Franzen, Freedom, Corrections

Jonathan Franzen is way overhyped. I thought The Corrections was pretty much the minimum of what a decently-regarded book should be, not an exemplar of the best being written. 
Now I'm reading Freedom and having the same reaction. It's not that the book is uninteresting. I like Franzen's sensitivity to the peculiar turns and tides of people's relationships, especially family. For example, the below, a college-age son's thoughts about his mother:

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself. To make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

What a lot of hurt and hope and tenderness there. But it's always narrated rather than written. (Tired adage about showing, not telling.) The characters are never discovered or revealed by dialog, and too much of the action is explained rather than manifested.
Here I am blogging in the office on a day of light work, and the graphic designer sitting behind me is complaining about always getting simultaneous instant messages from two different people asking him to do the same thing. 
OK, there it is, ha ha, how frustrating. But why not strip the explanation away:

There was the usual hubbub of a meeting breaking up. Lyle immediately received two IMs. 

Pat: "Levering proofs ready yet?" 

Mitch: "Levering ASAP, plz."

Maybe Franzen's gift is for situations, as I've said above. I simply don't believe his characters' longer story lines. One of his protagonists, Patty (that must be where I got Pat, above), models herself to be a perfect Mom figure, but that has nothing to do with the basketball player she was in college or the analysand (therapand?) she becomes later. She doesn't commit adultery in a manner that flows with or against her history, it's just doing something else. Her husband is an exec first for 3M and then at an environmental foundation, but as far as we know she has never been to a function in the role of wife - esp lacking as a reality point, because alcohol is part of her story as their marriage goes on.
Patty's (and here is something of manifesting, not telling - she's always Patty, a tall woman known by her diminutive) therapy journal makes up large sections of the book. There's no doubt but that these are supposed to come straight from her journal, they're not secondhand or narrated - Patty's story is being told by somebody who refers to herself as the autobiographer. Her writing style is in no way differentiated from the novelist's. Same vocabulary, same average length of sentences, same recursive grammar. Why introduce an element like that if you're not going to take advantage of it, and if you can't take advantage of it, why introduce it?


This blog is of no significance. I write it because I would never think these things out in this way except to an imaginary reader, who occasionally is a real person. And I enjoy writing sentences. I'm going to move over to a new blog soon, to consolidate all my little projects (how I used to bristle if somebody asked me if writing was my hobby), and make a fresh start, with less political fulminating.
This blog doesn't matter. Starting a new one doesn't matter either. I'm looking forward to it.

The Frog's Eyebrows

Entries from A Flapper's Dictionary, July 1922. Just fun.
From the blog of The York Emporium used book and curiosity shop in downtown York, PA, via boingboing. A "boob tickler" is not what you might think.

oh yeah, I forgot

> Spent the morning at MoMA, checking out Picasso's guitars.
I noticed that the newspapers collaged into the first couple of constructions had headlines about violence - a murder or such. As best as my eyesight, flexibility and inferior French can make out, almost all of the newspapers were cut up to include violent stories, especially about the conflicts that would lead up to World War I.
This might be more related to the contents of French popular newspapers than to any joke or intuition on Picasso's part. Still, an odd coincidence. Of the clippings that did not refer to violence, as far as I can tell, all or most are collaged in upside down, as if to neutralize the subject matter.
> I'm thinking about changing up and renaming the blog, since it's turned out to be so seldom about my Blurry Books projects or photography. I'd like to feel more free to just post a small item or two on occasion - I've been feeling obliged to write longer and better-shaped posts, essays if you will, and that's not only what I want to be doing for my legion of fan. I also might as well put a Firedoglake newsfeed up, allowing me to turn my indignation upon a broader range of subjects.

"I think I'll go for a walk."

> That backwards-looking paragraph mark that indicates a forward-moving paragraph? It's called a pilcrow. 
> boingboing interior view of a glacier, via http://photoguth.com. I'd post a pic, but I don't seem to be able to work anything more complex than a toothbrush today.
>  No more vuvuzela practice in the Wisconsin State Capitol building.
> "You're not fooling anyone, you know."

different stuff, same bucket?

