Earlier this week, I read a strange news story about Virginia Tech. A Chinese grad student decapitated a student who he had been assigned to help assimilate.
"Zhu was standing in the café holding Yang's severed head when authorities arrived on the scene. A kitchen knife and Zhu's backpack, which was filled with other sharp weapons, were lying on the floor nearby. There were seven witnesses."
The story happened in a restaurant called Au Bon Pain which was apparently right on campus. There's been almost zero news coverage. One channel segued away from the story, after about three sentences worth of coverage, using the transition phrase, "And in other Virginia news..."
Apparently it is considered discriminatory to turn mentally ill students away based solely on that issue. It is even considered discriminatory to ask incoming students if they have any special mental health needs. Is the story not being reported, as well, for fear of seeming discriminatory?
In getting rid of discrimination, have we gotten rid of sanity itself?
It does seem that a general news blackout has been ordered. Who ordered it?
Is the idea that now that we have a new president, we can no longer report atrocities? Because the world has changed, and hope has been restored?
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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I think our new Commander in Chief with the God complex eclipsed all news recently.
Even so, I am more interested in the escalating drug wars just 15 miles south of here. It's waaaay ugly. And I don't think the national media does enough to report it.
WW
So I guess what I'm saying is that is very sad what happened to the student, at the same time, we are faced with massive, horrific destruction of human life.
Perhaps mentally ill students are an issue, but not to the degree of mass murders in Mexico, and our US cops trying to keep it all south of the border. The implications are far reaching. I don't hear Obama even talking about it. All I hear is hey, Muslims, we're not the enemy.
And there's the economy too. (just survived a round of layoffs, thank you.)
Kirby, sometimes you sound totally out of touch with the rest of the US. Maybe living in a small rural town in liberal academia does that.
WW
One of the reasons I like having the blog is that it opens me up to different viewpoints, different concerns. We hear almost nothing about the incredible drug wars going on across the border with Mexico. Fox News is the only channel that ever covers anything at all. The other channels are like Pravda. All the news that fits the commmunist agenda, and nothing else. NPR is even worse.
But Fox News also has a demented tilt, and you can't get anything straight out of it. Last night they did a long segment on Al Franken's bid to steal Norm Coleman's seat by freezing the vote arbitrarily up in Minnesota.
And every time they quote Franken, they call him Frankenstein, and have eerie funny music play in the background.
How can anybody take anything seriously any longer?
What do you think should be done about the border situation, WW?
McCain would have done something about that.
Obama is busy undoing every border, every distinction, letting mass murderers out of prison, and making sure that nothing sensible gets said or gets done.
The situation with Mexico? He probably doesn't even know what's happening there.
Lou Dobbs brings it up, too, on his show. But the situation is so dire that it's almost comical.
Mexico is an incredibly lawless country, as are all the legacy countries of the old Spanish colonial empires. People say that England was bad. Spain was ten times worse.
Should we invade, take over the country, and make everyone speak English? I think this would mark a fine beginning to improving the border situation. Plus, we could get our hands on their oil.
Finally, the Mexicans wouldn't have to walk so far to get to a country that has laws.
bush and the boys set the stage for the manipulation of the messages they made the deal with the big 6
since i've all but forsaken watching tv i did not hear of the event in VA for two days
the college is most likely afraid of taking on an atmosphere of being haunted...can't blame 'em
i'm thinking the jews would get along with the mexicans
we should arrange to sell them baja california...make a deal with the muslims to let the christians live peaceably and share in government...we could even arrange to have all the holy sites dismantled and rebuilt... jerusalem de la mar pacifico
mexican culture stemming from spain is nearly 500 yrs old...bound to be decadent..they're lapping up televangelism like lemonade or beer...normally this is when the milton friedman boys would be stepping in to solve the problem...electroshock therapy...we would all do well to extend hands of hospitality and encouragement to the best of the people of mexico...they are plentiful...but they are poor and desperate...let us agree to find and help the good people...perhaps some american financed socialism just to take the burden off the poor...the rich can go phuq themselves...just kidding...they're god's children too...they just control more money that's all..i should go to confession
there's lots of crazy chit goin on
down on the border
Skittles,
You may be interested in William Vollmann's new book coming out soon called "Imperial." It's a 1,000 plus tome of journalistic investigations into the Imperial Valley, of which I understand much of the migration flows into CA?
