StumbleUpon is great when you’re bored.  It’s basically a website where you click the “stumble” button and it sends the clicker of the button to websites that StumbleUpon users finds interesting, in any degree of fashion.  There are no limits to what people choose; it seems like there is a category for everything.  Almost everything.

A while back I stumbled my way on to a page where a blogger discusses one of the topics that he conversed about with Kurt Vonnegut, and I’ve continually seen it being enforced by people’s behavior.  Here is the website in question: http://sivers.org/drama

While he does a very good job at portraying what he means to say, I will attempt to summarize for our purposes.  Vonnegut explains that people have been exposed to grand stories from the  time they are born.  Epic battles, looming disasters, drastic circumstances, noble characters.  Stories so surreal and sublime that real life appears to be one poorly written story lacking the vitality of the great anecdotes.  So people begin to create this pseudo drama in order to compare their lives with the expectation of the stories around them.  I also think it gives an explanation when people exaggerate when they tell stories, in order to entertain the people listening to the story more so.

Recently this just seems to be hitting me more often than not.  It probably has more than anything to do with the people that I am finding myself around.  This search for faux drama does not apply to everyone, but enough people to engage everyone, those not affected by it included.  I find myself dragged into it at times and it seems like a useless waste of effort, as if nothing is accomplished, but at the same time I search for meaning in life when I feel as if I have none.  There is something to be said about the mundane routine that life has, but I do not have any answers.  To paraphrase Agent Smith in The Matrix, it is purpose that gives us meaning, and I desire that more than most things.  An individual lifespan is amazingly short in the duration of history, and even more insignificant if you can conceive the vastness of the galaxy, let alone universe.  What effect do we have as individuals?  What can I do that will ever really matter beyond the now?  I fear the answer is nothing.  One day in the future the sun will consume the earth and what I am writing now will have no merit, no meaning.  Realizing this is a daily challenge, and yet it makes everything that much more important, in its unimportantness if that makes sense.

Thinking about what I’ve just said, maybe the people who create drama out of nothing are simply searching for purpose themselves.  But I would suggest that instead of creating unnecessary conflict or producing some bastardized version of real life where protagonist and antagonist are requirements, that we can pursue more promising avenues of discovering purpose without the counter productive bullshit that will only ruin our chances. Life is not a fairy tale, and I would not be satisfied to think that it is.  It is my hope that, no, wait; this goes beyond simple hope.  We need to act in ways that circumvent contemporary thinking and interact and become something greater than our current selves.

(Am. 11/11/1922 - 11/04/2007

Dit is een boekje waarvan ik niet echt weet of ik het nu geniaal vind of net het tegenovergestelde. Het is een dun boekje over een man die zijn oorlogstrauma’s op een heel eigenzinnige manier ‘verwerkt’.  De rode draad is het bombardement op Dresden (1945), waar hij zelf aanwezig was. Vonnegut was toen een Amerikaanse krijgsgevangene. Het hoofdpersonage in dit boek is Billy Pilgrim, waarvan zijn heden en zijn verleden door elkaar lopen. Het ene moment zien we hem afzien in Dresden, het andere moment studeert hij aan de universiteit, om vervolgens een ruimtereis te maken naar de planeet Tralfamadore.

Als een Tralfamadoriër een dode ziet denkt hij alleen dat de overledene op dat moment in slechte conditie verkeert, maar diezelfde persoon maakt het op andere momenten uitstekend. Tegenwoordig haal ik, als ik hoor dat iemand dood is, gewoon mijn schouders op en zeg wat de Tralfamadoriërs over dode mensen zeggen, en dat is: “Zo gaat dat.”

