These days I'm sort of against animal spectatorship, particularly of elephants, which I think should not be bred in captivity and used for performative purposes because they are too smart and interesting, and can communicate with one another by sensing vibrations through their feet from up to twenty miles away. I also am tired of people like Karl Lagerfield, and wish he could take his world and move it several miles into space, and I am annoyed that he is dressing this elephant in a Chanel suit, as if she were some botoxed vampire stalking a chintz-filled living room in the Upper 80s.

I turned on to the off-ramp of I-30 today and I think it was only sort of a mistake. I meant to link this days ago, when Emily B. called at 8 a.m. to inform me that Stephen Levin was wearing a blazer in the NY Times. This recent spate of appearances by Brown kids in the Times has left me sort of dumbfounded. Rebecca tried to set me up with Manu once. Good people, these boys.

Thank god for ponchos

Nov. 21, 2004  |  SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- President Bush tried to mend relations in Latin America with fresh promises of immigration reform Sunday while a new security spat surfaced with Chile after an embarrassing fracas in which Bush intervened.

What was supposed to have been an elaborate state dinner with 200 people Sunday was downgraded to an official working dinner, reportedly because Chilean President Ricardo Lagos balked at Secret Service demands for guests to walk through metal detectors. The guest list for the working dinner was pared down to the leaders, their wives and top aides.

On Saturday night, Bush waded into a scuffle that erupted when Chilean authorities blocked the president's Secret Service agents from accompanying him into a dinner. As tempers flared and a shoving match ensued, Bush pushed into the commotion, grabbed his lead agent, Nick Trotta, and pulled him inside.

The incident, shown repeatedly on television worldwide, was an unlikely episode in an otherwise staid gathering of 21 Pacific Rim leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. In a moment of levity, the leaders posed in colorful, hand-woven ponchos -- following the summit tradition of wearing native garb of the host country.



I've needed to e-mail my host family for awhile, but now I'm sort of ashamed to.

Eureka

Thanks to the impeccable e-mail archives of Ted and Solon, the depressing ODB article was found. It was in Blender, not The Source. It's still depressing. Read it.

Some might call my my mother a pessimist.

The Life and Times of Big Baby Jesus

Today, on Russell "Rusty" Jones's birthday, we must sadly mourn his sudden and unexpected death last week from what appears to be heart failure. Rather than focus on his myriad gunshots/arrests/gonorrheaoutbreaks/paroles/incarcarations/baby'smommas/bulletproofvests, etc. I think the thing that stands out most in my mind was that amazing article in The Source about him in prison, which I can't find anywhere on the internet. I'm guessing it ran in 2002, before The Trials & Tribulations of Russell Jones came out, a sad commentary on a sadder man, where the writer described Ol' Dirty in a state of physical and mental decay, on suicide watch, toothless and muttering, not even knowing what material would be on The Trials & Tribulations (which was universally panned.) But I can't find it, so this, my second favorite news item, will have to do:

Ol' Dirty Bastard Saves Child

Ol' Dirty's second most noble deed came shortly after that one, at the 1998 Grammys, where he interrupted Shawn Colvin's speech to bum rush the stage and give his opinion on the fact that Puffy had just won album of the year. His speech echoed the sentiments of many:

"Please calm down. I went and bought me an outfit today that cost me a lot of money, because I figured that Wu-Tang was gonna win. I don't know how you all see it, but when it comes to the children, Wu-Tang is for the children. We teach the children. Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best. I want you all to know that this is ODB, and I love you all, peace."

Sorry if you already read this on Arkansas Rockers. I can't imagine there's much overlap in readership. Two people max. is my estimate. I've been wanting to write an extensive summary of life in Little Rock, which I feel like I've barely posted about at all, but it gets muddled in my head and, like any outsider perspective, could potentially be seen by natives as a massive display of ignorance, a tourist's view. I'm a bit sensitive about that. I was thinking I could make a link to the 4-page thread on ArkansasRockers.com's message board about The Localist/Vinos conspiracy, and provide an appendix with necessary vocab words and personalities like "The Localist," "The Mansion," "T.J. Deeter," "Vinos," "Davey, " etc. but I can't imagine anybody up in the Northeast would actually go through the trouble. If one were so inclined to undertake such an anthropological study, out of sheer voyeuristic obsession with what we can all agree upon is my thrilling existence, where even such mundane facts as where one might eat pizza in Little Rock, Arkansas are small cultural gems of higher knowledge, than they should just call me and we'll work something out.

It doesn't get any scarier than this...

Congratulatory letter to President George W. Bush from Dr. Bob Jones III:

November 3, 2004

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

The media tells us that you have received the largest number of popular votes of any president in America's history. Congratulations!

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

More of the same.