--Tom
Tom,
You can call me WW, even though I'm signed in under my cat's name.
I'm not really interested in reading a book about immigrant labor exploited by our agricultural industry. Right now I'm concerned that our neighbor, with whom we share a border, falls into a bloody chaos beyond the drug wars.
Did you see the interview with the guy who confessed to dissolving 300+ bodies in acid?
WW
Uhhh, Kirby, the only place I've seen any news about the Mexico situation is NPR.
WW,
Oh I think you sell William a bit short; you should always want to read Vollmann! One of the travesties of our era is that 9/10 literary people have no idea who Vollmann is!
I did not! That is nuts!
I think we should invade. Why not just bomb them into submission? We need a good WW2 type bombing to rattle up our troops again, make 'em feel good! Nothing better than an incediary firestorm to raise morale!
--Tom
Well, I think they would welcome us as liberators.
Plus, I can imagine they are tired of their language and their languid culture of siestas. We could bring in the Protestant work ethic, and the country would be up and running in no time.
Hey JH,
Just checking: you do know that Baja California is Mexican territory? It's not ours to sell to the Jews.
But then again, that didn't stop us from taking California from Mexico.
WW
Spain took it from the Aztecs, didn't they?
The drug lords are reinstituting blood sacrifice.
yeah it's hard to keep
those old primitive faiths down
they just keep re-emerging
"don't let santisima muerte be in your eyes my love
down on the border
when i get my cell phone you know
i'll call you everyday" -jh
christ in your precious blood
save us
WW
i am being a bit playful with the politics of the world....perhaps because i feel so helpless in doing anything...i am involved with the hispanic community here in minnesota so i get a sense of the desperation...but generally i've become pretty cynical about the way of political and cultural violence...sorry to have to drag you through my existential dementia...hard to kill one bird with one stone let alone two
WW,
The idea that Mexico has soverignty apart from the US is a joke. Ditto for Pakistan (if you can't stop a country from shooting missiles at your citizens you are not a soverign nation).
It's odd, I was saying the same thing about Montana (since it would be easier to sell). Though for fairness's sake, we should give the Jews and the Palestinians each a homeland -- perhaps Montana for the Jews and North Dakota for the Palestinians.
Another gruesome death to add to your toll, Kirb, is the family of seven whose parents decided to kill the whole tribe because they lost their jobs. Reminds me of Dylan's song about
"seven shotgun shells" on a "North Dakota farm."
GM:
The idea that Mexico has sovereignty apart from the US is a joke. Ditto for Pakistan (if you can't stop a country from shooting missiles at your citizens you are not a sovereign nation).
This is absurd. If a country is suffering from foreign aggression it does not compromise the ideal of sovereignty. If you are occupied by another country, this is a different story as your country is now being administered by another entity. See Somalia under Ethiopian occupation up until two weeks ago. If one country enjoys complete air superiority over another, does not mean anything as you cannot take over a country from bombing. We were scared to death to invade Serbia and only after 75 straight days of bombing could we advance our agenda at all, getting the Serbian forced to vacate Kosovo. I was hoping someone would call me out about my statement on Pakistan. There was actually a tacit agreement that we could bomb within their territory as long as US troops did not enter.
Mexico, as an independent republic, only administered places like California etc... for about 20 years before we took over. Their hold on the territory was tenuous at best.
--Tom
Your definition of sovereignty leaves much to be desired.
Were Pakistan a sovereign state, we would never deign to send missiles willy-nilly into its borders.
Certainly their response wouldn't be "oooh, we don't like that -- could you stop now?"
GM, I once drove from Oregon to New York State (about eight years ago when I first came to Delhi from Portland Oregon). When you go over the mountains called the Cascades (I think) you end up in a desert that lasts until you get to about 100 miles from the river that runs through Omaha (which is?).
