Whiskey Ashes

Eeeek

2007-03-15T20:01:00.001-07:00

NTodd is in my house.

Eeeeek.

LAST POST

2006-07-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

Whiskey Ashes is Moving! Name changing, too.

Go here for the new site:

whiskeyfire dot typepad dot com

Don't be a square. Check out the new digs.

Holy Shit

2006-07-23T01:48:00.000-07:00

Seriously.

Holy shit.

Man, these people are brazen.

Too cool...

2006-07-23T00:17:00.000-07:00

Good news, and a preview!

Neat.

ANOTHER SHOCKING WHISKEY ASHES EXPOSE!!!

2006-07-22T20:41:00.000-07:00

This is so shocking in its shockitude that you will not merely be shocked -- you will be shocked!!!!

I was in the grocery store today and I saw THIS:

T Rex, dude, you are so busted.

Why did you do it man? WHY! WHY!

This story by the way is from The World's Only Reliable Paper -- says so on the front cover. And that's even more persuasive than "All the News That's Fit to Print." So you know this is true.

So I exclaim to the Heavens:

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Oh wait. Sorry. Here is what I shout:

STELLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAA!

Damn. I mean:

TREXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX!

Changes

2006-07-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

Big changes a-coming. Hold on to your hats.

Why?

2006-07-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

Can anyone explain why on earth anyone sees any value at all in "vlogging," besides its capacity to permit crazy people to gibber nonsensically at you in the comfort of your own home? I mean, damn, I used to have to go down to the N train at 2 AM to see these people...

Though yellow walls are a pretty appropriate look for Althouse, all things considered. Can't deny that.

Sex and Power at Disneyworld!

2006-07-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

The Happy Panopticon

At Crooked Timber, the question is asked, was Foucault secretly a Habermasian? Tongue in cheek, but also semi-seriously. Without getting into the whole argument (read the post and thread if that's your thing), this caught my attention:

To me, Foucault is a little like Bourdieu – his theory of power is less valuable as an abstraction than as a method; an intellectual tool for critiquing social practices that we would otherwise take for granted. But for a critique to really work, it should hint (at the very least) at a vision of how things might be better if they were organized differently. The Foucault of Discipline and Punish isn’t entirely the Foucault who wrote The Order of Things and is more attractive for it (just as the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire is more attractive and complicated than the Marx of the Grundrisse).

Foucault and Bourdieu are not often mentioned together, at least in the States. I think part of the reason is to do with an assumed distinction between "method," as the CT post calls it, and capital-T Theory. Foucault and Bourdieu don't necessarily work well together as Theory, perhaps because of the pressure that you first start to feel in grad school to sort of pick your theorist to be loyal to like you'd pick a football team to root for. But for practical purposes I see no reason why various aspects of what they say about specific social and political modalities can't be used in a complementary way to illuminate a particular issue or phenomenon in literature or history or literary history or whatever. The question is, what do you put first, the work to be done or the theoretical theorizing? I've always thought it was the work before all, and then you install the theory to support it, as it were, or, maybe a better image, to help you examine and reweave the knots as you untangle them. (I mostly lean towards Bourdieu myself, but really, my work on censorship owes a lot to Foucault, whose insights on sexuality and repression are more or less right on and indispensible for my project.)

This is why I'm a bit suspicious of the remark that "for a critique to really work, it should hint (at the very least) at a vision of how things might be better if they were organized differently." I don't see why; if a theory helps one produce a compelling description, that is a fairly major accomplishment. Description, I've come to somewhat sourly observe, is rather a lost virtue in the humanities. More of a premium is placed on arguments that are directed at ambitions such as "liberation," or an overthrow of the patriarchy, or an end to neocolonialism. Not that these aren't worthy goals. I just could never get my head around how an analysis of the minor works of Walter Scott was supposed to advance them particularly. (My dyspepsia here is genuine, though my more patient readers will be perhaps recognize the comedy of the fact that this has been my position for literally years in the light of certain of my recent online adventures. Oh well, what the hell.) Anyway, I don't like the notion that the ultimate value of criticism lies in its ability to point a way forward to a better future for all humanity. This strikes me as the ghost of Arnoldian sweetness and light knocking feebly at the door. Ah... that's maybe too harsh. I really have no beef with progressive literary analysis. I just stubbornly refuse to concede to it the capacity to ultimately judge what is and is not good theory or analysis. If that makes sense. And if it does, drop me a line, and explain it to me...

Oh, and yes, Disneyworld. (I admit, I used the word "sex" in the title of the post purely to titillate. I am SO ashamed.) ANY-way, a brief aside here:

Is it not obvious that the architecture of Foucault's Discipline and Punish is precisely the inverse of that of the EPCOT Center attraction Spaceship Earth? Disney sees the emergence of new communications technologies, such as video cameras and computers in every home in the world, all connected to a central "Network Operations" command center, as profoundly liberating, in that in the future it can help your extremely blond kids talk about karate with some prepubescent Japanese girl with an accent like she grew up in Scarsdale (I'm not making this up). Foucault was perhaps somewhat more skeptical of these sorts of technological advances.

Corpse Metrics

2006-07-20T00:14:00.000-07:00

In the 1990s I closely followed the unfolding Irish peace process. This was and is a confusing, complex issue laden with all sorts of political and historical and cultural contradictions. And the process itself was and is perpetually on the verge of collapse. At various points it actually did collapse, only to rise again and stagger on.

It's easy to get lost in all the arguments and counterarguments when you're trying to make sense of this kind of a messy situation, where even the most apparently sincere actors clearly have more than one motive and are obviously responsive to more than one set of imperatives and one class of audiences. But of course the fact that some political issue is difficult is no excuse for ignoring it, or for refusing to pass judgment on the grounds that it might damage your own standing, whatever that is; that is of course the dishonorable way out, tempting as it may be to keep silent, or to just ignore it altogether. I have this crazy idea that reasonable people need to develop a reasonable language with which we can describe these seemingly unreasonable conflicts, in the hopes of perhaps maybe one day solving them. Eh.

I mean, there is a powerful censorship effect that is exerted by all such struggles, like the Troubles, and also of course Israel/Palestine. This censorship effect is not just negative, producing silence, although that is of course quite powerful. Whatever you say, say nothing, as Heaney diagnoses it. But even more important: all knotty conflicts produce their own jargon, their own set of cliches and expressions, their own more or less irreducible linguistic chunks of ossified ideology. "Israel has the right to defend itself"; "the Zionist entity." This is an insidious kind of productive censorship, one that defines the conflict in language that does not explain anything but protects the speaker from having to, well, run the risk of encountering an uncomfortable explanation. Heaney again:

As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and Sten,

Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree.'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.'
'They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably ...'
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

It occurred to me at some point as I was watching the events in Northern Ireland that part of the confusion I felt was confusion over what I really wanted to see happen. What would be the best outcome?

I think the kind of censorship I'm describing obscures a simple answer to this question.

It is my opinion that the only reasonable metric that can be used to figure out the best way forward in these situations is to count corpses. The best approach is the one that produces the fewest dead people. This approach would be the one that performs the magical feat of transforming an actual armed conflict to one that is essentially symbolic, where saving face is a matter of diplomacy and not of missiles or special forces.

To put this another way, a difficult conflict, like the one in Northern Ireland, or in the Middle East, can really only be achieved when the true goal is shifted from that of victory to that of peace.

Sounds banal, I know. But I don't think this argument is widely understood, let alone accepted. Certainly not by this administration.

Fewest corpses wins. How about that as a foreign policy objective?

A Response to a Critic

2006-07-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

What shall I say to this?

Merely, that Phila exhibits, inevitably, a lamentable misapprehension of the ontological res ipsa of the conservative Weltanschung, perpetrating a lachrymose conflation of the ineffable, foundational values of the national genesis with an ahistorical, anachronistic hothouse exhibition of contemporary mores, producing in extremis, naught but jejune animadversions upon the essence of the contemporary genus of the American l'homme naturel; and, more is the pity, Phila is also indelibly guilty of a disgusting liberal inability to accord Mexicans all due contempt, especially the gay ones.

Amazing

2006-07-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

This really is the most astonishing thing I have ever seen.

This is the President of the Unites States of America. Let me repeat: this is the leader of the United States of America.

Unbelievable.

My Loves

2006-07-17T21:30:00.000-07:00

Probably my favorite show on television is E!'s The Soup. Why? Because nowhere else on television can you regularly see clips of, say, rapper DMX saying things like:

I don't give a fuck how big he is, how small he is. I'll fuck a midget up. Straight up. Straight up. I'll bust a midget's ass.

I, for one, believe him.

UPDATE

Oh, I know. You only come here for this shit. Very well, then, here goes:

Nevertheless - and herein lies the aporia - one cannot at once demand that the intellectuals leave the masses to their untutored, uncritical feelings about things, their unsophisticated, unphilosophical, often quite arbitrary and incoherent emotions, and demand that they be liberated from the `tyranny' of schoolmarms, busybodies, and the other parasites the Derb claims to perceive in their toils for the Culture of Life. Either one will demand, and to some real extent, strive to teach, everyone to think for himself, or one will strive to inculcate in all a reverence for authority as this is embodied in custom, tradition, inherited norms, folkways, the Church, and so on. What one cannot reasonably do is maintain, as the twin poles of a neopagan ethos of nonthought, that people ought not be subjected to the authority of those institutions and persons who have been the embodiments of wisdom in a culture, and must be left to the imagined sanctity of their utterly untutored, unelevated, wo wo wo feelings. Men must either think for themselves, and that deeply, to the depths - and conservatives have always been sceptical of both the process and the results of this - or they must yield, even bow, before some authority; but what they cannot do - what they should not attempt, for it is the peril of any civilization - is to wall themselves within their uncultivated feelings and urges, refusing to think about them save in some narrow, unspecifiable sense, and within some undefined limits, while repudiating the wisdom of those who may have, of whatever origins, some superior insight into the matters on which they are content merely to ejaculate their ignorance, as though feeling something intensely were equivalent to either thought or knowledge, however obtained.

