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Suzy Says
Jul. 8th, 2009
12:13 am - music, music, music
Some will recall that I've been asking about today's pop music and kids in High School, since I'm working on a story about teenagers + vampires (a kind of anti-Twilight thing). I was going to post queries about what kids are listening too here, but I just had a chance recently to to confer with my two grandkids, Juliet (16), and Nate (17/18), and they gave me LOTS. We visited San Francisco for a weekend, thinking it would be great to catch them before Nate goes off to John Hopkins in the fall. Lo, we had something to talk about for once -- Nate gave me a slightly older boy view, and Juliet gave me a younger, female p.o.v.
Acting on their suggestions -- pages of knowledgeable commentary included -- I've been checking out Youtube and finding stuff that I really like, including songs that I've heard whispering in the background at the gym and wondered about, since I liked the bits I could hear. So -- I'm bookmarking songs by Coldplay, Green Day, Belle and Sebastian, Matt and Kim, and (yes, old but *good*) The Clash, Wilco, Radiohead. From Juliet, M.I.A., and Amy Winehouse (yeah, yeah, skanky blah blah but "Back to Black" is strong, and "You Know I'm No Good" I like against my better judgment . . .), Jason Mraz, John Mayer, here and there a song from Madonna or Beyonce et al.
NOT Red Hot Chili Peppers, White Stripes, Cataracts; and NOT "trance" -- akk! Awful. Mostly not Hiphop either -- it just irritates me, mostly. Then much wandering off, late at night, into, oh, you know -- Sami folk songs, shaman drumming, what can I tell you -- I'll go anywhere -- but that means I get to point Juliet at sweetafton23, a recent high school grad who plays the ukele (very well) and sings fast, funny stuff like "My Hope" (Tom Lehrer is a hero of hers); and I get to tell my gym coach who -- in his young thirties, Hispanic background, with pretty broad tastes as it is -- laughed with delight when I said I really like Coldplay, to maybe check out Devotchka and Balkan Beat Box, and . . . Oh, you know. All the *goodies* out there. The Decemberists . . . mmm, but I knew about them from NPR, "All Songs Considered".
I am ready; I really don't want to listen to late Beethoven, and Schubert and Brahms, Sibelius and "Souvenirs of Florence" and "Chrysanthemums" et al for a while, so it's time for ramblin' round new (to me) country for a while, freshen up my ears.
What I love about writing stories: there's always something new to learn, explore, hell, roll around in waggin' yer tail and snuffling happily.
So anyway, I think I've got what I need for the story, but would be happy to have more recommendations, of course. I think I need to stay fresh for a while; this was the best conversation I've had with the kids, though this has something to do with the fact that they're old enough now to actually chat about stuff they like without being utterly tongue-tied with shyness and that sense that adults are another species.
Must go sleep; there's some Mongolian music I want to listen to more of tomorrow a.m.
Jul. 3rd, 2009
01:38 pm
Ah, well, it had to happen: world in turmoil, sex scandals persist, Pope keeps putting his foot in it, Evangelicals making serious inroads and galloping wildly toward the Right, what to do? REIN IN THOSE BLASTED WOMEN, of course:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02
Gotta love monster institutions: things going wrong? Turn around and wallop your own basically powerless working class into submission, that'll rally the troops who really matter and show everybody else! And to think that the proverbial straw appears to be -- the dastardly practice of Reiki!
Well, okay, I can see the argument that these dang women, who seem to be actively seeking out unorthodox ways of doing what Christ wanted done -- service to the needy and decency toward all -- are can be seen as dangerously diluting the core beliefs and practices of the patriarchal core of the Church, as opposed to Jesus (and it does seem increasingly opposed).
This is shaping up to be a witch hunt on a somewhat more rarified level than that noted recently in Kenya; middle aged women will be forced out of the institution that they have devoted their lives to but not actually burned alive, so that clutch of male hysterics in men's dresses can reassure themselves that they are preserving the only "truth" they let themselves see: Paul's masculinist perversion of the original message.
Way to go, Popesters!
Jun. 29th, 2009
08:55 pm - Cheers!
Something good from Israel, for a change -- how long do you think before some settler or soldier picks this guy off, and the Israeli authorities claim that he was murdered by Palestinians?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/w
Jun. 26th, 2009
11:03 pm - horrors
God, how I hate this: but it seems to be real, and reminds me of what both religion and superstition can do in this world:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/81192
When I read fantasy novels about magic and wizards, I tend to remember this kind of thing, too -- as a reminder of what not only fundamentalist religions but flat-out superstition can do, even in our "modern" world.
What is a village without elders, anyway?
Jun. 24th, 2009
12:24 am - moving
Hi, all --
I'm moving this blog to Dreamwidth, since LJ has been bought by unknowns, and many friends have switched over. New URL is:
http://suzy-m-charnas.dreamwidth.or
I'll be importing my backposts here to my Dreamwidth archive as soon as I figure out how to do that . . .
Jun. 13th, 2009
01:01 pm - Why I love The Guardian
p.14: a brief story about restaurants forbidding wait staff to explain that cash tips go directly to them, while tips on credit card payments go to the restaurant companies to be used in making up the minimum wage payments they make to their workers.
And, since so many charities are redundant and the pool of incoming money is shrinking, a think tank called New Philanthropy Capital suggests that some of these outfits should merge -- ie, downsize their admin staffs, which is of course the reason they *don't* do this. (Myself, I use a quarterly report grading major charities in sorting out those I will support -- the ones with less administrative outlay -- from those I won't.)
p. 15: An Afghan smuggling ring has been busted; they were bringing in illegals to work cheap for a couple of English pizza chains. The illegals lived on pizza and slept over the shops while paying off their 5,000 pound each debts to the smugglers. The pizza chains, of course, knew nothing about any of it . . .
And a marked rise in lay-offs of pregnant women has been noted in these tough times. (Take THAT, womb-person!)
And, members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, daubed in "blood" and wearing bear-masks but nothing else, protested at St. Paul's -- against a decision to "continue to use bearskin for guardsmens hats."
Spain has granted honorary citizenship to 8 vets of the International Brigade for their "generosity" in joining in the Civil War 70 yrs ago on the anti-Fascist side.
Not to mention tons of stuff on the Rightward swing of the European elections that just concluded (thanks to, it says here, a lackluster and confused response by "Leftist" governments to the economic crisis). In Eastern Europe, much aggressive nativism is driven by the presence of gypsies, who are (sort of) Catholic; in the West, by influxes of muslims.
Here's a little item on the decline of hitch-hiking that does not mention an unmistakable cause of same here in the US -- the madness of litigiousness (ie, trying to gouge money out of your neighbor when a system promising endless economic opportunity stops providing any). The kindly driver puts herself at the mercy of any hitchhiker who cares to bring charges of molestation -- or maybe an offer to share drugs or worse.