> Two (at least) interesting developments in the rollout of Obama 2012: the Justice Dept will stop defending DOMA against constitutional challenges (yay, gay people, and lesbian people, and straight people, and bi-people, and trans- and cis-gendered persons of all kinds!), AND is distancing itself from defending the individuals (as opposed to the government) responsible for denying Jose Padilla his rights as a citizen and a person. I'm talking about Rumsfeld, John Yoo, others of that ilk. Firedoglake. If I love Firedoglake that much, I should just go and marry it, and maybe someday I will.
> One of the things that people get wrong about Rumsfeld is that his distinctive patterns of speech produce nonsense. They are actually rigorously logical. The famous "known unknowns" quotation is an accurate and sober elaboration of 19th-century military strategist Helmut von Moltke's dictum, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." What offends me in Rumsfeld's speech is that it is weaponized against his domestic critics, his fellow Americans, either to display an unmatchable complexity of mind ("the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence") or belittle our tiny concerns ("Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war").
They also remind me of the lists of possibilities and their impossibility that Samuel Beckett compiled, esp in his early fictions. No reference on hand, but I'm sure I first saw them singled out by Hugh Kenner.
> It is always a good thing to read anything by Hugh Kenner. Here's a randomly chosen appreciation of his work.
> Oh yeah, I was writing about Ohbama. I imagine his moves away from DOMA and torture (slightly) are intended to make voting for him in 2012 more palatable to much of his former base. And on nothing else.

same stuff, different bucket

Reuters:

Russia blames Google for stirring Egypt unrest: report

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's deputy blamed Google Inc in an interview published on Tuesday for stirring up trouble in the revolution that ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

"Look what they have done in Egypt, those highly-placed managers of Google, what manipulations of the energy of the people took place there," Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin told the Wall Street Journal.

For "highly placed managers," read "learned elders."
Via DailyKos, which often has good stuff but ranks lower than Firedoglake and TPM in my esteem because of their incomprehensible, gleeful support of the individual mandate.
Putin&Co. are no doubt preparing lest Russia get as interesting as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain.... Looking way down the road, Tienanmen scenario? No, I think, because the military is hardly better off than it was before perestroika. Hama? Definite possibility with Putin in charge. But that is way down a road not yet paved - one gets the impression the wealthy are happy and entrenched, and the masses are too dispirited to make a real move.

revolting

So why am I going on and on about Egypt, Libya, etc. and playing armchair general?
Because I am fascinated by what it takes to move the donkey-wheel of power. What force and what leverage succeed? How do a people turn around a hostile government? What does it take? Is non-violence enough against a state that will kill? How much can a state, perhaps the one we live in, get away with? What the hell do I do about living in a torture-reliant state? Make no mistake about it, under Bush/Obama doctrine, an American citizen can be seized, subjected to torture, all civil rights denied, without even being prosecuted, and with all prospects for redress denied. If you think you're any better in the eyes of the law than your kindred American citizen, you're kidding yourself.