Therein lies the FUCKING APORIA, MOTHERFUCKER. Motherfucking jackanapes. Go ejaculate your feelings elsewhither before the bugbear of the escutcheon masticates your spondee, you.

Wo wo wo, Ichabod.

A Rare Delight

2006-07-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

Via Roy Edroso, I am pleased to announce the discovery of perhaps the Very Greatest Writer on All the Internets. This would be one "Maximos," a commenter on Tacitus's blog. Maximos's style is very much in the Tacitus idiom, only -- and this will amaze you -- much, much better. Here is a sample of his deft touch, his mastery of metaphor:

It is this shattering inability to reckon with reality that kindles in me a desire to simply turn away, to turn away so as not to witness the insalubrious spectacle of a society so etiolated as to manifest no righteous anger, but only either indifference or further rounds of self-inquisition. It is this spiritual torpor, this unconscious despondency of the national soul, in which, bewitched by the illusion that there is virtue in national self-abnegation, Britain imagines that she will manifest virtue by courting the favour of those who, if they only remain true to what they are, cannot but despise her and seek her violation, that moves me to indifference. Is there not a time to bid the fool enjoy his folly while it endures, for after that there will be judgment? - especially when the fool refuses to acknowledge the judgment? One may, perhaps, offer prayers for such an one; nothing else will be availing, except perhaps some unutterable extremity of horror.

If you got lost there in the subordinate clauses, I'm pretty sure what he's saying is that he wants a sandwich. Or else he's talking about organic gardening, or how he thought the third season of The Sopranos was a bit of a letdown. Whatever. Excellent stuff.

Best writer since Amanda McKittrick Ros, easily. As this Grande Dame of Letters put it so memorably in her classic novel Irene Iddesleigh:

The silvery touch of fortune is too often gilt with betrayal: the meddling mouth of extravagance swallows every desire, and eats the heart of honesty with pickled pride: the imposury of position is petty, and ends, as it should commence, with stirring strife.

To this, Maximus might perhaps reply:

I have longed to return, as well as to revisit many of the other nations of Western Europe; but, of late, the desire has ebbed. To behold the great cities and cathedrals of Europe, and to know that Europe has chosen one of two futures - perhaps both - the first A Brave New World, and the second, one characterized by the call of the muezzin, is to behold a land of which it may be said, “Ichabod!”, and to feel a palpable darkness that constricts the lungs and emtombs the spirit.

Indeed. Indeed.

Thers's Law of the Internets

2006-07-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

95% of what happens online is not worth getting upset over.

When you find yourself bogged down in that last 5%, turn off the damn computer.

Uncanny...

2006-07-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

Because watertiger is here...

It's uncanny. It really is the same creepy smile. Not to mention the same lipstick.

Good Lord

2006-07-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here with our friend watertiger, and we're looking at this picture from the front page of Newsday.

Well, shit. Story here.

Yeats:

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

I see no good from this, nor any "good guys." Only gathering evil, and chaos, and the rule of fools and bigots.

Blind Nonpartisan Squirrels (Nasty as I Wanna Be Remix)

2006-07-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

I've spent several months now reading Ann Althouse closely, mostly because she is entertaining as heck for fans of self-obsessed banality. So when she says something actually interesting, it would be less than integritudinous not to acknowledge it. If you don't know the background to what she's referring to, count yourself lucky and reread one of the amusing anecdotes in one of the last two posts, you'll be much better off:

I agree Frisch has a big problem. She's the weakling who entered a drinking match with a man who can drink you under the table. She lost control. She paid the price -- a big one. Goldstein's you-talked-about-my-child move is a strong one, but it's a move nonetheless, made by a person who likes to play the game... hard. He's not a victim. He's one of the people who has advanced himself in the blogosphere by making it hostile and ugly. Like all of us, he is capable of being hurt by a genuine crazy. But why not just delete the trolls? Why rile them? Some of them really aren't playing with a full deck. Why push weak people until they lose control? It's an ugly game, and I think Jeff knows he plays it.

On this, I'll just quote the Editors:

That Althouse comment was not only not stupid, not only right, it was downright penetrating. That is the dynamic, how she describes it, perfectly.

*shudders*

Pretty much, yeah.

Now, let's realign the planets.

This Althousian eruption is pretty funny, really. She sounds far more obsessed with my old blog than I ever was with her. Or than I ever was with my old blog, for that matter. As a clever person once said, "But why not just delete the trolls? Why rile them?" Why not just not read a blog that drives you ape, you big gorilla? Oh well.

The comedy though lies in her speculations as to just why I would be so driven to make fun of her every so often. She comes up with "jealousy," because as a community college professor what I must really want in my secretest heart of hearts is a job just as FAB-ulous as hers!

God, that's great stuff.

Me, I'd always thought I'd made fun of her because she is a liar with a nasty streak as well as just plain goofy.

Criticizing Althouse is like taking Occam's Razor to a giant jelly doughnut.

One More Kid Story...

2006-07-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

A short one. The Almost-Two-Year-Old gets a hold of the portable phone and delightedly starts pushing buttons. But she's then quite startled to hear a voice suddenly say:

"If you'd like to make a call, please hang up..."

So she thinks a second, listens some more, looks up and screams in joy:

"MOMMY!"

So now you know exactly what my wife's voice sounds like. She also has a fantastic memory for phone numbers -- just ask her the name and town, and she'll hook you up. (Hahahahaha. Little phone humor, there!..... Sorry.)

Learning By Example

2006-07-10T14:55:00.000-07:00

So I was in the shower, and I hear the bathroom door bang open, which means the Almost-Two-Year-Old is coming in for a visit. Sure enough, her little head soon pokes in through the shower curtain. We have a little talk about bathroom things; I turn off the water, say "I'm wet" and she yells "TOWEL!" She knows what's what.

As I'm drying off the conversation inevitably turns to poo. She has a potty chair, and so we've been introducing her to its use and functions.

The Almost-Two-Year-Old: Poo-poo.

Me: Yes, poo-poo in the potty chair.

TATYO: Chay-ah!

Me: Right! How do you go poo-poo in the potty chair?

She shrieks in delight, opens the lid, peers inside.

TATYO: Poo-poo?

Me: You have to sit on it first and make the poo-poo. How do you do that?

A look of enlightenment crosses her angelic little face. She runs from the room... and comes back in with a book. At this point she sits down in the chair and cries out in triumph:

POO-POO!

And of course is holding the book upside down.

Always have something to read in the bathroom. I'm kinda proud she learned that even before she knows how to properly take a dump in a toilet.

Incidentally, the book was Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody. It's a good read, but try to hold it rightside up.

BTW, I've been reflecting for a few days now that I'm glad I did what I could to keep this kid out from the epicenter of a blogwar, even if I was only semi-successful and was initially & briefly pissed off enough to think otherwise. People can make their own decisions about what to do when their child is slandered in a blog comments section, but personally, the idea of making hay of it ultimately turned my stomach. (Details about the actual events here and here. I again thank Bas-o-Matic.)

2006-07-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

A Right jolly old elf

Christmas in Hell

So I'm reading Boehlert's Lapdogs and enjoying it. Most of the stuff I already knew, as will anyone who's followed liberal blogs for a while, but it's still pretty powerful seeing it all compiled.

This passage stuck me, much in the same way that having one of those giant cans of Progresso soup fall on your head at the supermarket would strike you. Boehlert is talking about the cozy relationship between the press elite and the Bushite junta, and cites this gem from Andrea "Mrs. Greenspan" Mitchell:

In her memoir, Mitchell descibed this inside-the-Beltway holiday scene, as cabinet members and celebrity hournalists socialized: "At the Rumsfelds', everyone seemed especially jolly. The defense secretary was almost bouncing on his heels. The vice president and my husband huddled in a corner. George Tenet was cracking jokes. At one point, Tim Russert told the CIA director that he'd dreamed Saddam had been captured."

Gah. Among the disturbing images here is the notion of a jolly Rumsfeld bouncing around dressed like a Christmas Elf, with little bells and green tights.

Instead of a Christmas ornament, picture Rummy sitting on a cluster bomb...

2006-07-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

NY Gay Marriage Appeal Loss

Well, nuts.

I'd sort of expected it, though. For one thing, Spitzer has been consistent in his opinion that the NY constitution does not provide a basis for legal challenges to a ban on same-sex marriages. I'm not going to slam him for this, unlike some others. (I understand the anger, but, well, Spitzer is a lawyer and I'm not. He's consistently made it clear that he supports same-sex marriage in principle, and I don't think that on this issue there are any politicians who would say this if it were not actually true, even in NY.) The upshot is, based on what I understood about Spitzer's opinion and upon what I'd gathered about NY judges, especially the high court, I'd not been very optimistic about the outcome. Which was, in the end, a lot of blather about the children, Oh! The CHILDREN!, and a punt to the lege. Feh.

The question is of course, what next? Well, Spitzer has pledged to seek a change to the law to allow same-sex marriage if he's elected governor, as seems more than likely. Suozzi, his Long Island primary challenger, and Faso, the latest complete lunatic dredged up from the cesspit that is the NY GOP, are agin' it. So we'll vote for Spitzer and hold him to his word. What the hell else is there to do?

