Dan Savage out-snarked by his own comments section

I get tired of his schtick but today I'm happy for his existence, because it meant I got comments like this:

Let's get back to basics this time of year, "natalis solis invictus" everyone!

I want a shirt that says MERRY WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT TO CELEBRATE. Can anyone make this for me? Comic Sans preferred.  

FRONT: "Merry Christmas is what conservatives say" 
BACK: "99% of you can fuck off is what conservatives mean" 

Ha! We have them fooled! REAL liberals say "Joyous Solstice". 

Is it time for that zombie carpenter's birthday again? You'd think after being eaten by Papists all year long there'd be nothing left to throw a party for. That must be the miracle part, I suppose. And why is there never cake for his birthday? Everyone else has cake and ice cream for their birthday parties. And hats. The Brits have hats for zombie carpenter's birthday so why not us? Cake and Ice cream and hats. Now that's a goddamn birthday party.  

How about "Merry Wednesday"?  

....the extremes on either side can be vexing. I went to a "holiday tree" lighting the other night that featured a choir that sang a sappy song about helping, a traditional Hanukah song, and a song about solar energy that was set to the tune of "Angels We Have Heard On High". The whole thing was so ridiculously Seattle that I had the urge to stage a live Nativity scene right then and there, but I didn't have a manger handy (although there were plenty of asses in attendance). 

I want a shirt that says "'Happy Hanukkah' is what Reform Jews say" and has the Shehecheyanu on the back. No wait, I'm not a complete tosser.

(And for good measure we got this beautifully earnest fightin' mad comment too.)

'President Obama Speaks on Economic Mobility'

Transcript here.

The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income -- it now takes half.  Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273 times more.  And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.

So the basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed.  In fact, this trend towards growing inequality is not unique to America’s market economy.  Across the developed world, inequality has increased.  Some of you may have seen just last week, the Pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length.  “How can it be,” he wrote, “that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

But this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.

Yesterday we saw The Smartest Guys in the Room and Inside Job. I sat there with my mouth open for so long my tongue dried out. One more documentary and I'll be wandering down to Kshama Sawant's office and begging to be allowed to lick envelopes in support of her plan to retool Boeing war machine plants into bus factories, or whatever the hell it is she's doing now.

e for effort

NPR finally realizes all those internet-mad "listicles" are brain-deadening, and tries for something that requires actual intellectual effort: a thematic "best books concierge."

Unfortunately their staff's prose is still rampant with Choire Sichaform encephalopathy and will have to be put down: "And we started to think about a site that would be more Venn diagram-y than list-y...." TALK LIKE AN ADULT, PLEASE.

"....a site that could help you seek out the best biographies that were also love stories, or the best mysteries that were also set in the past." Hey, I remember something that worked like this! It was called a CARD CATALOGUE. The lost art of cross-referencing! What other mysterious yet intriguing intellectual tools await us in the dark lands far from the comforting neon ADD glare cast by Buzzfeed and Flavorwire? Safe return doubtful indeed.

before-sleep music

more morning music

morning music!

......yeah, I'm totally a ((( ))) girl*

'What your favorite punctuation mark says about you'

#: You’re on Twitter a lot, often starting sentences with “HASHTAG: DULL” or “HASHTAG: AWKWARD!” Or you’ve mistaken the keyboard for an old-timey touch telephone.

.: Ah, the period. Formerly, the mark of a complete thought. No longer, since no one has had a complete thought since 1998 sometime, since they had to stop in the middle to check their e-mail and make certain nothing more interesting was happening on Twitter. Now, the period is reduced to being used in e-mails to indicate that you are irrationally angry or disappointed about something. Contrast “Yes, Dave, I got the file!” with “Yes, Dave, I got the file.” Is something good about to happen to Dave after that second sentence? I should say not.

Oxford Comma: You are a person who insists on telling other people how good your grammar is and how much you care about it. You get a lot of support on the Internet, but in person, you’re insufferable. Like most people who get a lot of support on the Internet.


*I blame Salinger. I'm either parentheses or the asterisk-to-footnote.