And, sadly, a long article on the disastrous mess of slums that has engulfed Lagos, capital of Nigeria, thanks to corruption, exploitation, etc etc etc, but mostly to massive reproduction. "It's an article of faith in Lagos that the city's population growth is caused by migrants, yet the chief has four wives, 12 childen, 12 grandchildren, and hundreds of nieces and nephews." The only good news is that urban men in Nigeria now "hesitate" before taking on more than one wife; but of course the damage is done and will keep on rolling and gathering impact for decades to come. It is noted that numerous other mega-cities, whch are primarily made up of massive slums, blight the underdeveloped world, as governments continue to favor city growth over attention to the quality of rural life (Indonesia is mentioned as having two such cities).
What's in *your* paper?
Jun. 6th, 2009
12:21 am - The Cairo Speech
No surprises -- it's become so obvious that the on-going Isreal/Palestine mess is NOT solely the creation of the Arab "side". Then, OMG, hysteria per usual, from the usual suspects -- but not only that. It's gratifying to find American Jews of a different mind finally speaking up, after decades of being silenced by the pro-Israel lobby (a force that I used to regard as a figment created by anti-semites, fool that I was).
When an Israeli spokesman expresses outrage at the idea that his children should locate in a suburb of Tel Aviv rather than in one of the illegal settlements on Palestinian land, I just want punch his lights out -- to remind him that growing populations everywhere have to make such adjustments if they are to relate to their neighbors as other than selfish aggressors arrogantly demanding -- yes, I'll say it, because I am fed up with pussy-footing around this -- "Lebensraum", at no matter whose expense.
So President Obama spoke for me, all right. I just hope publicly acknowledging some ugly truths about all this doesn't cost him the second term that we so desperately need him to win. In any case, I can only applaud his courage in speaking of the harsher realities of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Now let's see who has ears to hear -- enough people on all sides, we have to hope, to start correcting course, even though it's so late in the voyage and so much appalling damage has been done -- not by just one heavily demonized "side" but by all.
Jun. 4th, 2009
01:02 am
Alors -- just got back from a long weekend in NYC, where Steve and I had the use of his brother's apartment on the upper West side. What a trip! Great weather, good food and friends, and home with all our luggage and our minds reasonably intact. More on this anon.
Meantime, though, a word -- I did some reading en route, as usual, and can report that Michael Swanwick's new fantasy, "Dragons of Babel", resonated agreeably (once I got over being annoyed that it was essentially a picaresque novel, a form that normally drives me crazy); although I am, I confess, a lot less charmed by a circular resolution than I used to be. One of the rapidly proliferating sub-genre of supernatural action tales featuring tough female operatives dealing with spirits and monsters and gods in a facsimile of the modern west kinda lost my interest 2/3 in (one of the best of these series is Kat Richardson's, starting with "Greywalker"), though I couldn't figure out why. It was decently written, moved along quickly, and had some interesting takes on what it might be like to practice magic in a functioning magical sub-culture.
But; I think it was the relentless, neurotic nastiness of the heroine that finally turned me off (the book is on the passenger seat in my car and I'm almost done with it, but I don't think I'm going to bother). There's a species of "hard boiled" detective fiction that I can't stand -- the kind where the PI is such a tough guy that he incessantly and all-too-predictably marches into perils that a bit of common sense would have avoided, and then needlessly makes things worse by compulsively smart-mouthing a stronger enemy until he provokes same into beating him senseless. The "hero" does not go to the hospital, of course, although the damage described would lay out an actual human for a month followed by more months of necessary physical therapy, and at the next opportunity he indulges in the same insanely macho behavior (usually with the same result).
Now I'm finding something very similar cropping up in these supernatural thrillers with female protags who have some supernatural talents of their own and who tangle with various ghosts, gods, and monsters in the course of their work as independent operatives in imaginary twilight worlds of secret feyness. It's a penchant for relentless irritability and pathological "independence", which all too often takes the form of deciding *not* to share vital information with one's allies and confederates, leading to predictable (and unnecessary) screw-ups and the deaths of supposedly valued friends, which then become the pivots of endless, dreary self-recrimination and self-punishing foolishness. It reminds me of nothing so much as the sulky, self-absorbed withdrawal of hyper-sensitive teenagers, and it's deeply annoying behavior in supposedly sympathetic characters who are supposed to be adults made even wiser than their years by arcane experiences.
I mean, you just want to slap these women upside the head, same as you would with those dopy romance heroines who put off the ultimate clinch with Mr. Wrong-but-Right by very similar lapses of convincingly adult judgment.
Another unsatisfying venture into related territory, "Ghost Ocean" by S.M. Peters, proved to be an urban fantasy with vast ambitions, a wildly contorted and (to this reader) confusing ride through a mash-up of folklores and mythologies to a cataclysmic ending that feels all too much like the kick-off to a series. I liked the bizarre characters, some of the allusions of mystical texts (notably Elliot's "The Wasteland"), and a couple of chapters detailing the heroine's journey through a mythic underworld, but a couple of things about it began to really tick me off.
First, being bashed over my readerly head by an absolutely relentless hysteria of grimness: it's always raining, everything is dirty and diseased and deformed, and everyone is constantly exhausted, unbelievably smashed up and injured by various encounters with monsters, and either angry or terrified or both all the time. I started picking up on the unending parade of extremely negative words, sometimes to a Lovecraftian degree: scream, pain, rip, tear, wrench, crawl, ooze, stench, agony, terror, horrid, repulsive, scaly, dirty, broken, decayed, writhing, grinning, peeling, etc. etc. It became almost comical by the end (yep, I did read to the end, although I was skimming by then because the lovingly sadistic descriptions had become so predictable as to be boring), so that the truly powerful elements -- visionary glimpses of monsters like Bird and the Kitsune and others -- were simply drowned in a soup of oppressive gloom, pervasive ruin, and despair.
Maybe it's just me, but that kind of thing is more effective in shorter fiction than in a thick novel in which every climax turns out to be -- only penultimate, after all, and then at another remove, and another . . .
So I turned with hopes of relief to a non-fiction piece called "Wesley the Owl", by Stacey O'Brien, about "an owl and his girl", which had been on several best-seller lists and only got to be because of the ridiculous creature pictured on the cover, and my long standing interest in true stories of unusual animal behavior.
I read this book in a happy dream all the way from New York to Albuquerque, laughing out loud but also marveling at the stunning strangeness of its details. Here's an apercu from this book: that predators accustomed to hunting alone (as opposed to social predators like lions or wolves) have no experience with negative input from others that is designed to modify their own behavior so as to fit them better into a group. If you yell at your hawk, all the hawk knows is that you are suddenly being aggressive toward it -- attacking it, in other words -- and so the trust between you is broken. So in "taming" (not "training") a barn owl to live in her house (it was too damaged ever to be released into the wild), she avoided telling it "NO!" when trying to keep it from getting itself killed by investigating interesting but dangerous stuff (as she points out, a pair of mated owls in the wild don't try to stop each other from doing things).