Uit het nawoord door Jan Donkers:

De letterlijk tijd- en ruimteloze structuur van het boek stelt Billy (die losstaat van de tijd, hij is een (tijds-spastiscus) in staat als bizar geklede krijgsgevangene door Dresden te lopen en even later met zijn droomachtige mooie minnares tentoongesteld te worden op de planeet Tralfamadore. Vervolgens is er maar een kleine imaginaire sprong nodig om Billy terecht te doen komen in zijn meest concrete heden, in het stadje Ilium waar zijn dochter hem probeert te verzorgen maar zich hoofdzakelijk boos maakt omdat hij zo raar doet. (…) De schok die Slachthuis Vijf veroorzaakte bij een Amerikaanse lezerspubliek dat niet aan de werkelijkheid van de oorlog in Vietnam gewend begon te raken, was groot en is in belangrijke mate verantwoordelijk geweest voor het succes van het boek. Hier zag de lezer, gewend aan heroïsche oorlogsgeschiedschrijving, de onderkant van de oorlog, de barbaarse werkelijkheid zoals die wordt beleefd door soldaat en burger.

if this life were a dream, how would you interpret it?
-harold klemp, living ECK master (loosely quoted)

x

the only difference between dreams and reality is
the only difference between dreams and reality.
god constructed one and we constructed the other
(and we are all god). 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxyour blinkers are out and
you’re giving false signals to hapless young men
in bars.  ever notice the coincidence and wonder if
you’re inadvertently flirting in reality’s only dream?

‘The Commandant’s Desk’ is one of the “new and unpublished writings on war and peace” in Armageddon in Retrospect, Vonnegut’s first posthumous publication (a second, Look at the Birdie, has since been released). In many ways it is not a typical Vonnegut story – that honour falls to ‘Great Day’, with its mix of folksy narrative voice and time travel. It is certainly science fiction in that it presents us with the aftermath of a war between Russia and America, but there is nothing futuristic about it and it seems likely it is based (as most of the writing in this book is) on Vonnegut’s experiences in the aftermath of the Second World War.

In the story American troops liberate / occupy (take your pick) a small town in Czechoslovakia which had previously been held by the Russians. The story is told form the perspective of a Czech carpenter who has experience of both the First (“I lost my left leg as an Austrian infantryman in 1916”) and Second (“three deep nicks near the iron tip, for the three German officers whose car I sent down a mountainside one night in 1943”) World Wars. To the narrator, the arrival of the Americans is a blessing:

“Now praise God, I was seeing Americans again…Knowing this day was coming had kept me alive.”

In expectation, he has hoarded a bottle of Scotch under the floorboards to celebrate their arrival. However, when the American commander, Major Evans, enters his shop he finds himself treated with contempt. When Evans discovers the narrator can speak English, he comments, “Good for you, Pop.”

“He made me feel like a small dog who had cleverly – for a small dog – fetched him a rubber ball.”

He refuses to shake the narrator’s hand, and when offered whatever he needs from the shop, he assumes the narrator is simply afraid rather than grateful. Evans is contrasted with Captain Donini, whose manner is much more conciliatory. The difference is plain – Evans has experienced years of conflict and Donini hasn’t:

“It was hard to imagine him on a battlefield and it was hard to imagine the major anywhere else.”

Evans spots a desk that the narrator had been making for the Russian commandant:

“I’d designed it as a private satire on the Russian commandant’s bad taste and hypocrisy about symbols of wealth.”

Evans, however, also finds the “hideous piece of furniture” appealing and intends to take it for his office, once the hammer and sickle has been replaced by an eagle. Vonnegut’s point is clear – only the symbols change.

The attitude of Evans is echoed in that of the American soldiers. They are not as bad as the Russians or Nazis, needing to get drunk before their worst behaviour and embarrassed when women or old men stand up to them, but they regard the townspeople as little better than enemies and soon the town has “the atmosphere of a prison.” Eventually the narrator and his daughter drink the whisky while he reminisces about the time when her mother was alive and she was a “young pretty and carefree girl.”

In another story the Major might have been a sympathetic character. We discover that he lost his family in the war, and that he is so numbed by the fighting he wishes he had been killed, and only longs to be transferred to Leningrad where pockets of resistance still hold out. Vonnegut, however, does not let him off so lightly:

“So what are you trying to tell us – that we are all doing penance for the death of the major’s family?”

The narrator has also suffered but his voice remains rational and considered throughout, though a twist at the end shows that all are eventually corrupted by war.

