May 18, 2006

THERE ARE WORSE THINGS YOU COULD DO

adrienne barbeau 36d

Dear Berkeley Public Library,

Thanks again for ordering those reactionary counterrevolutionary books I requested. Hopefully now that I've finished you can exchange them for books other people might like too. I wanted to alert you to my latest must-read: There Are Worse Things I Could Do, the story of the legendary Adrienne Barbeau.

Who can forget Adrienne's amazing thermodynamics in The Fog, Swamp Thing, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, & Battle of the Network Stars? Or her immortal line There's something in the fog! She also did serious work, such as Norman Lear's important sociopolitical sitcom, Maude:

"If the producers needed information in a scene, my character was the one to do it. What I didn't know is that when I said those things, I was usually walking down a flight of stairs & no one was even listening to me. They were just watching my breasts precede me."

I was surprised to see you hadn't ordered this yet, but I'm sure it's just an oversight. Please hurry as I'm still a pauper but really really have to read this book.

Your friend,
Jeff

VIDEO: The Fog trailer with Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, & Janet Leigh

See also Top 11 Scream Queens; Adrienne Barbeau's Big Boobs

Posted by Jeff at 07:20 AM | Comments (10)

February 21, 2006

BRUCE BAWER: WHILE EUROPE SLEPT

"These acts of dhimmitude by Norway & Sweden have had their counterparts in the corridors of international power. Franco Frattini, EU Commissioner of Justice, Freedom, & Security, promised to take steps to 'regulate' speech (though he later denied this); Kofi Annan, on Danish TV, said You don’t joke about other people’s religion, & you must respect what is holy for other people. Since when do the EU & UN tell supposedly free people what to respect & what not to respect?

"Many Islamists do not hide the fact that their long-term goal is to turn Europe, step by step, into a Muslim caliphate ruled by sharia law. Alas, it looks at present as if the cartoon controversy may turn out to have been a significant step on the way to that goal. One thing is clear: these have been the darkest days for European freedom in many a decade."

— Bruce Bawer, a liberal gay poet who moved to Europe & got bitchslapped by reality. See also Bruce Bawer: Hating America

Posted by Jeff at 12:58 PM | Comments (2)

February 17, 2006

A MESSAGE FROM THE BIG O®

Recently, I was doing my shtick when 3 terrible words popped up on the teleprompter: I. WAS. WRONG. I fired 10 people & kneecapped Dr. Phil before they tranquilized me with a BBQ pork sandwich & sent my galpal Gayle to tell me it was kinda sorta true.

I should have stuck with Dead Writers Who Don't Talk Back. After that one turd suggested having the Big O® on his book was tacky, like it wasn't a sacred honor to sit beside Wally Lamb & Maya Angelou! W. T. F.

I knew James Frey's A Million Little Pizzas was a Big O® right away, I read it in one 12-hour session on the Stairmaster. Just gimme a juicy account of someone's unimaginably horrific childhood & a Philly cheesesteak: HURTS. SO. GOOD.

But Frey lied to the Big O®! OH. MY. GOD.  I am, like, the richest most heinous bitch in the universe, no one so much as crosses their legs in my presence (which is probably why you hear so little about my galpal Gayle).

Verily I say unto you, anyone who hires, helps, assists, befriends, takes pity on, & / or shags James Frey, I will fictionalize you, your family, your friends, & all your relatives.  You will never eat Arby's in this town again, because I am: THE. BIG. O®.

If you had a really appalling childhood involving scaldings, torture, psychic genocide, ooky sexual thingys, or miscellaneous trauma, please contact the Big O® right away!

See also Bruce Willis vs the Big O®; I Hate the Big O®

Posted by Jeff at 10:15 PM | Comments (6)

February 26, 2005

ng of a famous novel I'm reading. What is it? No fair googling.

"The temperature hit 90° the day she arrived. New York was steaming — an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell. But she didn't mind the heat or the littered midway called Times Square. She thought New York was the most exciting city in the world..."