UPDATE

The Suozzi campaign sure seems quite like a circus-train wreck -- dead and dying clowns littering the ground, their noses honking a mournful dirge.

2006-07-05T21:47:00.000-07:00

CENSORED LESBIAN SMUT!

Bourdieu is here talking (Rules of Art 58-9) about France in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it applies equally well to Ireland in the middle of the twentieth. And who knows, maybe it applies to other times and places as well.

Thus it is clear that the literary and artistic field is constituted as such in and by an opposition to a "bourgeois" world which had never before asserted so bluntly its values and pretension to control the instruments of legitimation, both in the domain of art and in the domain of literature, and which, through the press and its hacks, now aims to impose a degraded and degrading definition of cultural production.

Bourdieu is referring at the end here to one of his IMO more interesting and useful ideas, about the best way to explain the more or less constant fighting over Art -- and indeed, anything humans seem so driven to create.

All artistic judgements are in one sense arbitrary. You like this, I like that, they liked that 400 years ago, they wore THAT crap in the 1970s! That was horrible! (Well, it was. Most 1970s clothes were indeed empirically horrible. But I digress.) So if it is all arbitrary, why do people get so worked up over arguments that we all know will seem silly in a decade or so? (Whitesnake still, of course, sucks.) What's up with all the fighting?

Bourdieu's great insight (for me, anyway) is that this is an essentially political question. People get so worked up over these sorts of issues because what is really is at stake is what he calls the power to impose the dominant definition of legitimate cultural production.

The point of any specific conflict may be, say, Janet Jackson's tit, or Ulysses, or The Passion of the Christ, but take a step back from each of these controversies, and what do you have? Different groups and individuals struggling mightily over who gets to decide what we can and cannot, what we should and should not, say and do in public.

That is power at one of its most basic levels. What you wear, your haircut, the music you like, the books you read, the films you hate -- all of these define you as an individual and express a whole universe of data about how you see yourself (consciously and unconsciously) and how you relate towards the wider culture in which we all must exist. Ever dyed your hair, picked out a shirt, played a particular song, whatever, knowing that it was some sort of "message" about who you are and what you aspire to be? Ever refused to do so, because it was not who you thought you were, or think you are?

That's some powerful shit, man. Think about what it means to be able to influence such decisions for masses of people. If you can establish control over these obscure, arbitrary, contradictory, confused impulses -- THAT is power.

The natural corollary is that when you can define what people CANNOT so or say, that is also an expression of this same power. (All this explains why NRO gets so hysterical about this kind of nonsense.)

As for the rest of the excerpt I excerpted above, Bourdieu is arguing that in the middle of the 19th century in France, writers like Flaubert and Baudelaire had to struggle against a dominant bourgeois class that roughly, and even violently, asserted its power to define what could and could not be said in public, and deeply resented the capacity of "artists" to express their own unique view of the actual dynamics of the contemporary social and cultural order.

Wait, what was my topic?...

Oh yes, lesbian smut. See, in the debate in the Irish Senate I mentioned earlier, the fighting over Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices centered over a single sentence in that book -- and it is, indeed, in my opinion one of the most shocking and deliberately offensive sentences ever written, considering all the circumstances.

That's why it is, to this day, officially stricken from the official Irish parliamentary records, even 65 years later.

I won't tell you what that sentence was. You won't be able to handle it. It would horrify you to your very marrow. No: I will remain silent, and will not reveal the most awful sentence in all of modern Irish literature to you.

I respect your honor and sense of decency too much.

(PSSSST: The sentence is about teh GAY! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!)

UPDATE: Oh, OK. The sentence is "She saw her father and Etienne in the embrace of love."

2006-07-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

These are pictures of the chicken boursin on brown rice with asparagus I cooked for my wife. She also got pate and a glass of wine. And why not? She deserves this.

The mommy duck is doing well. All seems right with the world tonight.

2006-07-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

What a Country

The always delightful Bull Moose opens a post on torture with, appropriately enough, ruminations on Yakov Smirnoff:

As we approach Independence Day, the Moose waxes rhapsodic about the wonder and glory that is America. He recalls the Russian-born comic Yakov Smirnoff who was hot back in the eighties. When he was confronted with another marvel of his new home, Smirnoff would declare, "What a Country!"

That was the response the Moose had to the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision.

It is indeed wacky that the Supreme Court declared that the president does not have the right to torture whoever he wants. What a gas.

Anyway, it makes sense that someone who fails to recognize just how grating his affected third-person schtick is would similarly fail to realize that Yakov Smirnoff didn't actually tell "jokes." As I recall it from endless 1980s talk show appearances, Smirnoff's act was comprised of simple declarative sentences that formally resembled jokes, but were in fact merely banal and indeed largely meaningless observations.

But maybe he got funnier, so I looked him up.

Hoo boy. Smirnoff now owns his own theater in Branson, Missouri. He informs us at his site that this municipality has twice voted him "comedian of the year." I do not doubt it. He puts on a regular show, which he describes here:

There ought to be a caution sign as you enter the Yakov Smirnoff Theatre in Branson, Missouri. It should read “Warning! Hold on to your seat ‘cause this guy is about to blow you away with dynamite comedy!” This ‘guy’ of course is Branson’s Two-Time Comedian of the Year, Yakov Smirnoff, the famous Russian Comedian. He delivers explosive laughter in a show filled with brilliant special effects, dazzling dancing, heartfelt moments, and just plain fun. Yakov’s entire show is packed with comedic tall tales and witty perceptions, funny facts and huge laughs.

You know, it's your own damn theater. If you think there ought to be a sign put up, then go ahead and put up the freaking sign. Gah.

Laughs keep on coming, though:

From the heartland of America, our funny philosopher takes us on a comedic journey and brings us unique insights into life, family, and these United States. As Yakov says, "Only In America can a Russian and a Japanese own a theater in the middle of the Ozarks!"

This is truly the sort of thing that can only happen in America, because that is where the Ozarks happen to be located. You have to give him that. Well-spotted.

As for the "philosopher" bit, we read that he "has just completed a new book, 'Smirnoff For The Soul', that shares this funny philosopher's life-changing stories from the heart." Noted without comment.

All this is of course kitsch. But I find something grotesque about all such warm, fuzzy patriotism, because it's an eruption of thoughtless emotion. One expression of this ideological tangle can be found in Branson, Missouri. Another can be located in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It's all part of the same long-running American clown show, booked solid for years, get comfortable because they've bricked up the exits.

2006-07-02T23:54:00.000-07:00

Who's Your Favorite Wingnut Shitbag?

The cretin who runs the New Editor wants to know who is your favorite chickenhawk. Apparently, this smug little git believes he has us On The Ropes if we use the "chickenhawk meme" against himself and his cohorts:

Some critics of the Iraq war like to use the 'chickenhawk' argument in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of those who support the war, but did not themselves serve in the military.

This rhetoric ignores many things, the history of this country being chief among them.

So, in the spirit of the Fourth of July weekend, The New Editor lists ten prominent Founding Fathers who were 'chickenhawks,' and asks, "Who's your favorite 'chicken hawk'?

Ummm.

Oh, fuck you. "This rhetoric" still lodges itself deep up your can. The "chickenhawk meme" is valid. Why? Because if this idiotic war in Iraq were what its proponents claim it is, the Central Front of an Epic Clash between Barbarism and Civilization, Necessary for our Survival, you would fucking volunteer to fight it. No?

The Iraq adventure was sold as WWII re-animated. Appeasement, and all that rot.

If anything vital were at stake in Iraq, I would go there. If my children's safety depended on the war in Iraq, I would go to Iraq. If vital priciples of our democracy could only be defended in Iraq, I would go to Iraq. If the WWII parallels, if the historical and patriotic imaginings were real, I would go to Iraq.

But they ain't.

You wingnut idiots are the ones who conjured the bugbears and ogres. That you cower beneath your bedsheets still, says you are, well, fucking despicable. You decided to fantasize about a lie, and you won't back up a matter of life or death with even your word.

You are utterly contemptible cowards and fools and, well, gits.

But you knew that.

2006-07-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

Back to Business

Kate O'Brien

So below I rambled semi-coherently about Flann O'Brien, Kate O'Brien, and Irish censorship. Let me get my thoughts in order, or in an approximation of such.

Ahem. Two of the masterpieces of 20th century Irish fiction are Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman and Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices. Nobody really disagrees with this assertion, by the way. Sure, critics nowadays have problems with this and that in either book, or have this or that for or against either author. But nobody would dispute that these are two of the most important and fascinating books to come out of Ireland in the 1940s. Neither can be dismissed by the serious literary historian, to put it more negatively, much as the serious literary historian might like it to be otherwise. (Flann and Kate were not related, BTW, if you were wondering; "Flann O'Brien" is a pseudonym for Brian O'Nolan.)

All right. That said, well... Readers of my blog are pretty damn smart, they read voraciously and intelligently, and are careful consumers of culture. They're not Irish literary historians, though, and I'd venture to guess that until I started raving bizarrely about Kate O'Brien, they had not heard of her. Or had heard of her, but had not realized how important a figure she is, or that she is as brilliant -- and even, in her own slyly patrician manner, as funny -- as he is.

Why? Well, part of it is that K O'B did not engage in obvious formal experimentation. She is very much a realist, in the BBC Very Special Miniseries Presentation sense; if you like George Eliot, you'd like K O'B. F O'B, with his ostentatious formal pyrotechnics, his metafictive fun, gets more recognition because his stuff works with a broad narrative of international modernism. Fair enough. He does look like the Joyce heir apparent; a good candidate, actually.