It is not clear when this story was written, but it obviously has a lot to say to contemporary America despite it rather 1950s style World War Three setting. As is often the case with Vonnegut his incomprehension and cynicism fight it out, and neither one is the victor.

After working Jena, my fiance, for 46 hours per week and split shifts on the weekends, I can say that I am only grateful to Cracker Barrel for one thing. They made sure that she had the shortest labor that the eighth floor of Pinnacle Health Harrisburg has seen in quite some time. I am, in fact, lucky to have even made it in time to see our little girl come into the world.  Like a torpedo she had wedged herself up into Jena’s ribcage, and like one she entered the world.

Yesterday, an hour and a half into my shift in the kitchen, and near the end of getting everything ready for the a la carte pasta bar (AKA Operation: Cook All Of This Stuff Because It’s Going To Go Bad Over The Thanksgiving Break Anyway) when I notice that my phone has been ringing in the midst of all of my prep work and running around. I tell one of my chefs that Jena has called me four times and he tells me with assurance to go call her. When she gets to me first all I can hear her saying is, “The doctor says I’m ready to push… Get to the hospital”. I can explain this as being a little jarring when her planned due date was the eighth of December. I came back into the kitchen crumpling my chef hat as I scrambled at my apron strings, saying, “I need to get to the hospital…!”. I had forgotten how to untie a knot for just those few seconds, Chef Gabe remarking, “Aw, look, his hands are shaking… I remember when I was like that”. I got the call at ten thirty, she got to the hospital at quarter till eleven and the nurses were already telling her that she should start pushing, but she held on for me. Evette Lynne Agnew was born at nine minutes after eleven at six pounds and seven ounces on the twentieth of November 2009.

With a 9 out of 10 on the APGAR test (for responsiveness and overall health), her mother’s lips, my nose, and a head of hair she has come into this world. It’s like I mused to Evette when she had trouble getting settled, “Okay look baby, I know you’re not very happy not being inside your mom anymore because it was nice and dark and warm, and now you’re out here and it’s bright and cold with all the poking and moving and people making you wear diapers and wiping your butt. It’s pretty rough. We had to move recently too, your mom and me, and that was kind of annoying, but it’s a much nicer place with off street parking and a spacious kitchen, not that you know what any of those words mean. I hope that you like your new place too.”

Which reminds me of the classic line from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

The nurses have informed Jena not to tell any other women about how short her labor was (a first contraction at eight thirty in the morning) for fear that these women will get their hopes up. Because, apparently, this NEVER HAPPENS.  This fact was confirmed to me by the waitress at the diner that I had breakfast this morning.  Upon hearing about my new state as a father the manager came over and talked and heard some details, then informed me that my money wasn’t any good there.  Of course I had to bring the baby in to meet the ladies of the diner.  Naturally, I still tipped.

It was really difficult to leave my girls at the hospital for the night, but I knew I’d need to have my energy to get things in order tomorrow. Still, for some reason, dead on my feet and with that hundred yard stare from sleeping on the worst pull out bed in the history of man, I decided that it would be a good idea to make the chili that I’d been planning to cook today. I tend to treat cooking as therapy sometimes, when stressed or just in need of something to get very focused on. When considering making a pork based chili I decided that I wanted to accentuate the sweeter side of the dish so in addition to onions, garlic, bay leaf, red beans, and the usual suspects, I chose to use roasted bell pepper and hominy which added a nice character to its flavor as well as some nice texture from the hominy.

Driving home from the grocery store, I suddenly caught one of my occasional olfactory memories. From time to time I get specific smells that will hit me, like oregano or fennel, triggered by some random memory. This time it was Evette, the slightly musty smell that I’ve had right up against my chest, and beneath me on the changing table for the past day and a half. To have such a concise sensation hit you is jarring and intense. I had a twinge of regret for spending a night without her or her mother. And now my bed is much larger than it has been other nights, and the house much quieter. I look forward to hearing Evette’s fussy sound, which reminds me of something in between a creaky door and a sad puppy.

Next week- Something more light hearted. I promise.

