer where you’ll find an apron.”
“Eggs? Bacon? Toast?”
“All there. All for you. I’ll settle for one cold Tuborg. Bottom shelf. No glass, thanks.”
Bruises and roundhouses.
This may just be a pattern in search of a theory that is itself in search of a problem, but it struck me in the shower and hasn’t gone away, and so I give it a wipe and a polish and set it down before you. “It” being: the notion that there might be if not an essential difference between the pulp heroics of prose and the pulp heroics of comics (because, let’s face it, everything is essentially the same dam’ thing) then perhaps a perceptible difference: what is heroic in a prose pulp hero will tend or drift or gesture toward the done-to, the withstood, the survived, the masochistic; what is heroic in comics pulp will tend or drift or gesture toward the done-by, the delivered, the unleashed, the sadistic.
Not to freight our gestures or drifts or looks too heavily or anything. Pattern, theory, problem. —But think of James Bond (in the books), think of Travis McGee: the scars they display; the pain suffered so exquisitely during and after every fight. Think of Spider-Man, think of the Batman, think of the balletic spins and kicks, the terrible punches, the bodies in motion.
There’s nothing sinister about this, no more than there’s anything original: it’s merely the difference in artistic technologies employed. One’s hand fitting itself to one’s tools. With prose, all you have are words, and the reader’s sensorium, and the changes and echoes you can ring by banging the one against the other: and so for effect you’re going to focus on making the reader feel (and see, yes, and hear and smell and taste, too) what’s happening. You’re going to do to them, and if you’ve got a protagonist in the way, you’re going to do it through them. —Whereas with comics you’re handing the reader what they’re seeing (with certain shorthands and gestures and signs and symbols to be interpreted according to various rules, yes, we’re still reading, after all); it’s pretty much the preoccupation with what it is you’re doing, and doing just looks ever so much cooler than being done to. And so.
And of course there’s all sorts of spoiling overlaps, and yes Wolverine is the best there is at soaking up yadda yadda, and Bond is himself a sadistic bastard, but then he’s also in the movies a lot. —This is hardly a hard and fast genre rule unwritten or otherwise; it’s hardly an idiomatic necessity. It’s a reflexive tendancy. It’s a pattern, in search of a theory, wondering whether there’s a problem with reflexively, unthinkingly, turning to doing, or being done to, in order to drag the reader from the phenomenal to the sublime. Probably not. (One so dislikes being judgmental.) But like I say, it hasn’t gone away. Give it a poke. See if something happens.
Cui bono?
“‘A group of boys I know were thinking of going to the Lloyd Center on the max to see 28 Weeks Later on Friday night,’ said TJ Browning—a long-time Forum member, this morning. ‘But one of the boys said, “Wait a minute, that curfew thing is going on,” so they chose not to go on Friday night.’ —Browning was, in fact, touting this as a sign of the policy’s success, but to what end?” —Matt Davis
It’s the little things.
Shouldn’t he be saying “Myanmar”?
Evil is conquered and the blade’s work done.
“Then share this, as well,” said Dallben, who had been listening closely and now held out the heavy, leather-bound volume he had kept under his arm.
“The Book of Three?” Taran said, looking wonderingly and questioningly at the enchanter. “I dare not…”
“Take it, my boy,” Dallben said. “It will not blister your fingers, as once it did with an over-curious Assistant Pig-Keeper. All its pages are open to you. The Book of Three no longer foretells what is to come, only what has been. But now can be set down the words of its last page.”
The enchanter took a quill from the table, opened the book, and in it wrote with a bold, firm hand:
“And thus did an Assistant Pig-Keeper become High King of Prydain.”
That’s the difference between God and me.
You’ve seen Steve Benen’s timeline, and calimac’s use of Dunsany is impeccable, and Phil Nugent’s perspective is as close to a last word as any of us will need, but I ended up smiling the most at this. —It’s the little things, y’know?
The long creamy spill (and fall).
I suppose it should come as no surprise—Dad loved ’em, Mom’s folks had ’em by the shelf-load, those cheaply designed but nonetheless beautiful Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks, each with the color and the iconic figure of a “girl” rendered variously by Divers Hands, I was reading ’em long before I could make sense of the drearily complicated business shenanigans or relate to the paternalistically didactic sexual politics, they’re bred in the dam’ bone, for all I haven’t read one in twenty years—it shouldn’t, but still, it surprises the hell out of me to find the bass line I’ve been playing in the metaphoric pop band of my style is a lifted hook; that the characteristic stink I can’t scrub away whiffs so redolently of John D. MacDonald.
It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is—along with “truth,” “Bush,” “administration,” “extraordinary,” “scandal,” “free,” “single,” “instance,” “corruption,” “unearthed,” “the,” “that,” and “of.”
Those brave truth-eaters are at it again:
The truth is that the Bush administration has been extraordinarily scandal-free. Not a single instance of corruption has been unearthed. Only one significant member of the executive branch, Scooter Libby, has been convicted of anything. Whether the jury’s verdict was right or wrong, that case was an individual tragedy unrelated to any underlying wrongdoing by Libby or anyone else.