But you can only push that so far. You have to realize that in their day, K O'B was much better known than F O'B. Her books, uh, sold. So did her plays. She was unabashedly Irish, in subject matter as well as outlook; she was taken seriously as an artist (her novel Without My Cloak was a runner-up for the Hawthornden Prize.

So what's up with the fact that F 'OB gets the rep and K O'B doesn't? Well, a lot of things. But sexism is a part of it. And what's really amazing here is that it is Flann, the formal rebel -- who in the end comes across as far more timid than Kate.

Kate O'Brien in her quiet way was the most severe and cutting critic of the deadly hypocrisies of Irish Catholic sexual orthodoxy currently going in the 1940s. Why doesn't she get her due...?

Hmmm. Look at her picture up there. Bet you can't guess what new perspective she brought to Irish literature about sexuality and gender roles. Bet you can't. Neener.

More to come...

2006-07-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

Back

A Christmas miracle! We have power again. Back to normal posting soon.

2006-07-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

Bugger

No power until July 4. That's the latest.

2006-06-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

Flood

We live on a mountain, so we're OK, by and large, though we're without power and will be through at least tomorrow afternoon (I'm posting from my office). What a mess. The photo is from our local paper; that bridge is usually about, oh, 20 feet over the waterline...

Obviously, light posting for a while.

UPDATE

Nuts, power was supposed to be back today, now they're telling us late tomorrow night. Oh well.

2006-06-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

Censorship and Books

Righteous Bubba asked for some Flann O'Brien. That sort of ties into the thing I was talking about below, about the "voice." Aaaarhg. I'm faced with a knot. Bear with me. The specific knot I'm trying to unravel is partially to do with F O'B's second novel, The Third Policeman -- widely regarded as his second masterpiece, along with the earlier At Swim-two-Birds. F O'B is one strand in the knot.

The entanglement here is the place and function of creative literature in the Irish Republic, 1941-1942. Below I link to the great debate in the Irish Senate of that year over censorship.

Now, pay attention. While this public furor was furor-ing, just the previous year had seen probably the second most famous act of literary self censorship in Irish literary history. That is, F O'B's decision to stuff The Third Policeman into his desk drawer and not try to publish it. See, his first book, At Swim had been published, to dismal sales (the war had a lot to do with that, also, the book was just plain weird), but his publisher turned down T3P on the grounds that it was even more bizarre. F O'B could not handle the rejection, went into a tailspin, assumed his book was rubbish, hid it, lived about 30 more years, died, and than had the book found and hailed as utterly brilliant. Which it is. Poor bastard.

Now, why did he hide it? That was hardly Joyce's response, or Sean O'Casey's, to rejection. Why the failure of artistic nerve? A lot of people consider themselves artistic failures, and you know, most of them are right. But this was a guy who really DID sit on a masterpiece. Why?

Well, biography helps... The thing about F O'B that a lot of people don't get is that he was really a depressed, cynical bastard with a major drink problem. This is not especially uncommon among comic geniuses, as he undoubtedly was. But his depression I think was clearly tied to his ambivalent social position. On the one hand, he relished the freedom and the prestige of being a writer in a place and time where that had a lot of value -- in the right circles. On the other hand, he had a profound bourgeois suspicion of "artists," a suspicion that derived from a lot of sources... This left him in rebellion against everything but with a profound unwillingness to actually risk anything significant in his struggle. He was a career civil servant. A cruel but perhaps accurate assessment would be to say that he is very much like Little Chandler in Joyce's "A Little Cloud," but much smarter and far more gifted so he knew it and hated himself for it. Anthony Cronin's biography, No Laughing Matter of F O'B is worth reading on this if you have any illusions about the man's life. (Cronin was a friend of F O'B's, and of Patrick Kavanagh's, and is a fascinating poet in his own right. And if you have not read his book about Ireland's literary scene in the mid-20th century, Dead as Doornails, do it when you can, as it's a great fucking book.)

All right. So here we have a masterpiece buried. But on the other hand... we have another one censored in plain sight at the same time. That would be Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices. (no relation, of course).

What you have here are two of the greatest novels in mid-century Irish literature, both of them subjected to different forms of censorship. One is public, the other private. And both of these novels have to do with sex, in very bizarre ways...

Anyway, I think it's interesting that these two books are quite literally never spoken about as being at all related.

Also, every censored work of literature contains within it the story of its own censorship. That much is clear.

2006-06-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

The 6-Year-Old Mind

Me: Buddy, could you run upstairs and tell me if your baby brother is still asleep?

The 6-Year-Old: OK.

(Runs upstairs)

(Pause)

The 6-Year-Old: (from upstairs, screams) DAD! THE BABY IS STILL ASLEEP!

Baby: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!

Me: (whacks forehead)

2006-06-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

Bad News

We're worried about our duck. For two days it's been raining like hell, and the part of the strawberry patch she's nesting in is unfortunately at the downward end of a slope. She could be flooded out.

UPDATE: She looks to be OK. The strawberry bed is draining better than I thought it would.

2006-06-26T20:51:00.000-07:00

Voice

There's a story about censorship and literature and politics that I'm dying to tell, but I'm finding it very hard to tell it. I need to find a different voice. Neither my blog voice nor my usual academic voice are right for this. My academic voice does not work in this medium, and my blog voice is not really right for what I want to say. This is frustrating because I think I've made some good and intelligent friends who are not academics who would like to hear this story, and I'd love to hear what they think about my ideas. I have something to say and I want to say it here, but it's tricky.

Let me tinker a bit. Stand by.

2006-06-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

And Now for the Comic Relief...

We have Althouse:

So I assume there is a conspiracy and a strategy to investigate Kos. And it's so easy to do because it can succeed even if it fails to turn anything up, because it will provoke him, and when he reacts, they'll all say he's paranoid, belligerent. Escort that man back outside the gate.

But why is Althouse saying all this? Is she trying to stoke his paranoia and lead him into the very pitfall she's identified? Is she nonpartisan and just calling them as she sees them? Or is she just saying that because she knows that's the kind of assertion that Kos folk are least likely to believe? And is that one more reason to suspect there's a big plot? Look at that line she boldfaced up there. There's a Republican plot and a Democratic plot all converging on poor Mr. Moulitsas.

The good Friar Occam would, I believe, conclude that the reason Ann Althouse is saying all this is that she is a complete dingbat.

2006-06-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

--Lee Siegel, Self-Portrait

A Civilized Rebuttal

Lee Siegel, the Culture writer for The New Republic, has posted a rather sharp critique of blogs and bloggers. He makes several insightful statements, each of which invites a serious response. In this post, I will address his comments and treat of them with all the seriousness they deserve. Siegel's comments are in blockquotes and italics. Mine are in normal text. Let us proceed.

At the end of my post yesterday, I wrote, "The blogosphere's fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus." It just so happens that on his blog today, none other than Andrew Sullivan, hardly an ideological soulmate of mine, quotes Santayana: "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." Sure enough, fanaticism ruled in the responses to what I wrote yesterday.

"Moron"; "Wanker" (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and "Asshole" have been the three most common polemical gambits. A reactor even had the gall to refer to me as a "conservative." Another resourceful adversarialist invited me to lick his scrotum. Please send a picture and a short essay describing your favorite hobbies. One madly ambitious blogger, who has been alternately trying to provoke and fawning over TNR writers in an attempt to break down the door--I'm too polite to mention any names--even asked who it was at TNR who gave me "the keys to a blog."

Fuck you.

All these abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as "any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control." The proof, you might say, is in the puddingheads.

Asshole.

I am overwhelmed by the intolerance and rage in the blogosphere. Conscientiously criticize, in the form of a real argument, blogospheric favorites like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the response isn't similar criticism, done conscientiously and in the form of an argument, but insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism.

Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition.

Ahhh, blow me.

But, then, Zuniga--let's cut the puerile nicknames of "DailyKos, "Atrios," "Instapundit" et al., which are one part fantasy of nom de guerres, one part babytalk, and a third thuggish anonymity--believes so deafeningly and inflexibly that it's hard to tell what he believes at all, expecially if you try to make out his conviction over the noisy bleating of his followers.

Dick.

He told Deborah Solomon in The New York Times that he joined the army out of high school to build up his self-confidence. Elsewhere, he has spoken of his love of 25-mile marches with a heavy knapsack. After the Army, college and then law school. But he never practiced law, it seems. He drifted to San Francisco and into the high-tech industry, where he designed Websites. Finally, he ended up in politics, again drifting into the Democratic party, supporting first John Edwards, and then Wesley Clark, and then, as a paid consultant, Howard Dean.

It wasn't long after that when Zuniga began channeling other people's rage.

Jesus tits. What a wanker.

This concludes my debate with Lee Siegel, Culture Writer for The New Republic. Thank you.

(Note: This post is improved materially if you imagine Vivaldi's The Four Seasons playing the whole time you're reading it. And, please, enjoy a sip of endive. Don't forget to extend your pinky! 'Cause your other digits will undoubtedly be otherwise employed, you ill-bred blogshites, you.)

UPDATE: Would it be rude to start to refer to this person as "Le Siegel"? Heaven knows I would never want to seem rude.

2006-06-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

Voting and Democracy

I have a lot of things to snipe at in this MyDD post, but you can't bitch at the central thesis: there are fundamental flaws in how we conduct elections, and the fact that we refuse to fix these obvious problems indicates that we are dominated by an elite class who do not value democracy.