Hence this delightful passage:
. . . whenever he saw something he thought looked interesting, which was nearly everything . . . he'd race toward the object in his galumphing gait, wings out like an airplane, with me running behind saying, "Wait! Not for owls, not for owls!"
That is, for the command of an "owner" she substituted a warning from a friend.
A fascinating book, highly recommended -- with a lot more to say about cross-species communication and relations that most of what I've been finding lately in fiction by writers of fantasy and science fiction. I'm gonna go back to reading work by naturalists and observers for a while; that seems to be the way my mind is tending, because every time I dip into such writing, I find the most amazing things -- which are not dependent on more or less clumsy manipulations and sleight of hand by writers ridden by the Hag of Plot and the Goblins of Genre.
Well, it is awfully late . . .
May. 16th, 2009
10:15 pm - Okay, I saw it (spoilers, natch).
Star Trek: the Cute Trick. It was fast, it was sweet in its efforts to honor the source as to the one-dimensional character of its characters, and it would have been very very loud except that the whole middle section somehow came through at half-decibels, which was wonderful: the sizable Sat. afternoon audience of (mostly) middle-aged fans and some young guys actually shut up because they had to listen hard to catch the dialogue. And it retained all of the annoying stupidities that I remember from the old Star Trek, just as most big-budget SF since has slavishly copied them too, for decades.
1. The villain and his associates are practically indistinguishable from each other, all choosing bald heads and the same off-the-rack riding coat with the split tails, plus huge doc martens; like, WTF *is* it with a whole crew dressing in weird, cumbersome, 19th c s**t while running a space ship? You'd know them by the tattoos, even if some wore bikinis. And why would a Romulan villain be named "Nero"? I mean, the guy who fiddled (well, recited his own odes accompanying self on the harp, maybe) while Rome burned? Really? Wow: talk about your role model! For another species, yet! Not that "Tiberius" was exactly a good guy either . . .
2. Spaceships with vast, largely empty interiors with lots of massive, floating junk for people to leap onto and off of, never mind that you have to get all that metal up there and then move it around, and service the enclosed air to keep it liveable. Only VAST will do.
3. Black holes that only swallow up exactly what you want them to swallow up, not including your ship that is hovering nearby to make sure the thing works (only at the end does this become a way-too-easily-solved issue).
4. A big scary monster attack that has nothing to do with anything and is never alluded to again. The monster makes all sorts of roaring threat-displays to make sure the prey runs away very fast, thereby causing the monster to expend all of the calories it might glean from the prey *before* catching it after a completely unnecessary chase. Not to mention the fact that it is a very big monster, living in what appears to be an endless, icily arctic waste. Presumably it chases down and eats snowballs between meals of stranded space-man, since it appears to be the top of a food chain with no lower links, AND it discards its fur coat and crashes around very very naked in what is supposed to be a very cold environment. What is this, the Jabberwock?
5. A time-travel plot that, like most time-travel plots, is shot full of insuperable holes, if you can catch what it's supposed to be and then think about it for 30 seconds.
6. Nero's ship looks like a petrified tumbleweed (russian thistle variety) dipped in shellac. Bad guys' spaceships are always ugly and spiky and threatening-looking, for no sensible reason except that in movie-space, there is only form -- function is an afterthought.
7. Uhura is still a twofer -- black *and* the only prominent female on the bridge -- in a short skirt and high boots. I WANT A BREAK ON THIS, guys. Really.
8. A lot of empty macho dialogue, very worn at the edges from over-use, with some frat-boy cleverness mixed in.
9. Much stiff upper-lippery by the men, but Kirk's mom is a whining, sobbing mess in the middle of childbirth (of course, when else?) during an attack in space, where she has to be hauled around helplessly by frantic crew -- they have starships, but their crew-women carry babies to term in space? No in vitro pregnancy has been developed for star-faring women who might have to handle instrumentation not designed for somebody with a much bigger belly but arms the standard length? Assuming she has any onboardships function, which she probably doesn't -- she appears to be just a wittle wifey-poo along for the ride -- ? Wha -- ? I could go on. Suffice it to say: the whole pre-title set-up was retro and insulting, and creaked dangerously with action-comic cliches. I thought about leaving, but six bucks is six bucks.
10. The huge drill that drives to the core of planets -- the cable is severed, the vast thing crashes into an ocean and -- everything is fine? No enormous, life-scouring, port-drowning tsunami? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
Never mind. It's endless.
Like the series of movies that will be spun out of this "fresh start" for the young crew.
I'm tired. And the endless round of crashing, shrieking, roaring trailers for more SF movies full of men and monsters and big machines didn't help. "What *are* you?" "I am your only hope."
Well, no; apparently there *is* no hope.
May. 2nd, 2009
02:11 pm
On the local educational radio station this a.m., I heard a story about how "conservative" U.S. columnists and commentators, not just in states along the border with Mexico (one in Seattle was quoted), are doing their best to use the outbreak of flu in Mexico as a way to whip up anti-immigrant "outrage" among their sheep (and I do mean sheep, if the way these people seem to "think" is anything to go by; rabid sheep). The commentator, a Latina announcer on a program called "Women's Focus", quoted people who have written that this swine flu is exactly the reason that our border with Mexico should be closed, and, in one case, that you never know whether Mexicans who handle your food in restaurants "wipe their behinds with their hands" or not.
Clearly these rabble-rousers are unaware of the filthy-restaurant-news-uproars that erupt every now and then in all kinds of restaurants in major U.S. cities, not to mention the horrors on show almost nightly on "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" -- in disgusting kitchens in which Mexicans have not recently set foot. Not to mention my own old Dad's wry reports of dirty doings in the kitchen of the Manhattan restaurant he worked in for twenty years or so, when kitchens were far less likely to have Mexican staff. Or, for that matter, repeated warning about the disease-encouraging practices of good old American factory farming of animals on their way to our restaurant tables.
A few weeks ago there was a local report on TV about some kids employed in fast-food joints and their colorful hi-jinks in the kitchens of some of these establishments. Incidents caught on film included a boy sticking cheese-sticks up his nose before putting them on top of a pizza, and another wiping his butt with a rag before wiping dishes with the same rag -- in both cases, local boys showing off their childish stupidity for their gratifyingly shocked girl co-workers. You know, the kind of thing I doubt any "Mexican", legal or illegal, would indulge in for fear of being reported by some pimply anglo co-worker who listens to the garbage spewed by the above-mentioned Right-Wing unpundits.
I read all this as the kind of aggressive hysteria we can expect to break out at every conceivable opportunity (and many inconceivable ones) among the Right-Wing dolts who have begun -- at LAST -- to lose their inexplicable grip on our political process. Not having Ashcrofts and Rumsfelds et al in office to foist their own stupidities on witless voters, these same witless jerks are finding other "leaders" to articulate their narrow-minded nightmares of imaginary victimization and oppression by hordes of semi-human "others" not from here.
