I (supposedly) write like

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

This is the "badge" that was generated when I inputted my text from "At least you can afford shoes", below. Apparently I Write Like is the newest thing, for people who have time to kill and require flattery and haute distractions. I heard about "I write like" from Jim Macdonald, here.

(Incidentally I inputted the verbiage from the Euronews interview with Elif Şafak, and "I write like" decided the unnamed blurb writer is just like Kurt Vonnegut.)

Writing n' junk

"Do We Still Need Libraries?"

What's the purpose of libraries—really? To be a community gathering place? To promote life-long learning? To help users navigate the information flow? To store print documents for the historical record, as Nicholson Baker argues they should (and aren't) in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper?

Libraries can serve all these functions. But what they mean to us as physical spaces is changing, and the information-science vision has now been enshrined at Cambridge Main.

from Martha Nichols, who also writes at Talking Writing, a literary blog. I didn't even know there were such things, but if there are blogs for immigration rights activists and healthcare administrators and realtors and hockey fans, I guess that shouldn't surprise me terribly much.


and, "Do Novels Still Matter?" also by Nichols, who is apparently some sort of troublemaker.

OK, one last Salon.com related link:

"Are video games the next great art form?"
Developers are pushing the limits of storytelling, interactivity and design. Why aren't they getting any respect?
By Alex Jung

and, not from Salon, Gina Telaroli, "the top 10 film blogs"

BBC News, "What is Secret Cinema?" This video makes me think some people have more free time and disposable income than sense, although I suppose blogging may strike some as being the same sort of thing, at least as far as the time goes.

Novelist Elif Şafak-Euronews

Euronews — June 06, 2010 — Elif Şafak is Turkey's most popular female writer. She has also gained fame abroad, not only for her literary accomplishments but also because of the lawsuit brought against her in Turkey because, in one of her novels she refers to the mass killings of Armenians in 1915; that is in The Bastard of Istanbul. The suit was dropped. Euronews met up with Şafak in Lyon, France, where she was attending a book festival. We asked her about her impressions of Europe, her writing and culture.

John Perkins re Obama

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, discusses his disappointment in Obama. But I don't get how he (apparently) really believed that Obama was ever a liberal, as he suggests here.

The full-length conversation is here. Maybe it's a little more promising than this snippet.

"The Office of Letters and Light"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaNoWriMo

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Fear of writing

from Derrida(2002)

Joe Bageant, Obama, and the days and years ahead

I hadn't visited Joe Bageant's digs in a while, and I was curious to see if he had any thoughts about the Obama inauguration. Joe's new essay is here:
"North Toward Home: from here in Central America, you can't see America's "shining city on the hill," but you can smell the dead in Gaza."

Also, I chanced upon an earlier, really exceptional, essay I hadn't seen before, from April of 2008, "The Audacity of Depression." Written in the midst of the HRC-Obama scrap, Joe makes it pretty clear that he sees Obama's appeals to hope for what they are, without therefore suggesting Hillary is a better alternative. I've saved it to my del.icio.us account under "the fall", which is the name I give for this category of writings, not quite a genre, which I see more and more of, discussing forebodings of US decline. From the 2008 essay:

Lately though, I don't hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called "rage fatigue." Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it's true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I'm no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing.
[...]
like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course -- that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition -- will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

The only one of you characters who has any balls is Dennis Kucinich, and you sorry sons-of-bitches had to run him out of the race

I have a lengthy post about the SOTU which will be up Wednesday night. In the meantime, here a 2 parts(out of 7) of a Real News interview with Gore Vidal from last year.

1.Gore Vidal on FDR: "he smiled benignly on the oil wells."




2.Gore Vidal on Truman:"Hiroshima was the end of the American republic"



3.Vidal on McCarthyism and the Military Comissions Act of 2006


4.Vidal on the US media: "the people have no voice because they have no information."

5.Vidal on the dems and religion.

If you want the other items they're at their site. I found the 1st two plus the one on the media the most interesting, the others less so.

silber-1

arthur silber is fundraising, as he appears to be in pretty dire financial straits.

Naomi n' Naomi

If you are a good liberal-- and naturally I hope you are-- then you probably (1) care about being able to tell Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf apart, and (2) occasionally have some difficulty doing so.

So as a public service and an excuse to post a picture of a couple of Naomis, I am offering this simple primer to help you tell these Naomis apart:

1.Naomi Klein(on the left), born in Montreal, is Canadian. Naomi Wolf, born in California, is American.

2.Naomi Klein is probably best known for No Logo, published in 2000. Naomi Wolf is probably best known for The Beauty Myth(1990).

2b.Unfortunately, Naomi Wolf is also known for a bit of righty/MSM misinformation: for supposedly having advised Al Gore to "wear more earth tones" when she was an advisor to him during the 2000 campaign. Although she was in fact an advisor to Gore, there is no actual evidence that she said this, and it was just another example of the idiotic big media narrative about how Gore was less authentic and out of touch when compared to the "authentic" George Bush, Jr. [...]

3. Naomi Klein is married, whereas Naomi Wolf is divorced.(Yes, I noticed the lack of a wedding ring in Naomi Klein's photo, above. But I wouldn't read too much into it-- she probably just doesn't want her new book to be jealous, since they probably spent a lot of time together.)


4. Speaking of new books, they each put out a new book in September of 2007, possibly out of a desire to confuse people. Klein's is The Shock Doctrine, and Naomi Wolf's is The End of America:a letter of warning to a young patriot.(This past summer Ms. Wolf had an article in the Guardian discussing the premise of her then-forthcoming book-- here: Fascist America in Ten Steps.


5. They're both very talented and smart and pretty and should send me free copies of their books to review. Don't you think so?


see also

Critical Thinkers: "Naomi Wolf resources"

Naomi Klein article in Harpers:Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia

Norman Mailer

As you may already know, Norman Mailer died yesterday. So I suppose if there's an afterlife he may well meet Marilyn(the Time cover is from '73. I think you can barely make it out if you're an abnormally good squinter.). Incidentally he came out with a novel earlier in 2007, his 1st in about 10 years, The Castle in the Forest. The stubby Wikipedia entry describes it as

"the story of Adolf Hitler's childhood as seen through the eyes of Dieter, a demon sent to put him on his destructive path. The novel explores the idea that Hitler had no Jewish heritage but was the product of incest."

You can decide for yourself whether or not that sounds promising. (Just based on the description, it sounds to me like psychic displacement masquerading as literature, designed to reassure readers that People are Basically Good and Hitler was a mere aberration. But hey, what do I know. If you've read it, feel free to comment below.)

I take a certain amount of perhaps morbid comfort from the fact that he somehow made it to 84, and lucidly, in spite of not seeming to have taken terribly good care of his health, although I suppose his reputation in that area may be exaggerated. There's an NPR interview with him (from January 2007), here: approx 11 minutes.