Today

The morning was punctuated by three events ocurring between stepping out of my car and arriving at my building:

1. Domestic dispute, where the following was overheard: "Wull Hunny, thar's a reason yew bin married three times."

2. This misplaced campaign of righteousness on a bumper sticker: "No to Mike, yes to Roy: Save Disney."

3. A dead blackbird.

Rue the day

First Avenue closed. Sad times in Minneapolis. More.

I saw The Motorcycle Diaries the other day and liked it quite a bit. It made me rather nostalgic—while in Chile they pass through Temuco, Valparaíso (where I was an exchange student for a year), the Atacama and Chuquicamata, all places I have rather intense emotional memories of.

In other news, I just realized our cat has a Friendster page. She has six testimonials. It's weird to Friendster your cat.

Obligatory Thoughts on the Re-election of GWB

"Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal ('The Great Relearning,' as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it) — no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected."

Thus writes Bill Bennett his doughy face alight in flabby celebration, presiding over a tea party of assholes at The National Review.

Here in Arkansas it was a morning of rain and hangovers, and as Kerry conceded the vote, the final death knell for pluralism in Washington D.C. for a good while, I happened to be fact checking an article on John C. Calhoun. Generally credited with spawning the Civil War, he was advocate number one for secession, putting forth nullification as a Constitutionally-granted State right. I had to wonder what would happen, for a minute, if the entire block of the North seceded this morning. Ideologically, on the Internet at least, it does not seem implausible.

"Despite living here all my life," laments Nathalie, "I'm not familiar with America." Wonkette offers us Harper's guide to expatriation. Over and over we hear of this great cultural divide between the South/Midwest and the Northeast. I feel the need, in the middle of all this, to reflect on the part of the country I just moved to. Since my parents left Minneapolis for Georgia two and a half years ago, I no longer have a home town. I have voted in four different districts since the last presidential election and I have completely lost touch with the people I grew up with. But after four years in Rhode Island it never felt like any sort of home. I love New York but I spent the majority of time there in total solitude and although anti-depressants made this experience much more pleasant than the same experience in Rhode Island, it was still never home.

So culturally, even though it's only been two months, Arkansas is my home. With the exception of Atlanta, where my parents live, I love the little I have seen of the South, I love the people here. Speaking in generalities I relate to them more than I do Northeasterners and life has just come a little bit easier since I moved here. But it makes me really fucking upset that 75% of the voters in Arkansas wanted to ban gay marriage and I may not celebrate Christmas this year in order to protest religious fundamentalist fascist ideologue assholes, even if they are in the vast majority.

HOWEVER, Kerry only lost by some 11 percentage points. We re-elected a Democratic Senator and Congressman. Maybe if a few people in the more liberal states would lose their snooty opinion, because it is snooty my friends, and maybe if they realized how much money they could save by living in, say, Oxford, Mississippi, than in New York, New York and how, particularly if you are a writer, artist-type, you can get a lot more work done and feel much better about yourself than you would surrounded by all the other douchebags trying to do the same thing in Williamsburg, maybe then we could make a political difference.

My friends. We have lost the election. We cannot lose again. The next democratic candidate will be John Edwards, and he'll be a Southerner. Will you let this dumpling of the Carolinas down again? Would you suffer his twinkly smile to falter? In the next four years we need to alter the landscape of the country:

Don't secede, don't expatriate... CARPETBAG IN 2008!

Big Time

Little Rock has now joined the likes of Memphis and Providence with the completion of its own novelty trolley. The trolley goes to North Little Rock! And the Clinton library! (Which looks, incidentally, like a large traileron stilts.) It is so heartening to see municipalities around the country taking genuine steps toward better public transportation.

I mean, at least when Minneapolis decided to build a train they made it a Light Rail that goes to useful places, like the airport, and the Mall of America.

The Robot Hall of Fame "recognizes excellence in robotics technology worldwide and honors the fictional and real robots that have inspired and made breakthrough accomplishments in robotics."

From the NYT:

Scientists Find Skeletons of Miniature People
"Once upon a time, but not so long ago, in a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons, and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.

The island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and downsized others.

The carnivorous lizards that reached Flores, perhaps on natural rafts, became giant-sized and still survive, though now confined mostly to the nearby island of Komodo; they are called Komodo dragons. Elephants are excellent swimmers; those that reached Flores evolved to a dwarf form the size of an ox."

Emily B. always mails me the best articles. I would l like to live on a magical island with large lizards rafting into the sunset and mini-elephants populating its forests. I have also, since moving to the South, become very adept at spearing giant rats.
More.

Hurrah for the Red Sox.

Memorial event

For Joanne. Monday, October 25, 5 pm, at the new MCM building (135 Thayer St.) in Providence.

Gorrillas in the Mist

Louis is in Rwanda and he finally has a a blog of his own. One step closer to becoming a khaki-wearing, gunshot-scarred, Graham Greene-reading mercenary of a dispatching expat. DO IT!

