a sense of joy and then a panic

I missed his actual death, didn't hear about it until someone else told me.  I never read any of his books and I doubt I'd like 'em because I doubt I'd like his famous Main Character Type (the white Anglo-Saxon protestant middle-American male, Rabbit) and I made a post snarking about his Widows of Eastwick a few months ago.  But I really appreciate some of the things he says:

“I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

“Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."

If it was only a little to the north of Kansas...

From Colin Blakely's description of his "Somewhere in Middle America" set:

"It is about a group of people living quite literally in Middle America- geographically, economically, politically- at a time when our notions concerning what this means are quickly changing. Having shunned the constant call of the “suburbs,” we live in a small neighborhood close to downtown. Here, the passing of time is defined as much by the rituals we collectively participate in as by the months on a calendar. This work is a celebration of and possibly a eulogy to our way of life."

Holy crap, Lord of the Rings is so damn depressing.

This is why people should not aim for "epic".  I would take obscure, inconclusive Cormac McCarthy endings over all that grandiose let's-watch-everybody-die-so-people-know-not-to-expect-sequels crap.  I won't ask you for a sequel, ok?  I won't ask you for a fucking sequel. 

This is also directed at Akira Toriyama, obviously.  And myself, because I have done the epic overarching, overreaching ending myself, and I have to say writing it really depressed me.  I won't do it again. 

Also, is it wrong how much I like European folk metal?  Faun is my favorite.  I think it ties in to my forbidden love for Charmed and my secret desire to be pagan.  And the fact that I'm going home in two and a half weeks and Nebraska brings it out in me!  You can't be pagan in the city, man.  The city's naturally dead, which is why it depresses me so much. Seriously, though - when I first moved to Nebraska and lived with my aunt and uncle, I got this big influx of folksiness.  Like I've said, my cousins are SCA re-enactors.  My aunt always listened to Steeleye Span, for goodness sake, and I'm still obsessed with their version of "Tam Lin".  Two of my favorite Midsomer Murders episodes are The Fisher King and The Straw Woman.  And I think part of what annoyed me about Twilight was the use of folk-pagan symbolism in the justification of a Mormon pro-abstinence public service announcement. 

The problem, and one that I've written about before, is how thin the line is between happyvolk and Nazivolk.  I really hate that this is true, but... it is, and seriously Europe, blame the Nazis for usurping your culture and making all the white supremacists proclaim that they're descended from Odin and Frigg.  Or blame the French, if you desire to take it that far, for making you develop Cultural Nationalism (or as my history professor calls it, Nationalism with a capital N). 

Goddamn crisis of modernity.  I'm pretty sure I've bought into it.  Don't think I realized how much so until I had to write an essay about it.  Let's just hope I don't self-immolate in a glorious fascistic moment.

I hate Garrison Keillor.

Secret because I'm from Nebraska - part of the southern half of Garrison Keillor country - and Nebraskans are all supposed to find Prairie Home Companion hilarious.  That is, unless they find Blue Collar TV and Larry the Cable Guy hilarious - liberal Nebraskans, that is, are all supposed to love Garrison Keillor, who is quite the self-declared liberal.  I really think he's just my uncle in disguise.  Except published and more inclined to turn things into jokes and, actually, more depressed.  My curmudgeon uncle has seemed to have become less mopey in recent years because he has decided to spend his money for a change - on trips to Greece and Alaska.  I could hate on him for not spending that money on my cousins and their medical bills and leaky house, but engaging with the world has made him more tolerable than Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion. 