Two exciting things:
1. While putting away a book I just finished reading, I went about organizing my book shelf (as I am prone to do) and was in my Vonnegut section when I discovered that I had put one of his short story collections away, in the ‘read’ pile, when in reality I had not finished the stories. Oh happy day! New Vonnegut for me to read! (the book is ‘Bagombo Snuff Box’)
I steadfastly put the book in my washroom. This may seem odd to most, but I challenge anyone to read ‘Welcome to the Monkey House’ on the crapper and not feel like it was the most productive part of your day.
2. I found a note in the book. I do not recognize it. I now wonder the following: a) who wrote it?; b) to whom was it written?; c) was it written to me and I just don’t remember it?; d) what was the ekey for?; e) what kind of job or duty did this person have the required the use of an ekey, and not just any ekey, but an ekey that expired, and that getting one until Saturday was a hush-hush affair; f) who’s this Nina character?; g) I wonder if her disturbance is to be feared…

Let’s get the trivialities, the “givens” out of the way.  Vonnegut has a very distinct narrative voice and frequently breaks (read: completely disregards) one of those steadfast rules writers deal with now called “show don’t tell”. 

I’m not a big Vonnegut fan (I know- “gasp! horror!”) but am an admirer.  This book is the third one I’ve read by him and it easily ranks somewhere in my top “whatever number suits best” books I’ve ever read list.  Vonnegut tells a story about a guy named Billy Pilgrim and his experience of the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II.  Now, it wouldn’t be a Vonnegut book if it were that linear in scope but that’s pretty much the focus of the novel.

While he uses dips, turns and lifts to bring us closer to Dresden in 1945 he simultaneously weaves the story away from it with tales of aliens from Tralfamadore and parties with a guest list almost exclusively comprised of optometrists- Dresden is the point upon which Vonnegut pivots.  It’s the axis of the story.  It’s the purpose.

Billy Pilgrim, our faithful conduit, leaps through time and space.  When he’s on his honeymoon with his wife he goes to the bathroom and finds himself back in the bathroom at the POW camp in Germany.  Sometimes we find him making love with a beautiful ex-porn actress at the zoo, in front of visitors at Tralfamadore, and others we find him walking along in silver boots and an azure toga into Dresden.

What is beautiful, and miraculous, about this piece of literature is its blatant defiance of show vs tell.  Vonnegut, through telling, communicates the story in such a way we’re able to jump into the mind, the body of our protagonist while still keeping our wits about us.  It’s not a book to read for escape, nor to have someone think for you.  It’s not character driven in the modern sense, but instead forces you to see things you might not know.

For me it was this:  More people, in all likelihood, died in the firebombing of Dresden than did those in Nagasaki or Hiroshima.

It is my contention Vonnegut is to literature what Kubrick is to film.  The images are there, the dialogue readily accessible but it is up to you, your mind, your intellect and your philosophy to discern what is good or bad about the work, and if any of it can be applied to life.  While this kind of writing isn’t always my speed (I do so love linear tales showing character development) it is interesting and evocative.  One of the rare occasions in which I read something which literally didn’t tug at my heart strings AT ALL and still I can recommend it most ardently.

* Ireland wants a rematch against France, but FIFA says it won’t happen. More here.

* Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home as a POW, 1944.

* The headline reads, “IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat.”

* Eric Barker calls this New York Times article on DNA testing and parental rights “thought-provoking”, and I suppose it is—but mostly I was completely aghast at the idea that a father would desert his child after a decade just because the child turned out to be “not really his,” “someone else’s kid.” Speaking off the cuff, it seems to me the best solution here would probably just be to change the law to allow children to have more than two legal parents—but regardless of the legal question there’s a clear ethical imperative to remain a parent the child you have raised and claim to love, whatever the mother might have done or said in the past. In some sense this actually seems to me to be beyond ethics, or rather before; it seems to me you’d want to stay the child’s father, that you’d be desperate to, in whatever way you could.

* Autocomplete Me is a blog devoted to revealing the weirdest gems in Google’s autocomplete feature. (Hat tip: Neil.)

* The Board of Regents for the University of California system has voted to raise tuition 32% over 2008. How the University Works declares California is burning.