It's amazing, suddenly there are trees.
It's true that Palestine doesn't have as much water, so these would be desert dwellers, but -- you need water, I think, if you are going to put people there. Montana does have trout streams, but it's so blasted cold up there in the winter.
Not sure how habitable these regions are.
Maybe we could take over Mexico, and then put both groups there. This would give Mexicans more reason to move north and we could then have cheaper labor.
The problem with bringing those people here, is that they might prefer to move to your town in Florida, since it's warmer. And I don't think we could do something like ghetto-ize them, and say, you can only live here, in the middle of nowhere. Once they're here, they would have the same rights to freedom of movement, yes?
Just like the folks at Git-mo.
Once people start to get near our legal universe, they have rights.
We're like a huge molecule of legality, and any electrons that enter, end up orbiting about the rules that Locke set up (life, health, LIBERTY, and property) which still form the basis of the Constitution that Obama SWORE to protect (even if he muffed up the procedure, he still did solemnly swear to protect it, and most people agree that the Constitution has at least a large part to do with JOHN LOCKE).
Unless he was secretly thinking about Saul Alinsky, and his real allegiance to the Marxist notion of change.
I hope change just means that MORE PEOPLE will be covered by Lockean liberalism (really covered, as opposed to lip service coverage).
To return to the real center of this thread: if we have the right to life, and health, I think we should be able to discriminate against the criminally insane in terms of college admissions, because to not do would endanger the rights to life, and health of the great majority.
Ja, nicht??
It's called civil war. Was Russia a sovereign state while it fought the Chechen rebellion? Your argument is once again compelling... Your armchair politics leave something to be desired...
--Tom
Heck, there are plenty of 'em in Jacksonville already. We like them (both Palestinians and Jews) -- and they (AFAIK) refrain from shooting and busbombing each other.
Jacksonville's a big town (about 1/10 the size of the entirety of Israel), with about 1/10th the population (significantly less than the population density of say Houston or New York). I'm sure we could use a few million more immigrants -- especially the educated, English-speaking ones. Indeed, I think it would be a much more lively town if we doubled our population (that and I would have a lot more home equity).
M
You talkin to me, Tom?
What do US missiles in Pakistan have to do with Civil War (or Border conflicts in Russia)?
Or do you think that if the US sent missiles into Chechnya or Russia during the conflict they wouldn't have cared?
Never mind GM...
--Tom
Kirby I liked your rants on Irving and Updike. I think I will give Updike more of a chance. I think his criticism are more book reviews, which seem different than literary criticism as a discipline. Have you read James Wood's "How Fiction Works?" I just finished it and really enjoyed it. It's nice to see some criticism mostly devoid, except for Barthes, of French Post-Structuralism. I find that area of study fascinating, but feel that formal or aesthetic criticism is valuable as well. I'm not sure that last sentence came out right; I think you probably know what I mean though.
What are your thoughts on the "difficult postmodernists?" I am suggesting Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Gaddis, Gas etc...
--Tom
Tom, you ask a good question about the "difficult postmodernists." I don't read them, in general, I have to admit. To me they are a lot like the difficult poets, like ... all the Language poets, for instance. I think of poetry as at least in some way connected to emotional life. I think of the novel in that way, too. In many of the difficult poets and writers, that just isn't so.
I lose a sense of the significance of what the writer is going on about if the emotional level of the writing is missing.
My own hunch is that the more difficult a writer is, the less they have to say on an emotional level, and beause you don't know what is significant if you don't have any emotional life, they are trying to cover up the paucity of emoional significance they offer by offering a kind of trivial pursuits of tiny details instead. Kind of like a dried up pistachio nut that you spend ten minutes getting open, only to find some shrivelled little nothing in there, or nothing at all, in some cases.
Thesis driven poets, or thesis driven novelists overthink their writing, and it seems to me they leave a shrivelled nut at best. I don't like too much emotinoal emptiness. I also don't like writing where the emotion is all there is and there's no reflection, no thinking layer, no general discussion of current events or philosophical ideas. I want the two to intersect.
