In which Our Hero is once more forcibly reminded just how annoyed he can be by Spider Robinson.
Butler: I’ve wondered, and this may be the audience to put this question to, what the likelihood is of a future in which reading is no longer necessary for the majority of the people. I don’t much like the look of that future, but I wonder if when computers, for instance, can be addressed verbally, can be spoken to, whether it will still be necessary for people to be able to read and write. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Burstein: Well one of the things that I was recently reading was an essay by Spider Robinson which points out that reading is actually difficult. He was walking along the street in his hometown, and I think it was in Vancouver, where he saw that somebody had written on a piece of sidewalk and immortalized in stone a nice big heart with the names “Tood and Janey forever.” He couldn’t believe that anybody in this society would go to the lengths of naming their son “Tood.” So his only conclusion was that young Todd didn’t know how to spell his own name, and what he found to be worse was that this is somebody who is old enough to have the hots for Janey and possibly produce progeny and yet he cannot spell his own name.
There’s a lot that annoys in Robinson: his glibly superior voice; his tin ear for moral tone; his deplorable attitudes toward sex and gender; his overindulgence in appalling puns. But the failure of imagination involved above? —Perhaps our graffitist, known for the rather large chip on his (or her) shoulder, perfers to spell their nickname as Tood rather than the more grammatically correct ’Tude? Perhaps, unused to the medium of wet concrete, Todd shaped the first “D” poorly, and didn’t stick around to fix it because he was scared of getting caught? Perhaps the light was failing as Robinson took this particular constitutional? Perhaps he leaped from under a looming deadline to an otherwise untenable point he needed to fill out his Y Tood Kant Reed column for the Globe and Mail?
The Rules for Hearts.
I guess today’s my day to friend-pimp.
The cover of the sequel to Empress of the World, due 19 October.
Der Familienvater.
I’d say this was the apocalypse to Bite Me’s masquerade, but someone would start cracking ultraviolet underworld jokes, and that’s hardly the point. Dylan Meconis is back! Well, her comics, I mean. New ones. That update every Wednesday. That’s what’s back. Except with fewer chicken gags. I think.
Hi rinktum inktum.
Apparently, a big hit in 1937 (along with “I Feel Just as Happy as a Big Sun Flower”) for sparkling duo Lulu Belle and Scotty. Boys, then girls, trade off on the couplets, and watch me for the changes:
Where are you going, pretty little miss,
My little blue-eyed daisy?
If I don’t find me a young man soon
I guess I’m going crazy.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody, how doody.
How old are you, my pretty little miss,
How old are you, my honey?
If I don’t die of a lonesome heart
I’ll be sixteen next Sunday.
Hi rinktum, etc.
Now can you court, my pretty little miss,
My little wildwood flower?
I kin court more in a minnit an a half
Than you kin in a hour.
Will you marry me, my pretty little miss,
Will you marry me, good-looking?
I’ll marry you but I’ll not do
Yore washin’ an yore cookin’.
Then I won’t have you, my pretty little miss,
I won’t have you, my dear-o.
Well, they aint nobody asked you to,
You yaller-headed skeercrow!
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody, how doody.
I’ll say this for 
spinooti: you buy a 19th c. treatise on spiritualism and demonology off her, and she throws in the 1937 Alka-Seltzer Song Book for absolutely no charge. (For extra free copies of this song book, for social gatherings, church affairs, banquets, etc., write to MILES LABORATORIES, INC., Elkhart, Indiana.) —Maybe next time I’ll share some of the popular songs of the Hoosier Hot Shots, or the favorite songs of Lucille Long (“From Aunt Dinah’s quilting party, I was seeing Nellie home,” and also “Nita! Juanita! Lean thou on my heart”), or I’ll cough up Joe Kelly’s ode from beyond the grave, “Gold Star Mother o’ Mine.” —If you’re especially lucky, I’ll even tell you what Uncle Ezra saw.
