Wasting My Time: 9/11 Edition

Question: Why did I take the time to weigh in (again) on this unsatisfying film adaptation of Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare At Goats?

Answer: I'm probably avoiding real life issues a bit.

Invitation To Derisive Laughter

The backstory: This guy used to teach one of my brother's math in high school. According to my brother, this "toolbag [...] was a turd bucket."

"Huh, Collateral Damage"

George Clooney has made a defecation out of one of my all-time-favorite nonfiction books. (Thanks, jerk. Really: Thanks. Thanks especially for the ham-fisted, Big Lebowski stunt casting.)

Beep Boop* seems enthusiastic about this turkey; though Videogum is more in my camp—but: Why trust us? Why not view the trailer and a clip or two from the actual Jon Ronson documentary and decide for yourself?

[Note: This last clip is of Jim Channon, the man Jeff Bridges is playing in the Clooney adaptation. Do you not notice how much more amazing and wildly implausible and frankly more compelling the real guy is?! Ahhhhhhhhrrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!!!1!!]

*My 2003-era blog idols are in their twilight.

An Old Fake New Yorker Joke

Mary Gaitskill Interview: The Believer Issue 02.09

I sometimes feel like I come off like Ed Wood talking about Orson Welles (as depicted in the film Ed Wood) whenever I'm talking about writers and how they've conducting their lives: that is to say, earnest and more than a little embarrassing.

In any event, this Mary Gaitskill interview was good—and I don't have much more time tonight to devote to this subject than to say that. Personal highlights included (but were not limited to):

• Sentiment as false-feeling.
• Her notion of what a wife is, and more importantly the, frankly, heartwarming post-print-publication addenda.
• The bit about repetition in Dickens and the proceeding tangent on (essentially) everyone's natural tendency towards apophenia.
• The differences between guilt and shame.

When Haruki Murakami Chose To Be Poor

Part something-or-other in an ongoing series wherein I read things about great authors whose early-30's were not exactly financially successful — largely to comfort myself with delusions of being in good company.

From a truncated version of Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" that appeared in (as with the first installment of this series) the New Yorker:

For three years I ran my jazz club-keeping the accounts, checking the inventory, scheduling my staff, standing behind the counter mixing cocktails and cooking, closing up in the wee hours of the morning, and only then being able to write, at home, at the kitchen table, until I got sleepy. I felt as if I were living two people's lives. And, gradually, I found myself wanting to write a more substantial kind of novel. I had enjoyed the process of writing my first two books, but there were parts of both that I wasn't pleased with. I was able to write only in spurts, snatching bits of time-a half hour here, an hour there-and, because I was always tired and felt as if I were competing against the clock, I was never able to concentrate very well. With this scattered kind of approach I was able to write a few interesting, fresh things, but the result was far from complex or profound. I felt as if I'd been given this wonderful opportunity to be a novelist, and I had a natural desire to take that opportunity as far as I possibly could. So, after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business and focus solely on writing. At this point, my income from the jazz club was significantly more than my income as a novelist, a reality to which I resigned myself.

Why Orwell Chose To Be Poor

Part something-or-other in an ongoing series wherein I read things about great authors whose late-20's were not exactly financially successful — largely to comfort myself with delusions of being in good company.

From a recent New Yorker review of Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" by some guy:

That’s a long time to be poor and living as hard as Orwell did. It suggests more seriousness of purpose and staying power than some comments would grant him. It’s true that he came from some rung of the English middle class (“lower upper middle” he once called it, subcategory military), but it wasn’t a social world that leant itself to sponging off your parents. His decision to become poor was just that, but it wasn’t a joyride that he could easily have gotten off once under way, and it carried psychological as well as financial dangers. So why did he do it?

Orwell’s explanation, given a few years later in “The Road to Wigan Pier” (which is a far more sociological and political book, about the unemployed poor in northern England), connects the experience to his years as an imperial cop in Burma:

I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same…I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to “succeed” in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.

[Via The New Yorker]

Getting Sold By Academic Criticism

I am a sucker for long-winded (but precise!) scholarship.

