I thank my loyal readers for their barrage of comments & e-mails, mostly saddened outcries about the scarcity of postings on this weblog in recent weeks. Here I'll respond to a few.
My old friend Sarah, a college comrade with whom I bonded primarily over a shared appreciation of imported rums, just e-mailed me: Dear James, it's been a week, there's been so much election news, you've only posted an old poem and a few dumb e-mails. My plan was to read your blog all day at work, now I'm just going to read celebrity news.
Well, Sarah, this weblog doesn't often discuss politics – not that it aims to be “nonpartisan” in our increasingly polarized country. Perhaps the political landscape is changing with the emergence of the blogosphere. But the political climate is always changing with every new decade, with shifts of culture, technology, &, most importantly, different people. The internet is drastically & subtly rewriting political rules as it reshapes our world. Our culture has the largest “middle class” of any society ever anywhere, which means lots & lots of people sitting at desks with computers hooked to the internet, often idle. Blogs, like mine, are exciting! The nightly news seems fake, but here's political views, well written, by some guy, with access to an infinite amount of information. Maybe that's why this blog, O it was lost!, is so lame. Perhaps doomed. Perhaps its author was meant for another time, I should have been hired at a 19th Century publication like Melville's Literary World, where bookish arrogance thrives. Should I hone a more popular voice, or dig deeper & seek a marginalized audience? Am I a martyr for pseudo-intellectuality!? My God, what a thought! Needless to say, I felt dwarfed by the humongousness of the Midterm Elections, repulsed by the slime, into which the blogosphere dived & swam jovially. How could I post what I thought of John Kerry's botched joke? Maybe I need a real job.
I deleted an anonymous comment from my post on Borat, but I'll reprint it here: Yo fucker, it's just a funy movie. Sacha Barron Cohen can suck it.
Anonymous, I'm not really sure what you aimed to communicate with that statement. Was my review pretentious? Or is he reveling in the existential futility of it all. I'm curious what the second sentence could possibly mean – has “suck it” become a positive, like “bad” & so many other previously simply-defined words? I noticed in Moe's Books today that there is a book called Bad President. Indeed, direct. I believe strongly that “funy” movies can be important, revolutionary, & speak frankly about the human condition. Parody can be endlessly revelatory, & will be vital for as long as there is drama. The best artists, Shakespeares & Wes Andersons, so interlace the tragic & comic that... well, I don't need to finish that thought. Still, Anonymous, I'm not a fucker. You are the fucker. You can suck it, or not suck it.
My mother, now in Ghana eradicating polio, wrote an e-mail which said, among other things: James, [...] Why don't you review some of books you've been reading? If you're not going to be writing music or searching for employment, you should at least be responding to some of things you're reading. [...]
As she knows, my reading list has been daunting during these, my “lost years.” Besides several newspapers, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Cosmo, & a list of blogs, I also read many novels & non-fiction on a range of subjects. Why can't I report on more of the ideas I have in response to my individualized categories of intake? [I gave up on that sentence after several retakes -ed.] Sometimes, Mom, without the threat of a University to make you react in words, it's hard to find the motive to blah-blah about everything you're experiencing. I could write about my walk today, either metaphysically or empirically – for instance, it was 2.45 miles according to the little thing my dad gave me which clips to my pants. I loved the two books I read last week, Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country & Nabokov's Ada, but I feel that I've reverted to grade school reports in criticizing some author's works. “I would recommend it to my friends.” Seriously, tho, both those books are amazing, watersheds, they both changed me & made me cry. Sometimes a man is too busy to write because he is lying in the bathtub drinking beer.
We do, doodley do,
doodley do,
doodley do,
What we must,
muddily must,
muddily must,
muddily must,
Until we bust,
bodily bust,
bodily bust,
bodily bust.
-Bokonon (as quoted in A Man Without A Country).
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