Listics

I drove into the city in a cloud of cigarette
smoke and a cacophony of sound—a collection of the great blues men and
women singing their upbeat solitude. "You gonna leave me, baby…I

gotta find me someone else." Mine’s a low, chunky car and I drive it
fast, especially on De Waal Drive. This morning, I drifted in like a
train on the sweep of well-known rails, allowing the neon glow of
electric mayhem, now washed by a pale-rinse, milk-white dawn to rise
and fall with the rhythm of the day.

– The Man from ZA

Kurt Andersen reviews Garry Trudeau’s The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time in this Sunday’s NYT  Book Review.  If you haven’t already caught this in the funny papers… okay, on the op-ed pages… then you should pick up a copy.   Everyone from the blithering right wing to the morally pure extreme left will gain from opening themselves to this work.   From the review…

So a story of war and amputation and depression and physical therapy
manages to be funny and, maybe more surprisingly, entirely devoid of
antiwar argument. The merits of the war in Iraq are never questioned or
debated. For more than two years, Trudeau has used ”Doonesbury” to
rail against the war on every ground possible, but none of that
material is here. Missing from this collection, for instance, are the
exquisite Rumsfeld parodies to which one of B.D.’s men defaults like a
tic; the Hunter S. Thompsonesque character, Duke, liberating the city
of Al Amok; and one Army officer’s explanation of the present Catch-22
– that ”we’ve got 150,000 troops in Iraq whose main mission is to not
get killed.”

…If one weren’t otherwise aware of his hard-core lefty politics, it
would be reasonable to infer that the author of ”The Long Road Home”
was conventionally pro-military, maybe even a Republican. When he went
on television last year to defend these strips, Trudeau had it exactly
right: ”Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not,” he said to
George Stephanopoulos, ”we can’t tune it out; we have to remain
mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering
in our name.”

When "AoxomoxoA" becomes "AoxovoxoA" then you know the CBO is up to something good.  In this case we’re talking about a kick-ass radio as well as a whole passle of prose that I have not read yet.  This is not because I am lazy, or stupid, although god knows those conditions apply.  But in this case it is like totally bed-time and I have to take the pup out, and I want to read it when I’m fresh because clearly it will be one of those Locke posts to remember.  So tomorrow then… that’s when I’ll read it.

And who says art isn’t business?

kiss me pretty
in the morning
when the sun drips golden dew
and the rain that fails the night
leaves the concrete moist
after a night of licks
and sweatings

(…read more)

Mike Golby’s daughter Catt celebrates her 14th birthday and Mike shares one of her poems.

I have to offer my thanks again today to the CBO who continues to uncover internetlich-cool-stuff.  Today the thanks go for the link to the technorati book site.  Included in the top ten books are three that I have purchased in airports and not finished, three that I would like to purchase in airports and not finish, three that leave me cold, and The Time Traveler’s Wife.  Father’s day is coming up by the way…

Thanks Harry!

Rebecca Goldstein has something of epistemological importance to share.

I like to think that the shallower aspects of the intellectual scene of the last century have played themselves out. I mean in particular the assaults on objectivity and rationality, which often take the form of attacks on science. There’s nothing less exhilarating than reducing everything to social constructs and to our piddly human points of view. The pleasure of thinking is in trying to get outside of ourselves—this is as true in the arts and the humanities as in math and the sciences. There’s something heroic in the idea of objective knowledge; the farther away knowledge takes you from your own individual point of view, the more heroic it is. Maybe the new ideas that are going to revitalize the arts and humanities are going to be allied with the sciences. It’s not, of course, that novels will all address scientific themes—that would be ridiculously restrictive. But I hope that the spirit of expansiveness that’s associated with the pursuit of scientific truth can get infused into the arts and humanities.

Why does Andrea’s post remind me of R Crumb?  Maybe it has something to do with the river of snot.  Maybe it has something to do with the artful photo of the grocery bag filling with freighted tissues.  Maybe Frida Kahlo is on vacation.