That’s one of the boys at Minnesota’s most popular blog, Power Line, written yesterday, Saturday, April 28th, 2007. —David Kurtz wants to know when the piper’s gonna get paid:
If you’re a hard-core conservative reading Powerline, does this sort of nonsense make you feel better about yourself or about your beliefs? For the uninformed, maybe it offers the assurance that things are okay. For the semi-informed, maybe it comforts them that things aren’t as bad as they may seem. At what point does the internal dissonance of those who read and write such garbage exact a personal toll—morally, emotionally, spiritually?
Kurtz is looking at it the wrong way. The piper’s already been paid and done packed up and left the building; that post at Power Line isn’t so much a strategy or a tactic as it is a symptom. —“I realize,” said John Holbo (some time ago), “it is really a quite serious matter that the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back.” Yup; once again, yup.
“Apparently,” then, but: are they really not coming back? Is it possible to reach someone who’s so far around the bend? So removed from the world as it indisputably is? —I’d like to think I’m as open to dialogue as Detritus, who’d rather try teaching a young Hitler English than just shooting the little fuck; I’d like to think I could have a civil conversation with John Hinderaker, should I bump into him between planes at O’Hare, say, and not just punch him in the nose. But he has accused you and me and everyone we know of betraying America. And I’m only human.
But forget the punching, and leave aside for a moment the rather large question of whether such a conversation civil or otherwise could even begin to reach someone so far around the bend. What we’re talking about here isn’t a conversation. It’s a blog post, yes, and so it looks like it’s part of our great political multilogue, our give and take of political argument and debate, but it’s a truth-eating post. It’s no more an argument than David Broder’s columns are political journalism, or the Attorney General’s appearance before Congress was testimony. —This is cargo-cult stuff, hieratic gestures that mimic argument and journalism and testimony, incantations no more meaningful than a magic spell, attempts not to engage the world as it is but take it and through sheer force of will bend it to what it damn well ought to be.
Put it that way, and I think our responsibility is clear: engage them in conversation, yes; try to reach around that bend when you can, when reaching is possible. But don’t return those gestures. Don’t respond to the call of their spells. (We were supposed to be outraged when Giuliani promised another 9/11 if he weren’t elected president. Better instead to point and laugh. —Perhaps it seems unfair to sweep an entire wing of our national discourse beyond the pale? Very well, it is unfair. But all our arms are too short to box with a whole damn world of straw. Why should we bother?) —When they put on their robes and gin up another solemn ritual to mimic the fillips of civil discourse, do what you can to minimize the infection by discrediting their authority. Point and laugh. Point and laugh.
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.
O to be in Brooklyn in the Spring!
On May 18th, my older younger sister’s birthday, Rose Thomson, Hanna Fox, and Tim Thomas will all be onstage again in their various separate incarnations, at the Magnetic Field. —Explains all the searches lately for Babe the Blue Ox. (Laura: you gotta go and tell me all about it.)
No controlling authority.
Ladies and gentlemen, your Attorney General and mine:
During those conversations, to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.
And it’s not that the guy who’s, y’know, in charge of the Department of Justice thinks he just dodged the bullet of a bad decision by saying, hey, look, I didn’t make the bad decision. It’s that he can’t even weasel without weaseling. “To my knowledge”? How on earth do you not know that you might have just made a decision? How can you be in doubt as to whether a decision had been made by you? —No, seriously. How?
All it takes is one bad apple.
Remember how mega-agribusiness Dole had a little problem with E. coli-infested bags of factory-farmed spinach last summer, so that all over the country restaurants and supermarkets went through a spinach dry-spell? How on earth will we protect Oregonians from ever-increasing outbreaks of food contamination? —By slapping draconian regulations on small farmers, of course, driving local farmers’ markets out of business.
Goose and gander?
I’m not so sure about the wisdom of the sauce prescribed, and far be it from me to jump in a bigblog pie-fight, and it’s not like I even have the knowledge to say for myself whether this is the stupidest thing Markos Moulitsas has ever written, but I hope to God it is, because it’s staggeringly, mind-bogglingly stupid. —Lisa Spangenberg rounded up some links to actual, intelligent grappling with the vital topics squirming under the hateful things that were done to Kathy Sierra, and follows up by unpacking a joint statement from Sierra and someone who might could help Kos realize how smart it would be to own up, publicly, to the implications of his admitted ignorance of what happened, and stop playing stupid.
Defending the republic from the likes of Kimberly Prude.
On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County—I’m going to mispronounce the name—but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.
I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.
“There were no voting locations in the county in 2000,” he explains. “It was all strictly by mail. This was the first election after vote-by-mail passed, and everything was mailed in. People could go into the county elections office to pick up their ballot if they didn’t receive one, but there weren’t other locations to drop them off.”
As for the bizarre library card claim, “I have no idea what he’s talking about. A library card has nothing to do with people being able to vote.”
—Scott Moore, quoting Multnomah County Elections Director John Kauffman
It bears repeating: Republicans depend on preventing as many people as possible from voting. —The New York Times details some of the collateral damage in this foul, anti-American quest for permanent hegemony: folks deported and rotting in jail for filling out the wrong form at the wrong time. Josh Marshall puts the damage in perspective.