For a bit of perspective, I remind myself of recent news reports of Gypsies being harassed and even killed in Italy and in parts of Eastern Europe for being "aliens" on whom the blame for local crime, disease, and poverty can be (and is) routinely projected. Having few Jews in residence since WWII, I guess these populations are making do with the Roma when it comes to the need for scapegoats for the ills of the day.
And "we" have -- Mexicans. Which is going to get even more interesting, when you consider that according to the same crazed sources, we are in the process of being turned into -- not France, that's old -- SWEDEN.
In some ways, the crazy Right sometimes exhibits a kind of cockeyed imagination that's right at home in Science Fiction and Fantasy, doesn't it?
Apr. 8th, 2009
11:32 pm - Glass works
Tonight, a documentary called "Glass" on PBS. Two hours, with both breadth and depth, a fine piece of work -- the sort of thing that happens if the right documentarian teams up with a truly articulate artist.
I love what Glass has to say, and I know -- as will others here -- exactly what he means when he talks about composing as *listening*, and recording to the best of one's ability what is heard -- often, as he points out, at the very limits of that inner hearing. And his take on artistic collaboration aligns very well with my own ideas on the matter: that"artistic integrity" is not the integrity of the artist but of the given work: if a collaborator comes up with an insight that serves the work, you don't say, "But that's not what I want to do!" but "That sounds interesting: let's try it that way and see what happens." And then maybe you say, "Thanks for that really good idea."
The thing I am most disappointed about in my own work is that I haven't had enough work in theater, the place where I got the strongest sense of this power of opening the work to the creative insight of others -- with confidence, because the work is itself strong and singular and flexible enough in itself (because of what it is, not what you did with it) to determine what fits and what doesn't, never mind what cool stuff you thought you did in chapter three ("You know what?" says Glass to the music director -- Dennis Russel Davies -- who has changed some notation in an operatic score, "I don't think that trill belongs there either").
Anyway, I guess I should get off my duff and take a serious crack at that play that I meant to make of the book about my old Dad. No use complaining: make something worth collaborating on!
Glass as presented here is a great study in what it can be to really live on that crest of that kind of a life. Even with the most benign will in the world, the cost to others close to you can be heavy, because if you really fine-tune your ear to that incoming signal, so much else necessarily gets filtered out. And not just if you're a guy, either; I know from the stories of women artists that no one who's seriously listening escapes entirely, and no choice can be judged "better" than any other choice in this, no matter who makes it.
There is a price for serious creativity, and that price tends to get spread out among other people who can find themselves very surprised and dismayed to be paying part of it once you get beyond playfulness and pride and into the world of obsession with that incoming signal -- and the more complex and profound the signal, the more compelling I think it must be (because who else can receive it, capture it, render it into something accessible?).
Wow. Must be late. Gotta go sleep!
Mar. 25th, 2009
10:47 am - The Problem of the Provinces
I heard the CEO of Google the other night, on BBC News, lamenting the fact that bright foreign students come here to study, but as soon as they get their degrees we kick them out, instead of letting them stay here so that American enterprise can have the benefit of their intelligence and training. "It's stupid," says he.
Well, yeah -- if you can't see beyond the end of your own nose. The American aversion to history ensures that people like this man will not remember that the policy has its roots in the problem of the "brain drain", which was the subject of much discussion some decades ago. It was noted in the Third World that very few of the smart people who went West for education brought home their new skills and experience. They stayed in America, leaving their home countries' labor pool diminished.
The West was acting like a huge vacuum, luring away many of the best and the brightest for good, and it was seen to be not a good thing; steps were taken. Students from the Third World began to be required to leave after schooling here, and we've been making sure that they go. (Not coincidentally, educated Americans didn't like competing with sharp foreigners for good jobs on home soil.)
It made sense and it still makes sense. Who says the rest of the world is obliged to send us their best and brightest to train and then to hoard here, so that we can stay ahead, innovative and rich, while they stay poor and scrambling to catch up? Oh, I forgot -- imperialist attitudes *never* go away, even when you're broke.
Keep sending those foreign students home! If a broader geographical distribution of trained intelligence creates more business competition from companies outside our borders, all the better. Poorer countries need those companies and the jobs they make to raise their own living standards (and becoming better trading partners as well). And America needs the challenge, if only to force us to sharpen up our public education system after years of malign neglect, abuse, and financial starvation by morons who can't see the immeasurable value of building and maintaining an educated, healthy US labor force.
I am seeing this, mind you, from New Mexico, a state that has lost more possible new business ventures than you can shake a stick at (despite wooing them with with outrageous tax breaks) because our local education system sucks and our labor force is, consequently, mostly pathetic. Companies that do come here have to import their upper echelons -- which is hard to do, when the families of those people will have to go to our miserably underfunded schools.
End of rant (well, pausing for breath, anyway) . . .
Mar. 23rd, 2009
11:18 pm - Orlando
No, not V. Woolf's sex-shifting protagonist but Florida, one of the many homes of The Mouse, although I did not pay a call there. In 2008 I missed this yearly conference of academics involved with genre fiction and popular culture in all its forms, thanks to missing my flight, but this time I was actually on my game so . . .
Highlights: I don't actually do highlights, having a really bad memory for events like this, but I do take notes.
First note: I woke up Thursday morning thinking I'd go to the hotel gym, and then settle down to run through the material I had brought for my reading-slot, only to blow off the gym and spend the time reading the conference program instead -- thus discovering that my reading was Thursday, not Friday, and in half an hour! Whereupon I found that my printer at home had massacred the pages I had planned to read from, delivering half-pages, blank pages, one damn thing after another. Not to worry: I read a different section, which to my great relief was well received. And if you don't think that's important to a writer, take my word for it -- it's a real shot in the arm. The chapter I read from was not the opener about the village boy escaping vengeful grave-mound ghosts only to be kicked out of his home to wander in unfamiliar lands, but -- a section about an aging hill witch who has made her life in the big city, now dealing with a dying man who says that the foreign occupiers are pulling out -- no one knows why. People liked it. I'm about to dive back into it, being mightily encouraged.
I also had the pleasure of listening to the other authors in my section reading, though I have to say that this is one gathering where I'm more likely to go to the program panels and presentations by teachers and graduate students from all over than to listen to readings by my colleagues. The scholarly work is almost always stimulating, enlightening, and entertaining (like a presentation -- with sides -- on the public showing of unidentified corpses in the Paris Morgue in the late 19th c and the highly popular and much more controversial "body" exhibitions of our own time in which plasticized corpses are mounted like mannequins demonstrating how our physical workings work -- a form of commodification of the corpse).