I've been meaning to talk about this for a while, because it touches on a bugbear of mine: conspiracy theories. Look, we do not NEED to prove that all the Diebold machines are rigged to make the case that voting in our vaunted democracy is a fucking mess. No. All we need to do is point to Blackwell and Harris, and make the almost obscenely obvious point that INVESTED PARTISANS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO RUN THE FUCKING ELECTORAL MACHINERY. HOLY TITS! WHY IS THIS EVEN A FUCKING QUESTION?

I mean, Jesus FUCKING Christ! It is absolutely insane that this should be allowed to happen. We do not need to prove a mysterious conspiracy -- it's right out there in the open. We have what, checks and balances for everything but who controls how we vote? Are we mentally ill? Are we that obscenely hypocritical?

Let me rant: WE DO NOT NEED A FUCKING CONSPIRACY THEORY ABOUT VOTING IN AMERICA TO PROVE THAT IT'S FUCKED UP.

We need to point to Blackwell and Harris.

That should be sufficient. Sheeeeit.

Why do we need to search for buried mysterious truths when the public record is as appalling as it is? I just don't get it.

2006-06-24T20:10:00.000-07:00

The Inconvenient Truths

We saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight. Wow. It's very well done, and quite powerful. And ultimately hopeful: here you see a politician (and that's what Gore really is) not being actively mendacious. And not simply mouthing vapid slogans. And displaying a serious intelligence. And pointing towards a workable solution to a dangerous problem.

You know, Al Gore is the guy John McCain only pretends to be: an independent-minded, serious thinker who puts the truth first and focuses on solving serious issues out of moral and intellectual convictions.

One of the arguments against Gore running again is that the idiot media Heathers will still have their nasty little pinking shears out for him. Actually, I think that is an argument in favor of his candidacy. The Heathers need to be defeated, not appeased. Gore seems to have learned some sharp lessons about how to fight them. An Inconvenient Truth reaches an audience directly without being first subject to their inane bitchy judgments about what is and is not worthy of the public's attention.

Even in our little burg, the theater was almost full. Gore can win. And I think we need him.

2006-06-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

HAVE YOU NO DECENCY!

Now, this is great stuff. The Internets rule...

Update

For some reason, some of you want more context. This is of course a link to the famous 1942 debate in the Irish senate (Seanad) over Halliday Sutherland's Laws of Life, Kate O'Brien's Land of Spices, and Eric Cross's The Tailor and Ansty. Frank O'Connor called this "debate" a "long, slow swim through a sewage bed." Anyway, if you thought blog and Internets dustups were fierce and nasty, heh, check this shit out. Professor Magennis is one of the Great All-Time Assholes. See if he reminds you of anybody.

This is the prime beef, the sacred fount. Dive in!

UPDATE:

I really do dig this. No, it's not on topic, but you should listen to something as you read through Irish parliamentary debates, and this works well. And fuck Archbishop McQuaid, anyhow.

2006-06-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

SHOCKING EMAILS REVEAL THE SHOCKING TRUTH! HOW SHOCKING!

Now that the intrepid cub reporters at TNR's The Plank have ripped the cover off the greatest American political scandal since Teapot Dome and the time Al Gore killed that hooker in the Buddhist Temple, the floodgates have opened and the raw sewage that is the Left Blogosphere is flowing like sewage, rawly.

An entire metric assload of supposedly alleged "private" and "off-the-record" e-mails between prominent liberal "bloggers" have been leaked to this blog's News and Journalism Division, The New National Whiskey Ashes Republic Review Online. We are sure that their appalling contents will appall you on account of their appallingness and appallingossitude.

What these "e-mails" reveal is the extraordinary power of the dark stranglehold one Markos Moulitzanigas, who for some as-yet-unexplained reason goes by the shadowy nom-de-blog "Kos," has over the entire Left Blogosphere. He is the founder of the Liberal site "Daily Kos," which nobody of any sophistication cares about because it is wildly popular and doesn't lose money -- sure signs of its irrelevance. He commands all the money that Liberal bloggers ever need, from the estimated $6000 startup costs of starting up a Kos diary, to the even more exorbitant entry fees needed to break into the hard-knuckled Blogspot rackets. If you haven't at least offed a hobo, he won't even talk to you. Or so goes the word on the street, anyway.

Below are the e-mails. You won't fucking believe this shit, man. But it's all %100 True Real.

The first one comes from one Duncan Blacke, from Eschaton.com. He's talking about some problems he's been having lately with his career:

DUNCAN BLACKE

Kosfather, a month ago, this director, he bought the rights to this book, a best seller. The main character, it's a guy like me... wouldn't even have to act, just be myself. Ah, Kosfather, I dunno what to do, I dunno what to do...

And here's the response:

KOS

YOU CAN ACT LIKE A MAN! Slap!

And it only gets worse. Here's a message from angry liberal blogger Stephen Gillard:

STEPHEN GILLARD

These big media journalists are dangerous to your blog-fleet, NOT to this bloggle station. Any attack by nosy journalists against our liberal advertising network would be a useless gesture, no matter what private e-mail data they've obtained. Our blogs are now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it. Don't try to frighten us with your sorceror's ways, Lord Kos! Your sad devotion to your ancient fundraising sceheme has not helped you win any elections, or given you clairvoyance enough to help you find the Republicans' hidden Diebold machines -- GAAAK! GAAAK!

And the chilling reply:

KOS

I find your lack of faith... disturbing.

My source tells me that it this point Kos did some weird finger-thing and choked Gillard. Freakshow.

Finally, here's one from Christine Harding Smythe, and it's probably the most spooky of all:

CHRISTINE HARDING SMYTHE

May I speak plainly?... If you'll forgive me, Kos is common... He's like an animal. He has an animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is. Markos Kos-alski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle.

Kos's reply will shock you:

KOS:

Take a look at yourself here in a worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for 50 cents from some rag-picker. And with a crazy crown on. Now what kind of a queen do you think you are? Do you know that I've been on to you from the start, and not once did you pull the wool over this boy's eyes? You come in here and you sprinkle the place with powder and you spray perfume and you stick a paper lantern over the light bulb - and, lo and behold, the place has turned to Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile, sitting on your throne, swilling down my liquor. And do you know what I say? Ha ha! Do you hear me? Ha ha ha!

You don't even want to know what he does next.

How can this monster be stopped? This is an extremely legitimate question.

2006-06-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

Cornerboys

It's always fun to just randomly tune in to The Corner; you're pretty much guaranteed a good time. The problem is you never really know if it's a put-on, or if they really do huff glue over there. To wit:

ANDERSON COOPER is sure taking a tough, skeptical look at Angelina Jolie right now. Very inspiring. [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Please tell me they are not for real. Please.

2006-06-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

Duck Update, or, "Duckdate"

Well, she's still there. A trio of mallards came by the other day and gave her shit. We're still not sure what that's all about. We've seen the mallards around the neighborhood a lot, though, so it's probably some territorial thing. NYMary chased them off; she is very good at chasing off rogue ducks. It's a skill. Anyway, those mallards are bad news; I saw them smoking behind the pond yesterday. A bad element.

Anyway, no hatching or anything, but there's still 11 eggs.

Note also the ripening strawberries in the lower right of the picture. We are foregoing strawberries for these ducklings. They had best appreciate it!

On a separate note: balloons are evil. I am convinced of this. Balloons are humanity's most wicked invention.

Update: The Evil of Balloons

Since you asked...

Why are balloons evil? Because they can never live up to their promises. Little children love balloons: they go bananas for them. They laugh, and dance, and sing dumbass little songs, and gad about and act all immature -- but when they have the balloon, they don't know what the hell to do about them. Usually, the child is crying her tiny eyes out within three minutes of the sighting of a balloon. The little ones just can't handle it. And that's BEFORE it pops!

And if you have more than one kid, no matter how many balloons you have... you have war.

Balloons look like "fun" in its purest form, but they are lying little lightweight orbs of Satan. FUCK BALLOONS. FUCK THEM TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-06-19T15:23:00.000-07:00

Honorary Ethics

North of the border: Ryerson University, in Toronto, has decided to offer an honorary degree to Maragret Somerville, a well-known medical ethicist at McGill. The presentation will be made at Ryerson's graduation ceremonies today.

The problem though is that Somerville has publicly argued against legalizing gay marriage:

her opposition to gay marriage led several student groups and many faculty members to urge that she be disinvited to receive the honor. Somerville is a medical ethicist, holding appointments at McGill’s medical and law schools, and most of her work has nothing to do with gay marriage, but she did testify against it before a Parliamentary committee. With protests being planned for graduation, a Ryerson panel reviewed the invitation and concluded that it would be wrong to rescind the honor, but said that had Somerville’s views been known before the honor was announced, it would have been appropriate never to have extended the offer in the first place.

For fans of higher-education administrative-official weaseling, that is pretty choice stuff. Why a university would want to honor someone before they know their "views" is a bit of a mystery. (Google, of course, can help one establish this sort of thing pretty rapidly; for instance, I know that she is against circumcising infant boys, so please don't invite her to your next briss. It would be awkward.) And that she testified against gay marriage before a Parliamentary committee might have been a tipoff.

Anyway, the "we didn't know!" defense has very predictably pleased nobody, whether they're fer her or agin her.

A couple of issues here. First, her argument against gay marriage sounds rather silly. I'm only going by the following from the first link, though, so maybe her position is more nuanced, but, well, for now, I'll stick with silly:

In a phone interview from her Montreal office Saturday, Somerville said that her opposition to gay marriage comes out of her work on reproductive technologies. She said she started working on that issue when she was approached by children and adults who were created by artificial means — and that many of them are troubled by the process by which they were brought into the world, and their lack of information about one or more of their biological parents. Somerville said that she worried that gay marriage would lead to challenges to laws she supports that ban cloning and the selling of eggs. She stressed that she backs full civil unions for gay couples and laws that would bar any discrimination against gay people except on the right to marry.