* Troubled times in Casino City. Via Atrios.

* Stopping ACTA. Via Boing Boing.

* Dump Geithner: A growing consensus?

* Good and bad polling news: Even Fox News viewers overwhelmingly think the bow was appropriate (good news), but 52% of Republicans think ACORN stole 9.5 million votes in the 2008 election to put Obama in the White House (bad news). Naturally, ACORN stole NY-23 as well.

* Meanwhile, 52% of Americans are shockingly misinformed about whether an army of gorillas could beat an army of bears.

* And the news story that launched a thousand 2010 puns: there could be fishlike life on Europa. All these puns are yours, except Europa. Attempt no punning there.

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”
—Bennington College address, 1970

I så fall kanske den här bilden som jag fick av gummiyxan (en av mina nyvunna vänner och tillika lagledare för oss i GatSmart på frågesportsajten Vetgirig) sände mig igår kan vara till hjälp…?

Ok , titta noga på bilden nedan……….

Har du kollat klart..? Bra.....

Såg du rumpan på tjejen i bakgrunden???

Hehe… så det kan bli ibland.. Eller, för att snacka med Kurre Vonnegut; So it goes…

P S     Så här ser förresten vår lagfana ut på Vetgirig:

Det går bättre för oss än vad man skulle kunna tro...!

Kurt Vonnegut este, pentru mine, unul dintre acei autori pe care i-am auzit lăudaţi pe toate gardurile, de către oameni în al căror gust literar aveam o oarecare încredere. Acum ceva vreme am citit “Bufoniada” (apărută tot la Humanitas) şi nu mi-a provocat niciun fel de reacţie. Dar pentru că nu mă dau bătut atât de uşor, mi-am zis să-i acord acestui om o nouă şansă. Aşa am pus mâna (şi ochii) pe această colecţie de povestiri numită, foarte sugestiv, “Bun venit printre maimuţe”.

Se pare că atunci când nu sunt un fan absolut al unui autor, îmi prieşte să-i citesc (dacă are aşa ceva) proza scurtă. Aşa mi s-a întâmplat şi cu Heinrich Boll… Revenind la Vonnegut, trebuie să spun că povestirile lui au nu doar o inteligenţă ascunsă sub masca ironiei, ci şi o doză consistentă de “miştouri”. Nimic nu este întâmplător în istorioarele lui Vonnegut. Poveţele lui îmbracă diverse forme: fie mici poveşti semi-sf  (“Chestiunea Eufio”), fie întâmplări anodine, menite să surprindă latura psihologică a chestiunii. Din punctul meu de vedere, cea mai reuşită povestire este “Încă o casă maiestuoasă”, chiar dacă fanii lui Kurt Vonnegut vor recunoaşte că aceasta este una din cele mai ne-vonnegut-iene izbânzi ale scriitorului. N-am s-o povestesc aici, pentru că-mi lipseşte, evident, talentul său şi modul extraordinar prin care reuşeşte să transforme o întâmplare banală într-o pildă emoţionantă.

Cred că, până la urmă, rostul lui Kurt Vonnegut (chiar dacă neasumat)  a fost acela de a-ţi oferi câteva ore de entertainment literar de primă mână (nimic de reproşat stilului, recunosc), dar să te şi lase, la sfârşitul parcurgerii rândurilor, cu impresia acută că te-ai uitat, în aceste 350 de pagini, într-o oglindă cât se poate de fidelă. Vonnegut scrie despre noi. Cu umor, cu patos, cu înţelegere, cu duioşie. O face într-un fel nederanjant, dar util. Fiecare poveste a lui Vonnegut ascunde o pildă. Detectabilă sau nu, depinde de starea în care te afli.

Aşa că turnul Babel există. Întrebaţi-l numai pe Kurt. Iar dacă, în loc de răspuns, o să vă facă cu ochiul, simţiţi-vă privilegiaţi. Pe bune!

(Kurt Vonnegut, Bun venit printre maimuţe, ed. Humanitas, 2008).

*reading in progress: Saul Bellow, Iarna decanului; Piotr Wierzbicki, Structura minciunii.