I caught an excellent panel on some movies that I actually had seen, for a wonder. The first was "The Orphanage", a movie which I had not really noticed is a Wendy-and-the-lost-boys story (and we did come up with some possible fixes for the enormous plot hole: the complete obliviousness to everyone concerned to the disappearance of five, count 'em, five whole orphans from their orphanage!). Then came a paper on the non-linearity of time-that-should-not-be in "Donnie Darko" and "The Butterfly Effect", in each of which the protagonist restores linear time by erasing his improperly alive self. After that we heard and saw a paper with film clips (that worked -- no glitches!) on the movie version of the Canadian ballet "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary", stressing the brilliance of the film-maker in casting and cutting and collaging in such a way as to bring out basic elements of Stoker's novel using the striking power of silent, almost-black-and-white film images and dramatic acting styles.
Also Guy Kay's speech (he was G.O.H.), with a talmudic cast, about privacy and modern fiction's infringement on the lives of actual people, historical and modern; and three good papers on monsters, winding up with a strong study of Ted Hughes' children's story THE IRON GIANT as a metaphoric environmentalist piece too stark for its intended audience (or maybe just their parents). There was a lively panel on vampires and vampire fiction which raised the issue (well, for me anyway) of the authenticity (as folklore) of the "Dhampir" or half-vampire child of a vampire and a human woman.
My gut feeling about this was that the concept was the product of the fixation of modern female (mostly) paranormal romance authors on turning the vampire into a love-object and their heroines into the Mary-Sues of horror ("I am so beautiful that the monster falls in love with me alone; and only I can flourish with delight on a diet of corpsey hugs and kisses from my Byronic tooth fairy"). But no -- I was informed that in fact there are folkloric roots to this notion reaching back to Eastern European tales of dead peasants who climb out of their graves to go home and both suck and f**k their own family members, giving rise to very creepy pregnancies -- and yes, I do remember reading a few such accounts in one of the background books that I read while working up my own Dr. Weyland as a vampire in our own time.
But there were also supposed to be beliefs about this among Gypsies, which I found untenable just on practical grounds: European Gypsies did not, so far as I know, bury their dead in country graveyards (where those deceased would surely not have been welcome, their particular brand of Christianity being suspect to the peasant gaje among whom the Gypsies moved as perpetual and "dangerous" strangers).
Which raises the question -- where *did* the Gypsies bury their dead, as they ricocheted around Europe being driven from pillar to post? And what is "native earth" or "the earth of my grave" to a Gypsy vampire, since the Gypsies were by tradition wanderers with no "native" land, and (presumably) no graveyards of their own, even, to live near? I've never heard mention of haunted houses or cursed villages being built on "Gypsy graveyards", as with "Indian burial grounds" in American legend. Not to mention the problem of a Gypsy vampire busting out of his grave and then having to run like Hell to catch up with his family's caravan (so he can sleep with his wife and make a "Dhampir") -- a caravan which has been driven with all speed to the next county and across running water too if possible, precisely to *avoid* a visit from their own vampiric dead.
If anybody out there can tell me where to find a reliable account of Gypsy beliefs about vampires, I'd love to have a cite.
Of course there were lots and lots of papers that I have circled in my program that I ended up missing -- most particularly one about music (Nick Cave, "postmodern Goth", etc.) *with* actual music that was unfortunately scheduled for 8:30 a.m.
No. Dice. Not if the evil Count himself were on the keyboards.
I shouldn't be rambling on so long, but I want to. The fare at ICFA is always too much, too rich, too provocative to take in nearly enough of it, but I do my best and am *never* sorry that I attended (here's a note, re a paper on how Terry Pratchett's "Witches Abroad" has been used as a helpful text for teaching 19th c English culture; there's a book out there about how our picture of that very 19th c experience is at least in part a fictional construct of our own -- as is all history, of course, to those looking backward -- must locate and read).
Next time, it's "Race and the Fantastic", with G.O.H. Nalo Hopkinson, and I won't miss it unless I'm really, really, really in big, bad trouble (like, dead myself).
*Big sigh of contentment* here.
Mar. 10th, 2009
07:58 pm - Lars
We went to an event at the local university Sunday, a presentation on the Israel/Palestine train wreck by a group called "Another Jewish Voice" which is trying to break the automatic, lock-step "Quick, we must have a support-Israel event!" response that happens all over the US every single time the Israeli government commits another crime (one that the American media actually notice and report, that is).
Speaking of which, the Israeli Intelligence agency recently got our US news idiots all hysterical with a report *to Washington* that the Iranians have weapons-grade uranium and are building a nuclear bomb. However, according to our own Intelligence Boss Dennis Blair's testimony before a deeply rattled Congress, that was, not to put too fine a point on it, a bald-faced lie. In fact the Iranians do *not* have any of that stuff (yet -- "they have not made the decision" to take that step, says Blair, so it is a weighty "yet" -- but still, it's "yet", not "now").
Apparently the Israeli government will say anything that they think might rope us into attacking the Iranians, or at least unquestioningly backing another attack on Iran by the IDF. We should not be surprised; that's a page they took out of G.W.B.'s own playbook. And why not? "Weapons of Mass Destruction, oh MY!" worked brilliantly for Bush, Cheney, et al years ago, and we're *still* not out of Eye-rack!
We should not be surprised; but I reserve the right to be revolted and repelled. Again.
But I digress: as I was saying -- we came out of the Student Union building deeply depressed but had to burst out laughing when we saw that some one had chalked on the paving in big, bold letters (rather nicely formed, too):
LARS ATE YOUR COOKIES EVEN THOUGH YOU LABELED THEM
Lars! That *dastard*!!
Then, a few paces on toward the street, we found the same handwriting along a low stone wall:
LARS TOTALLY HIT ON YOUR GIRLFRIEND
Whoah, now -- this is getting serious! And intriguing: now it's a little story about some kind of relationship triangle with a whole implied history (and implied questions arising from it, such as, *did* Lars eat the cookies, or is that a lie from a trouble-making onlooker with plans of his own?). It's a story told by someone presenting himself as a friend looking out for "your" interests (but does he have ulterior motives?). That's a lot to pack into two meager sentences -- without any punctuation, yet!
I am all admiration.
But I worry about Lars. He's got a mean, sneaky, manipulative enemy there. Come to think about it, the fella with the cookies and the girlfriend (except that someone seems to have made off with them recently) should maybe be a little more careful about how he chooses his friends.
Mar. 2nd, 2009
12:11 pm - music -- ?
I'm driving along on my way to pick up some lamb chops for dinner, and the classical station starts a gentle chamber piece for harp, flute, viola, and some other instrument, and it goes (sort of) like this:
"Yo - lan - da - bup - SQUAAAAEEK!!!"
Three nice little melodic notes, plus a little eighth note that's gonna link us to the next -- blat on the flute, somewhere in the low dog-whistle range (you wouldn't think a flute could blat, particularly on a high note, but I am here to tell you -- ).