You can't deny full civil rights to adults because their children might perhaps one day become confused. And artificial means are only one way of having children: what of a gay parent who divorces an opposite sex partner, why couldn't she remarry a woman? Dragging cloning and egg-selling into the equation is rather a stretch, and the distinction between marriage and same-sex unions is, I'm convinced, purely semantic.

But should she be disinvited? Well, after the invitation was extended, probably not. Should she be protested? Hell, yes. Vigorously.

But here's what really gets me about this -- a statement from the committee that reviewed the decision to award the degree after the controversy erupted:

“There would have been no academic freedom concerns if we had initially decided not to award an honorary doctorate to Dr. Somerville. However, if we decide to rescind the award in a public manner, we are raising these concerns.... If we withdraw the award, then we demonstrate that as a university we show tolerance for some contestable views but not others. Consequently to rescind the award would raise basic issues of freedom of speech in an academic environment,” the committee said.

Heaven forbid that such issues should be raised in an academic environment! Uh, isn't that exactly where they should be raised?

Indeed yes. And the fact that they clearly are being raised there is what has caused the furor.

At the heart of this issue though is a fundamental question: who gets to decide what positions on a cultural issue are and are not legitimate? And here is the issue at stake with Somerville: can one be considered a legitimate speaker if one opposes gay marriage?

What terrifies the pepole who don't like gays is that it is becoming ever more clear that the answer is heading every day towards "no." The broad consensus against the open expression of homosexuality has shattered. We know this because the issue exists as a matter of public controversy at all. After all, even 20 years ago, would Somerville or anyone else have even needed to argue against gay marriage? In another 20 years, her position will be seen as outlandish.

2006-06-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

Make Way for Ducklings

See that? Do you know what that is?

That is a mother duck who has chosen to lay her eggs in our strawberry patch, right by the side of our house. We noticed it this morning. The children are excited -- well, the 4-month-old doesn't really care, frankly; he is very selfish. But the 6-Year-Old can't stop talking about it. The Almost-2-Year-Old needs to be prevented from poking Mama Duck, who hisses if you get too close to her brood.

This is pretty excellent stuff. We will keep you posted on developments.

2006-06-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

Write Your Own

In reference to this by now well-told tale:

Dennis Hastert is the kind of guy that would offer a couple of lesbians breakfast at Denny's to team up on him during Pride Week.

Or:

Tom Cruise is the kind of guy that would offer a couple of lesbians $5000 to team up on him during Pride Week so he could sell the story and hope it distracts from what he actually did during Pride Week.

Or:

Ramesh Ponnuru is the kind of a guy who would offer a couple of lesbians $1000 to stop laughing at him during Pride Week.

Write your own!

2006-06-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

Sadly, Yes...

Retardo explains it all. And makes a Roger Casement reference in the process. Anyway, this one's for Retardo, via Yeats:

What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea´s roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

Nothing wrong with a good rousing roar of mockery now and again.

As for the recent insanity. The definitive account is by Bas-o-Matic in the comments to John Cole's post about what happened to Armando. I'd link it, but Balloon Juice takes forever to load, and Cole can KMRIA anyhow. I copied Bas-o-Matic's post, though, just for posterity. And there the matter rests, for the time being.

I'm still pissed about what the British did to Casement, and to Wilde. Fuckers.

2006-06-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

Lists of Cool Conservative Things

Pace this post at the Liberal Avenger taking off on the widely mocked NRO list of the Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs, I got to wondering what else could be more or less randomly classified as "conservative" and therefore "cool" if you are a "movement conservative" and therefore "totally retarded."

Here are the Top Six Conservative Disease-Causing Microorganisms:

6. Staphylococcal bacteria

This rugged individualist of a foodborne pathogen can be found in rancid or badly prepared meat, fish, or eggs. It can cause diarrhea, vomiting, cramps, and other terrific anti-liberal symptoms. Anything that can piss off big-government, anti-meat whackos like that Schlosser jerk has just got to be totally cool, totally conservative.

Staphylococcus aureus bacteria; Dr. Kari Lounatmaa/Science Photo Library, Photo Researchers, Inc. Look, some of them are dividing! Who says conservatives can't be sexy! Also, this looks like sushi.

5. Streptococcus A bacteria

All the A-strains are totally sweet -- but the one we have in mind is a real killer! That's the Texas Flesh-Eating Bacteria, and it killed 26 people in Texas in 1997-8 by destroying their red blood cells. It's conservative because it's Texan, and it's cool because "flesh-eating" is cool -- recalling as it does the Romero classic Night of the Living Dead, which, as everyone who is educated knows, is actually a searing conservative parable about the evils of the Welfare State and a devastating refutation of Keynesian economics.

Above, a heroic band of Culture Warriors marches against degenerate 1960s sexual libertinism.

4. Bartonella henselae

What more need be said -- except that this is the microorganism that causes "Cat Scratch Fever"! And therefore it is the pathogen that inspired the eponymous all-time great conservative rock anthem by Ted Nugent! The Nuge! When you think of The Nuge, think of pathenogenic disease that can cause blindness, encephalitis, liver damage -- and ... CONSERVATISM!

The name of the musician attached to the infected tissue is Ted Nugent, Conservative Rocker!

3. Treponema pallidum

Syphillis! The superfly spirochete that does God's will by smiting the sexually sinful! General Paralysis of the Insane in the Membrane -- insane in the brain!

Syphilitic mucus patches -- a sign of God's loving justice!

2. Tuberculosis bacteria

Who does not love tuberculosis! As everyone knows, conservatives are all about the Great Works of Literature, so conservatives really dig stories about hookers with lung problems. They don't run away nearly as fast as the healthy ones!

Finally, a woman even Ramesh Ponnuru might be able to take down two out of three!

1. Legionella pneumophila

what is more patriotic than the American Legion? What veteran would not swell up with pride, and their lungs with infection, to know that this watery but valiant little bug was named for the American Fighting Man and the hotel room air conditioning system that killed him?

Look at that picture -- now can you finally get it through your thick moonbat skulls why we must repeal the Death Tax? What the hell is wrong with you!

TOTALLY DIFFERENT NOTE: Lion Kitty is Cool. Happy everything to you, 4Legs & Maxx.

2006-06-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

Socks

This is trivial, in some ways, but it is in its own way a nice little illustration of some of the principles we've been discussing.

Above see a poster of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who for years were known for ending their shows by performing clad only in sweatsocks affixed over their penises. Very good. Now, this afternoon I was switching channels and happened across some VH1 program documenting this phenomenon. It showed footage of the, uh, sockage, and ended with a brief interview with the singer, Anthony Kiedis. Mr. Kiedis explained how the idea got started, and how much fun it was to be on stage naked except for an "exagerrated phallus." He then said (and this is the punchline) that eventually the band had to stop doing it, because "people were starting to think it was just a gimmick." (It was making people think the band's performances were "not about the music." Yes, he really said that.)

Now, this is an astonishing statement. Of course the socks-wearing was a gimmick. And as these things go, it was a pretty good gimmick. It helped them become better known, said something about the image the band wanted to project, and was, frankly, not very easy to forget. And then, understandably, it got a bit old, and they stopped doing it. So what's the big deal? Why the perceived need to distance yourself from something that, while bizarre, clearly helped your career?

The answer is to do with the logic of the field of "alternative" music from whence the RHCP emerged. The band always quite clearly wanted to become popular, but stating this as a goal would violate the first rule of the field of restricted production: "success" can only be legitimately attained if it is defined in artistic terms, not in the ordinary terms of money and popularity. The disdain of indie-music scenesters for such rewards is of course legendary. And while this sort of sneering of course is easily mocked as ridiculous, one really cannot deny the potentially devastating force of the accusation or potential accusation. So a "tipping point" was reached for the socks on the cocks: they came off and the undies came on when the band began to fear that the stunt would be perceived not as a rebellious act, a natural outgrowth (beg pardon) of their happy-nature-boy screw-conventional-standards ethos, but as a calculated attempt to get attention and notoriety and thus fame and money, etc. That would lose them credibility -- and, paradoxically, sales. Be seen as a "sellout" and you risk not being able to sell anything. So, in a paradoxical and confounding way, to make a finacial profit, everything for the artist who wishes to be seen as "independent" depends on a firm disavowal of the exclusive desire to make a financial profit.

Now, there is of course a further wrinkle to all this. Mr. Kiedis could have said (and hell, probably has at some point) that he is sick of the scenesters who are always accusing his band of being "sellouts." This is a fairly typical move. (Ripley mentions in comments how this happened with Green Day as they began to sell more and more records.) The key point to remember here is that the underlying principle for attaining "legitimacy" in such circles depends on a logic of reversal. The first reversal: that of the field of general production (money and fame). OK, so your band builds up a following, gets a deal, becomes popular, and then -- bam, predictably, comes the accusation of "selling out." So what's the answer? Well, another reversal, this time involving a repudiation of the "scene." Such reversals usually involve the accusation that it is the band's erstwhile followers who cannot understand how the music is evolving according what is most often described as a "natural" progression of the artistic vision: the hipsters are merely pursuing the grubby rewards of small-time prestige while the band has moved on. (Yes, bands will often concede that getting rich is pretty cool, but their ultimate justification is pretty much always the music, man.)