So, I've decided to write down a recent example I happened to have thoroughly enjoyed from Tony Sharpe's biography of poet Wallace Stevens:

This poem ["The Comedian as the Letter C"] was indeed the accomplishment of an extremist in the exercise, an act almost of aesthetic terrorism in a society whose post-puritan recrudescence had recently (1919) introduced Prohibition. It was also, as I have tried to suggest, a repudiation of several of the precious tenants of literary Modernism, in its unorthodoxy with regard to location and locution — no wonder Stevens and Hemingway came to blows! Although the heightened consciousness of the materiality of his linguistic medium might link Steven's poem to radical experimenters such as [Gertrude] Stein, the willed anachronism of its lexicon, and the old-fashionedness of its blank verse and the basic narrative shape, suggest a more traditionalist poetics. It is almost as if the poem had been expressly designed to appeal to nobody at all[...]

Post-puritan recrudescence! The willed anachronism of its lexicon! Complex ideas wrought more complex through the wit of formal linguistic expression! God, I miss the ivory tower

Wow, This Really Hit The Spot Today

[via Cat and Girl]

I am about to start doing my taxes.

“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”—Frank Bidart, "Borges and I"

Far And Away The Nerdiest Thing (Comedy-Centric) I've Ever Done

... was, once upon a time, look up this YouTube video of the Onion staff having a "Thanksgiving Day Chili Cookoff" after hearing two of the writers mention it on an episode of WFMU's the Speakeasy. Everyone who reads this blog now has something on me. Unless, I guess, if you watch it all the way through yourselves.

Someone I Know Was On The Colbert Report

This is semi-old news in the world of my acquaintances, but I just thought I'd post Jon Golbe's November 3rd, 2008 appearance on The Colbert Report. This will probably be the last time (for a while) I'll get to use the "Election 08" tag on this blog:

My First Blog Post With MTV Iggy

So, the goal with MTV Iggy is for it eventually to be the opposite of MTV World's constant exporting of MTV's garbage (i.e. translations of "The Hills," "The Girls Of My Super Sweet 16 Dropped in a FARC Encampment," "Real World vs Wondershowzen Challenge")—instead importing the best from foreign cultures, starting with Asia.

I do a Asian politics and culture blogging for them.

My first post is on Mumbai.

It does not suck.

Thank You. [Via MTV Iggy]

I Do Not Want The Mexican Walking Fish To Go Extinct

Thing is like a Pokémon. [More Info Via AP/Yahoo News]

I Didn't Laugh Once During This Onion Article, But I Still Loved It

What does that say? [Link]

[Also: Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Matthew Phelan's 26th Birthday!]

The Rutgers Mess

Thank God this New York Times editorial is coming days before Thanksgiving, when all of us have to hear about Rutgers football from relatives who, frankly, no nothing of the insane waste of resources behind our team's non-meteoric, "You didn't even get what you paid for" rise in the rankings:

Rutgers, the biggest and most important public university in New Jersey, has spent millions of dollars furthering its ambition to become a major football power that might otherwise have been devoted to academics. It has done so during a period of rising tuition and budgetary cutbacks in academic departments, and, worse, without any real oversight from the university’s president, Richard McCormick, and its Board of Governors.

A review committee appointed by Mr. McCormick has now issued a scathing report accusing him of being “too passive in exercising his authority” over the athletic department and football program. The report suggests that he and the board turned a blind eye while the university’s athletic director, Robert Mulcahy, signed the football coach to multimillion-dollar contracts and employed a sports marketing firm that once hired Mr. Mulcahy’s son. It also criticizes a secret side deal engineered by Mr. Mulcahy in which the marketing firm paid the football coach an extra $250,000.

[...] But while Mr. McCormick did not create the mess, he did nothing to clean it up. If he knew what was going on with the football program, he was negligent by not stepping in; if he didn’t know, he should have. This leaves him a choice: put the brakes on the stadium project and immediately clean house at the athletics department or resign and make way for someone who will.

[Thanks, Marcus!]

My Brother Singing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"

Warren Sinclair (as Kevin McAlister)

Way back in summer 2001, one of the original visual inspirations for how I would draw Warren was Home Alone-era Macaulay Culkin. It's never really felt obvious to me, until I saw him tonight drawn in a holiday sweater. "Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!"

I Want To Know Where I Can Find This Larger!

NOW NOWNOWONOWNOWNOW NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Would Biblical Prophecies Influence Palin's Foreign Policy Positions? [Holy Crap]

I am genuinely afraid.