I manage not to drive up onto the sidewalk, punch off the radio, and when I catch my breath (in the Smith's parking lot), turn back on again in time to hear that this was one of the last works by a Japanese composer (Matsekura? Something close to that) before he died (in his eighties and not long ago); and wasn't it a lovely little piece, inspired (according to the composer) by a trio by Debussy.
So I sit there thinking, what the f***? I could maybe understand if it was inspired by something by Darius Milhaud, French musical jokester supreme, but Debussy? Okay, maybe I missed something in Debussy's work (I'm not a fan of French classical music in general). If I did, GOOD; I'm glad.
But I'm left with the question, Why write ugly music? By "ugly", of course, I mean ugly to *my* ear -- flat music, shrieky music, and most of all disjointed music a la moderne -- the stuff that hops up and down the staff like a rabid monkey, invariably going for the most hideous sharps and flats to stamp out any faint possibility of melody, or even coherence, before it has a chance to get off the ground. I've heard a lot of this anti-music in modern opera, particularly, where the scamperings of rabid monkeys are replaced by human voices ricocheting off the walls at what sounds like complete random -- except that whatever sound A is, sound B has got to be the most off-balance, dis-harmonizing note possible in juxtaposition to it, so we're not talking about random choice -- it's *deliberate*.
And mine aren't the only ears offended, as evidenced by the fact that very few modern operas have entered the repertoire. An opera house in financial trouble doesn't go for "The Dutchess of Malfi" or "Ghosts of Versailles" or "The Death of Klinghofer" but for something older, something that people actually enjoy listening to, even if that means trotting out a warhorse. At least a warhorse trots, it doesn't just throw itself on the ground and scream.
Nor am I alone in my aversion. When I have found myself walking out on one these super-dissonant abominations ("The English Cat", say, by Heinz Werner Henze, premiered in America at Santa Fe some years ago), there is usually a goodly trickle of other people leaving too, all uf us shaking our heads to try to dislodge the shared headache we've bought for our outrageous ticket prices. And conductors *still* routinely place a modern piece as #2 in the first half of a concert, hoping that people will hang in for the Chopin or the Prokofiev that opens the second half.
I guess I just numbered myself among the dinosaurs. At least I come by it honestly, doddering around as I do in my ancientness (particularly now that the damned left leg works funny, in the wake of horrible sciatica). But I do sometimes hear new music that grabs me (like Glass's score for "Mishima"), so I'm not totally tin-eared for the modern. I just don't get the aversion composers seem to have to actual *music* in music.
The piece on the radio this a.m. was, I recall now, supposed to be "about" outer space. If that's the Music of the Spheres, phooey on it; I'm past worrying about whether I'm "with it" or not (well, I never did much worry about that); so I'll to stick to the Music of the Cubes.
Grouch, grump **. Kinda fun, that.
Mar. 1st, 2009
10:44 am - entertained
I went with my sister and a friend of hers to see the comedian Lewis Black last night, first night out in a long time (it's amazing how much Netflix encourages cocooning). He performed at one our city's more far-flung casinos, out on the West mesa, to a very nearly full house of boisterous folks (including a couple of guys who contributed a holler or two to the comic's monolog -- taken in good part by him, as I'm sure all these performers learn to do). A very funny woman with very very red hair opened for him, and by the time she was done I'd figured out how to laugh without making any sound, so as to avoid rasping my throat so raw that I'd have to leave or else cough the house down: she was Kathleen somebody (she gets NO billing in any of the ads I've seen), and got us all nicely warmed up with an easy flow of my-crazy-family jokes, among much else, marred only (for me) by a tendency to rush and slur a bit so that I missed some laugh lines that I wish I hadn't.
Black himself delivered lots of good stuff on his (and my) favorite subjects -- general human stupidity, economic outrageousness, the experience of reaching sixty years of age with all (or some) of what that entails (and *his* family, meaning his parents, both in their nineties). He seemed not just relaxed but a bit tired -- a common phenomenon with live performers here, who tend to "do" Albuquerque as their last stop on a tour just before heading home. I get the feeling that we've only recently grown populous and moneyed enough to be tacked onto the standard tour schedule, so tacked on we are, like the tail on the donkey.
But the somewhat lowered key of Black's performance (punctuated by his trademark outbursts of nearly inarticulate rage) gave the evening an oddly intimate feel -- despite the fact that we were in a huge, packed auditorium attached to a casino. Maybe it was his lapsing more often than usual into what I assume is his everyday voice -- a rather sweet, meditative low tenor, not the growling baritone I associate with his high-octane TV schticks -- plus the easy jeans-and-t-shirt outfit (in TV performances I've seen, he's always worn a suit); maybe it's partly turning sixty and starting to mellow out a bit, too.
Whatever the case, it was a lively and refreshing evening out -- and a chance to note in passing that the insane ambience of a casino-floor on a Saturday night has become perhaps a tad emptier than it used to be: lots of unoccupied machines, a very loud male voice announcing unintelligible "giveaways" or "rewards" with deadlines for presenting your whatnots at such and such a place (new to me), old people feeding their cookie money (I hope it's just that) into the slots in the rhythms of the hypnotized, and -- the weirdest part of all -- younger people hovering and watching a seated companion do the gambling.
Wow. Talk about waste-of-time-squared! Or maybe they take turns because they think it might increase their combined chances of a lucky pay-out? You got me; as a complete outsider looking in, I can only wonder.
Standing in the very long line to pick up our tickets, we stood a while next to a Navajo grandma dressed in her finest -- velvet skirts, handsome silver and turquoise jewelry -- working one of the slot machines. It occurred to me that maybe her daughter or her grandson has a job at the casino, and she gets to amuse herself with the gadgets (and to help both fill and decorate the place) while that person is making a living there. Or maybe she got dressed up and drove in on her own for an evening (almost) on the town. It's always risky to make assumptions about the whys and wherefores of others' behavior -- but, of course, it's the gift, and the compulsion, of writers and storytellers of all kinds; you just have to remind yourself that it's a story you're telling yourself, not the observed person's reality.
I can't say why, exactly, but seeing her there on the way in gave my spirits a lift. When I came out again after the show, I had that delightful lightened feeling that you get from laughing a *lot* in happy company.
It sure beat sitting in front of the television watching stories of fictional crime and news reports of the real thing. Thanks, Liz, for suggesting this!
Feb. 27th, 2009
11:13 am
A last diversion from Thirlwell, before the book goes back to the library:
About Pushkin's mode of address in "Evgeny Onegin", in which the author, in the poem, introduces (fictional) Onegin and others in the poem as friends and acquaintances of himself: " . . . this trick of having Tatiana [the heroine of the poem] be a peripheral friend of Pushkin's social circle.