revolting

Before Mubarak's exit, stage right, I was discussing the Tahrar Square situation with a friend. I was certain that the only way the tide could be turned would be the Tienanmen Square option, murder all the folks protesting and scare the hell out of everybody else.
The people who run China, then and now, have the advantage of a standing army as big as a country. There are more soldiers in the PLA's permanent military than there are men, women and children in Latvia or Botswana. If you add in all military and paramilitary units, that comes to 7.5 million troops, one million more than there are people in Libya. Add reserves and civilian guards and you're up to 45 million at least, more than the population of Poland or Argentina, about the size of the nation of Colombia.
My point would be that in China the rulers had the advantage of being able to call on a country within a country, with its own hierarchy, mores, culture and governing laws. And all the weapons (approximately). That's a hell of a thing. The Tienanmen brutalist paradigm could not be easily replicated in Egypt, though it wasn't until after the government was deposed that I saw the factor that might have made it impossible.
The Egyptian military did not have a virtual country separate from the land they lived in. They were too much part of the population not to have it manifest that they would be turning their guns on their nieces and cousins, or childhood friends.
I've also seen the point made that the Egyptian military is a major owner and investor in the economy. They couldn't treat the population in revolt as if they were a colonized people, because they would have been razing their own fields.
What now are the possibilities in Libya? The army is mainly underweaponed and untrusted by the rulers, except for elite battalions dedicated to one Qaddafi or another. The elite battalions could commit a massacre (more sustained and localized than the mere killings they've committed so far), but I don't think that they have the resources and numbers relative to the population to impose a new normal and an absence of memory as the masters of the PLA could.
It scares me that Qaddafi certainly remembers as do I the total destruction of the city of Hama, Syria, by Hafez Al-Assad in 1982. The city was bombed flat and bulldozed to eradicate a revolt. A salutary action from the dictator's point of view.
We may be at the cusp of this occurring in Libya or not. There are likely reliable reports leaking out of attacks from the air, and of the defection of two jet pilots who flew to Malta rather than obey orders to bomb civilians. I'm sure somebody who knows Libya better than I do could still pick out an exemplary city Qaddafi could destroy to break the back of the revolt. I don't think it would work - not a sufficient separate military force to tame the nation. Mercenaries have been brought in from other countries, which must be galling elite and non-elite soldiers. A peace imposed by mercenaries and elite officers is a recipe for coup d'etat possibly even more threatening to Q than the general revolt.
A Tienanmen is not possible in Libya, I wager. The singular quality of Tienanmen is not only the end of the rebellion but the extirpation of rebellion and suppression from memory. We may yet see a Hama-style massacre in Libya. It might quell the immediate revolt, but I would bet we've seen the end of the Qaddafi era. Simply not enough resources for this country to make war on itself.
Stats are rough and courtesy of Answers.com and Wikipedia.

revolting

Again, Firedoglake.

In a meeting Sunday at the presidential palace in Kabul to investigate reports of multiple civilian deaths in a US operation in Konar province, General David Petraeus deeply offended those present when he suggested that Afghan civilians had deliberately burned their children in an effort to blame US attacks for their injuries. Rear Admiral Gregory J. Smith, the top military spokesperson in Kabul, then provided a statement to the Washington Post suggesting that the burns were inflicted on the children as punishment....
...the injuries included “burns and shrapnel wounds”. Is Smith next going to claim that in addition to burning their children, the Afghans are exploding bombs next to them so that they have shrapnel wounds?

Washington Post originated the story. No coverage in the NY Times, as of this posting. Next biggest MSM covering is Newsday. Faux News is only reporting the denial of the allegations in the WP story. Good lord, it almost makes you wish there were photos like this coming out of Afghanistan.

news

The fact that I'm being kicked in the head by serotonin-seizing bullies doesn't mean that I'm not fascinated by what's going on in the Middle East.
As usual, Firedoglake has the best round-up. The headline is about Bahrain, but the post goes on to cover Libya, Jordan and Yemen. And Iraq.
Who knew that the people were so miserable in Bahrain? This ignorant Americano thought that it was one of the oil countries' wealthy happy places.
Who (amongst the Americanos) could have imagined that there would be a popular non-violent uprising in Libya? I would have thought that The Colonel kept the grip too tight for such a being to breathe.
And Iraq. A Million-Orphan March on Baghdad. This is going way out on the theoretical limb, but what a thing it would have been had it happened under Saddam, rather than Bush&Obama (my stomach still turns at the thought of joining them with a slash rather than an ampersand). 

hums of a bore

A couple of posts ago I went on at some length about a couplet from the Jim Morrison/Doors song "Break on Through." Here are the other two lyrics that pop into mind when I think about pop faves.

Don't start me talking

I could talk all night

My mind is sleepwalking...