Believe it or not, I am a proud graduate of Elon University.

And, believe it or not, Elon University happens to be a more than decent institution.

So how I got in (and graduated), I have yet to figure it out.

Anyway, while enjoying the mistake Elon made during those four wonderful years, I had the pleasure of learning from some of the brightest, most interesting minds of their fields.

One mind in particular, and the subtopic of this post, is Professor Michael Skube. What an odd fellow. But he gave me some of the best advice. And it is pretty simple. All he said was “good writers read good writing.”

Easy enough.

As a communicator, it is crucial to weed out all the fluff we read, in order to continually expand our minds and stay sharp. So below is a short list of the material I read, and the material I stray away.

What I read:
1. New York Times
2. Kurt Vonnegut
3. Shakespeare (I know, quiet)
4. Some classics (Machiavelli, American Revolutionaries, etc.)
5. Anything Freakonomics

What I Don’t read:
1. Wall Street Journal op-eds (Post-Murdoch)
2. Anything associated with Fox News (perhaps due to my own bias, but ah well)
3. Anything science fiction (minus Ray Bradbury)
4. Anything long-winded (Nathaniel Hawthorne- yikes..easy on the description)

And of course, also from Prof. Skube, I keep an AP Stylebook and  Strunk & White’s “On Writing Well” nearby at all times. Good grammar and writing is hot.

Cheers,

DW

In spite of the 2009 copyright, Look at the Birdie (previously) unpublished short fiction by the late and indelibly profound Kurt Vonnegut reads more like a historical tome rather than a new release. There are 14 stories in all with doodles peppered throughout, but not a one reads like signature Vonnegut. That is because all the works stem from an early period in the fifties, before Vonnegut became… well, Vonnegut.

And, while this isn’t much of an endorsement on the surface, what makes this work remarkable is that his signature voice is struggling to be born in almost all of these works, bubbling up between sentences, poking out from around paragraphs. The most thrilling part of the book is that it is damning proof that Vonnegut didn’t start out writing with pure literary genius. Years ago, I’d seen the author himself say as much to a room full of would-be writers: don’t aspire to be a unique voice in literature, he joked, any more than trying to write to the fad of the time, just tell a good story as best you can.

All of the stories in Look at the Birdie are good stories. Some are cute (FUBAR, Song for Selma), some are thrilling (Ed Luby’s Key Club, Hall of Mirrors), all are clever, but reading the book as a study of the emergence of a craft that has produced masterpieces, well, that is definitely worth the price of admission.

“Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants” – from Breakfast of Champions

Every night, with rare exception, finds me fitfully roaming through nightmare after nightmare. No drug will stop them, nor will an enjoyable evening, happy conversation or love making just before I go to sleep. They are consistent only in their power to disturb me, and always leave me feeling much abused and cruelly manipulated by morning. In a fashion similar to an excellent novel or film, which can provide a transendant emotional experience that adds up to a whole lot more than a series of images or words. But not quite like that, as the emotional currency that we use against ourselves can be more evocative than the works of all but a few truly gifted artists. The language of a nightmare draws upon a rich lexicon that is made up of more than thoughts of people and things meant to create an emotional response. That would be bad enough, and sometimes, for whatever reason, the power of a dream ends there. But sometimes, a dream (or more often a nightmare), cheats and uses emotion itself to create a response that is unearned. One may only remember a collection of random events of little or no importance; walking to the store, getting on a trolley car, or climbing a flight of stairs. If it were a play or novel, we would be waiting for something to happen. But the mind is a stage where you (all of you) is both the performing artist and the audience. You are relating something to yourself, and it that’s what I mean by efficiency. Perhaps a better word would be elegance.

In that sense, every dream and every nightmare is sentimental. It is an unearned appeal to emotion. But the emotional power is found to an astounding degree, regardless. That’s why you can never explain the dream or nightmare to other people. It’s usually embarrassing to try to do so. For example, the things that happened to me in my nightmare last night made me wince upon remembering. I awoke covered in a cold sweat and with a terrific headache. From there, I sought only to escape myself via some distraction, via the television or even stroking the cat. One way or another, I had to get the fuck away from me. Pills help. But if I tried to tell you about it (which I wouldn’t), you would laugh at the seemingly random imagery and get really uncomfortable as I earnestly tried to relate something impossible to relate. Your dreams are produced, composed, written, choreographed, acted and performed by and for you.