Gimmie a little toot on the tooter Tommy… (horn)
Another little toot on the tooter Tommy… (horn)
The reason we all feel so swell sir—
We Al-ka-lize with Al-ka-seltzer—
Gimmie a little toot on the tooter Tommy
Station E.Z.R.A.
Lacuna.
I haven’t yet read any Octavia Butler, and now her œuvre’s set in stone with a short sharp shock. (This is why I can’t keep up with the here and now: I’m always trying to shore up my foundations—)
I bet you wish you had.
Best short story writer in America? —I don’t know; I haven’t been keeping up with American short stories these days. I did just finish the latest Kelly Link collection, though, and passed it on to the Spouse, and there is some little afterglow. It’s an album (of course), the one your friends are talking up and when you finally download it and unzip it and drop it into your mp3 player, you hover over play with some little skepticism, because it couldn’t possibly, but then you click and listen and yes, somehow, it does. Dreamlike, they’ll tell you, and I’ll tell you too, but you should maybe know that’s only how she gets where she’s going. Has nothing to do with what she does when she gets there.
“The Færy Handbag” breaks your heart, and “The Hortlak” chills it neatly, and “The Cannon” is as close as anyone’s got to Milorad Pavic in this language that I’ve seen; “Catskin” is as disconcerting as it was in a brown paper zine, and “Lull” is—“Lull” is. Wow.
And then there’s “Stone Animals,” which was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2005, and it’s the second-weakest piece in here, which maybe says something about where Kelly Link stands among the short story writers of America. (Oh, it’s as fiendishly clever as Matthew says, and it’s stuffed to the rafters with goodness, but it ends with the obverse of it was just a dream, and that’s never satisfying, no matter how you slice it.) (Though I am dragged back, and back again: the Journal excerpts a bit from Eddie Campbell’s truncated History of Humor, and it’s the panels where he’s trying to explain what’s funny about the marginal illuminations he’s showing his daughter. “Look,” he says. “They’re going to war.” “It’s not funny when humans do it,” she says. “Why should it be funny just because it’s rabbits?” Which it is, and it isn’t. Moving on—)
“The Great Divorce” is the weakest piece, but that’s okay; it’s a trifle, not meant to carry much weight. It’s the two pieces I haven’t mentioned yet you’ll want to be especially careful of. “Magic for Beginners” I left for last, because I read the opening lines first, and they—
Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.
—filled me with such a sudden ache of presque vu that I had to leave it until I’d read everything else. But it’s online, over here, so you don’t have to do what I did. Go, download, press play, see if it lives up to its hype: Did you watch Buffy with all your friends? Trade fansubbed tapes of Utena episodes? Are you obsessively trolling the TWoP boards for Veronica Mars clues? Do you download torrents of Battlestar Galactica as soon you can? —Well, that’s how she gets where she’s going with this one, and something of what it’s done to you when you get there.
And as for “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”—
Do not fuck South Dakota.
Roy Edroso’s headline does not withstand the fundamental point Roxanne makes, but it’s PZ who most eloquently, even poignantly nails it: South Dakota is only trying to de jure (against the people’s will) what’s been de facto throughout the country for far too long.
At least we can buy Girl Scout cookies this year without a wingnut fuss. —More and more, I’m thinking this classic Herblock cartoon cuts to the quick of sexual politics here in crepuscular America:
Fifty years and counting, and they’re still fucking terrified. Take what heart you can.
I’ve won hundreds at the track, but I’m not betting on the afterlife.
“The Big Guns,” Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins; “Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book,” Dead Can Dance; “Mercury,” Heidi Berry; “Behind You All the Way,” Steve Espinola; “Picnics,” Monk & Canatella; “Kayleigh,” Marillion; “Bacalo Con Pan,” Irakere; “God Will,” Holly Cole Trio; “Walter Carlos,” Momus; “Amazed,” Poe.
Live through this, and you won’t look back.
So our government is bound and determined, it seems, to hand control of several major ports (including those of New York, New Jersey, Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and what’s left of New Orleans, all of them already grossly undefended) over to a corporate arm of the United Arab Emirates, which, among other things, some of them doubtless germane and even adducible to the business that is running ports, are known to have perhaps circumstantial but nonetheless thick and fast and furious connections to That With Which We Are at War; namely, Terror—at least, connections thicker and faster and more furious than those which nominally launched ten thousand Iraqi deaths.