'I thought irony wasn’t going to make it. It lay there, pale and wheezing in its flannel'

No, give me my irony, where it’s safe. We know what happens when you drop the mask for a second. You can fail. You can look foolish. You can flop. Better to look idiotic on purpose than foolish by accident. As long as you’re not really trying, you can never fail. Fail, with everyone watching? Unthinkable. And everyone’s always watching, thanks to the way we’ve set things up, living our lives half online. With the Internet, you live and die by your persona. No generation has ever been so scrutinized in all our interactions — the place where we have casual conversations with friends is graven into the public record for our employers. If “know thyself” was on the door to the ancient world (where was this door, anyway?)* then “curate thyself” hangs over ours. You have to. If we were meant to put everything out there, unfiltered, all the time, the Maker wouldn’t have given us an untag button. Never show the quick, nervous, squishy bits behind the mask. You might get hurt. We need our masks — what’s a persona, after all, but a mask?

- Alexandra Petri 


* γνῶθι σεαυτόν was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. sigh. Don't they read Plato at Harvard anymore? I mean, there was a Latin version of it in the Matrix and everything.

(Yes, I am the person who ruins the movie for everyone else. "But she'd never be able to actually fly the Chinese -- " "Shut up! Shut up!") 

Alexandra Petri has my heart

Reading “Jeeves and the Wedding Bells” will not sell you on Wodehouse. Other than that, the premise is entirely sound. You don’t sell someone on heroin by giving him methadone. Wodehouse is some of the strongest stuff there is, hard to imitate, as Faulks acknowledges, hilarious, tightly plotted and easy to read. It is the genuine article. So I don’t understand why we’re doing this exactly. Are the originals being put back into the Disney vault? If you are trying to sell someone on the Beatles, you don’t hand them a cover by Carrie Underwood. If you want to sell someone on hamburgers, you don’t hire a guy to tell him how good it would be if he were eating a hamburger and draw him a picture of How I Remember Hamburgers To Be, A Nostalgic Harmony To The Hamburger Of My Youth. Do you? No. You hand him a hamburger. Why would a novel that admits it is only a poor imitation of the original, set in the same world and with the same characters, somehow attract people to the original? Is there some hypothetical Young Person who hasn’t read Wodehouse on the grounds that “he hasn’t published anything in a while, but if he came out with a new book, I’d see him differently”? Because this person sounds like an idiot, and I don’t know why we have to cater to him.

(But yes, of course it was this: 'Faulks has a good handle on Wodehouse’s rhythm — IF SOMEONE TAKES THIS HALF OF THE SENTENCE AND USES IT AS A BLURB I WILL HAVE YOUR GUTS FOR GARTERS — if not his music.')

dignified and old

Well, that made my heart stop for a second. Yeah, everyone's making fun of this (with some justification -- check out the deeply freaky photo business website) but still, distant echoes down the corridor of time, or however it goes.

(Also, tell people -- for whatever reason: desperate for coerced conversation filler at the bus stop, moments of unguarded weakness, I'd say drunkenness but that excuse disappeared for me on April 1 2002 -- anyway, tell anyone, anywhere, that you're writing a novel set in Seattle and they will assume three things --

1) It's about Microsoft
2) it's about Kurt Cobain
3) it's about yuppies

Bonus: "Isn't there already a television show about that?")

OH MY GOD

THE WATERBOYS PLAYED KEXP LIVE AND INCLUDED ONE OF MY _FAVOURITE_ SONGS (it's based on a poem by my dead poet boyfriend Yeats). //faints

lhasa - desierto

your writer's block it don't mean shit

2008 interview

ANTHONY CAREW

Sometimes I feel like this over-documented era is like the surveillance state of some old science-fiction novel. Except instead of being a dystopian nightmare, people love it! Every single thing has to be documented, now. The undocumented event is like the tree falling in the woods.

JENNY LEWIS

I’m so happy I grew up before the change, in a time when that wasn’t the case. It seems like moments aren’t really moments anymore; nothing’s allowed to be fleeting, to just be what it is. For me, the obvious thing is when we play shows. There are kids who’re watching, but the majority of kids are filming it, are watching it through their cameras and their cell-phones, are seeing it from behind the frame. It’s like we’ve been taken out of the moment. And we can’t get it back.

boredom

I’ve never understood about boredom. I realise that with time and repetition all pleasures can run out.  Yelling in our cots and watching them come to hover over us anxiously; sex; TV; reading; long walks on frosty afternoons if that is the sort of thing you like; drugs, even; everything palls, eventually. But how can anyone be bored when there’s always death to think about? Every day. Every hour. Don’t you? All the rest is just evading or glossing the real subject of our lives. Beckett, again, the maestro of death: Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store.

- Jenny Diski

I love this woman.