Moving up in the world

Last Sunday's New York Times was scattered around the house and I was going through the morning cereal ritual when I see the Sunday Styles section on the floor with a picture of Evan Rock. Or at least it looks like Evan Rock. And then I notice the caption, and it is indeed Evan Rock. Not only that, the story is by Elana Berkowitz, and she quotes Jordan Carlos too. Isn't everyone so young and fabulous? The story.

For meanings differ and defer

Perhaps in my last posting I quickly hopped over Derrida's death to complain about my undergraduate institution, but in all fairness today I feel compelled to praise one of my favorite academic personalities, who I learned about, of course, in the same room I denigrated in my last posting.

It is raining today. I wore sweatpants in solidarity with the weather, which was banging "stay in bed!" against the windowpane this morning. Unfortunately, the sweatpants have gone to my head, leaving me in a sort of sweatpants-like mindset that demanded I read every obituary about Derrida I could find on the internet instead of writing a challenging article about elephants that I assume will never be published.

As a person who writes, I know it is possible to execute a moderately successful article about a subject you don't attempt to understand by describing the controversy around it. This was the case in the majority of Derrida articles and obituaries that have been printed in the past few days, most of which devoted much more ink to the academic squabbling surrounding his various theories than the theories themselves. A number of publications brought up a New York Times interview where Derrida had refused to provide a definition to the concept of deconstruction, responding instead with the question, "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?"

Without a small statuette in one's hand, it sounds silly to thank one person for the influence they have had on one's work, but I and many other people I know owe a debt to Derrida for teaching us about language. Rare is the day that I do not think about the concept of différance, not directly perhaps, but through the ability to articulate what exactly is wrong (or perhaps right) with the linguistic process behind a phrase like "the war on terror." It's what I wrote my first one-act play about, and he said it, there is nothing outside of text.

Having gone through a fair amount of obituaries, this one, appearing in the Guardian, was the most comprehensive:

"He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts - which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" ( différance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way...

Derrida moved easily among French, English and German writers, and his favourites included James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan. Although his name is often coupled with the term "postmodernism" (sometimes with a suggestion of moral relativism), his allegiance was much more to the strenuous aesthetic experiments of the modernist writers. For him, the fact that moral values cannot be expressed as simple rules of conduct increased, rather than decreased, the importance of our ethical responsibilities."

Which internet did you hear that on?

I'm in Memphis with the Oxford American for a literary conference of sorts. I watched the debates last night in a little broken bar with a pool table and christmas lights just one block from where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Passing by the Hotel Lorraine on our way to dinner (decision to eat determined via gut check) made me sad. Downtown Memphis is old ornate buildings interspersed with late 1970s monoliths, it feels rather dead but ornamentally so. Like every city suffering a renaissance for its blighted downtown, there is a novelty trolley. Somehow urban wastelands looked for redemption and were presented with apparitions of novelty trolleys that have since been worshiped as false idols. We had ribs from Rendezvous, and I really wanted to Fed Ex someone a package of ribs. It's a pretty penny though.

So Jacques Derrida has died. I imagine there have been various candlelight vigils and memorial panels at Brown. Ugh. Sometimes I daydream about going to an MCM class and sitting on that big wooden table at the Malcolm S. Forbes Center and vomiting on the best-dressed student in the discussion section.

Today I also fell in love with James Ellroy. He asked me what my name was. I said Emily. He looked me in the eye and said, "Emily, history rages." Then took my copy of American Tabloid and signed it, "To Emily. History Rages! J.E." He did this for no-one else that I saw. I was pleased.

He's pretty crazy. He said something along the lines of "I always tell writers not to write from their own lives," and yet at the same time he talked at length about growing up in L.A., about how his mother was murdered in 1958 when he was ten, "an unsolved body dump sex crime," and how all his best friends are cops. This is a person whose life and experiences are totally inseprable from his fiction, to an uncanny extent. He's also a total populist, all his favorite books were released as trade paperbacks and he was very up front about only writing film scripts (none of which have ever been made, excluding adaptations of his own work) for money. He think films are a lesser art than literature. He hopes to die without any money, except enough to build an auditorium at his old junior high in L.A. (where he says he spent a few happy years). And in the James Ellroy Auditorium he would erect a statue of himself with the words "Read motherfuckers!" inscribed at the base.

He "dreams of a new language for popular American fiction.''

It's been a day surrounded by the middle-aged however, and the maroon and forest green motifs of my hotel room in the "Sleep Inn" are beginning to swim before my eyes. I must go take the novelty trolley to trays of canapes and small tarts and Edward P. Jones accepting an award.

Pleather: the body wrap of teensploitation.

Merriam Webster announces new words for 2004.