SCUMBAG HYPOCRITE ALERT: Maureen Mullarkey loves painting the Gay Pride Parade, but she hates everything it stands for, and all the people in it–and probably you as well
Maureen Mullarkey, the art critic and artist well-known to the gay community for her iconic portraits of drag queens and gay pride parades, was yesterday revealed by the NY Daily News to have contributed $1000 to Proposition 8. […] When asked how she could have donated money to fight gay marriage after making money from her depictions of gays, she just said, “So? If you write that story, I’ll sue you.”
(h/t to Joe.My.God)
A quick trip over to Campaignmoney.com reveals that the person in questions–Mrs. Maureen Mullarkey of Chappaqua, NY–ALSO gave nearly $1000 to different arms of McCain/Palin ’08.
HTMLXYLOPHONE: Mayke Things Mayke Things Mayke Things
“Make Things” – A Drum and An Open Window (mp3)
When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go into iTunes and play this song by A Drum and An Open Window. I met them through my friend Jordaan, and they played a show in Oroville, CA with me the summer before I moved to Massachusetts. We skipped rocks and visited the Chinese Temple, stayed up in Ryan’s apartment keeping Whisper awake and singing with both Ryans, including the backhoe driver. Dustin was driving and making all his money through poker, mostly online. Andrew wanted to go to Europe, and Ashley had a radio show.
when it’s dark i’ll write some new songs
This song is really twee, to which I’m like, well: either life really is holy with meaning and that’s coming up, your scuffle with that, or life is just a place to keep your bones for a while, which you’re going to handle by moving them a little and then moving them some more.
Power Quote: M.L. Rosenthal
Behind much of [Edward Arlington] Robinson’s work, in both its more successful and its less successful aspects, lies a deeply American obsession with the theme of failure: failure of a career, failure of a social class or a society, failure of a needed meaning to sustain itself–and, finally, the inevitable failure of life to resist death’s encroachment. Remembering Eliot’s motifs of sexual and spiritual failure and Pound’s savage complaints at a culture’s failure to realize itself, we see how much those poets have in common with Robinson after all. ‘When we think of America,’ said D.H. Lawrence in his introduction to Edward Dahlberg’s novel Bottom Dogs, ‘and of her huge success, we never realize how many failures have gone, and still go to build up that success.’
– “Rival Idioms: The Great Generation” (being Chapter Five of The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction)
**BONUS**
Read Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy”
Read Robinson’s “Richard Corey”
Read Lawrence’s “Last Lesson of the Afternoon”
Enough failure for one day? Ready for earthy pagan Modernist resurrection sex?
Read Lawrence’s “New Heaven and Earth”
Daily affirmation.
— (part 1): THE MORE I CAN FEEL I AM FALLING OUT OF BABIES THE BETTER I BE ABOUT THE MOUTH
When you are ready to sit at the desk, sit at the desk.
When you aren’t ready, still have a desk too.
I like a lot of little food and walkings.
It’s good to have a dog to fuck you up.
If you ever start to figure out what you are saying, get up and sprint straight away until you hit a wall and there will be someone there telling you what to do, which might be GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.
Are you ready stop being so entertainment? That’s the most fun.
It’s never too late to get a law degree.
Have a mother bring you half a sandwich that she didn’t eat at lunch with those other women.
Try not sleeping when you are are asleep.
Try sleeping when you are not sleep and doing it the best you ever did.
Sometimes don’t masturbate for a long time and then do it first thing in the morning.
Shampoo is still soap.
When someone asks you what you are doing in that room for so long, say ‘titties’ or else take karate for enough years until you can gut punch them in that just one spot.
Say a lot of things in a very short time sometimes.
Say not much at all for really long.
Say things you don’t mean and mean them.
Mean mean things say and don’t you them.
Make use of that time when other people are just driving but don’t realize that you are making use of it.
When the guy approaches you at Wendy’s with that look in his eye, show him where it hurts because of what you did too much.
Be this guy more often:
Sometimes when you are reading something you really like in the bathtub, put it down right where you are really liking and get out of the bath and go all wet to the desk and finish writing what you were reading, but don’t do it like that, or do it later. Or do it before you read the next thing you really like at all.
Think about submissions less and publications less and just forget you are ever going to show anyone.
Try not to show anyone.
Turn off the gmail chat.
At your desk be the worst person ever born.
Whenever someone says, ‘teach me something,’ say ‘hi.’
Enough with all this literature. Let’s have some ukulele music!
Here’s something else. Embedding of this youtube video has been disabled, so please follow this link. And then come back.