Intuitively, one would assume that crazy people have stranger dreams and more horrifying nightmares. I’m not so sure, and I think that I’m inclined to believe that because I doubt other people are as fucked up as me. And to some degree, that may be true. The sane people I know tell me about dreams where they are knitting an enormous sweater while Dane Cook plays darts with Ned Flanders in the background, or some such shit. I ache for that kind of enjoyable simplicity. I suspect that my stupidity and mental instability leads to indecipherable iconography and random imagery, coupled with very disturbing feelings. More intelligent and stable people perhaps have more ordered dreams, with less spillover from one part of the brain to another. They may find themselves having sex with a set of bagpipes in the back seat of ‘57 Chevy, and wake up feeling violated, but it is still vaguely coherent.

As for me, I don’t know what the fuck happened last night. Anxiety was in the background, guilt was absolutely dripping from everywhere, the images were horrifying and complex but they could be related and still have power. One part that I can remember will go with me to my grave, but most of it is thankfully gone. But I still feel like a used rubber, flung from a speeding car (perhaps a ‘57 Chevy), smeared and stuck to the windshield of a tractor trailer. And this happens five nights a week. I kick my own ass beneath the sheets. As for the other two nights I don’t sleep at all. Yeah, I know, woe is me. The world ain’t easy.

Saturday night, and I can’t stop reloading the blogs to see how health care is doing. Image at the right via kate.

* The White House press corps does not believe you have not heard of V.

* Democratic congresswomen shouted down by Republicans. Matt has the video, and it’s pretty astounding.

* Krugman: “There’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980.”

* Kurt Vonnemutt.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Mars. Related: 1924, the year Navy radiographers were asked to listen for communication from Mars.

Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care “plan.”

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It’s already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It’s already made its compromises with reality. It’s already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It’s one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It’s another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren’t even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn’t perfect, but in comparison, it’s looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I’m pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn’t be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

Indianapolis, Ind - October 30, 2009 -Kurt Vonnegut fans will gather to honor the Hoosier author on Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 7:00 p.m. at the Earth House Collective, 237 N. East St., located inside Lockerbie Central United Methodist Church, on what would have been  Vonnegut’s 87^thbirthday. 

The third annual Gospel According to Vonnegut celebration will honor the life, theology, politics, humor and local roots of Indianapolis’ most important postwar writer.   There will also be birthday cake.

“Vonnegut focused on the absurd and he found a lot of absurdity in religion,” Mike Oles, organizer for the event, said.  “He comes from a long line of religious skeptics and atheists but his hostility towards religion allowed him to write powerfully-perhaps more so than any other Indiana voice– about the historical Jesus.”

Along with Vonnegut’s riffs on God and Christianity, the gathering will also focus on the writer’s Indiana roots.  It was at Indianapolis’ Shortridge High School where Vonnegut wrote for the only daily high school newspaper in the country.  Meanwhile, Vonnegut attributed much of his moral vision to fellow Hoosier radicals like Eugene Debs and Powers Hapgood. 

Earth House is located inside Lockerbie Central United Methodist Church, on the corner of New Yorkand East Streets in downtown Indianapolis. 

 For more information, please contact Mike Oles, 317-354-3207.

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“Confetti #21″
Edition of 52 Two color silkscreen print on white Coventry cotton paper 11 x 15 inches.
Signed and numbered in pencil by the artist. 2004.
Available only through web site sales.

Here are a few of my favourite short stories. I will try and post some every Sunday. Feel free to leave comments, requests or links after.

Hope you enjoy:

‘On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning’

By Haruki Murakami

‘Psychology’

By Katherine Mansfield

‘Harrison Bergeron’

By Kurt Vonnegut

I’m on such a Vonnegut kick right now. My friend and fellow space cadet Caleb originally posted this on his inspiration blog