". . . The characters' lack of freedom in a novel is based on the fact that the author is real, while the characters are not. But once Pushkin is in the story, and is therefore fictional, then the fictional characters gain a new appearance of freedom. . . Pushkin can pretend to not to know everything about them [. . . and] can make jokes about how, distracted by his description of a ball, he has lagged behind and must rush off to overtake Onegin on his drive home.
" . . . As well as allowing the freedom of a character from its narrator, it also allows a freedom for the narrator from his or her character [which Pushkin doesn't fully develop however]. . . It would be left to more audacious narrators, like Tolstoy, to leap around the characters, happily, with his essayist digressions, his theories of history and of war [viz. WAR AND PEACE]."
There's also a wonderful chapter on Nabokov and a complex if ideas and realities around the concept of exile, real and artistic, which I liked very much -- unexpectedly, since I've found Nabokov's work mostly insufferably artsy and tricksy. But that's the beauty of Thirlwell's book: it has clarified for me just what that "tricksyness" is, in all the authors under discussion, which helps me know better why I (usually) react so strongly *against* it. I'm thinking, in fact, that this is one of the ways that really old, very experienced souls play with art in order not to be bored by doing it (yet again); and that I'm just not "old" and experienced enough yet to wholeheartedly join that type of play.
I have mentioned here, somewhere, that I think that the transmigration of human souls is very likely a reality, haven't I? That's what I mean about souls being old and experienced: Sterne, Tolstoy, Kafka, Nabokov, Pushkin, some eastern Europeans I've never heard of before and can't spell and some French guys (being old souls, they won't mind -- either being miss-spelled, or omitted entirely), and, undoubtedly, a number of women authors whose tricksy work has not been seriously studied or preserved.
The best thing about reincarnation theory is that it leaves all the time in the world to get around to everything eventually, so that for now, I can comfortably take away Thirlwell's musing about these artists, without having to to read their stuff again any time soon. Being a "real" character rather than an authorially constrained fictional one, I can comfortably take a lazy belief-set over a high-pressured and rigid one any time.
And change my mind later, if I want to . . .
Feb. 22nd, 2009
10:47 pm - Frost/Nixon (mit spoilers)
In prep. for the Oscars this evening, we went to see "Frost/Nixon" this afternoon, the enthusiastic recommendation of my step-daughter, Jo. I'd read Denby's review in the New Yorker, which was some admiration but more of a "Ho-hum, there's no suspense because we know how it turned out, and since it didn't prevent a return to gangster politics with the Bush gang over a quarter-century later, what's the point?" As I hadn't seen the original interview programs themselves (the first one really was dull as Hell, and since we all loathed Nixon anyway, we turned the fool thing off), I thought Denby was probably right, and why bother.
But I have to tell you -- I think the movie is excellent, very suspensful indeed, and full of heart -- not just for Godfather Nixon in his self-triggered collapse, but for hummingbird Frost, reaching for more than just flash. Langella's hulking but shrewd crook is remarkable for the combination of menace (I note, over the credits, "tape excerpts" of him siccing the IRS on journalists critical of him, which was pretty seriously horrible) and his weird jealousy of shiny little Frost, whom everyone -- and the camera -- just eats up.
And then there's the undertone of a traditional masculine style -- patriarchy, laced shoes, authoritarian politics -- giving way before the more playful, variegated style of what today sometimes refers to as the "metro-sexual" male. This is a fraught nexus still, given that we've just had a devastating resurgence of gorilla politics from the Cheney/Rumsfeld gang, followed by -- what did Sean Penn say in his Oscar speech? That we'd had the courage to elect as President "an elegant man" -- damn, how elegantly put! All of which reminds us that gangster politics, as carried forward by evil but intelligent men, is never really eradicated in America because it's basically the tactics of corporate success.
A useful lesson in the cyclical nature of our Right-left-Right oscillations in D.C.
The midnight rant, when the ogre is drunk and reaches out by phone to both embrace and to threaten his opponent, is spectacular. It reminded me of a spiritualist friend of mine who maintains that the most corrosive, the most devastating emotional experience in the formation of negative character is being on the receiving end of contempt, particularly from those whom you admire and hope to emulate. This is a lot more convincing to me than our recent habit (in books and movies) of ascribing twisted natures to sexual molestation in childhood (which strikes me as a whole Hell of a lot more complex in its effects than disdain is). I'm thinking of world leaders who came from the lower ranks of society and scrabbled their way to power, only to become paranoid tyrants when they got there -- Juan Peron, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, some of the current Burmese Generals and their ilk -- and how it must be almost impossible to eradicate that internalized contempt, which means you never really can arrive at a secure place and so *must* keep seeking and attacking "enemies" everywhere.
The final little scene between the two men is simply brilliant; it unseals the finality of Frost's unlikely victory and opens the story out again. Frost stands well back even when shaking hands, wary of the physical and characterological thuggishness of the ex-President, but when Nixon asks what they talked about during that midnight call (he was drunk enough not to remember), Frost hesitates -- and does not deliver the blow that he could. He says, "Cheeseburgers", which is part of the truth.
But why does he hold back from saying, "You told me some very intimate stuff that inspired me to take you down in our last interview, so in a sense your own guilt beat you"?
Does his reticence mean, "If you don't know your inner self well enough to answer that question, I'm sure not going to fill in the blanks for you -- stay in your well-deserved fog of arrogant self-deception"? Or, "You don't need to know that you sabotaged yourself by talking from your heart to me -- having won, I choose, showing my magnanimity, to protect you from the shock of that knowledge"? Or, "You tried to make me your intimate (as well as your victim) because you had literally no one else to speak the truth to, but you are much too scary and horrible for me to admit that this ever happened and then have to worry about what might come of it"? Or, "You said we were alike, and if either or both of us were to seriously examine such a claim our heads might explode"?
Or what? The nature of the relationship as it reaches its denouement is so evocative of such questions that it unties the neat knot of the last interview and leaves us thinking still about these two people and what passed -- and did not pass -- between them.
Of course in the Oscar competition this movie couldn't stand up to the colorful, exuberant fairy tale of "Slumdog Millionaire", but I could have missed "Slumdog", charming as it is, without a qualm. I'm very glad I caught "Frost/Nixon", before it vanishes into the shadows of that-which-we-would-rather-not-remember,
Feb. 10th, 2009
12:06 pm - What am I supposed to do about this?
Here is Thirthwell ("The Delighted States", though which I am still ambling in a daze of surprise and pleasure) on a Chekhov story about a woman riding home to her country schoolhouse in a cart. The paragraph begins however with a quote from Samuel Johnson, to wit:
'" . . . life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures." Or, as Franz Kafka said, (. . .) "In the battle between you and the world, back the world." This is the contrast on which Chekhov's story is based: the distressing mismatch between the past and the future; the way in which happiness is only ever a memory, or a fantasy.'
