a face in the crowd

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 13:41:40 GMT

What liberal American will ever forget the American electoral map, slowly but surely revealing itself to be red (what would Mcarthy say?). What do we do now? Busy trying to get into grad school, I never made time to volunteer for Kerry or the many anti-Bush organizations. What do I, can we do something now to sustain us throughout these next four years? I wish Kerry had said a lot more a lot sooner.

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 13:36:02 GMT

from Salon.com

But like many liberals I'm betting on the Armageddon theory of politics. Bush and the GOP majorities in the House and Senate will make things so bad in the next four years that the country will never elect a Republican ever again. So here's hoping things get much, much worse!

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 21:58:02 GMT

from Salon.com

Kerry opens big lead among early voters

The latest national numbers, courtesy of Josh Marshall:

The second national poll released Monday, the Marist poll, has Kerry up by one among likely voters (Kerry 49%, Bush 48%) and tied among registered voters (48%). All calls were made on Sunday.

The final Fox News poll -- with calls on Saturday and Sunday only -- has Kerry over Bush 48% to 46% among likely voters. Among registered voters it's Kerry 47%, Bush 45%. Among those who've already voted, it's Kerry 48%, Bush 43%. Fox has been releasing not a tracking poll, but a new poll every day for the last four days: Friday, Bush +5; Saturday Bush +2; Sunday, tied; Monday, Kerry +2.

According to Gallup's mega-final-ultra poll out Sunday evening, 30% of registered voters in Florida have already voted, either through early voting or by absentee. Of those who have already voted, Kerry leads President Bush 51% to 43%. According to the Des Moines Register poll out late Saturday evening, 27% of Iowa adults have already voted. And among those Kerry leads 52% to 41%.

-- Mark Follman

[09:04 PST, Nov. 1, 2004]

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 20:12:47 GMT

Everyone I know in Florida is voting early. This pre-election period is like one big tension headache that may not be eased by tomorrow's election. Like my friend Jessica said, I am just glad I don't own a TV.

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:48:59 GMT

workshop

This is the second writer's workshop I have taken this year. The first one was a good experience, even though about a third of the students weren't good at giving any sort of constructive criticism. They weren't good at giving any criticism at all.

"I loved the story. The characters were great, the story was interesting. I really have nothing bad to say about it..."

But our instructor was great. May I interject with something I mentioned months ago? I live in Manhattan and as anyone who lives or works there knows, this particular unnamed workshop has stands holding it's fliers on just about every other street corner in NYC. I have seen it around for the last 10 years or so. And I have picked up the course catalog at least a handful of times. But it always seemed to good to be true--valid literary instruction and critique of your work for a fraction of the cost of a college level writing course. And the catalogs... they remind me of The Flyer--the cheap weekly in South Florida that is full of advertisements and classifieds. But last spring, on a whim, I finally decided to take the course. As soon as the instructor spoke, she set my mind at ease. It wasn't just the Brown and Sarah Lawrence degrees--although my animal consumer brain was pleased by the brand names--she spoke with ease and authority about literature. And not just novels or just short stories and not just the classics or the avant garde but all of it.

I am in the advanced class now. No lectures. Finished stories are expected. Your stories are jumping-off points for mini-lessons on craft. The class is larger--11 (as opposed to 6) students. And I would say that 10 out the 11 have intelligent well-thought-out things to say. And a good 45 minutes are spent on your work. I told Jessica I was unhappy with one aspect of the critique: when the writer emerges at the end and speaks to the class. I just don't like explications of works of art by the artist. Not when the work should speak for itself. And yet, yesterday, when my turn came... I found that I was saying things like: "Oh, you didn't get that about my character? Well, in an earlier draft I think I explain that further... " Or, "Hmm, but it takes place in Florida because that's where the landscape looks like this..." Things I would have criticized others for. But I found that I wasn't saying these thing to justify my work or to explain it them. I was saying these things because I needed even more feedback on the creation of this work--and because I needed to share my creative process with them--a little (without trying to explain the mysteries of creation). And I got the feedback. And it wasn't about validation or approval, it was about the work. And for a few moments, I felt solidarity with the other writers in the room.

and for jessica...