That's by Elvis Costello, from "Oliver's Army." I don't think I want to write any additional words about it. Some of the mystery has faded from "Break on Through" since I wrote about it.
The other is "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell and The Drells - a tightened up version appears below:

Hi everybody  

I'm Archie Bell of the Drells 

From Houston, Texas 

In Houston we just started a new dance 

Called the Tighten Up

This is the music 

We tighten up with 

Let's tighten it up now

Let's tighten it up now

Tighten it up

Do the tighten up

Come and tighten it up

Tighten it up now

Come on now, Billy

Tighten it up 

Oh, yeah

Now look here 

Tighten it up now  

Now everybody tighten it up now

Tighten it up

Tighten it up now

Come on and tighten it up

Tighten it up now

You can do it....

The SINGER is in the SONG. The SONG is what the WORDS are. The WORDS are what the SONG is made of. The DANCE is what the WORDS in the SONG say. 

Now make it mellow.

hee hee hee

Chickens coming home to roost for the Teapublican Party.

heartening, part two

Muslims protecting Christians, Christians protecting Muslims.

something heartening, for once

In Egypt, "...we see once again what the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. described as the “powerful moral force” of nonviolence in achieving social and political change..." Article by Jim White at Firedoglake, with interesting comments following.

I was heartened that speeches in Tahrir Square expressed Muslim unity with Christians. I was a little less heartened when I reviewed the history of the Jews in Egypt. Basically, none left to include. But who knows, maybe, overall, it could happen, something good, Egypt a democracy, Israel maybe someday not a theocracy, maybe it's OK to find it all heartening for once, after all.

sienna, umber, ochre, beige

Speaking of excellent friends who write books, Bill Brown has been very busy of late.

He's collected his reviews of popular and locally produced music in the '80s, originally written for the Ann Arbor News and Michigan Voice, into one volume called You Should've Heard Just What I Seen. I did the proofreading for the book, correcting him on such fine points as there being no hyphen between "Electro" and "Boogie" in the title of the Jonzun Crew's "Electro Boogie Encounter."

The juxtaposition of reviews of acts national (Devo, Violent Femmes, Olu Dara) and not (The Electrifying Mojo, Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band) suits Brown's democratic dancehall politics, where the floor and the stage are at the same height. It also made me wish that I had experienced being a member of a smaller community than NYC in those days, someplace where the band and I really lived in the same place, not merely crossed the same streets.

Michael Jackman of Michigan's Metro News ran a good interview with Bill, very amusing.

Brown, a devotee of Guy Debord, for many years has been publishing thoughts and provocations concerning Situationism, politics, Letterists/Lettrists, etc., as well as, comment dit-on?, informal translations by many hands of otherwise unavailable or ill-treated articles by and about the Situationists and their ilk, at the website NOT BORED! He's collected these, too, in a big black book, NOT BORED! Anthology 1983-2010. You can read them all online, of course, but I prefer reading longer, more challenging stuff on paper. Bill's own prose is clear and direct; this tendency can make difficult, even deliberately difficult, writing easier for a simple American like myself to understand.

The NOT BORED! book completes Bill's project of putting his work of years between covers and moving on. It's reminded me of Bart Simpson avidly hawking his conscience to Lisa after selling his soul to Milhouse: "It's a Bart sales event! Everything about me must go!"

You know...

I had a conversation with my excellent friend Patricia Morrison last night, about the newest of her very smart mystery books, set in the '60s.

One of the underlying themes of the books (and the '60s) is the destruction of old aristocracy (wealth, industry) and the rise of a new (youth, charisma). This morning I wondered whether this was a topic also addressed in a collection of poems by her late husband, the lyricist, singer and poet Jim Morrison.

Not so much, as it turns out, since I was misremembering the title as The Lords and the New People, not the New Creatures. But it got me turning over in my head my favorite Morrison lyric, the first words sung by Morrison on track one of the Doors' first record:

You know
the day destroys the night
night divides the day


I enjoy a hearty portion of mute nostril agony as much as the next inheritor of the '60s, but nothing slays me like concision, concentration and the elevation of the vernacular.