His new book, Liberty, is being reviewed by the New York Times in this week's Sunday Book Review, and while the reviewer of course thinks that he's one of the greatest American voices of our time (whenever people start to use words like "our time" or "this generation" I start to get very nervous), but look at the reviewer's web site: clearly he's trying to be Garrison Keillor for... Florida.  I'm sorry, Florida.  I don't think Liberty is about very much - substance is the kind of thing beyond Garrison Keillor - except, apparently, the chairman of some Independence Day campaign who has an affair with "a bosomy redhead".  And see, Garrison Keillor's weakness is women, and I hate writers like that.  They write a character who's clearly a stand-in for themselves, who expresses their opinions and mopes and grumbles about the absurdity of their neighbors, and then give their character (themselves) some hot woman who just lurves them.  Phillip Roth does the same thing.  So does Kurt Vonnegut.  Anybody who wonders why it is that I dislike Kurt Vonnegut and never read anything beyond Slaughterhouse-Five?  Besides the sickening lack of regard for "the enemy" (a trope Vonnegut falls victim to way too easily), he gives "himself" a stripper-wife who he spends the last half of the book fucking.  And it's like, what the fuck am I reading?  Who the fuck are you?  Because I don't think you're talking to me.  Tellingly, Garrison Keillor is sympathetic to Sarah Palin, who he probably also has a crush on: "Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how McCain has made a fool of her."  Really?  I don't.  Oops, guess I don't have a heart.  Garrison Keillor is after all the arbiter of who the "good people" are in our society.  

Not that that's the only reason I hate Garrison Keillor.  The main reason, actually, is that I don't think he's funny (I don't think most writers are - if you know anybody that writes like Hot Fuzz, though, let me know - that's stuff that Garrison Keillor would find crass, by the way).  I'm sure he thinks he's funny, but he is essentially writing to himself, and he is a boring, boring man.  Some people call him absurd.  He's not absurd.  Catch-22 is absurd.  This guy just writes about mediocre things that could definitely happen any day in any town in a totally passion-less manner.  What he really wants you to do is look down on everyone, to sneer at them derisively, to share in his resentment that stems from nothing (because seriously, what the fuck does this guy have to complain about?), to basically be a bitter, sullen, cocky old man with a shriveled up soul who places joy in bygone things so that he can never find joy again. 

I also don't like his attitude.  He's one of those people who says "you young people" and bemoans fast food and thinks, hilariously, that Minnesota provides a "test of one's mettle".  He likes things like civility and dislikes things like lines in airports.  I can't think of a better way to describe him than "small-minded".  He's a big fish in a small pond - I don't know if he's even left the country - and smugly smirks at all the other fish in the pond, mocking them for moving on with the 21st Century.  He mocks power and the people who have it but doesn't want it himself, oh no - politics is hopeless and you are all idiots, but don't give the hot potato to me.  So what?  Is anarchy the solution?  Jimmy Carter was a nice guy, but a terrible president.  I don't even like the way this guy criticizes the Republicans, and that's saying something for me.  Like this gem: "McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in a department store window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer." 

This is called a man who profoundly misunderstands national politicians, and a lot of liberals in my hometown revel in his haphazard, uninformed commentary.  These are people who, you know, go to the Unitarian Church and give money to Nebraskans for Peace and live in comfortable houses and send their kids to Stanford and go to Jazz in June concerts and occasionally go to films that screen at the independent college theater (but nothing too disturbing!).  People completely mired in their own self-satisfied complacency, happy that they are miles above the wretched rednecks who they think surround them.  When these people criticize Bush it's hollow because they don't know what the hell they're talking about - they just get all blustery and crazy, and they convince no one of anything except that they think Bush is an idiot, though why he's an idiot, who knows.  There's this conception in the Liberal Midwest that Bush really is a president in a diaper and for some reason, he's just being allowed to randomly blow countries or welfare programs up by his goons who refuse to check him.  (Molly Ivins, from Texas, was guilty of proliferating this interpretation of Bush too)  But of course this isn't true - politics are a lot more complicated than that, and no amount of hysterical hand-wringing will make a difference.  In fact it'll just hurt the hand-wringers.  Bush needs to be taken in historical and international context - but taking things in context is something that Midwestern Liberals are totally incapable of.  They are the best representation of the worst trait in liberals: absolutism.  Incredible, fanatical absolutism, the stuff that they think belongs to Puritans because they don't see it in themselves.  I have developed a newfound respect for Neo-Cons at college - I disagree with their goals, but they are at least not self-righteous, moral absolutists (they pretend to be, sometimes, when it benefits them; this is a ruse) who refuse to play a role in the world.  Midwestern Liberals are laughably clueless when it comes to anything that is not their whitewashed suburb in their whitewashed state.  They know nothing of the world and they're fine with that, because what's America doing try to do things in the world?  Grumble grumble.  Shuffle shuffle. 

As some guy says, "I can't stand motherfuckers from Minnesota and Wisconsin who think they know jazz, and would like to lecture me on race relations." 