Gass wrote a book called Blue, which I read. I liked it. I think it was an essay, though, not a novel. It was fun to read, but I would never on earth recommend it to anyone else. By the end, it just seemed like a tour de force, with nothing else to recommend it.
I read Barthelme's Giles Goat Boy when I was about 22, and I didn't like it. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Is it worth it? The cynicism or something was disgusting.
Barthelme can be fun once. Once you see his gimmick, I can't understand why anybody would want to go through that twice. I think postmodernism is often a way of not getting down to any kind of emotional significance. It's about peeling away layers until there's nothing left. Another kind of postmodernism (easier?) would be Brautigan (who I like, until the very end, when he seems to have lost his mind in an alcoholic haze of dissociation). I liked vonnegut when I was 18, but his ideas are too simple, andhis metaphors too easy. He was just a jerk.
Pynchon wrote an early novel set in Seattle (it's only a novella), and I read that, and didn't like it.
I guess I don't like much American fiction. I liked Brautigan's stuff, except the one piece that everybody knows him for: Trout Fishing. I hated the cleverness of that book. I much prefer when he's writing about sex. I think he's funny then. The Hawkline monster is very Gothic, and creepy, but funny, and sleazy in a nice way.
I really liked the novels of Ronald Firbank, especially Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. JH might enjoy that one. It's about a Cardinal who baptizes a police dog. It's set in the 20s. The Pope is about to have him defrocked but Pirelli dies chasing a choir boy around the cathedral before the Papal Dis-missive reaches him. Some of the sentences in that book are eye-poppingly lovely.
I liked some surrealist novels, especially Jarry, and later, the works of Philippe soupault, especially Last Nights of Paris. I liked Breton's novel, Nadja, too.
(Recently there was a Gothic film called Nadja -- did anybody see it? Does it dpeend on Breton's book?)
Nabokov probably isn't considered difficult, but I didn't like it. I liked his essays. Sebastian Knight was ok, but filled with meaningless tricks. Lolita was just an awful book with no redeeming value.
I like a certain kind of scurrilous humor that is soaked in a kind of whimsical desperation, but I also think a book should look beyond itself and offer some kind of hope to the reader, which I think of as its seriousness. To that extent I don't think of Kafka as a SERIOUS writer, because I think he allowed himself to go down an easy road in which justice can never exist. That is useless in my estimation. Any recommendations?
I can't stand too much piety that borders on the doctrinaire, or too much impiety that borders on the cynical and grotesque. I like the two to be played off, and for the writer to attempt to think seriously about life is, and what it should be like.
What do people get out of the difficult postmodernists? Is it like doing a crossword puzzle or something?
I tried to read one of Gaddis' books in which the sub-plot was set in the Civil War. But it was just too endlessly trivial. One of the subplots was about a Richard Serra sculpture in NYC and how annoying it was, and the legal issues surrounding it. It was supposed to be comical, but I didn't think the book was a serious attempt at thought. It was again more in the line of tour de force. I hate that kind of thing.
It's that the points Gaddis was making were taking too long compared to the amount of time I was putting in on it, and then when they came, it just seemed to defer any kind of difficult point that he might have made.
too much of postmodernism is just a deferral of problems. In fact, all of it is. Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, etc. None of them are doing anything about thinking hard about problems or trying to provide answers.
Rorty is better. Too bad he's just a bigoted jerk.
Paul tillich is also just deferring problems endlessly. Plus, he's a jerk.
The other side are people like Reinhold Niebuhr, who I think has his opinions too quickly, and that's being a jerk, too. I don't know which is worse.
There hasn't been any really good writers in English since Shakespeare. He's the only good one.
I loved Corso. He's the best since Shakespeare, but he's only really Mercutio or Lucio (my favorite characters in Shakespeare). He doesn't present a whole world.
No one can do that any more. We're all jerks.
The biggest jerks are in the left because they think they have done some thinking, but they haven't. The jerks on the right are just animals. But at least they haven't done any serious thinking. So they're better in my view.