It's a trope, trivial, a cliche you might dismiss - night yields to day as day to night. But there's more here to hear.

the day destroys the night

Right there! Destroys! Destroys? Overcomes, supersedes, reigns o'er, sure, heard that before, but destroys? The day obliterates, crushes, kills the night forever? The day destroys the night, as if its victory were vicious and permanent. Also kinda cool that it's the day, associated with life, action, positivity, committing this act of violence against the sinister, mysterious and frightening night. It's not a sunrise, the sky is on fire.

night divides the day

This is the kind of transition I love because it operates against rationality, sequence, and is better for that. And I would never think of it. The day destroys the night? I'd be likely to think that the night must in turn declare war on, rebel against, overthrow the day. That's would be my direct, sensible, logical extension.

Instead Morrison next puts the day and night in different relation (even the definite article differs), a continuity of days broken by nights. If that first line I see as an explosion, this second is a band of white broken by blacks - and the blacks, being mere separators, interruptions, would be smaller bands, stripes between the lengths of days.

But night divides the day. It's not a pause, a rest, a sleep. Whatever the continuity of days, the night breaks them. Repeatedly, inexorably, snipping them off like a Fate. The day forever, and forever broken by the night.

Between them, for me, if not for you, is the invisible lyric, the Zen stretch where dualism vanishes. You think it's one and another, you think this acts against that and that against this, but they do exist together. They are a continuum. The superiority of one over the other is illusory (there is no aristocracy to overthrow). They are only more time seeming to pass, seeming to change. And the one that's destroyed in the morning still exists to divide the day come night.

It's very close to a koan. Does the match eat the fire or does the fire eat the match?

It's not as if I think Jim (and I call him Jim because that's what I call him when I'm talking with Patricia, not because I think I have some special or vicarious relation to him) had this all intended when he wrote these lines in his notebook, most likely wacked out of his gourd on a summery California beach. But he kept these words, when I'm sure there were many opportunities to lose them. He kept them stoned and he kept them sober. He kept them together and had the sense that they would be lesser, alone or apart. This is called writing poetry. And because I don't like his rococo verse (and such big portions) I've generally only tentatively given him the title of poet in my own mind. But while writing this I've convinced myself or he's convinced me (is that the afterlife?), yes, he was a poet.

Yeah, there are actually three lines. That "y'know" is the difference between a lyricist/singer and a poet on paper. And dropping the definite article before "night" in the last line is the work of a lyricist, singer and poet acting as one.

> Patricia Morrison's four rock 'n' roll mysteries are available as books and ebooks from Lizard Queen Press. They and her previous books are also available from Amazon. Jim Morrison's books and songs can be found through many purveyors of fine media.

lately

Lately I've been making these posters for some reason

Well I thought I'd upload you one of them

But between Apple, Google and Adobe, one of them won't let me

Let's try this one:

There. That seemed to work.

o well

> sO I'm giving up on my attempts to understand President O. I joined the ranks of the many exhausted when the midterm elections showed pretty much what we expected them to show, that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And the best weren't so hot to begin with.
I think I understand him now all too well... he's not the man we need/ed and hope/d we were getting. Some jerky jackasses may want to think that we projected this necessity onto Obama because of his blackness, but I reject that. It wasn't unreasonable to hope that the man who said the things he said during the campaign would do those things and others that we/I think are urgently needed.
I notice that I skip a step in thinking about this. I didn't get what I hope/vote/d for - I accept that. My worst fears for where the country is going seem to be materializing - and I'm starting to figure out what I'm capable of doing about it, knowing that if I was ever capable of doing this, I'm just too old for it now.
That middle step - that I was fooled, duped, was out-and-out stupid to believe - that's the one I try to jump over.

squaring the O

....It isn’t that [Obama]’s not fighting, he fights like hell for what he wants. He whipped incredibly aggressively for TARP, he has passed emergency war funding (breaking a campaign promise) several times, and nearly broke the arms of feckless liberals in the process. I mean, when Bernie Sanders did the filiBernie, Obama flirted with Bernie’s potential 2012 GOP challenger. Obama just wants policies that cement the status of a aristocratic class, with crumbs for everyone else (Republican elites disagree in that they hate anyone but elites getting crumbs). And he will fight for them.