Anyway, rock music, especially in its indie or alternative or whatever areas, one where there is a "scene," is an especially instructive place to look for illustrations of the dynamics I'm talking about. This is because the distance between "freedom" and Art on the one hand and "selling out" and Crap on the other is so very narrow. The pressures exerted by the field on musicians and performers and scenesters, the constant demand for "legitimacy," are incredibly powerful. So much so that the same story seems to be told over and over and over again, often in almost exactly the same language, only with different names. (Ever notice how many times you've heard a band say they resent being "labelled"? It's always very revealing when someone uses what amounts to a cliche to explain that they do not wish to be reduced to a cliche. That is the pressure of the field, man.)

2006-06-10T21:31:00.000-07:00

Back to the Smut

Blogger permitting, let us now return to the subject of dirty art.

On Thursday I had a good idea where I was headed with this, but then the Technical Shit intervened, and now my categories are confused. Thus, indulge me:

What has GONE BEFORE, for the benefit of NEW READERS and the ABSENT-MINDED BLOG-OWNER:

Your host, Thers, was ruminating on Art and Censorship, in the context of 1920s blues lyrics, Joyce's Ulysses, and Flaubert. He noted that for all of these, censorship proved to be a significant obstacle -- and yet also seemed to fuel the artist's creativity. Blues singers, like these writers, faced fairly serious sanctions in the pursuit of their Art. Yet, these challenges in the end only seemed to spur them to greater artistic achievements.

This led me to inquire:

Can art be any good if it is in not in some way transgressive? Or was, once? And why? And can art genuinely be "transgressive" without referencing the Nasty?

Given all this, has not censorship in the long run been GOOD for art and artists?

If so, then on what basis do we oppose the censorship of artistic production?

My wonderful commenters -- beg pardon, my "minions," "bitches," and "cohort of charlatans" (pace recent fulminations elsewhere in blogland) -- quickly threw cold water on all this, pointing out two obvious things, namely that the dynamic I am referencing is relatively new in Western culture, dating from about the middle of the 19th century, and also that it is not necessarily The Nasty that causes folks to become angered at Art: it is its formal transgressions, its refusal to be interpreted in any terms other than its own.

OK, it was at this latter point that I started to get all fuzzy, using terms like "the censorship impulse" or whatever that my friends were kind enough not to point out were pretty much just hooey. So let me backtrack a bit.

I'm convinced by Bourdieu's argument, as laid out in The Field of Cultural Production and more fully and systematically in the Rules of Art, that by and large cultural production -- that is, anything anyone makes as a cultural product, music, paintings, cartoons, books, movies -- can be divided into two separate but related worlds: what he calls the field of general production and the field of restricted production.

Now, the first, elementary, and crucial point here is to do with the concept of the "field." What he means here is that the big giant world we live in is subdivided into separate smaller worlds, and humans define themselves according to where they stand or would like to stand in these worlds. So we all belong in one way or another to a "family field," and a "work field," or a "sports fan field," or a "political field," or whatever. Now, we never get to completely and only rarely partially define the rules of the various fields we exist in, because these fields existed before we did, and because they are always populated by people other than us. Some fields we are born into; some, we choose. Either way, our lives are like a series of games -- we find ourselves on different boards all the time, and have certain options for how we move, and can adopt certain strategies -- but we are always playing, and always to win, however we define it. (Please hold your questions until the end of the tour. Thanks.)

Now, as to art and culture. The difference between the two forms of cultural production, the general and the resticted, is at once simple and profound. Let's use movies as an example.

We all know that there are two kinds of movies, studio pictures and independents. All major studio movies are subjected to test screenings, focus groups, and so on. Studios thus spend a lot of time and money essentially making sure that people will like their movie before most people are able to see it. So what are they doing? They are, in short, trying to ensure that what they produce will conform to already generally accepted rules of what distinguishes a good movie from a bad one. This is what characterizes the field of general production: an attempt at conformity to accepted artistic rules in an attempt to achieve financial profit.

Now, independent movies. The producer of a non-studio movie is trying to do two things that are different from the big studios: she or he is trying to make the audience change their categories of perception. That is, she won't make the two young people fight and then fall in love; he won't make the good ninja beat all the bad ninjas. The story and its means of presentation will not be those that are most conventional. And, of course, this means that the producer has something else in mind beyond financial profit: that is, some sort of artistic profit. And what is artistic profit? Hard to say... but whatever it is, it is not money, that is for sure. Great artists, of course, are supposed to starve.

This is the field of restricted production. Why restricted? Because it is restricted to people who are themselves producers. This is a market distinction. If you want to succeed generally, you try to appeal to everyone. If you want to succeed artistically, your audience is primarily those people who intimately know the field you exist in: that is, other artists, established critics, patrons, the jerk in your film school whose stuff you hate but who has some sort of connections, hip magazinje writers, scenesters... people who are producing "insider" opinions, essentially.

Now, here we make a great leap forward. Why? Because we can see that what is at stake in any censorship controversy is not so much the actual nasty expression, but a much wider and essentially political struggle.

I'll get back to this, and explain the Rouault, tomorrow. Or Monday.

2006-06-09T15:31:00.000-07:00

Help Maple Syrup-Boy!

Everyone's favorite maple-syrup drenched blogger, NTodd, is tying to achieve a certain number of hits tonight. For some arbitrary reason. Go, help him out!

Actual picture of your man NTodd biking through the Vermont mountains:

2006-06-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

Return!

Well, Blogger seems to be back... I'm really not very much longer for Blogger, and the recent technical problems are only part of it. Anyway.

Don't have time right now to get back to the Topic of Art and Smut, but I will (I *did* have time yesterday, grrr).

For now, here is a wonderful example of military press conference-speak. Apparently, Zarqawi survived the air strike and in fact died in the custody of Iraqi police. Asked if there was evidence that Zarqawi had been shot, Maj. Gen. Caldwell

said he could not give a definitive answer based on what he had read in the latest official U.S. military report on the event. "I'll go back and specifically ask that," he said. "But no, there was nothing in the report that said he had received any wounds from some kind of weapons system like that."

"Receiving a wound from a weapons system" is a pretty great euphemism for "shot."

2006-06-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

Smut

Phila will perhaps forgive me, as I can't remember exactly where he said this. But he was talking somewhere recently about how jazz singers in the 1920s would use euphemisms to get around censorship. "Sugar in my bowl" would stand in for a reference to sex, for instance.

The whole question of the complex interrelationship between censorship and art fascinates me. There is an interesting paradox: censorship of course endangers art. But at the same time, without censorship, would art really be? As Phila's observation suggests, censorship can have oddly productive effects. The slang and euphemisms in 1920s jazz, for example. The deliberate, sly sexuality inevitably inflects the music, the verbal marker of what makes it, well, different and therefore transgressive and so, well, appealing. And lasting.

You can't really separate out what jazz is and how it came to be what it is without remembering its disreputable roots. It's long since become a "legitimate" form, with univerity departments devoted to it, books written on it, events where people put on evening dress to see it performed, and so on. But the "heroic era" of its beginnings (term appropriated from Bourdieu) are an inextricable part of what it is -- and of its appeal. Just as in literature: Flaubert's trial is an itegral part of Flaubert's reputation. Or the Woolsey decision effectively legalizing Ulysses in the US is (for a while quite literally) an integral part of Ulysses itelf, as we receive it. Nobody picks up Ulysses randomly and just gets into it. Well, a few people do, maybe. But when they find out it's dirty -- well, that's what gets them past Chapter Three. "Ineluctable modality of the visible," oy. Where's the beating off and the S&M? And the poop jokes. Don't forget the poop jokes.

So let me open this up.

Can art be any good if it is in not in some way transgressive? Or was, once? And why? And can art genuinely be "transgressive" without referencing the Nasty?

Given all this, has not censorship in the long run been GOOD for art and artists?

If so, then on what basis do we oppose the censorship of artistic production?

I'll be back with more on this later. Answer the questions correctly or be killed by circus freaks.

MORE

Hope you all don't mind me addressing the the excellent points raised in comments up here. I just want to sort out some of my thoughts, because the topic is being teased out in some interesting ways.

First -- we can make a distinction between "ancient" and "modern" art. As Flory, Speechless, and anonymous (please name yourself, BTW; it makes things easier) point out, referencing Michaelangelo, Phidias, and Bach, the relationship between censorship and art that I talked about, citing 1920s jazz, Flaubert, and Joyce, seems to be a relatively modern phenomenon.

So is it fair to say that something fundamental about the way we think about art and artists at some point changed? One thing that strikes me about the examples we've discussed is that the older ones are all religious, involving the patronage of the church. Since I asked a question about the Nasty, I suppose it is not surprising that these were the examples referenced. Shakespeare would be a more challenging example, given his sly earthiness. However, while we'd surely all agree that his plays are "art," it's not entirely clear that he did, or at least he saw them in a way that was not ours (otherwise he would have taken a lot more care of the texts). And it is also not clear just how "transgressive" these plays were in his time. To be sure, he talked about sex constantly. However, they were also a form of popular entertainment. What he saw as his more lasting stuff was the poetry, and when he published this, he made to secure an aristocratic patron. In that sense, what Shakespeare and Bach had in common was a sense that for art to be Art it needed a patron.

Obviously, patronage is not a part of artistic production nowadays -- not at least in the older sense of the word.

So, speaking broadly and allowing for many exceptions that prove the rule, whether we're speaking of religious or secular art, can we say that to really hone in on the phenomenon I began with (the relationship between art and censorship), we have to keep in mind how the economics of art have changed? Because this gets to something else. Art with a religious or noble patron is sanctioned by some outside agency. For Flaubert and Joyce, and for jazz singers, art was sanctioned by Art itself.

Is that a fair conclusion?

Second: the matter of form. As Shrimplate says:

But art is constantly seeking to transgress boundries of technique: perspective, abstraction, 12-tone-rows, free jazz, cow poop Virgin Marys, and the like.