But far be it from me merely to rail about the wrong that’s going on! Silly notion: could we maybe, once we’ve staked the heart of this monstrous regime and cauterized the last neck-stump of its endless talking heads, could we put some safeguards in place? —We could wait till after the parade, you know, when the last of the ticker-tape settles on the makeshift stage, that moment, you know, the echoes of the cheers have died, and we’re starting to look at each other, a little uncomfortable, the whole future opening up before us with opportunities and possibilities and dare I even say it some little hope, but it’s all blank, formless, unshaped—what do we do now? Where do we go? What step should we take? —Might I suggest, and like I said, could be a silly notion, but hear me out: what we do, see, is decide, write down, codify an agreement that no one single, unitary person ever again should have this power to sell us out for a greasy buck: that the power to make such decisions be broken and scattered to differing, competing branches of whatever government we might put in place. Wouldn’t need too many: a couple, maybe three at most. Enough so that one can stop another should it step anywhere near being this far out of line. Needs a snappy name, though. Something like, oh, I don’t know, checks and balances?
(We may however have finally found the BTKWB limit: selling our port security to the highest bidder no matter whom. Jesus fucking Christ.)
You know it’s Friday when you wake up and it’s another Friday entirely and then you wait until it’s almost Saturday as it is.
“Music on the Floor, II,” Michael Torke, the London Sinfonietta; “Trumpets and Violins,” Suburban Kids with Biblical Names; “Between the Shadows,” Loreena McKennitt; “Oh, Lady Be Good,” Ella Fitzgerald; “Iced Lightning,” RJD2; “Strange,” the Soft Boys; “Four of Two,” They Might Be Giants; “Bungalow,” XTC; “Footsteps,” Brian Eno and John Cale; “We’re All Loaded (Whiskey Made Me Drunk),” Rosco Gordon.
Where we are; what we’ve become.
Fuck a bunch of vice president.
By the semi-nutty Stalinist line of discipline coursing through the fever-swamps of our national discourse—
—I hereby command you to stand the fuck up right now and salute the Editors. Present arms!
The loyalty “owed” a President, or any government official, or any policy of the same, by a private citizen, is this much loyalty: zero. Let me say that again: the loyalty I, or you, or anyone “owes” to someone in the government, or to some course of action they favor, is none whatsoever. To think otherwise, Teddy Roosevelt might comment, is “unpatriotic and servile.” Now, this is not to say you can’t give your loyalty to the President or his policies—it’s a free country, and you can do any non-treasonous thing you want with your loyalty—but that’s your decision, and nobody has to live with it but you (and all the people who suffer from the consequences of your stupid choice of loyalties, of course.) Personally, I think the President is a horrible fucking stupid cunt and his policies are for shit. Your results may vary. But if someone tells me that I “owe” it to the President or his crap policy to act like I don’t think that, well, that person can get in the big long line with WPE and the rest of folks who really desperately need to go fuck themselves.
But Democracy gets even worse. The President and the President’s policies owe me loyalty. The President and his policies are supposed to be working for the good of the country and her people. That’s how the loyalty flows. The President is required to act for my (ok, “our”) benefit; if he does not, the betrayal is his, and the sorts of things which you’d like to call “disloyalty” become duty. Does Gore’s speaking out against torture “undermine” the country? That’s a tricky position to hold if you oppose torture. Does it “undermine” the policy? I wish. No, it does this: it reminds the world that however fucked up our government is, it isn’t us, it doesn’t speak for us, and it can never, ever make us forget it. And I do say God Bless America.
So say we all, man. So say we all.
A mighty princess, forged in the heat of housework.
