Author Archives: Ryan

Hard-Right Resurgence in Virginia

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno

Sigh.  I had thought my beloved home state was leaving behind its idiotic reactionary, whistlin’-Dixie past and becoming a blue-ish Mid-Atlantic state, but in recent months we’ve managed to put several crypto-psychopaths into key positions in state government, including the governor’s mansion.  This last figure would be Bob McDonnell, a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty “University” who successfully fooled enough voters into thinking he was a moderate instead of a greedy, dogmatic bigot.  As George Packer observes in a recent blog post,

Virginia, not traditionally an incubator of extremism, has become one of the loudest sources of opposition and nullification on the right. Its new attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, has made a national name in his efforts to end Virginia’s ban on discrimination against homosexuals at state universities and his crusade to sue the federal government over health-care reform. The state legislature recently passed a bill declaring that Virginia will not be subject to any new federal health-care reform law. Verga calls health-care reform an unconstitutional government takeover. The rhetoric keeps getting more hyperbolic, the opposition more intransigent, and the ideological tests more rigid. In a political atmosphere as overheated this, the line between ideas and action is always in danger of melting away.

-TGR

Dig Carol Ann Duffy

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry

My hunch is that American readers, even poetry aficionados, don’t read a lot of contemporary British poetry. The Irish lyricists get plenty of deserved attention, but their Anglo-Scottish counterparts–indeed, all the Commonwealth literatures (hear much about the great Australian Les Murray?)–are somewhat ignored, with the exception of Derek Walcott. Personally, I know almost nothing about newer stuff by Brits; my experience of their recent literature has mainly come through reading novels. But while studying for an exam a couple years ago, I did come across Carol Ann Duffy, Scottish resident of Manchester, born in the mid-1950s, publishing great short poems since the 80s.

She’s genuinely famous in the U.K. and was named Poet Laureate last year (the first woman to get the job), but Duffy isn’t taught much in American universities or written about in out literary mags. In lieu of me burping on about her anymore (she’s really good), I give you a BBC biography site and a link to a recent Guardian profile.

Google her. Read whatever comes up and also be advised that her Selected Poems (published as part of the very cool Penguin Poets line in 2004 and again in 2009, in a better-looking edition) is available on Amazon.com for as little as three bucks.

-TGR

strike and counterstrike

Posted on by under in the news

Did you know that the Bush Administration’s clandestine, illegal program of torture and quasi-military imprisonment is basically the only reason America has survived the past ten years?  No?  Me neither, honestly.  But that’s the argument of a new book, Courting Disaster, by former Bush speechwriter/continued bootlicker Marc A. Thiessen.  Since I’m not a national-security expert, I can’t truly explain why Mr. Thiessen’s book is so specious, pompous, and historically inane; but the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer is, and in the latest issue she absolutely trepans Courting Disaster.  A smart, justifiably sarcastic essay that uses this thing called “evidence” that Thiessen himself seems allergic to, right here.  Dig in.

-TGR

219-212. Finally. My condolences to the stupid and/or reactionary.

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, Visual

Woooh, SPRING BREAK.  I have spent 3 hours today watching live coverage of & commentary on the House health-care vote, and my brain is greasy at this point.  Basic cable in Santa Barbara doesn’t give you Fox News, and I’m genuinely sad about that, because it remains as interesting as ever to compare it to CNN’s and MSNBC’s respective coverage.  Still, this gave me time to begin noticing (again) how much more humane and less cheesy MSNBC seems.  Sure, they have in-house reactionary perverts / commentators like Pat Buchanan and that cross-eyed guy who used to work for Cheney, but they also utilize Rachel Maddow and Ezra Klein, and shrill as Keith Olbermann can be, he’s still not the blue-state Geraldo.  Even their graphic design is somehow cooler looking, in both senses of the word: it looks hip compared to CNN’s hyperactive visuals and is more elementally soothing.