I have a huge problem with this, as a writer, because I know that it's true. I knew it when I first read Tolstoy, and Chekhov, and Kafka, et al, way back in college: this stuff was astoundingly, literally thrillingly true because it consisted almost entirely in miniaturist details that "read" the way my real life "reads" when I bother actually reading mine as it goes along -- from detail to detail, almost all of which details are not particularly interesting or rewarding in themselves. Which is why I turn a lot of daily detail into routine so that I *won't* have to pay attention to that but can be thinking instead about illustrious actions and elegant enjoyments, pasts and futures, that entertain, comfort, promise, and otherwise gratify me more than doing the shopping does.
Such gratifications are stories, the stories we all run in our heads to liven up all that "removing of small inconveniences" etc. that's what we're actually doing and must do, day to day and hour to hour, to maintain our lives. The stories that I write are written with that purpose, too, for myself and for other readers.
So, next to the attention to realistic detail in a Chekhov story, my stories are -- silly. Inconsequential. Romantic, in the sense that Thirthwell uses the term (that is, forced into a pattern of significance, when in fact real life just wambles along doing not much of anything, certainly seldom anything that doesn't have to be done again before long, because entropy eats up our actions as we do them). So, big, thundering tales full of deeds and ideas -- a lot of SF and fantasy, along with mystery and action fiction of every kind -- is simply absurd fluff next to a tiny, magnifying-glass snippet of a Chekhov story, because the Chekhov story is true in a way that "Romance" simply is not and can't be.
Chekhov, by the way, felt this way himself -- about Tolstoy (at least part of the time). Here's a quote (same book) from Chekhov, writing about dreading that Tolstoy will die: " . . . when literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature."
Hmm. Solved, then. After all, dead or not, we still have Tolstoy. His books exist to be read.
But personally, I still have a problem: I've always been drawn to this reality of the quotidian, of the (often unflattering) detail, admire it in others' work, and have tried to use it to anchor my own fanciful stories to at least an illusion of realism. But why? Why bother to do that? The romantic illusion of plot, of "story" itself, is less than dandelion fluff, compared to the ridiculous, aimless, lurching course that events actually take in the world.
Well, plot entertains, even while we know (once we've had a certain amount of experience in the world) that it's a total fabrication in that we can never really see where any action begins or ends, let alone the intentions and responses among all the individuals it touches or springs from. So I am in the business of lying on paper, tipping in stolen details to ground the illusion of a story in an illusion of reality, so that readers can use the result to divert themselves from the moment-by-moment reality of their own actual (often boring, mostly pointless, for all of us) lives.
Okay, I can see that and shrug it off, but can I continue to do this now that I'm reminded so sharply of it? Is that what a person approaching seventy years of age ought to be doing (and encouraging others to do) instead of making every effort to be totally present in each moment of the real life at hand -- no matter how dreary it is -- because those moments are drawing, inexorably, toward a necessary close?
There are all kinds of answers to this, but I suppose the practical one wins out: I've done a lot of zazen over the years, which is (as I understand it) basically a very Russian-fiction type of activity, made out of attending very very closely to the actual present moment insofar as it is perceptible to me. After all this time, even though I sometimes do get that frisson of amazement at the blazing vitality of one such closely observed instant, I still can't sit zazen for more than about 20 minutes at a time, with perhaps a few second of success somewhere in there on a good day.
So I might as well keep writing stories, since I seem to be able to do that a lot better than I can do zazen.
But I'm not comfortable. No, not at all. Thus, there's a great temptation to just laugh it all off and toddle on as before.
Only I don't want to; I want to think about this more, the discomfort itself being oddly stimulating.
And I haven't finished Thirthwell's book yet.
Feb. 6th, 2009
08:03 pm
Looks as if the Obama team will get a stimulus package after all, but it also looks to me as if they've given away the store to do it. Republicans (and some Dems) who were perfectly willing to "mortgage our children's future" with tax cuts for the rich, a hugely expensive war in Iraq, and then insisting on giving away money to bad bankers with no accountability to the public -- these arrogant fools are all up in arms about laying on debt for any social spending (which generally improves our children's future if done well) at all.
So, out goes family planning, Head Start, energy efficiency conversion of government buildings, new schools, and a huge chunk of the money that was to go to the state governments to help them avoid chopping the Hell out of, guess what, services to their citizens. Massive tax cuts remain or grow.
Wow. What a deal.
See, here's the thing: family planning and Head Start spending keeps pregnant girls and undereducated kids off the state services later on while keeping people employed in those preventive measures. How is refitting government buildings and schools NOT about jobs? Somebody has to DO that work, it doesn't just do itself by waving magic wand. Rural broadband makes computer work and commerce more accessible to people who don't live in big cities (and it takes workers to install the hardware, doesn't it? Workers doing jobs?).
But watch: when Obama comes back later to get these things funded as longer term investment, the Republicans, flush with having forced them out of the stimulus package, will of course dig in and "just say no" in order to avoid "mortgaging our children's future".
This was the Republican plan from Reagan on: to throw tax money out of the windows as fast as possible now and as commitments in the future -- on wars, on tax breaks for the rich and for corporations and cronies -- so that no Democratic administration would have any tax money at all to spend on public and social programs. This is how they planned to keep all spending private and profitable to themselves, while bankrupting the rest of us (who cares?) in the process, to create their "Republican Century".
They don't need to have the White House. They just have to make sure that *nothing* long term in the way of social services and safety net for the not-rich gets passed, and then, when the economy finally does start to turn, they'll go around crowing that it's all because of their goddamned idiotic tax cuts.
And they will.
Obama still thinks he can do what really needs to be done -- the whole thing, including overhauling our insane and crappy health care system -- with bi-partisan support from "moderate" Republicans, of whom there are -- what, three? -- in the Senate. I don't think the Obama people understand yet: yes, you can be a uniter if you work very hard at it. You can unite most of the people of the country by getting things done that they need done.
But you CAN NOT unite a sane, socially conscious (if way too "centrist") Democratic party with a furious, bitter, fanatically Libertarian rump party that's been spoiled rotten by having it all their own way for 8 disastrous years.
Not unless you knuckle under and pass George Bush's legislation instead of anybody else's. These guys do not compromise: they've only grudgingly agreed to let the stimulus go by because the latest unemployment jolt scares them, not because they would let the Democrats do ANYTHING under less dire circumstances. Playing at "uniting" means giving the rigid Right a veto on Democratic programs of any kind, and they will use it. It's their favorite thing.
Democrats want to be friends. Republicans want to be boss -- while robbing the public blind. It doesn't mix, not with the best will in the world, not after years of Rove Republicans purging their own moderates.
So, what has to happen? The Democrats have to get that filibuster-proof majority in the Senate -- or change Senate rules to limit filibusters' effectiveness -- and *then be willing to use those tools* to get the people's business done.
Odds?
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