Hoist By My Own Petard

Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension

In Czech it's To je pro mě španělská vesnice -- "It's all Spanish to me." My Czech teacher last summer said this about Hungarian. I found this hilarious.

Also, rah_kun found this one. I can't take credit.


World War II: If Maps Could Fight

rah_kun found this one, too. All you need to know is "YOU'RE NOT GETTING IN MY STALNGRAD!"


Tom Waits: True Confessions

Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection?

A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.

Three posts in one week -- I'm on a roll.

Why Books Won't Change Your Life

I like this article only for this passage (the rest of it is basically a convoluted joke/not-joke that devolves into a shitstorm in the comments section):

There is something else, a phrase rather than a single word, that also makes me shudder. Unlike "unputdownable" it is often used in broadsheet reviews, perhaps even more often in the sniffy land of the dedicated literary publication. That is the countless variations on: "This book will change your life."

This phrase is never used practically, as in: "Your life will have a new angle as you will now have a useful knowledge of agricultural practises in eastern Europe." In serious reviews, it is certainly not applied to self-help books, even though life-changing is what those sordid publications set out to be. No, I'm thinking of when it is applied to literature – high fiction in particular. The way a great book has to be life-changing in order to have its greatness justified. Watchmen can change your life, says Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. Jane Austen changes women's lives, says Professor Lisa Jardine. On the 1999 cover of Thomas M Disch's classic Camp Concentration, there is a quote from Ursula K Le Guin that states, simply and irrefutably, "it is a work of art" – which may be true – and that "if you read it, you will be changed". There is something unsettling in the "will be". The reader has no conscious choice but to be muddled and messed around with as a direct result of reading the book.

The phrase implies some instant metamorphic shift in the essence of our character: not just a new opinion on whether something is right or wrong, but a shift in the very fundamentals of our being. The sort of change where you're forced to admit at parties: "Well, before I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I was just plain Steve. Afterwards I'm afraid I found myself to be Stevian, the Magician of the Night."

Thankfully, this doesn't happen. It would be horrific if it did. Imagine a scene where Mother and the children sit silently around a cold dinner, all blood drained from their faces as they wait for Father to return from his weekly trip to the library, never sure what sort of man would return, how he would be different from the one who left them. Without making a sound, Mother mouths the words, as mantra and prayer: "Don't let it be Bret Easton Ellis. Don't let it be Bret Easton Ellis."

Who doesn't love a good dig at Bret Easton Ellis?

The US press deeply considers the nature of international conflict:

THE NETHERLANDS: GHANA ASKS FOR RETURN OF KING'S HEAD
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 21, 2009

The severed head of King Badu Bonsu II is going home to Ghana, about 170 years after it was hacked off in retaliation for the killings of two Dutch emissaries, whose skulls were hung from the tribal leader’s throne. A Dutch author discovered Bonsu’s head in a jar of formaldehyde last year at the Leiden University Medical Center’s anatomical collection. Ghana asked for it to be returned, with Eric Odoi-Anim, an official at Ghana’s embassy, saying, “Without burial of the head, the deceased will be hunted in the afterlife.” The Dutch government asked the hospital to cooperate, and the hospital said in a statement Friday that it was in talks with the embassy “to carefully prepare for the return of King Badu Bonsu II’s head.”

(NY Times)

I just realized I have been hearing the lyric "If you keep your goal in sight" from "Everybody's Got the Right" in Assassins as "If you keep your colon tight" since I first heard it.

Found a new toy in Wordle, with which I made the following:

A visual representation of the first five pages of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:



A visual representation of my final paper for Socialist Realism, on national participatory literatures:

Wrote 22 pages last night between 10 pm and 5:00 am.

Went to sleep at 5:44 am.

Rinse and repeat.

Hey, hey guys.

Remember how four years ago, conservatives accused the Democrats of not having a "coherent agenda" or a "consistent world viewpoint", claiming all they had to go on was that they would vote for anyone who wasn't Bush? Remember how they decried the clear moral collapse of a political belief that to them represented a morally bankrupt elite obsessed with identity politics? Remember how they suggested that the Democrats could never have another major win?

Well, how the tables have turned, my friends:

David Brooks Says Conservative Movement Has "No Leaders," "No Coherent Belief System," Is In "A World Of Pain."

Whose house, baby.

This is just too good:

Palin Backlash Continues as Republican Lawyers Head to Alaska to Take Back Her $150,000 Campaign Clothes

Palin was at home in Alaska and not giving interviews, although she is lined up to speak at length to Fox News on Monday.

Guys, seriously, I cannot wait. She's my new favorite comedian.

Edited:

Guys, guys, life just keeps getting better and better:

By the end of the week, their complaints had escalated considerably, with Fox News quoting unnamed McCain campaign officials as saying that Ms. Palin had not known that Africa was a continent, not a country, and claiming that she did not know which countries were covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Ms. Palin told reporters in Alaska that the anonymous criticism was “cowardly,” and that she had discussed the campaign’s position on Nafta at her debate prep sessions.

“I remember having a discussion with a couple of debate preppers,” she said. “So if it came from one of those debate preppers, you know, that’s curious. But having a discussion about Nafta — not, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t know who is a part of Nafta.’ ”

“So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context,” Ms. Palin said. “And that’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right.” (from Palin Calls Critics Among McCain Aides 'Jerks')

Emphasis mine. Because, you know. Africa the continent versus Africa the country AND discussions of Africa in terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement... I could not make this shit up.

I know, we won. Our president no longer sucks, and the campaign is no longer going, so this is a moot point.

But it was way too what-the-fucky not to mention:

White Supremacists for Obama

I think better when I wear pants with Batman on them.

All of us polish those lists for public view, and you can't get more public than running for president. But these lists do tell us something, even if it's not the truth. Obama's list says that he'd like to convey a willingness to face heartbreak and irony, that he's open to the new and to the experimental, but that he's serious of purpose and true of heart. McCain's list says that sure, he reads books, but he's not a pansy boy.
(Local Literati Rate Candidates' Reading Lists)

From alpheratz, an actual reasonable article on the conflict between Russia and Georgia that does not resort to Cold War rhetoric. Unsurprisingly, it did not run in an American newspaper.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead.

Well, shit.

ETA: Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings By and About Maxim Gorky -- A book I want to read somewhat desperately.

A hilarious thing: So You Want to Write a Memoir?

A terrifying thing: A Troublesome Visitor by Mark Ames

On Russian Fashion Week in Moscow:

"Apparently the hit of the week was 20-year-old designer Antonina Shapovalova, who is a Commissar of the political youth movement Nashi. According to Shapovalova, one of the aims of her underwear collection is to increase the Russian birthrate. One pair of knickers bears the slogan "Vova, I'm with you" - a reference to ex-President Vladimir ("Vova") Putin." (izo.com)