There is simply no basis for arguing that Democratic elites are pursuing poor strategy anymore. They are achieving an enormous amount of leverage within the party. Consider the following. Despite Obama violating every core tenet of what might have been considered the Democratic Party platform, from supporting foreclosures to destroying civil liberties to torturing political dissidents to wrecking unions, Obama has no viable primary challenger. Moreover, no Senate Democratic incumbent lost a primary challenge in 2010, despite a horrible governing posture. Now THAT is a successful strategy, it minimized the losses of the Democratic elite and kept them firmly in control of the party....

Matt Stoller, at Naked Capitalism, via Firedoglake

binary culture

> I recently watched a movie called You, the Living. That's what my Netflix instant watching queue tells me, and it tallies with my memory, so I'm sure I did.
I know it's a wry episodic comedy of short interconnected scenes, because that's what I saw. For the first half of it (approximately) I thought it was a movie with an interesting esthetic device: most of the sets were flats, either digital or actual, with working elements incorporated - a door, a chair, a table with two people at it foregrounded against an unreal background. I admired the execution of it, and how it complemented the theme of lives in physical and emotional isolation.
About halfway through (approximately), lightning struck. Figuratively speaking for me, actually in the movie. All the lighting, previously, had been quite static. Now a rain was falling in the world of the movie, and it changed the light in the movie, and the changing light in the movie changed how I saw the movie I was watching in/from the real world.
With the shifting light of rains falling and clouds moving darkness and light, the backgrounds all became digitally alive, changing texture, taking on depth within the two dimensions of my TV set. The backgrounds had not been flats, digital or actual - the movie had been digitized and compressed in a way that averaged out static elements so that they appeared unreal, manufactured or synthesized. The interesting esthetic stroke was a flaw in pixelation.
Once the rain stopped, I watched two movies, or maybe three: the movie made, with formally limited but nonetheless actual sets; the movie I could make visible by relaxing my sight and allowing the compressed pixels to become static again; and the one I made by shifting my conception of it back and forth. I moved my conception, an abstraction, back and forth in a space that was actually a preponderance of impressions altering the balance of perception - I watched a movie.
Netflix tells me that Roy Andersson, director and writer, was "[i]nspired by Goethe's poetry series The Roman Elegies." I don't know if this is true: I've seen the movie but I am illiterate in Goethe and have never read The Roman Elegies. But now that I've seen the movie I will go to Wikipedia and read about Goethe and The Roman Elegies and then I might go somewhere else (in digital space while still sitting on my couch) and read The Roman Elegies. Whatever reading is.
In the meantime, You, the Living, has fallen off Netflix's watch instantly stream, so unless the DVD has the same digital deficiencies, which it shouldn't, you won't see any of the movies I saw. By some wild freak of chance, you could see it projected from film in a theatre, as it was meant to be shown, but you won't see any of the movies I saw either. But you still might feel something for the little fat man who cries, "Nobody understands me."

The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument. One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved; they argued back and forth but could not reach a conclusion.
The Sixth Patriarch Hui-Neng said, "It is not the wind that moves, it is not the flag that moves; it is your minds that move."

o yeah

> Certainly I recognize that one of the other differences in the media treatment of the OJ and MJ cases (see King of Pain, below) has to do with racial/sexual fascination. The black man who fucks a white woman - a blonde - has always been an object of - well, really, I think fascination is the best way to describe it - to the Great White Public. The case had the controversy of race and the sexiness of miscegenation and rage.
In comparison, the case of MJ is just sad. To the degree that he was associated with sex, the attachment is at the least squirmy, at worst squalid and contemptible. No rage and no racial angle (imagine if Dr. Murray were white). Nothing to get excited about.
> You may remember OJ's lawyer, Johnnie Cochrane, at some point being asked about "playing the race card" and replying, "It's always about race." It's stuck in my mind and I've thought about it and thought about it and gone from doubting it to seeing its power as a filter. It's no less powerful phrase as "It's always about sex" AND "It's always about queerness." (I can't think of any other terms you could filter for that compare, not even "It's always about money." Close, but no. Perhaps money already is race and sex in this country.)