This is of course true. Even sticking with my examples, Flaubert, Joyce, and 1920s jazz, that would be true. In each case, the writer or musician's real "transgression" is formal. That is what really arouses anger about "new" or "high" art, by the way, or is at least integral to this anger. When people are outraged at art today it is not only because it breaks sexual (Mapplethorpe) or religious ("Piss Christ") taboos, but because it does so in the name of Art. It can't be dismissed as mere pornography or as just an offensive juvenile prank.

So if it is not merely sexual or even religious transgression in the modern period that makes art suceptible to "outrage," what is it about the formal transgressions that provokes what we might call the "censorship impulse"?

If you see what I mean...

2006-06-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

Just So You Know...

You're free to leave threatening comments about my children on this blog, but I will report all such comments.

2006-06-05T00:17:00.000-07:00

All right.

A rule of life: there is no problem so severe that listening to Ann Althouse's dopey version of it doesn't make you laugh your nipples sore...

2006-06-04T13:14:00.000-07:00

Abstract Thoughts on "Rules"

When the Enron story was breaking I remember listening to a discussion on some NPR program about what possible regulation could be created to prevent such abuses from occurring in the future. Somebody made the argument that while regulation would be necessary, it didn't address the real problem. He said that in American business nowadays there was a widespread attitude that rules exist only to define an arbitrary limit of acceptable behavior: in other words, you can do whatever you want, you just have to make it somehow sound like you haven't crossed the line. Rules and regulations are thus desireable because they give you something specific to exploit for loopholes; they give you something to trip up the other guy with, if you can, and give you cover for your own actions if you can finagle things just right.

Thus, explicit statements of "Rules" for "acceptable conduct" that are supposed to define, I don't know, the line between what does and does not constitute "Integrity," can be worse than useless. As long as the "argument" can be made that certain behavior follows the letter of the rule, or at worst some ad hoc justification can be manufactured to cover for a violation of this rule, then the attempt at regulation fails -- not merely because it doesn't prevent the behavior, but offers an incentive to those already inclined to act in the manner specified as "corrupt" by laying out for them a kind of a game plan for breaking the rule without seeming to do so. This is especially the case when those predisposed to act in this fashion have a hand in writing the rule. For them, a fine ambiguity can be worth more than a state of "lawlessness."

Anyway, the guy on NPR went on to state that you always know whether or not someone is serious about "ethical reform" if they include a mechanism for enforcement and are willing to speak up when a violation occurs -- without first creating a cloud of irrelevant details, spurious ambiguities, and simple nonsense.

Anyway, I was just pondering all this ethical stuff in a totally abstract way on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I don't really mean anything by it.

Update: Can one really refute an accusation that one has no intention of "threatening" someone by repeatedly posting their names and employment information? That's a novel theory.... (No link. Gah.)

Anyway. Here is a picture of a duck. It means nothing. Well, nothing because it was collected online, but it is still very funny: "Where you aware that SATAN’s behavior has already become the subject of a forum provided under the aegis of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC)? Do you understand the significance of that?" I think this duck is Extremely Concerned.

2006-06-02T17:21:00.000-07:00

136 Names, and a Secret Revealed

Several people have inquired as to the names of the 136 children. Here they are:

Conor, Conal, Conaill, Conn, Conan, Colum, Colm, Connor, Colmcille, Carrickfergus, Chuck Chuck, Deirdre and Deirdre (the twins), Medbh, Maeve, Maggie, Meg, Mags, Margare (pen ran out while filling out form), Margaret, Meggie, Molly, Moyra, Moira, Maurya, Moolah, Ming, Mary, Marybeth, Bethmary, Liam, William, Will, Willy, Warren, Dmitri (too much vodka!), Bill, Barry, Esperanto, Samsonite, Nynex (corporate sponsored babies were BIG in the 90s), Fergus, Fergal, Frank, Francois, Ferdinand, Finn, Finnbar, Fionn, Niall, Neil, Nelly, Nestor, Australopithecene (the little angel!), Piltdown, Pedar, Peadar, Detroit Dave, Mullingar Murray, Hoboken Hal (trendy little fella already!), Sally, Salmonella, Santino, Fredo, Michael, Frodo, Sam, Meriadoc, Peregrin, Goldilocks, Greta, Gabriel, Sean, Ian, John, Shaun, Shem, Seamus, Jacob, James, Fettucini (it can get hungry in the delivery room), Placenta (inspiration failed; named for first visible noun, pretty little girl, tho), Fallopian (we were bored), Phillip, Roisin, Gollum (our precious!), Duncan, The Dagda, Columbanus (fiery l'il guy), Conchobar, Cuchullain, Cu-Cullan, Coo-bear, Esmerelda, Stan Lee, Leonard, Stuart (if only he could talk!), Jeff, Steve, Robert, Roy, Debbie, Little Debbie, Snackcakes, The Masked Avenger, The Shadow, The Cisco Kid, the Kenosha Kid (a big, hatless disappointment), Hamnet, Hamlet, Hal, Hotspur, Gertrude, Gert, Montgomery, Homer, Bart, Bushmills, Guinness, Draft, Pintglass, Jameson, Absinthe, Amaretto, Amoretta, Eli (died young, hardly miss 'im), Danielle, Brandan, Brenden, Nathaniel Sugarlips, Jennifer, Jenny, Nominative, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Sasquatch.

And they are ALL ROTTEN.

Now, why is this blog called "Whiskey Ashes"? What is the Exciting Mystery behind the name? Well, none of you caught the reference, so you are all Big Dopes.

This blog is called "Whiskey Ashes" because:

1. I like whiskey.

and:

2. "Ashes" was completely random.

I hope you are all completely satisfied?

UPDATE!

Just had a new one! Everyone welcome NORA!

2006-06-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

The Faso Life

The New York GOP convention has rejected the Pataki candidate for the governor's race, William Weld, and gone with upstate anti-abortion, gay-hating John Faso. Weld lost by about a 3:2 ratio. According to the NYT,

Most worrisome to Republicans is that the convention vote exposed tensions between the party's moderate wing, represented by Mr. Weld, and the more conservative members who support Mr. Faso. That split could undermine a party that has held the governor's office for 12 years and is likely to face a formidable challenge this fall.

No kidding. The grassroots wingnuts in NY may be a majority in the party, but they are most certainly a minority in the state. The state GOP is in a lot of trouble. Unless something fundamental changes (Spitzer caught having liasons with a squirrel, maybe) this will be a very bad year for the NY GOP. With Spitzer and HRC set to win in landslides in the top races, the outlook all down the ticket for Republican candidates is grim.

Gosh, how sad for them.

2006-05-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

I think Pollitt gets a few things wrong here -- but yes, this was a great man.

Just saying.

... in comments Phila calls Bourdieu's writing "engagingly jaundiced and no-nonsense." That's exactly right.

This is an oversimplification, but one of PB's core ideas is that people are usually out to "profit" in some way in any social situation. Sometimes they do this in very strange ways, but that's what they're doing. When you start from this point of view -- and remember that this logic applies to yourself as well -- it keeps you focused as an observer not just on what people say, but what they are really doing by saying it. How are they profiting by saying that thing in that situation?

It sounds cynical, and it sort of is. But then, when Bourdieu starts talking about something like "the fundamental principles of intellectual freedom," as he does in Rules of Art, it has a genuinely bracing effect. You know you're getting it straight. A lot of theory, especially in literature, talks about concepts like "liberation," about throwing off the chains of repressive ideologies. Bourdieu rarely goes there, bit when he does, he is not talking abstractly. He's talking about the real world. That's powerful.

Also, his theory comes out of his research. His research doesn't come out of his theory. That is just goddamn refreshing.

Anyway, anyone interested in a down-to-earth, more or less "plain language" sample of his ideas might like ON Television, his polemic against TV talking head "journalism." It's meant for a wide audience (it's actually the text of a talk he gave for French TV).

2006-05-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

Like the new digs, and the new name?

Just a few notes on housekeeping: for a few days I'll be previewing comments, for obvious reasons. Then I'll probably put in Haloscan. I will not comment on the recent insanity in any public forum. Not interested. (Well, I might in Eschaton threads, but mostly I won't.) Troll policy: I'll ban and delete at the drop of a hat, much in the same fashion as I rock house parties. As for the title of the blog, it has a Secret Meaning. The first person who can guess it wins a Valuable Prize.

But now, gay marriage:

Jo-Ann Shain and Mary Jo Kennedy will celebrate their silver anniversary in January and by then they hope that they will be legally married.

The two Brooklyn women are among the plaintiffs in a court case to legalize same-sex marriage. The Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, is hearing oral arguments on it today.

They won their case in one court, lost it then on appeal, and now it's at the final step. To tell the truth, I'm not too optimistic about their chances; Spitzer, who personally supports gay marriage, nevertheless as Attorney General found that as a matter of law it violates NY's constitution. The law will need to be changed, I expect -- and Bloomberg supports this:

Just this past week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said during his Sunday radio address that the definition of marriage should be out of the hands of government. Bloomberg said he would follow the court's decision if it deems the marriages legal - and if it doesn't, he said he would lobby state legislators to change the law to legalize same-sex nuptials.

Ah, NYC, where party partisanship is still fucked up. Anyway, I'm not clear on whether this will require a change in the state constitution or not (seems like it would), or even how that is supposed to happen, procedurally.

Anyway, Newsday had a picture of two of the people involved in the lawsuit, a lesbian couple from Brooklyn:

Can you imagine the Moral Apocalypse if these two dangerous characters were to be afforded their full civil rights? Scaaaaaaary....