Posted by Jeff at 03:19 PM | Comments (19)

February 13, 2005

IN PRAISE OF PURPLE PROSE

From Rikki Ducornet's The Jade Cabinet, in which Baconfield, a turn of the century architect, descends into an Egyptian tomb filled with 1 million ibis mummies:

"...the architect began to explore, first the blebs & blisters of that infundibular terrain, & then, naked as a worm & carrying a torch, the very catacombs themselves.  The maze of mummies stretched out for countless miles in all directions; the sight of innumerable cadavers sealed within clay cones shaped like the wishing caps of wizards or dunces cast a spell upon his brain.

"Naked & panting, he explored on his ten toes the curiously cluttered galleries where the hot air was thin & the dust many centuries old. A man inspired, he stumbled on like a gnat ever more entangled in a web, tirelessly exploring that lugubrious colander truffled on all sides with dead birds & knotted in shadows.

"Sometime the inevitable occurred: Baconfield's torch lacked fuel & he was hopelessly lost among the mummies. For a day & a night he dragged himself in the utter darkness among those hideously persistent cornets, ravenous for food & above all for water. Just when he had abandoned all hope he saw a luminous diamond shining in the inky darkness: day was breaking.

"Digging with bare fingers through fragments of blue faience & bone, he lost his grip & tumbled down a shallow well, into a partially collapsed chamber cluttered with a muddle of outsize alabaster vases which in the light of dawn glowed eerily; he took the vases for eggs & feared he'd stumbled upon the nest of some colossal ibis..."

See also BOMB magazine interview with Rikki Ducornet; CBC interview; The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

Posted by Jeff at 08:26 AM | Comments (9)

November 26, 2004

EXCAVATING THE HUMAN SOUL

Canadian writer Alice Munro

Ace reviewer Maria Fish calls Alice Munro's new story collection Runaway 'the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest investigators into the human soul.' Munro's latest just copped Canada's Giller Prize (2nd award for Munro) which called the stories haunting.

It's been said that Munro's dense stories are richer than most novels. Like Chekhov, she was born for the medium, having published 10 collections of stories & 1 pedestrian novel (Chekhov thought himself a failure because he never wrote a novel).

Born into a farming family in Ontario in 1931, Munro suffuses her tales with a sense of place, like Annie Proulx (altho otherwise the 2 writers couldn't be more different).

Munro on growing up in Huron County: "We lived in this kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers & prostitutes & hangers-on lived. Those were the people I knew. It was a community of outcasts. I had that feeling about myself. I thought my life was interesting. There was always a great sense of adventure"

On writing first thing in the morning: "If I'm going to get anything done that day, I sort of have to do it by 9 o'clock, when the world isn't coming in on me."

On not advising young writers: "It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns & then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better & better just because you want it to be better, & even when you get old & think There must be something else people do you won't quite be able to quit."

On confidence & the lack thereof: "When my first book came out they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn't look at them. I didn't tell my husband. I was afraid it was terrible. And one night he was away, & I forced myself to sit down & read it, & I didn't think it was too bad. "

On the poetry of everyday life: "Even totally commonplace things are just sort of endlessly interesting in their physical reality. They seem to mean something way beyond themselves."

On timeless fiction: "I don't do a lot of indicators where you can tell what time it is, because that would impinge too much. Somebody writing about now would have to have Iraq in it. They need to have the right music & celebrities & style of clothes. But I always want to see what happens with people underneath; it interests me more."

Online stories: What is Remembered; Boys & Girls (about the modest expectations of girls in Huron County); Chance

Photogallery of Alice Munro's life

Posted by Jeff at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2004

ROMANCE OF THE INTELLECTUALS

2004 Booker Prize winner The Line of Beauty; Margaret Thatcher, of whom Francois Mitterand said "She has the lips of Marilyn Monroe & the eyes of Caligula"

In a 1994 essay that upset liberals, Norman Rush contemplated the end of the socialist dream & its implications for artists & writers whelped on utopianism. (Perhaps he spoke too soon, judging by the vacuous homogeneity of our effete literati.) British author Alan Hollinghurst just copped the Booker Prize for his 4th novel, The Line of Beauty, about the Thatcher era. Any guesses as to Hollinghurst's take?