Why is this?  Isn’t NBC owned by an evil conglomerate, too?  Why hasn’t all mass visual media turned into Fox?  Presumably the corporate overlords wouldn’t want Maddow doing stories about Blackwater murdering people in Iraq, yet in reality that’s what happens.  Is it just because media corporations can make more money appealing to niche political markets (e.g. how MSNBC is generally left-of-center) instead of trying to grab a vanilla plurality?  IS THIS COMMODIFIED DISSENT?  I need to stop watching the TV now.

-TGR

Martin Amis, “Success”

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Reviews

Do you sometimes read books? Are you a youngish male? (Bonus points for being the kind likely to feel vaguely sympatico with the main dude in Greenberg.) Do you ever complain about sex issues or your job? About class?  Like a drink? Have a sense of humor? Do you have at least a light liberal-arts education (including self-education)?

Then may I suggest Martin Amis‘ cruel, despondent, hilarious short novel Success? It’s a book about co-dependents who despise each other, and who are both vile, funny, self-obsessed human urbanites. The angst of writers like David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, and Junot Diaz is unimaginable without Amis; he is the bridge between their voices and the realist comedy exemplified by Graham Green, Kingsley Amis, Dickens, Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, and Charlotte Bronte. (Though Bronte isn’t a true realist. Plus, you would need to talk about Rabelais and Henry Fielding and D.H. Lawrence, who is unintentionally funny. Of course Samuel Beckett, too.  Especially him. Anyway.) Success is a book to read if you fancy yourself cosmopolitan in that coastal Anglo-American hip way but also enjoy ironic perspectives on the foibles of said lifestyle. Amis is a novelist for the end of parties, also the beginnings of them and the middles.

 

Heidegger vs. Nazis vs. Heidegger Fans vs. People Who think Heidegger was a Nazi (espisode one million)

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, Reviews

It’s a fact: Martin Heidegger was a good silent citizen under the Nazi regime–a full, tenured academic toady, to be honest.  And there are some creepy rhetorical resemblances between his notion of Dasein and the Nazis’ blood-and-soil vocabulary.  Still, was he really a crypto-fascist?  DUNNO.  I like Heidegger.  Am I a bad brain?

Anyway, a heavyweight French academic, Emmanuel Faye, of the University of Rouen, has waded into the scrum, and he doesn’t like what he found.  Having studied a lot of unpublished Heidegger, Faye concludes that H’s thought—his bizarre, polyvocal, poetic thought—has a lot in common with totalitarian ideology.  I will probably never read Faye’s book, recently published in English translation by the Yale UP, and which is subtly titled Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, but I did check out this review from the Times (of London) Higher Education supplement.  It is troubling stuff.  But I still like Heidegger.

-TGR

Wal-Mart is Good for the Planet—Wah?

Posted on by under in the news

No, not trying to be funny.  I was gabberflasted when I read this article from The Atlantic, which points out that in the past several years the giant grocery / cheap stuff firm has been developing a sophisticated, heterogeneous, localized network of produce suppliers.  This has been a boon for small regional farmers, many of whom are beginning to plant more varieties of fruits and vegetables suited to their respective local ecosystems and which can be rapidly plugged into the Wal-Mart supply chain.  As a result, fresher produce for the buyer, expanded markets for “mom-n-pop” growers, and way, way less carbon output, since instead of trucking the product from wherever a giant ag firm grows it (e.g. apples in Washington, oranges in Florida, cranberries in Jersey) to all the grocery stores across the country, Wally World is selling local food, much of it organic.  (Remember, many of our contemporary notions of where a particular plant “naturally” flourishes are products of the corporate agribusiness model, which prioritizes centralization and standardization.)  Anyway, this trend constitutes a revolution in the American food economy, a giant move away from the factory-farm model which has dominated since World War II.  Wal-Mart’s intentions seem genuinely non-evil (of course, they also realized how much  money is to be made—mountains of it—from satisfying the increasing American demand for fresh local food).  Now they just need to start hocking artisanal handguns.

-TGR