That was Cliff Edwards or “Ukulele Ike,” known to many of us as the voice of Disney’s Jiminy Cricket. As you can see, in addition to his career as a Vaudevillian, Edwards was also a World War I interrogator of German prisoners. In the video, we see him (and a fellow Imperialist American torturer slash tap dancer) engaged in some Abu Ghraib-style tactics, playing music that the subject clearly finds unbearable.
No doubt she moments later spilled all sorts of beans about the Kaiser’s plans, eh? Possibly she revealed the location of Wilhelm II mustache wax factory.
Literary tie-in: Cliff Edwards was born in Hannibal, Missouri. Also from Hannibal? Mark Twain, author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. Discuss.
Eyeball it
My friend Ryan has been writing a column about film on The Rumpus for a little while now, and I thought I’d bring it to your attention. I’ve been enjoying it.
Here’s a nice post on the movie Old Joy, a movie I wrote about on the Hobart blog. (Link in the comment I made to the post, if you’re interested.)
Here’s an interesting take on Guy Maddin’s Dracula. (Dracula is currently my favorite Maddin film. I had, until watching it, never really connected with ballet.)
And here’s a post about Lord of the Rings and the War on Terror.
on Proper Usage
Steven Pinker had a piece in the NYT yesterday about John Roberts’ flub of the Oath of Office, and why, from a grammatical standpoint, it doesn’t matter. He argues that the long-standing injunction against infinitive splitting is “a myth.”
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.
I thought it was a pretty interesting argument, and I’m always glad to see a shibboleth overturned, so I forwarded the link to my friend Amy McDaniel, who of all my friends is probably the most interested in such things, as well as the best at them. (In addition to being an expert grammarian, she’s also an expert on food, and you can/should check out her contributions to the Slashfood blog.) She replied to my message with a one-liner: “Steven Pinker is an enemy of proper usage,” to which I replied that “his insidious claims are deeply seductive.” I imagine at this point she realized I don’t know anything about Steven Pinker–or as much as I should about grammar–and so she sent me a passage of David Foster Wallace’s “Tense Present,” wherein DFW critiques Pinker’s “descriptivist” approach to usage. The essay, which originally appeared in Harper’s in 2001, can be read in its entirety here, or you can find just the part that Amy sent me to settle the matter pasted in after the jump.
hey, why don’t you write some historical fiction about THIS?
This link comes via my friend, David Gates, who retired not long ago from Newsweek. David got it from a friend of his who still works there.
None of us are 100% sure it’s true–and if you scroll to the bottom of the page, there are many highly skeptical commenters–but the pictures are great, and I figure it’s either (a) a very cool, weird nugget of real history, or else (b) something that isn’t true but should be–ie a cool, weird nugget of alternative history.
What’s your daily routine?
A friend just reminded me about this blog called Daily Routines. The blog seeks to gather together in one place the daily work routines of various smart people – like, you know, Günter Grass and Joseph Campbell. One of my favorites is the post on Charles Darwin:
| 7 a.m. | Rose and took a short walk. |
| 7:45 a.m. | Breakfast alone |
| 8–9:30 a.m. | Worked in his study; he considered this his best working time. |
| 9:30–10:30 a.m. | Went to drawing-room and read his letters, followed by reading aloud of family letters. |
| 10:30 a.m.– 12 or 12:15 p.m. |
Returned to study, which period he considered the end of his working day. |
| 12 noon | Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog. |
| 12:45 p.m. | Lunch with whole family, which was his main meal of the day. After lunch read The Times and answered his letters. |
| 3 p.m. | Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, listened to a novel or other light literature read by ED [Emma Darwin, his wife]. |
| 4 p.m. | Walked, usually round sandwalk, sometimes farther afield and sometimes in company. |
| 4:30–5:30 p.m. | Worked in study, clearing up matters of the day. |
| 6 p.m. | Rested again in bedroom with ED reading aloud. |
| 7.30 p.m. | Light high tea while the family dined. In late years never stayed in the dining room with the men, but retired to the drawing-room with the ladies. If no guests were present, he played two games of backgammon with ED, usually followed by reading to himself, then ED played the piano, followed by reading aloud. |
| 10 p.m. | Left the drawing-room and usually in bed by 10:30, but slept badly. |
Grace Paley takes heads
She does. Honest. Takes head and doesn’t give them back.
Example from the story “Wants”:
He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.
Here’s what I notice about this: that shouldn’t have worked. The metaphor—the plumber’s snake entering the ear and making its way near the heart—should come off as cliche. Familiar. A little silly. Following it up with “…leaving me choking with equipment,” redeems it.
Writers: push a cliche to the point where it strains to near snapping and you revive it.
Man, that’s a funny line.