Hollinghurst: "There was a sort of collective longing for punishment & chastisement, a sense that a really strong grip had to be exerted over the country. It was so extreme what she did ... terribly destructive."

Hollinghurst: "It was such a ghastly period to live through. We're very much living with the consequences of what happened in the Thatcher years now."

Money quote: "I was someone who felt very politically unhappy in the '80s, but nonetheless did rather well. I got a nice job [deputy editor at Times Literary Supplement]. I published my first book [The Swimming Pool Library] & earned more money than I expected, & having previously never had any money at all, began to feel rather comfortable."

Hollinghurst is a good writer whose first novel smoked, but like most novelists he's an economic illiterate & faux-populist. Thatcher was the only 20th Century PM elected to 3 consecutive terms. When she took office in 1979, England was the "sick man of Europe," hobbled by corrupt, tyrannical trade unions & stagnant government monopolies. Thatcher's crimes:

• Brought down inflation from 18% to 3%
• Reduced public expenditures from 45% to 39% of the GDP
• Privatization: in 1979, 33 state enterprises absorbed £500 million in public funds & £1 billion in loans; by 1987, these same privatized companies contributed £8 billion to the economy, reducing the tax load
• Competition in energy sector reduced gas prices 31% by 1997, electricity by 20%
• From 1981 to 1987, British economy grew at 2.9% per annum, 2nd only to Japan, & productivity outpaced all other EC economies

These were material benefits to people. Much criticism of Thatcher focused on high unemployment of 3.2 million in early 80s, but this bleeding was necessary after decades of stagnation & inefficiency. Sadly for leftists, a market economy has proved the best method of raising the standard of living for more people than any utopian system devised by intellectuals.

Better the greed crimes of capitalism than the mass crimes of ideology. - Andrei Codrescu

Dickens & Hugo wrote eloquently about the poor, but never suggested people had a right to a job, or a right to healthcare. Such notions imply a monolithic government to pay for such things (ie, make someone else pay for them), & stem from a misperception that wealth is finite, & therefore anyone with money must have gotten it at someone else's expense. Hence Hollinghurst's guilt, which has now earned him a fat Booker wad! Capitalism rocks.

Posted by Jeff at 01:37 AM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2004

I'M JOYCE CAROL OATES & YOU'RE NOT

In Slate's Bush/Kerry roll call of American writers almost all declare for Kerry, & almost none mention Islamofascism. This explains why there's no literature of 9/11, the seminal event of our time. Jihad can't fit into the tiny worldview of Vietnam-era liberalism, blinkered by sentimental Rousseau & neo-Marxist canards (see Dissent: Can There Be a Decent Left?). These poseurs purport to chronicle their world, but their Richter Scale 9/11 silence gives them away: they're not writers, they're tourists.

Much of this is the poisonous influence of academe. London, Hemingway, Dumas, Dickens, Colette -- all had wildly different lives, but none were effete academics mincing towards tenure. American writers have committed suicide by interring themselves in the one place you can't speak your mind for fear of offending someone.

Take Joyce Carol Oates. Right now. Post 9/11, Oates - who likes to prattle about texts & being transgressive - announced her new novel would explore such blind hatred. Did she write about militant Islam? Of course not, she teaches at Princeton, she wouldn't DARE write about militant Islam. Her villains of choice in The Tattooed Girl are neo-Nazis, precisely because they're guaranteed to offend no one. Oates is a wimp.

The few novelists who support Bush in Slate's survey all cite Islamofascism as their chief concern. The Kerry supporters completely ignore the elephant in the headscarf, while breathlessly reciting DNC talking points & NoEffect.org conspiracy theories. Here they are, with idiot rankings:

Millionaire airhead Amy Tan: "I'm voting for Kerry because I have a brain & so does he." Hates tax cuts she made a killing on. No mention of Islamofascism.

George Saunders. Kerry. On Islamofascism: Complicated question for which Bush has simple answer - "Exterminate the brutes." [Frankly, when jihadi psychopaths are gunning for me, I prefer a simple .45 mm answer to discourse, however outre.]