If some of these stupid whiners ran for office, I'd respect them more.  If they tried to do fucking ANYTHING with their lives, I'd respect them more.  Instead they just spend their money, little by little by very little, complaining about high prices all the way, pat the heads of some disabled/black kids, mock celebrities who don't even know they exist, complain about the internet, buy organic coffee, make plans to go to some screening of a weepy movie about Afghanistan, buy some books at Barnes & Noble, and write columns about how the nation is going to shit unless Americans can dredge up the small-town values that make us great and hold some massive national potluck.  They are the people who need to hear CRY MOAR the most.  I'm sure they think by voting they're doing some good in the world.  I'm also sure they whine about jury duty. 

They're one of two groups of people, it seems to me, who just truly can't wait to die and get the fuck off this planet and hate everyone on it.  The other group is the Evangelical Right.  Seriously, Midwestern Liberals have more in common with them than they'd like to think. 

For a completely different but very good reason to hate on Garrison Keillor, read this article.

Sadly, the only people who can criticize Garrison Keillor are conservatives, who usually just say he's being a liberal elitist.  Which, of course, he is. 

But the fact is, anybody who tries to own and embody an entire region - as Garrison Keillor has basically annexed the Midwest, especially for the entertainment of coastal liberals, who see his folksy stupidity as an endearing representation of liberals in the Great Plains - is a sadly deluded egomaniac. 

I vowed when it first came out never to see the movie of that Godforsaken radio show.  Well, I ended up watching it because there was nothing else on over the summer.  A) There was no plot.  B) Garrison Keillor was constantly flirting with Lindsay Lohan, which was just fucking bizarre, although not surprising.  C) I hate that fucking detective guy.  I don't care what his name is so don't tell me.  D) It was not funny and I'm not surprised the fictional radio show was cancelled. 

My advice to Midwestern Liberals?  Listen to "Dancing in the Dark".  In fact, just listen to Bruce Springsteen in general. 

I get up in the evening - and I ain't got nothing to say
I come home in the morning - I go to bed feeling the same way
I ain't nothing but tired - man I'm just tired and bored with myself
Hey baby, I could use just a little help

You can't start a fire, you can't start a fire without a spark
You can't start a fire sitting around crying over a broken heart
You can't start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart
Even if we're just dancing in the dark

1.  This is probably the most creative book I've ever read:

2.  On IMDb, the Dark Knight is #3.  All-time. 

( okay, come on, people. )

3.  I want to see this movie, Frozen River.  I love these kinds of movies, a lot more than I used to, and I think it started with things like Mystic River (which was okay) and Jindabyne (which could've been better but was goood).  I really regret not buying The Sweet Hereafter (I get chills just watching this video.  There is probably something wrong with me, but the last twenty seconds!  It's a flashback to the night before all the children in this town died in a bus accident).  Then of course there's the totally unappreciated Wendigo and the classic and should be even more classic Picnic at Hanging Rock.  Anyone who has not seen Picnic needs to.  I watched it with my mother - she had seen it in college - and certain parts of it are like being on drugs.  Really scary drugs.  As in, I could not watch certain parts - and there's no crawling ghosts either, it's just a fuckin' rock.  That's how amazing this movie is.  What's really funny is that none of these movies, if you use IMDb recommendations, are linked to each other (except for Jindabyne to Mystic River, and I think that's only because both of them involve rivers).  I think it's because IMDb is dumb and doesn't get it.  For instance, if you liked Mystic River, you are recommended by IMDb to see Sin City.  If you liked Jindabyne then you should watch The Da Vinci Code.  The Sweet Hereafter?  The Godfather.  Picnic at Hanging Rock?  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (WTF).  Wendigo?  Escape From New York.  Well, I guess the main characters are from New York City, and go to upstate New York...

4.  The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike-through the books you HATE (I added this one myself).
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them (I crossed this out, because I don't force books on people, don't even force them on myself)

( wtf is the big read anyway )

the most overrated "crisis" ever.

"Students complain about lack of sleep, stomach pain and headaches, but doctors and educators also worry that stress tied to academic achievement can lead to depression, eating disorders and other mental health problems."  Good.  Who the fuck cares about, you know, arsenic in the freaking drinking water?  Here's the real health crisis of our times. 