Remember when Belle had a pony? —Well, now she’s had a cow: an all too common and all too necessary cow, that too often sits in the living room with the dam’ elephant:
“Adrock”: Men seem to care less about certain chores. For example, in general, I think they’d rather just let the bathtub get grimy and deal with it than put a little time and elbow grease to clean it up. Is it a matter of priorities? Brain wiring? Societal influences? I don’t know.
Damn, why didn’t anyone ever consider that? Now that I consider this revelatory idea for the first time, I have to think it’s probably because “back in the day”, proto-human females liked to “tidy up” their area of the veldt in order to occupy their copious free time, while the males hunted big game. Makes sense to me! I mean, it’s obviously inconceivable that men in our society could learn that if they just flake out long enough, some woman will clean up their shit, and then they can be all “hey—you wanted to do that!”
It is brilliant, and hereby commended to your attention. —My only contribution is to violate a little copyright: in my ideal universe, we would all have copies of I Hate to Housekeep Book, with the delightfully frazzled Hilary Knight cartoons. (We might keep it next to The I Hate to Cook Book, and the Appendix to same. Our copy is apparently a first edition, ©1962 by Peg Bracken, ©1958 by The Curtis Publishing Company. It’s signed by Ms. Bracken (“Greetings!”) and inscribed: “From Mrs. Whittington, May 11, 1963.” Why, it’s only five years older than me.) —We would keep copies on hand so that when someone said something like, oh,
Wow, here’s a radical concept—men are generally sloppier/messier than woman and are better able to live with mess, women generally like a cleaner house, so it makes sense that women (unfairly) end up doing more cleaning.
I’m not sure how housework got to be elevated to some leftist cause, but it all sounds a bit petty.
well, we could sit them down with a copy and have them read for a spell, and they might could cop a clue or two as to how much of this earth-thing called “cleaning” is due to nurture, is a learned response, is all-too-terribly cultural, is easy enough to pick up for themselves. (I’d especially recommend the chapters entitled “How to Remember and How to Remember to Remember” and “How to be Happy When You’re Miserable.”) Heck, they might even glimmer to some of the reasons why it’s learned the way it’s been learned; might even muse aloud as to as well-meaning as these books are, they’re pretty clear indictments of just how thin and awful the tactic of going along to get along can be; might see just that even though women in this culture and this society have come as far as they have since then, it’s outrageous that Betty Friedan is dead of old age and they’re still in the aggregate expected to cover 70 of the cooking and cleaning at home. —But let’s not hold out too much hope. There’s nothing so self-righteous as a man explaining why he didn’t think to pick up his socks, and I say this as someone who’s a degree or two more slovenly than his Spouse.
The copyright violation? Well, I thought I might give you a taste of the foreword, here, along with a cartoon, and then close with a moral. And it’s not like anyone should care too terribly much about piracy; the dam’ book’s no longer in print.
For a number of long years, through no fault of my own, I have been shin-deep in the business of giving advice on Housewifery. This is a better name for it, I think, than Homemaking, which is rather too pretty, like Nuisance Abatement Officer for Dogcatcher. Housewifery is more honest and more inclusive.
Housewifery isn’t among the Seven Lively Arts, though it can certainly be regarded as the Eighth. It is lively indeed, in the same way sand-hogging is. They both take courage, muscle, and endurance. The main difference between a sand hog and a housewife is that he has a nice clean tunnel later to show for his efforts, and it stays put, while she has it all to do over again the next day. She must simply keep tunneling.
She is faced constantly with mute but persistent supplicants for attention. There are several choices; move it, clean it, shine it, brush it, wash it. Or hide it.
I have been doing all this myself for about twenty years, and I find it hard on the manicure. I’ve found, too, that none of the books about it does me much good. The household experts hand out cures that are worse than the ailment. They expect you to do things that depress you merely to think about, let alone do. They think you’ll actually keep an orderly file of all the washing instructions that come with the family clothes, once you’ve been told to. The efficiently organized expert makes the mistake of assuming that you, too, want to be one.