14 June 2010  --  Staying In

My old friend Michael, a painter, called me the other day. We've been friends since we were troubled teenagers in and out of loony bins, morosely drinking and drugging away our days, and pretty much given up on by everyone. Michael and I talk on the phone now and then to giggle with astonishment at the way we've managed to arrange our lives so that we find ourselves doing what we want — painting, writing, getting on with it quietly. "I don't speak to anyone all day long. I go for a walk every day, then work, and it's all in silence," he said, delighted with his achievement. "Same here," I said. "But I only go out once a week."

Michael gasped at the level of my accomplishment.

It's not merely silence I want, but uneventfulness, and continuing uneventfulness at that. I have a rush of wellbeing if I see a blank week in my calendar. An appointment during the week darkens it, and gnaws away at me in the background of whatever I'm doing until the event (even a pleasurable one) is over and done with. You can call it neurotic, or what you will, but reclusiveness works for me.

From The Sunday Times, June 6th 2010

- Jenny Diski

I guess this is better than the guy who goes on about 'Roman ipads'*

....my answer, to 9-year-old Ottilie’s question about why we have books:

Some people might tell you that books are no longer necessary now that we have the internet. Don’t believe them. Books help us know other people, know how the world works, and, in the process, know ourselves more deeply in a way that has nothing to with what you read them on and everything to do with the curiosity, integrity and creative restlessness you bring to them.

Books build bridges to the lives of others, both the characters in them and your countless fellow readers across other lands and other eras, and in doing so elevate you and anchor you more solidly into your own life. They give you a telescope into the minds of others, through which you begin to see with ever greater clarity the starscape of your own mind.

And though the body and form of the book will continue to evolve, its heart and soul never will. Though the telescope might change, the cosmic truths it invites you to peer into remain eternal like the Universe.

In many ways, books are the original internet — each fact, each story, each new bit of information can be a hyperlink to another book, another idea, another gateway into the endlessly whimsical rabbit hole of the written word. Just like the web pages you visit most regularly, your physical bookmarks take you back to those book pages you want to return to again and again, to reabsorb and relive, finding new meaning on each visit — because the landscape of your life is different, new, “reloaded” by the very act of living.

- Maria Popova

 .....that's okay, but my God, I find stuff like this depressing. Books are like the internet! Books are the original internet! Is this really the only way we can now interest the digital generation in anything? No, books are books, and telling small children "they're like video games or the internet but even better" is like saying kale is a wonderful new form of cake.

(Bonus negative points for saying "starscape" if you're not Carl Sagan.)

*No, really.
It's sort of like claiming "No Emily and Susan really were using Gchat," I suppose.

'Should I Check E-mail?' by Wendy MacNaughton

'a very nice walk'

But in conceiving of criticism as a value system for what is "good" or "bad," worthy or unworthy, there is another, implicit shape "criticism" can take—a celebration of the good by systematic omission of the bad. To put in front of the reader only works that are worthy, and to celebrate those with a consistent editorial standard, is to create a framework for what "good" means, and thus to implicitly outline the "bad," the unworthy, by way of negative space around the good. The celebrator then becomes a critic without being critical—at least not with the abrasive connotations the term has come to bear—yet upholds the standards of "good" and "bad" work with just as much rigor.

- Maria Popova

cultural shifts

I understand some students are still puffing their assigned wordcounts with "The dictionary definition of...." and God help us all, "According to Wikipedia....", but I've seen this tactic in dozens of online feature stories now:

To give you a sense of their lot, when you search “are millennials” in Google, the search options that come up include: “are millennials selfish,” “are millennials lazy,” and “are millennials narcissistic.” 

Want the zeitgeist? Just type it into Google! ....I got nothin', folks, not even sarcasm.

This was more poignant:

Once there were letters: handwritten, typewritten, carefully crafted, dashed off, profound or mundane, tinged with expectancy. Correspondence required waiting. “I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her future sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, in 1852. Were they alive today, would Dickinson and Gilbert merely G-chat?  

Simon Garfield might think so. His latest book, “To the Letter,” is a nostalgic and fretful look at the “lost art” of letter writing. “A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen,” he declares, noting that his book confronts this possibility. It’s tempting to laugh nervously and say, “Why so ominous?” But then again, OMG, maybe he’s got a point. A certain artfulness has surely been lost as emoticons and Snapchats take over as modes of expression.