Either go on medication (what I did) and/or suck it up, or don't apply to Harvard.  Having taken most of my classes at Columbia this semester I have become increasingly sure that there is pretty much no difference between the kid that gets into the Ivy League school and the kid that doesn't.

I have some hella dumb classmates, and I was rejected from their school.  Prestige is all B.S.  Even at Barnard, prestige is B.S.  I was at the Torchbearers reception sitting at a table with a filthy-rich alumna (and by filthy-rich I mean, filthy-rich off her husband and parents) who was talking about how great her sons' prep academy is - Dalton School, part of the Ivy Preparatory League, also known as the Children's University School, whose alumni include such "notable" people as Chevy Chase, Anderson Cooper, Claire Danes, Christian Slater, and Sean Lennon (shameful really.  Horace Mann's got Ira Levin and Elliot Spitzer, Trinity's got the McEnroes, and Fieldston's got Sofia Coppola, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Stephen Sondheim.  Dalton's the black sheep by comparison!).  Why, the teachers there are so wonderful, all the kids pool together money when they graduate (and by pool together money I mean, their parents drop off limo-loads at the front doors) and give a gift to the school, which is not by any stretch of the imagination lacking in funds.  But you know, said this Barnard alumna, quality should be rewarded with monies.

And as soon as she said the name of the school, Dalton, I immediately thought of this biographical story I read in a book called 33 Things Every Girl Should Know.  Cliched title for a book, sounds like it came from the American Girl Company, but those stories, told by adult women, seriously are 33 Things Every Girl Should Know.  I got that book when I was about 11 - it came from my uncle (!) - and I think it really influenced how I grew up and the beliefs I adopted.  That and People, by Peter Spier, which is hands down the best book I have ever read.

The story in question was called... well, I don't remember.  Follow Your Passion, I think.  It's not important.  But it was about this girl whose mother really wanted her to go to Dalton School, because it was such a good school, and they're at the interview, and the girl is thinking about the girls she's seen in the classes, the perfect pretty girls with jelly shoes, and when the interviewer asks her why she wants to go to Dalton she snaps her chewing gum and says, "Lady, I don't.  I wanna go to public school with my friends."  Her mother is horrified and clearly she doesn't get into Dalton.  Fast-forward twenty years and she's gotten herself to a prestigious college of some sort (Yale?  I think...) and is constantly having to tell the people she meets that she went to some prep school she made up so she isn't socially ostracized, when really all she wants to say is, "Lady!  I was a Dalton reject!"

Stephen King's words are actually the only ones I remember, although other authors spin better stories in better ways, overall. 

[some are phrases, some are just words.]

The Shining:  "redrum"
It:  "He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts"
Storm of the Century:  "give me what I want and I'll go away" and "my name is legion, for we are many" [which is biblical, I know, but Stephen King introduced it to me]
The Nightflier:  "Dwight Renfield... flew in from Derry... nice fella... different... said he was flying out tonight... said he'd stop to say goodbye."
Jerusalem's Lot:  "there are SOME rats in these walls!"
Dreamcatcher:  "same shit, different day." [SSDD for short]
Pet Sematary:  "the ground there is stonier than a man's heart" and "sometimes, death is a blessing."

My mother had a slasher moment today, by accident.  We were at an Indian restaurant and we looked up at a tapestry and she said, "Oh, it's... Rama and Krishna, right?"  And then rapidly corrected herself: "Rama and Sita, I mean."  It made me wonder if yaoi fangirls (some of my friends have worse terms for them) ever ship mythological figures... some of them, Krishna in particular, seem like they could be bisexual.  I'm guessing not.  I suppose that would be boring... or perhaps, they are just not hot enough, those deities.

My family are all Fire elements - me, my parents, my grandfather (my mother's father - my father's parents, I will never know).  I'm a Fire Rabbit (adventurous, prone to tantrums, conflict-averse), my parents are Fire Pigs (risk-takers, all or nothing, excellent leaders), and my grandfather's a Fire Goat (less sensitive, selfish, social).

Fire: south, red, bitter, middle finger, speech, Vermilion Bird, apricot, beans, youth, passion, intelligence, movement.