king o' pain, part two

> I'm trying to get away from every post rounding out as an essay. Essays are very satisfying to construct, but they take time. I want to maintain the freedom to just dash in here and drop a thing or two, at greater length than a twoot, but not always with so much care to turn a pile into a structure.
> For example, of course the inclination was to title the previous entry, on MJ, with a quote from one of his songs. But I would have to spend more time sifting through lyrics to find something non-obvious than would be fun, required or necessary for blogging. When I opened the possibilities to some other pop citation, right away I thought of "King of Pain." The first time I heard that song (sample lyric: "there's a skeleton choking on a crust of bread") I laughed and laughed. "What a sense of humor this Sting guy has," I thought. "And how cool to poke fun of his own po-faced solemnity this way." Eventually I realized that the song was not meant ironically and it became much less funny and enjoyable. But the title seemed apt for Jackson. I hadn't even noticed the echo of King of Pop. Even MJ crowning himself so was sad. And ultimately when I think of MJ, I don't think of the dancing or the singing or the pedophiliac urges, I just wonder if he ever had a really happy day in his life.
> While I was on the bus I thought of a great way to segue smoothly in one entry from MJ to King of Pain to something else and than structure back to MJ, but I forgot it by the time I got to the computer. It was one of those days when you have a million good ideas one after another but only time to do three of them and write five of them down to do later, if you're lucky.

king of pain

I find it remarkable that the manslaughter trial pertaining to Michael Jackson's death is getting so little media attention.
Michael Jackson has to be the best known person outside the political sphere to be killed at the hands of himself or another. I can hardly think of anyone to compare. Gandhi (Indira and Mohandas)? Political. Neruda? Political. John Belushi and Marvin Gaye? Not comparable to Jackson internationally. Marilyn Monroe? Comes closer, but a different time and place... no doubt an actress of similar stature today would rate a larger, more sustained fuss than back then. Compare the fuss over Lindsay Lohan's misadventures - and imagine if they led to her death.
The only comparable public figure caught up in a homicide I can think of is OJ. Why is the doctor's manslaughter trial so little a feature of the media, in comparison?
In the days after Jackson's death I think my mood matched that of the general public - sadness, sure, but shock, no, not even surprise. I think with all we knew of Jackson - his isolation, extremity in weirdness, refuge in pedophiliac relationships, his face carved and bleached to a skull - it seemed everything we knew about him as a person was pathological. Onstage, alive, yes, but offstage, no. For many of us, I think, it was as if he was already dead and the news was just getting around.
Not a hell of a lot of outrage as Dr. Murray's contribution was gradually made known. Arguably, he killed one of the most famous men in the world, but emotionally, it's as if MJ killed himself, even if by another hand.

the last happy new year

I was discussing the new year's holiday this morning with Irving, the office manager at my dentist's. It was a blah holiday for me, saved from inclusion among the very worst because there were no actual deaths in the vicinity. Irving was sick with a throat thing that's been going around. We commiserated, which gave me an idea for improving New Year's Eve, the holiday with the lowest ratio of actual to anticipated pleasure.
Rather than desperately strive to redeem the old or consecrate the new, we should resolve to have a fairly but not immoderately crappy time on New Years Eve. If you don't have that year's flu already, lay in a supply of comfort food and then acquire it. If you can't catch it, simulate it. Arrange yourself on the couch with too many blankets, smoke some bad marijuana and chase it with whisky and honey. Medicate with TV. Eat too many sweet things. Be bored. Keep the cough syrup close at hand.
I would even suggest that the week between Xmas and New Years become a traditional time for minor medical procedures: colonoscopies (there will be enough time and incentive to fast after Thankschristmas), mammograms, gum cleaning. The idea is to be able to say for the fifty-two weeks following, this sucks, but at least it's not as bad as New Years Eve.