Updike did a lot of thinking in his Rabbit series. He didn't conclude anything at all. But he really tried to think from multiple perspectives. He even went so far as to present his jerkiest thought, and to try to deal with it. That's good. It makes him not such a jerk in my opinion.
the biggest jerks are the people who present themselves as beautiful souls. Those people are the worst people in the universe.
Unfortunately, they rule. People are dumb enough to believe them.
The best people are people like Mike Topp, because they present themselves as jerks. That's part of why I like Corso, too.
The worst people are people like Ron silliman, because they try to present everyone but themselves as jerks. Which makes them the biggest jerks.
Most so-called multicultural or feminist fiction is jerky because it presents all other groups as bad or as worse than the group in which the idiotic writer is in. That's pure jerkiness.
One exception which I thought was pretty good was Ishmael Reed's Japanese at Spring. I think he overestimates Yoruba culture at the end of the novel (it's a lot jerkier than he indicates), but at least he spears Putt-Butt, his hero, along with everybody else.
The worst is Toni Morrison. It's unbelievably jerky of her. I only read the one book, Paradise, but the people whose taste I trust all think she's garbage -- although no one will say so in public.
I heard of Alice Munro in connection with the Updike death. She apparently is a woman who thinks the feminist cause is a lot of hooey. That might mean she's worth reading.
Mostly, contemporary fiction is either empty of any kind of thinking and is totally nihilistic, or else (worse), it has a simple race, gender, class agenda that is being pushed throughout the book.
Has anyone found exceptions to this?
Obama's book The Audacity of a Dope is the worst of both worlds. You can't find any serious principles, and yet he seems to allude to a race, gender, class agenda. But he won't even stand by it.
I find it very rare for anyone to be doing any serious thinking at all from the president down to the lowest guttersnipe.
Has it always been this way? Is everybody just a jerk who's passing the buck, and claiming the formation of values is above his or her pay grade unless they happen to be cardboard values along simplistic Marxist values so that there's an easy gravy train to get on and ride into payday?
C'mon, Kirby. . . Don't you like Milton and Pope?
I can't stand Milton or Pope. Both jerks.
Milton is a jerk because...
I think everybody's a jerk, but the people who don't really take in their (what Jung called the shadow) are particularly jerky.
Milton and Pope are just about the worst in this respect.
The end of your narrative poem (for me) was jerky, because it doesn't take on the Seneca tribe's own shadow, especially in relation to their subjugation and slaughter of other tribes, including the Delaware.
(I don't really know their history, but every tribe is a bunch of jerks. The more they realize this, the less jerky I find them.)
We, for instance, are just a bunch of jerks!
Milton might be the biggest jerk in all of English literature.
I make fun of Pope throughout my novel, Temping.
He was just too short to have any standing, in my view.
I like Gene Wolfe's books when I want something that rewards both thought and emotion. I've never read the postmodern stuff--life's too short.
I hadn't ever heard of Gene Wolf, who is apparently a sci-fi novelist. He has about a dozen books or more. One of them is called Pirate Freedom. My daughter explained to me yesterday that in 4th grade they learned that the reason pirates had golden earrings is that in case they sank and were washed ashore, the gold in the earrings was to pay for burial.
I never knew that, or the name of Gene Wolfe!
so kirby your view is one up on samuel johnson - that lightweight - who thought if pope (a decent catholic) was not a poet then the title is undeserved by all who seek it
he was short hardly 5 ft
but i bet even you would like to write
something like
the dunciad
and the rape of the lock or is that LOCKE
he managed to tell the english churchmen to GFY and hold onto his merits...quite a task
a polymath
a philologist
a papist in a god warped country
the anglican church needs to make reparations to me in person for the mistreatment of alexander pope --- i demand it now!!!
i'd like to read the novel temping
j
I'll send you a copy of Temping, JH. I have a used copy.
Got to put in a good word for Pope, Kirby; this dwarfish but plucky and sublime versifier, poet, critic, translator, and scholar had far more of the man about him than, say, the excrable Shelley or (as Byron had him) Wordy (excepting, of course, his sublime sonnets to capital punishment). Milton--well, he can be impressive in a "magniloquent" (T S Eliot's neologism) sort of way, but I think it must be difficult to affect a passion for him, as one can easily have for Chaucer.