In other news, my mother ran into a box in our garage while parking the car a few months ago and now the contents are in our basement.  It's old assorted books that she doesn't know what to do with and has no interest in reading.  At least some of them are hers - I can't imagine my dad ever owning a book called Breakdance: Apa dan Bagaimana? (what is it and how do you do it) - and the rest are his, presumably.  I'm keeping Armed Separatism in Southeast Asia and Time Out of Hand: Revolution and Reaction in Southeast Asia, but my most exciting find was A Passage to India, one of my favorite novels that my mother has never claimed to know. 

Thanks, Twitch.  I put the important parts in bold.

"In what is perhaps the perfect storm of talent for this project, John Hilcoat, director of the bloody fantastic Aussie western The Proposition (a favorite around these parts) is to direct an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post apocalyptic knock out of a novel, The Road.  Viggo Mortensen  (On a roll with two dynamite Cronenberg films) is set to star and the adaptation is being written by the screenwriter of the tragically underseen Enduring Love."

Tears literally sprang to my eyes.  Literally.

No words.  No words suffice.

Lisey has three sisters, one of whom is kooky, and at times ''Lisey's Story'' feels like ''The Ya-Ya Sisterhood Goes to Hell.''

Driven by the unanimous advice of the internet, I tried to find literary magazines in bookstores so I could actually read them.  Borders was the obvious choice - the Barnes and Noble version 2 is the biggest bookstore in Melbourne.  As Stephen King had warned me, the magazines are all piled in the back, out of sight and out of mind, but at least for Stephen King, he did find literary magazines, even if he had to stoop for them.  The only magazines I found were The Literary Review, something called Good Reading, and Australian Book Review. 

Next I tried the Melbourne Library.  I'd only seen the Famous exhibit previously, but had never entered the real holdings - and they are beautiful, like a cleaner, smoother Butler Library, with plenty of tables and IKEA-esque chairs, spacious and well-lit with high ceilings, elegant architecture, and some art galleries thrown in for good measure.  I had high hopes - they had a whole glass-enclosed journals collection.  I walked through said collection and was dismayed to find that ninety percent of the journals were civil/administrative/occupational, or related to animals.  There was one measly bookcase for literature, and it featured Shakespearean Quarterly and the ilk.  However, I did discover that one of the statues outside the Melbourne Library is of one of my favorite historical figures, Jeunne d' Arc. 

A complete bust at Angus & Robertson - they don't even sell magazines, and their only clients seem to be little old ladies.  There was, however, one of those living statue street performers nearby.  It reminded me of Hot Fuzz.  I suppose it does take talent to blink at such a slow speed.

I tried to find Collins, but failed - however, I did find a store I wish I'd gone into, Minotaur, some kind of pop-culture basement superstore that won my heart not by the anime covers on display but for pinning up my favorite H. R. Giger painting, Li II.  I also found what i thought would save me for sure - a cute little nook in Elizabeth St. called NationMag, featuring only magazines (and three-dollar coffee).  Grown-up hipsters pushed past me, children sat under the stairs with laptops - yes, it was one of those "secret" hang-outs, cool and carpeted.  I went to their Art & Literature section - no luck.  The same Good Reading offers, and some rather condescending magazines called Writer that are supposed to help fools like me.

I finally went into a Tattersall's.  At least here I found a new Granta and Zoetrope: All Story.  Granta, "the magazine for new writers" is of course anything but - the writing, however, was not too "precious"* and it remains an option in the far, far future.  Zoetrope: All Story has amazing photography and some of the essays were "precious", but the stories were awful.  The first one was a banal account of some guy's sexual encounters ("That lips.  That face.  I  yanked her panties down") and the second one actually made me laugh and put the entire magazine away.  Only a man would describe a girl's first period as feeling like "a tiny egg cracked open between her legs".

I crossed Lonsdale St. because I saw a sign for The Strand.  I was, I suppose, delirious by then and thought it was actually possible that a New York specialty would make it to nearly Antarctica.  And yes, I was wrong - it was just the name of a shopping arcade filled with flight booking agencies and jewelry stores.  Crossing the street did, however, rescue me from another bookstore: The Catholic Bookshop. 

*: like precocious, except grown-up and having artistic skill, if not purpose.