'suzy sunshine'

Betsy Lerner goes hardcore:

The bottom line is no one cares if you don’t write. No one asked you to. No one will die. There are chipmunks who work harder than you. You didn’t need to buy that Moleskin. You forgot you had one anyway. No one said: a poem please. No cried out when you sat down, mid-poem, because you couldn’t bleat another line, a lifetime ago on Minetta Lane. Do not ask what your writing can do for you. Do not got to therapy and crawl inside your inner ear. Did you ever think it was a gift from god? To stop? You won’t have to eat. You need not sing. You don’t have to be anything. When you remember those pages rocking out to sea, remember how good it felt to not reach for a simile.

Responses:

'Fuck quitting. I haven't started.'

'Thanks for pointing out that even this chipmunk is working faster than me.'

'If I didn’t write, then I couldn’t avoid writing.'

 'Wow. Suzy Sunshine’s back. So glad I stopped by. Happy effing Sunday night, everyone.'

'Well, quitting implies that I actually write. What I do is fantasize about writing. What I do is delude myself that I’m a writer. As soon as I have finished writing one stupid little thing, or even one stupid little thing that gets published in some stupid little magazine, I’m no longer a writer. You have to start all over again. it’s not a re-brith. It’s just another casualty.'

'I quit all the time. I am a major quitter. I am the queen of quitting, if there were such a thing, but I keep coming back like some sort of demented chipmunk, bashing my head against the concrete block wall over and over again.'

My favourite exchange:

'Sure, but then what would I do? I’ve got no money, interests, or social life. Maybe I could learn to knit?'
'I hear knitting’s overrated. And you have to carry yarn with you everywhere you go.'
'You’ll poke your eyes out.'

And then this person said it all much, much better.

....when you have no death, when nothing truly has weight or scale, when decisions don’t stick and nobody feels the consequences… it’s hard to care about anything. The stakes on the show feel so low at this point that a once addictive program is unengaging, dull and hollow. Even the 50th special had no real gravitas because we were basically watching a plot be un-done, rather than made. We were watching a character be un-banished, rather than created. For a celebration of 50 years of a television show, it felt awfully like a celebration of a writer who’s only been running it for 4 years. And, perhaps most irritatingly for a Davies fan, the complete erasure of everything that was developed during that previous era.

I don’t think it’s an insult against Davies, though — Moffat does it constantly to himself. Amelia Pond grows up without parents because they were erased by a crack in space and time. When they are restored to her by virtue of yet another giant re-set button, we never see them again. Amy rarely talks about them. You cannot have a character whose parents were taken from her at a young age, who then gets them back — and remembers that she had lost them in the first place — and not see a perceivable change in said character. Similarly, you cannot rob that character of her baby, remove her ability to have children, and have the biggest consequence be that she becomes a model who’s moody with her husband for his own good.

....We can talk for days about Moffat’s other problems as a writer — the sexism, the homophobia — and those are all valid complaints, but what will always be my biggest gripe is his fear of consequences. When you cannot deal properly with grief or loss or change, you cannot write believable characters or interesting stories.

- Sarah Siegel

books read in December 2013

Fiction is in red.

205. A Prayer Journal, Flannery O'Connor
206. After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, Alan S. Blinder
207. Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, Robert Kolker (much better than I was expecting)
208. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
209. The Circle, Peter Lovesey (this about sums it up, especially the weirdly dated aspect)
210. The Tooth Tattoo, Peter Lovesey (MUCH better than the last few Diamonds - the writing about music was great. But the ending and villain were totally fluffed)
211. Good Bones & Simple Murders, Margaret Atwood
212. The Headhunters, Peter Lovesey 
213. Inside Rehab, Anne M. Fletcher
214. The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, Mark Oppenheimer (Kindle Single)
215. The Man Behind Narnia, A.N. Wilson (Kindle Single)
216. The Man with the Electrified Brain, Simon Winchester (Kindle Single)
217. It's All In Your Head, Eva Hagberg (Kindle Single)
218. Truth Like the Sun, Jim Lynch  
219. The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester
220. Unnatural Death, Dorothy Sayers
221. Whose Body, Dorothy Sayers
222. Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers
223. Conundrums for the Long Week-End: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter, by Robert Kuhn McGregor and Ethan Lewis
224. Estranged, Jessica Berger Gross (Kindle Single) 
225. Descent: A Memoir of Madness, David Guterson (Kindle Single)
226. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy Sayers
227. Lord Peter Views the Body, Dorothy Sayers

2013 booklist 

Reading Sabbath

This will be a short and crummy post but I'm tired of falling behind.