Mary Jane, a stripper prone to acrobatics who said she came here to work a year ago so that that she could save money to return to college, recalled being astounded at what she heard was going on in the gay clubs.

"Oral sex, right there in front of everyone," said Mary Jane, who was wearing high heels, tattoos and nothing else. "I couldn't believe it."

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 13:51:17 GMT

From today's NY Times...

"Mr. Bush, who seemed to grow tired as the night wore on, repeatedly used the phrase "hard work" to describe the war in Iraq. Mr. Kerry repeatedly referred to his first-hand experience sending men into battle in Vietnam, and that seemed to unnerve Mr. Bush. The president said he understood that fighting was hard work and added, "I see on the TV screens how hard it is.""

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 04:32:56 GMT

my opinion?

Kerry looked confident and on the ball. He supported his points with facts and details. Bush? Lots of sputtering, uuhhs--the not-quite pregnant pauses were uncomfortable to watch. Bush side stepped a lot of questions with wierd assumptive statements like "I'm the president, of course I know it's hard..." (a paraphrase) when answering the question of sending troops into war. He didn't have many facts to back up his already imprecise points. He almost looked as uncomfortable as when he debated Gore except now he's gotten comfortable in his cushy incumbent seat. I think there is more at stake now, though and the only thing that can and may ruin this is post-debate spin. That's what happened with the Gore debates.

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:58:15 GMT

bingo...

I am finally convinced this is the man to vote for! Here is a good blow-by-blow account of the ass whupping George W. Bush got from Senator John Kerry.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/blog/09/30/begala.blog/

also...

I know Salon readers are fairly liberal so I don't know if their poll counts, but here are some results:

Salon

Who will win the first presidential debate?

George Bush 291

John Kerry 1981

11:08 PM, EST

fom https://sub.salon.com/poll/?viewPoll=17

msnbc.com

Who won the debate?

George Bush 28 %

John Kerry 72%

And Time magazine has these numbers...

George Bush 45.1 %

John Kerry 51.9%

with the rest 2.9 % voting a draw.

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 04:49:33 GMT

it's been awhile...

One of the few fair reviews of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog. I finished the copy I bought in the UK a few weeks back... I'll say something about it in a day or two but first, here's this:

from http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/y/yellow-dog.shtml

YELLOW DOG by Martin Amis

Yellow-Bellied

Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder . . . It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating.
— author Tibor Fischer, in his review of Yellow Dog

Dear Tibor Fischer:

The most recent trend in literary reviews is to address someone personally. Usually, that person is Martin Amis. But since I am neither a friend of his, nor do I have a book coming out on the same day, I'll address someone a bit lower on the food chain.

Your recent public plea to Amis, disguised in The Daily Telegraph as a review of his latest novel Yellow Dog, appeared well before the book itself was available and in defiance of an embargo on reviews. Guaranteed a first shot at Yellow Dog, you also ensured that almost all the subsequent reviews would mention you, your opinion, and even the dubious practice of reviewing books before you are supposed to. So successful were you in hitching your wagon to Yellow Dog, that Amazon UK offers a special discount to purchasers who purchase your book along with Amis's. The resulting press from your "review" has made phrases from it almost eclipse any quotations from the book itself; avid book review readers can recite them with greater assurance than even the already rather oft-quoted opening lines to the novel: "I go up I go down . . ."

I must admit it's pretty difficult to review an Amis book to begin with, especially if one is overly concerned with the opinion of fellow commuters as you seem to be. Really, Tibor (the trend in these articles is to use first names), perhaps you ought to do something about your fear that other people on the train really care what you are reading and that they are judging you for enjoying certain kinds of reading matter. Even without the problem of reading while only thinking about yourself, Amis is a hard one to look at with a clear head and a reasonable eye. Even if he hasn't already been blasted by some other British male writer with an eye on the Booker, Amis comes as part of a larger literary narrative.