Thomas Mallon: Supports Bush's "strong & measured,"response to 9/11. Notes Bush has extended "once-unimaginable degree of freedom to Afghanistan & Iraq." Compares to Reagan, also vilified by effete literati.

Dan Chaon: Anyone but Bush. "He's probably not the Antichrist but he's as close as I've seen." Hates tax cuts. No mention of Islamofascism.

Joyce Carol Oates. "Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry." To enumerate reasons "redundant & unnecessary". No mention of Islamofascism.

Orson Scott Card: Democrat for Bush. On Islamofascism: "Electing a president who is committed to losing seems the most foolish thing we could do."

Diane Johnson: Expat for Kerry. Claims sees events differently from Paris. Hilarious litany of why Euros hate us: "Guns, the auto, torture, & war." No mention of Islamofascism.

Jonathan Franzen: Claims supports Kerry. "He's the candidate whose defeat Osama bin Laden is praying for." On Theresa: "Hot, hot, hot!" Has to be satire.

Jane Smiley. Millionaire lunatic for Kerry. Repeats debunked conspiracy theories about voter disenfranchisement. "I consider a vote for Bush a vote for tyranny!" No mention of Islamofascism. [Isn't 'vote for tyranny' an oxymoron?]

Lorrie Moore: "Are there really any novelists voting for Bush?" No mention of Islamofascism.

Robert Ferrigno: Bush. "Most novelists live in their imagination, which is fine until the bad guys come knocking." On Islamofascism: Bush's approach to "stopping the people who want to kill my children is the right one: kill them first."

Jennifer Egan. Lunatic for Kerry. Bush's crimes: plunged us into war, wrecked the economy, widened the chasm between rich & poor, savaged the environment, tried to "mess with" our Constitution, "swatted away" [?] intl community. No mention of Islamofascism.

Roger Simon: Democrat for Bush. "We are in a war with Islamofascism & I don't trust Kerry to lead us for 1 minute." On Dems: "My party has been hijacked by a cult of know-nothing isolationism out of the 1930s." Simon is also a blogger.

Gary Shteyngart. Kerry. From sophisticated Europe, recites debunked conspiracy theories about intimidation of black voters, Swift Vets ("a team of cowards"). Wonders if "dark ages" are imminent in US. Notes Italians have elected their own "homegrown monster Berlusconi". [This is tragic, since Shteyngart is a great writer.]

Vendela Vida: Kerry. Promises to move to Canada if Bush wins. [Unlikely, as this would separate her from her one claim to fame: being Mrs. Dave Eggers. See hilarious gushing PR piece in Guardian, which calls them the Brad & Jenn of American lit.]

Nicole Krauss: Kerry. "If Bush is reelected, it may be the end of life as we know it."

UPDATE: DarkenWilde performs laser surgery on the Slate roster. On Oates: "I know they say Write what you know but your album is starting to skip, Joyce." On Vida's Canada threat: "Jesus, just give Bush a free campaign issue why don't you!" See also SF Gate: Authors Head to Ohio for Kerry, in which Andrew Sean Greer hopes to motivate young voters by repeating debunked conspiracy theories about the draft.

UPDATE: Now British writers are telling us who to vote for! Check out this wisdom from John Le Carre, Antonia Fraser, & Richard Dawkins! Priceless!

Also my story about jihad, Cities of Dust, due out in Barbaric Yawp this month. My most recent story, Angel Moreno, is just out in Caribbean Writer, & is surely the first story in a university journal to feature a cameo by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as Castro's lapdog.

Posted by Jeff at 01:42 AM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2004

THE PILL OF MURTI-BING

Kompozycja, 1918, by futurist artist/novelist Stanislaw Witkiewicz (click for full-screen)

KRAKOW: Nobel prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz has died at the age of 93. His life spanned the cataclysms of the 20th Century: born in Lithuania in 1911 to a family of Polish nobility, studied at Vilnius University, survived WWII, became a diplomat for the Soviet puppet regime before defecting to France in 1951.