I celebrated Thanksgiving in the ancient ways of my ancestors, by ordering in Thai takeout and hiding under the blankets. We now enter the hellish part of the year where we're expected to BE HAPPY AND JOLLY and other things ending in -olly and actually speak with people we're related to. I prepared by taking the battery out of my ancient cell phone I got for $7.11 at 7-11 about six years ago (I'm amazed this thing still works). Finally recovering some from my period (do I have fibromyalgia? Endometriosis? PCOS? NOBODY KNOWS!....well, more to the point, without insurance, nobody cares). And, while flat in bed, I miraculously managed not to just reread the same old books. Boo-yah. I consider that the mental equivalent of a four-minute mile, so you can see things have clearly begun to deteriorate even more around here.


What did you just finish reading?
Most notably, Raising Steam, the latest (and last?) Discworld novel, and Brad Gooch's Flannery, which is likely to become the standard biography of Flannery O'Connor, unfortunately for her and for us. I have posts about both books half-written in my head. I also reread some of my favourite O'Connor short stories a couple of times -- "Revelation," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," "Judgement Day," and of course "A Good Man is Hard to Find," one of the tales of the century, and beyond. I still remember reading that, in some anthology, when I was a teenager, completely unprepared -- it was the first O'Connor story I ever read, and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side still pretty much sums up my reaction to it (only for me it was more like "the power of art," which is probably blasphemous, but art and God were basically the same thing to her, anyway) (no no, that makes her sound like Oscar Wilde).

What are you reading now?
Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal, which was a late birthday gift to myself, and which is just as beautiful and amazing as I'd hoped. The best thing is it's a fairly accurate transcription and a facsimile, so you can actually see her handwriting, from when she was twenty years old, sitting in the midst of an Iowa City winter, begging for transcendence. Amazing. I would say "awesome" if the word weren't so corrupted.

What do you expect to read next? 
 I'd really like to read O'Connor's letters -- I have them on the ereader, but I know I have the hardcover, and I'm even pretty sure which bookshelf it's in! Although from what I can tell, her racism ('ironic' and not) is heavily censored, which is pretty crappy.


A postscript on Dr Who turning 50: ....so, basically, Moffat said fuck Eccleston, fuck the first couple of years of storytelling, fuck RTD, and fuck Tennant's father-in-law, which takes some brass ones. Well, fuck you too, Moffat. That was like the mother of all automatic resets, but I guess the Angry Birds generation isn't going to care. Let me make one thing perfectly clear*: I MOTHERFUCKING HATE that kind of cheap-ass copout. It has nothing to do with actual storytelling. You want to tell a new story, tell a new goddamn story -- oh, but that'll lose the franchise! Well, lose the fucking franchise, then. -- Oh yeah and the Tom Baker fanservice was rewarded with the predictable fangasm, although some of us were dying for more Paul McGann and are really sulky about not getting any more.

And we get another older white guy. If we are stuck with the Doctor being an older white guy for four thousand fucking years or however long it is can't it be Paul McGann?

What? I said really sulky. Really, really sulky.

//goes back under the blankets with the heating pads and cats and Flannery


*If you don't know who said that, it's past your bedtime.

you were in my dream / you were driving circles around me

put diet bacon on cats, and we're all set

Let’s say BuzzFeed reviewed “Aftermath” in the manner of Camilla Long. Let’s further say the review — like other products featured in BuzzFeed — was helpfully linked to an online retailer such as Amazon.com, which pays affiliate-marketing commissions to referring sites. Let’s say the review called the book “a needy, neurotic mandolin solo.” 

Let’s think about the click-through rate for that item: How much commission do you think the referrer — BuzzFeed in our hypothetical case — would earn for its brutal takedown of a book by “a brittle little dominatrix?” Actually, don’t answer that question, answer this one: How meaningless does a five-star review seem now? 

But never mind the e-commerce business model. To my way of thinking, BuzzFeed’s heroic initiative will succeed even if it merely eradicates the depressing negativity that has for so long kept literary criticism from becoming a full-fledged economic sector, like agriculture, transport and erectile dysfunction. 

It also brings us one step closer to my two lifelong dreams: first, a newspaper that delivers only good news; and second, diet bacon. 

- Bob Garfield

Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal

Last House on Holland Island, May 2010

via

Just like a bad plot, I won't tell you why Under floor or in a wall is where my secret lies

gpoy (it's the arrival of Aunt Flo and her Red-Hot Tampon-Strings Pluckers from Tampa Springs!)

(via)