But I did much enjoy your Temping. Is it possible to enjoy both you and Pope?
"execrable" (typo)
Don't sell Pope short, Kirby. He's piled high with wisdom and wit.
If you don't think he's fun, who do you think is funny?
Also, don't dismiss Milton until you've read Paradise Regained. What don't you like about him? The tracts? Lycidas?
Dear JH,
You wrote:
"sorry to have to drag you through my existential dementia...hard to kill one bird with one stone let alone two"
Not a problem. I wallowing in my own existential blues these days. And sometimes the sarcasm used on LS goes over my head.
WW
fools rush in where angels fear to tred
G.M. My main problem with Milton is a lack of a sense of humor. I did read the whole works at one point (graduate school), and except for one early poem to a postmaster, which was at least meant to be funny, the rest of it was unrelentingly grim.
The piece you mentioned was cleverly done, and interesting, but I couldn't stand it anyway.
As for Pope, he just strikes me as very clever, very witty, but not nutty, or any real fun. He's always superior in some way which I find unfriendly to the reader.
Readers with Catholic tastes can enjoy Temping and Pope, or any other combination. I really like humor, humor of a certain kind. I can't take anything else seriously.
Kirby,
It would be unbearable to have nothing but a cultural storehouse full of comic novelists and poets. I agree the best are the writers that can balance the two; I very much enjoy Beckett's novels and Kafka for this very reason. Have you read Bruno Schulz at all? He is a Polish writer that published two collections of short stories that are very funny as well as serious.
I like some of the difficult postmodernists: some I like in small doses. I read the Sot-Weed Factor in my early 20's and didn't like it at all. I recently read "Lost in the Funhouse" and was very impressed the t digressive self-conscious devices he employed throughout. Barthelme writes stories that are fabulously made up; I love this aspect of him, creating new geographical spaces etc... I agree that some of these writers do lack emotional elements and this is a shortcoming. I feel that this was reconciled with the second wave of postmodernists like David foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker. You must read The Mezzanine! It's hysterically funny and an obsessively smart novel. His WW2 book, "Human Smoke," is fascinating as he culls actual events from newspapers that assert a very different take on the bombings of London etc...
Thomas Pynchon is one of my favorite writers, if not my favorite. He reinvents himself with every novel, never relaxing into one schtick like many artists. I feel that "Gravity's Rainbow" is the postmodern Ulysses; a big difficult labryinth that is rereadable over and over. "Against the Day" was very interesting as it is steeped in late 19th century Americana and early 20th century Balkan politics: the latter of which I find quite interesting.
"The Recognitions" sits on my shelves staring me down...scaring me...
I think Brian McHale's, "Constructing Postmodernism" is a useful text; he asserts that Modernism suffers an epistemological preoccupation while postmodernism is preoccupied with ontological issues.
Kirby there are plenty of great writers these days!!! I would highly suggest John Banville; "The Book of Evidence" is one of my favorites. Also, it would be criminal if you had not dipped into Vollmann at this point. Do you not like Phillip Roth?
The following I really like:
Alex Rose (great Borges kinda style)
George Saunders (very dark sense of humor)
Donald Antrim (The Verificationist will have you on the floor!)
Paul Auster (yeah a lot of people think he's lame, but I kinda like him: Timbuktu was surprisingly good)
Stephen Marche (wonderfully made up)
J M Coetzee (I'm sure you know him)
Robert Coover (i forgot him in my difficult list, he is amazing)
Giles Foden (great historical novelist out of Great Britain, highly stylized, not lame like a Michener)
Wilhelm Genazino (yeah he's German but so funny and dark in a modernist kinda way, "The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt."
You would probably hate Houellebecq.
Ben Marcus (might be the most talented young writer in the USA. "The Age of Wire and String" is absolutely brilliant)
Gary Lutz (also very funny and dark)
Corman McCarthy (never met someone that didnt like him, of course he's a real hoot)
Well there are a few for you...
One of the saddest things was that we lost WG Sebald so young...