Perhaps more than any living writer, Amis suffers for being who he is. When he gets a "huge" advance (for The Information) or when he indulges in dental surgery or divorces his wife or switches agents or dumps his friends or suggests that he might move to New York, people become outraged and then write articles expressing their outrage. No one seems anywhere near as fascinated with the private life or the teeth of, say, Peter Carey or Ian McEwan.

Of course, Amis has his own mythology attached to him. His father Kingsley Amis wrote some very popular books in his day -- even if no one reads any of them any more. Amis fils hung around with a very hip crowd at Oxford and published his first novel The Rachel Papers when just a callow 24 years old. Even his own father said he couldn't read the book and made some noises about it being evidence of the decline of the modern novel. Thus Amis the younger's literary reputation has always been characterised by the personal attack (far more personal than yours), the scandal, and the evocation of envy that so often is its subject matter.

But the book itself? Yellow Dog isn't London Fields or Time's Arrow. The plot is a bit patchy. There seems to be too much going on with the various strands and some are more compelling than others. Xan Meo, the ideal husband whose unfortunate bonking on the head leads him to revert to a more primal self is, for instance, a much more fully realized figure than Clint Smoker, the tawdry tabloid hack. The Royal Family plot, while it has some insightful moments –- especially when it relays the feelings of the lackey unfortunately nicknamed "Bugger" -- tends to be funny but a bit thin. The corpse knocking around in the hold of the airplane lends itself to some delights and the clever rendering of cyberspeech has its moments. But ultimately Xan Meo is the only one we care about.

Of course, Tibor, when you consider that Amis has been publishing consistently for 30 years, a book as good as Yellow Dog is hardly cause to issue a career post mortem -- especially since the brilliant The War Against Cliché is still relatively new. Heavy Water contained some of the most exquisite stories I've read in a long time, and even at his very worst, Amis packs more cleverness in a few pages than most writers can jam into an entire book.

But it seems Amis's critics go in two directions about what he ought to do next. I've heard him called overly clever by some who want him to continually replicate those darkly funny alienated creatures of his youth, but I've also read suggestions that he loses it when confronted with children and becomes sentimental and ridiculous. Damned for being too smart by those who want feeling, he gets blasted by those who can't bear it. Part of the problem with Yellow Dog is that it is both funny and serious, and ultimately a very grim book. It's pretty difficult to write funny stuff about incest and pedophilia. And it hasn't been since Nabokov (one of the younger Amis's heroes and one of the deceased Amis's demons) that an adult sexual desire for a child has been in depicted as a natural, but horrifying, desire. Tibor, when you wrote the most telling line of your screed, saying that reading this book made you feel as if you had found your "favorite uncle masturbating in the schoolyard," you haplessly stumbled on the heart of the book and didn't even know it.

Very few of the reviews I've read discuss the disturbing theme which arises repeatedly in the multiple plots. Even Sigmund Freud, some argue, couldn't deal with this problem of adult desire for children and retracted his original seduction story when he realized father-daughter incest was too hot a topic for most of the world to handle. The lack of any mention of this pervasive aspect of Yellow Dog suggests to me that many reviewers have been all too glad to have you respond to, rather than read, Amis's book. This in itself makes it a book worth reading, and I'd suggest reading it at home if you worry about what other people are thinking.

— 5 November 2003

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 03:44:01 GMT

This just in:

Discovered the band Arcade Fire and mp3 blogs at the same time. Check out the blogs, Teaching Indie Kids to Dance and Said the Gramophone.

Arcade Fire's Funeral--sad but not depressing. It is late, I am tired--do they sound like X to me? Kinda. Check out pitchfork's rave: here. I wish I was a kid again. Wish I had time to sit in front of the stereo and just listen to the music over and over. So much great stuff coming out now. A kid? Because I remember music being my entire life. It still moves me in the same way now that I am a fogey. (Thank God) There's just less time when you choose to have other loves...