My own goals are more modest. I only want to make it around the clock, that’s all, and I don’t want to think about it too much, either, because I’m thinking about something else. If you’re a bit nervous in the service anyway, and your mind is on raising the African violet or running an office or painting a picture, reorganizing yourself into an efficient housewife is a giant step you’re not about to take. You want an aspirin, not radical surgery.
So, though I admit hastily and gratefully that many of the things in this book were discovered or invented by experts (even the experts slip up once in a while and recommend something you’d consider doing), just as many of them weren’t.
Indeed, some of the wee nuggets herein are ones that I mined, all by myself.
Take the matter of diapers. I had often heard, from wiser folk than I, that a soft, old, much-laundered diaper makes as nice a dish towel as any girl could want. When my child outgrew the diaper stage, I learned that this was true.
However, as one runs out of babies, one tends to run out of diapers. This happened to me, and for at least three months I was wiping the dishes on anything handy. Then, one day, with the lightning-swift grasp of fundamentals that has long marked my slightest move in the household arts, I realized that you don’t have to have another baby in order to buy more diapers. You just go buy some, that’s all. If you don’t have a wedding ring, let alone a baby, and if this sort of thing bothers you, you can always have the diapers gift-wrapped.
A note here, about language. I suppose it was inevitable that around so old a business as housekeeping—surely the second-oldest profession—a special vocabulary should have evolved.
It has. All the housekeeping experts say “food preparation area” when they mean “kitchen,” and “soiled spots” when they mean “dirty places,” and so forth.
In this book I prefer to call things by their right names, if they will let me. (Sometimes they don’t let you. Once, when I wrote a book about having a baby, I wanted to use the word “pain,” having come to a point in the proceedings where that seemed to be the only word that said what I meant. But they changed it to “discomfort.” These are things the writer can’t do a thing about, and he shouldn’t be blamed for them.)
One more point: the housewifery manuals I have seen pay little attention to certain aspects I consider pertinent; for instance, how to make yourself do things you don’t like to do, and how to remember to do them. Some of these techniques are included here. There are some swift recipes, too, for days when you shouldn’t have got up in the first place but still must go that last long mile and cook dinner. And there are some slightly slower recipes for company. And there is the matter of keeping up a good front—
Indeed, there is a small mountain of miscellany here—and naturally enough, in a book about the most miscellaneous of all miscellaneous businesses. Putting the scraps together was like sorting confetti in a wind tunnel, and you should have seen the ones that blew away. Catch them as they sail past, if you can. And meanwhile, here are the rest, in a book by a nonexpert for nonexperts, with warm good wishes, and best of luck to the African violet.
The moral?
Last night, we wanted a nice quiet evening at home, the Spouse and I, since the past couple of nights I’ve elsewhere or she has, and so we settled down together with some leftover risotto from a couple nights before, since I do the cooking and I didn’t want to cook, though I did stop on the way home to pick up a loaf of ciabatta and a bottle of plonk and another bottle of port, and after we’d supped and sipped and sat back from our empty plates, she said, did you get any chocolate? And I had to say, um, well, no. Hadn’t thought of it.
From which one can only conclude: there in the African veldt, while our male ancestors were out hunting giraffes, our female ancestors were sitting around sweeping and gossping and chewing on cocoa beans, which hardwired their neurochemistry (something to do with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, I think you’ll find) to damn well expect the stuff, and they’ve been nagging us about it ever since.
—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugged.
Just checking.
Lemme see if I got this right:
- The editorial page of a newspaper—a community organ—is a perfectly appropriate place to print ill-conceived, unfunny cartoons for pretty much the sole purpose of mocking the faith of some members of that community, and it’s irresponsible to voice even quasi-official disapproval despite the shockingly murderous backlash because, hey, free speech, they should grow up and suck it up and learn to deal;
- However, a memorial service—for a woman whose life has been dedicated to the fight for peace and justice and damn well grabbing the arc of the universe and bending it with her own bare hands—is a staggeringly inappropriate place to say much of anything at all about the fight that was her life, and the very particular strife and injustice yet afflicting her world and her country, because, hey, the president might be embarrassed, and how dare they carry on like that.
Okay then.
—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugged.