I read Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed and I really enjoyed it. I think he actually lives in Oakland.
--Tom
I recently read "Lost in the Funhouse" and was very impressed the t digressive
Should say "with the digressive"
--Tom
Don't want the wrath of Jacques coming down...
Tom, thank you so much for this list.
funny how this comment stream moved away from the original post funny but very interesting at the same time
of course the event in VA was horrible probably still is for those who had to witness it or live through it in some way - family etc
man cannot withstand too much reality be it in a college or on the border...why is this?
the human mind seeks distraction and these streams are evidence that while thinking can be linear and logical and deductive and cohesive it tends to be scattered and loosely defined and ready for diversion at any point
just now for instance i returned with a cup of coffee french press guatamalen free worker coffee catholic coffee ahhhhhhh
the nature of horrific news is to turn away from it and i think this is instinctive...if this notion is correct it makes jounalists sort of deviant in their discipline...while most folks are revulsed by gruesome murder and wish to leave it somewhere else others or a few others wish to explore it to it's strange inconclusive end...the question of why?..what complexes of neglect despair selfhatred desire raving violence uncontrolled will to power desperation anger causes humans to take things to such an extreme?
and yet the story seems to suggest that there was some sort of barrier put up to the normal journalistic tendencies in america....that tendency to have the cameras at the scene and babbling news people talking incessantly about something they know preciouos little about
perhaps there's been some sort of assessment of the lurid affects of widespread display of the grotesque however real events
maybe we're being conditioned to be ignorant and blind to the things we'd really not have to witness anyway...maybe nobody cares anymore we're innured to this sort of news and we just don't care it doesn't sell so forget it
the story of this post and the immediate allusion by WW to the daily viiolence on the border gets treated in these comments by references to the postmodernist literary movement and some bumbling around the merits of alexander pope
i would like to talk about alexander pope more than i would like to have to think about a grissly murder in virginia
however i think of the subgenre of songs that exist from the appalachian mtns and the wild west of terrible murders the culminations of hearts smashing into one another in space and ending up in ruins...ballads that were sung and remade over time....but the stories still get told...the harsh reality merging into myth and legend as a way of preserving itself i guess
that's why pope is better at life than the person who killed...most everyone will eventually put that terrible day out of their minds but someone will always be dredging up curious intellects
god help the people who must live through the horror parents siblings friends the people who see such things
well i gotta go play racquet ball
i cannot stand too much reality
j
Dear JH,
Your last post is brilliant. Uber-insightful. Srsly...A stunning reminder as to why we need poets.
WW
I agree that JH wrote a great comment. I wonder why it is that we haven't had any kind of motive at least established by now?
to me, the image of the man standing there with the woman's head is the image of the Greek hero who has chopped off Medusa's head.
But that's probably not what Zhang was thinking. What was he thinking? Will we ever find out?
I'd like a motive to be established? Had he known the woman in China? Was it some kind of revenge murder? Was Zhang insane?
Why did he do it in public with so many witnesses such that he was almost guaranteed to be caught? Why did he bring a whole bag of sharp utensils?
Was this something he had premeditated for a long spell?
was he off his meds?
Why didn't anybody who was present attempt to restrain Zhang?
The whole thing leaves so many questions. And then the area of silence around the incident is itself trebly mysterious. Why the silence? What on earth?
Is the media so involved with the new dawn of Obama, so involved with Blagojevich, that they can't think of anything else? Is it just that where this happened is so far from any known media center that there is no one on hand to report it?
WW's point that what's going on in Mexico is a full-blown mess that no one is addressing is also interesting. The media seems to want to say that all races are equal, and therefore anything that might put Mexicans into a bad light, or might focus on Asian versus Asian crime, shouldn't be reported, because it doesn't fit the agenda, and should therefore be silenced?
The story was a tiny article on p. 3 in my local paper. Only about a paragraph.
By the way, Curtis Faville has a new blog which is worth checking out. He's doing close readings of poems and elegies, and also, a study of the Taser.
Link is up on the link board.
Stop in and welcome him into blog world.
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