In 1953, Milosz's The Captive Mind, an etiology of moral suicide under totalitarianism, shook up Western intellectuals in thrall to Marxist cosmology. The book with a synopsis of Insatiability, a prophetic 1927 phantasmagoria by avant-garde writer & artist Stanislaw Witkiewicz (who committed suicide in 1939 when the Red Army invaded). Insatiability is a study of decadent Polish society that has lost faith & meaning, & fears the approach of a vast Sino-Mongolian army that has conquered the East from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Suddenly, hawkers appear in towns selling Murti-Bing pills, created by a Mongolian mystic who has found an organic means of exporting his philosophy. People who take the pills become immune to metaphysical angst & spiritual hunger, & no longer fear invasion. War is averted when the West surrenders to the East, and the leader of the Western Army is ceremonially beheaded. The new age of Murti-Bing begins:

"The heroes of the novel, once tormented by philosophical 'insatiety,' entered the service of the new society. Instead of writing dissonant music, they composed marches & odes. Instead of painting abstractions as before, they turned out socially useful pictures. But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities, they became schizophrenics."

Milosz wrote those words in 1953, when this nightmare vision had come to pass:

"People in the West are often inclined to consider the lot of converted countries in terms of might & coercion. That is wrong. There is an internal longing for harmony & happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction. And Murti Bing is more tempting to an intellectual than to a laborer. For the intellectual, the New Faith is a candle that he circles like a moth. In the end, he throws himself into the flame for the glory of mankind."

Prescient words in 2004, when the West is again threatened by Oriental totalitarianism our effete intelligentsia can't grapple with. For a modern take on jihad & the West, see my story Cities of Dust.

See also: Daniel Goldfarb's Argonauts of the Western Pacific,about the homoerotic relationship between Witkiewicz & Bronislaw Malinowski

Posted by Jeff at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

THE PILL OF MURTI-BING

Kompozycja, 1918, by futurist artist/novelist Stanislaw Witkiewicz (click for full-screen)

KRAKOW: Nobel prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz has died at the age of 93. His life spanned the cataclysms of the 20th Century: born in Lithuania in 1911 to a family of Polish nobility, studied at Vilnius University, survived WWII, became a diplomat for the Soviet puppet regime before defecting to France in 1951.

In 1953, Milosz's The Captive Mind, an etiology of moral suicide under totalitarianism, shook up Western intellectuals in thrall to Marxist cosmology. The book with a synopsis of Insatiability, a prophetic 1927 phantasmagoria by avant-garde writer & artist Stanislaw Witkiewicz (who committed suicide in 1939 when the Red Army invaded). Insatiability is a study of decadent Polish society that has lost faith & meaning, & fears the approach of a vast Sino-Mongolian army that has conquered the East from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Suddenly, hawkers appear in towns selling Murti-Bing pills, created by a Mongolian mystic who has found an organic means of exporting his philosophy. People who take the pills become immune to metaphysical angst & spiritual hunger, & no longer fear invasion. War is averted when the West surrenders to the East, and the leader of the Western Army is ceremonially beheaded. The new age of Murti-Bing begins:

"The heroes of the novel, once tormented by philosophical 'insatiety,' entered the service of the new society. Instead of writing dissonant music, they composed marches & odes. Instead of painting abstractions as before, they turned out socially useful pictures. But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities, they became schizophrenics."

Milosz wrote those words in 1953, when this nightmare vision had come to pass:

"People in the West are often inclined to consider the lot of converted countries in terms of might & coercion. That is wrong. There is an internal longing for harmony & happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction. And Murti Bing is more tempting to an intellectual than to a laborer. For the intellectual, the New Faith is a candle that he circles like a moth. In the end, he throws himself into the flame for the glory of mankind."

Prescient words in 2004, when the West is again threatened by Oriental totalitarianism our effete intelligentsia can't grapple with. For a modern take on jihad & the West, see my story Cities of Dust.

See also: Daniel Goldfarb's Argonauts of the Western Pacific,about the homoerotic relationship between Witkiewicz & Bronislaw Malinowski

Posted by Jeff at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)