a man can only love one team

Posted on March 22, 2008

I have a fractious relationship with McSweeney’s — I enjoy some of the work presented, but I wish Dave Eggers would be hit in the face with a shovel. it’s a problem. anyway:

Ernest Hemingway Blogs About the Top Teams in College Basketball, an item of particular note to at least four of my six readers.

so far today I have successfully avoided doing anything more strenuous than watering plants, which is what Saturdays are all about.

my views on many matters do not conform

Posted on March 21, 2008

Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead

(GV would also, perhaps, be soothed by the idea that this past twelvemonth has seen him outlive the last of his major literary foes, but I suspect he might not be so sanguine about having nobody to rail at.)

(a position with which I myself am really very sympathetic.)

Mr. Vidal would surely argue the point, but my hysterical love for his way with words and nearly equal affection for William F. Buckley’s way with words are not in fact mutually exclusive. ideologically, well… I take neither side, really, although I am perhaps closer to Vidal than Buckely. call me a moderate civil libertarian. a Tom-passionate conservative, Paine being the Tom in question. A Lincoln Republican, a Jackson Democrat, a non-partisan who believes that left and right are not a continuum extending infinitely in either direction but rather mere points on a möbius strip of red, white and blue.

oh, election year does stupid things to my head.

bullshit

Posted on March 15, 2008

so farming is now a style choice? it’s fashionable? how very nice for you kids, really. it’s sweet. and the next time you change your mind about what moves you? then what happens to your green revolution?

lies, damn lies, and memoirs

Posted on March 4, 2008

I’m following the [Margaret B. Jones] [shenanigans] pretty closely, in part because it’s just wow, and in part because it illustrates some problems with both the publishing world and the reading public.

first and worst is that apparently the “angle” of a white girl in the ‘hood (I feel like an asshole even typing that word) is far more appealing to those who sell books and to those who read them than the all too common — and ergo apparently boring and uninspiring? — story of a person of color surviving gangs, drugs and violence.

did that paragraph make sense? basically, publishing has this underlying racist assumption — I guess that statistics show that most of the people buying books are middle class white people and so the books that get picked up for publication are primarily those that They think will sell to middle class white people, which is totally ouroboral and makes me dizzy.

the second issue is that I keep seeing in comments on the story is “why didn’t she just write a novel?” and that’s a thing that’s infuriated me for a while. I blame Frank McCourt for the memoir mania that began ten years ago, and I’d really like the trend to end, please. she didn’t ‘just write a novel’ because it’s next to impossible to get a novel published these days, people want “reality” books the same way they want “reality” television. memoirs used to be reserved for people with interesting or remarkable stories to tell, or they were merely an endnote to a satisfactory life. now they are for every wanker who can string intelligible sentences together, and emphasis on the wank in the original self-gratification sense. everyone has “survived” something, everyone has “overcome” something — I read an article about this crap about a year and a half ago that called it damage lit, which I thought was an amazing, accurate description of this grossness. and so in this culture, both the broader culture and the specific book-world, a perfect petri dish is created for growing these fabrications.

(culture, petri, puns not intended)

(and don’t get me started on the Gordian knot of crazy that was the JT Leroy thing.)

I don’t know, in sum, I’m really fucking frustrated with the world of publishing, because they don’t seem to realize that they have helped create these people that scam them, it’s all flapping hands and oh we got took, but if they had not insisted on more memoirs and more edgy stories and more more more… well, speaking of a snake eating its tail. sometimes I hope it’ll choke.

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