I Evoke Brow XIV: Play it, Leroy!

Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction I already put up a great passage from this book earlier. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is subpar. My plan is to work my way through Robbin's works chronologically—this is his first novel and it shows. Not that there aren't nice lines scattered about, but on the whole the style is heavy-handed and the plot and characters are seriously lacking. This bit, though, is hilarious:

"By this time she had reached the lowest limb [of the tree she had climbed] and John Paul helped her down onto his shoulders. Her crotch pressed against the back of his neck. She hadn't bathed yet that day although they had made love the night before. She smelled like the leftovers from an Eskimo picnic. He was inflamed."

That still makes me grin. I read that in the break room with a work friend and cracked up, then had to read it aloud to hurn, sending us both into fits of giggles. The rest of that week we kept working "eskimo picnic" and "he was inflamed" into normal conversations. ----- Listening to: LivePhish radio: crazy Landlady, can't figure out what show, dangit. For the record, it ended at 5:48 EST on 2/28/06.

Where the Buffalo Roam

Driving to work this morning, a large bison or perhaps wildebeest made a left turn into my lane, maybe a hundred feet ahead of me. OK, so not really. But for a split second I saw a black blob lurching across the pavement and my mind refused to process it as a car; all I thought was "beast," with the tiniest bit of alarm. Then my visual processing unit rebooted and all was well. For the record, I didn't start the morning off with a beer, bong-hit or anything stronger than a small glass of chocolate soy "milk." I figured I'd record the incident here so that if I've gone completely nutty and sliced my ear off or something, someone can look back and go, "Oh, that's when he started to go crazy." I will keep this site posted with further hallucinatory ungulates as they arise.

Quote of the Day

"The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dog­matists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living—busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing—they are busy taking over. Soon their sour tentacles are around everything: our governments, our economies, our schools, our publications, our arts and our religious institutions. Men who lust for power, who are ad­dicted to laws and other unhealthy abstractions, who long to govern and lead and censor and order and reward and punish; those men are the turds of Moloch, men who don't know how to love, men who are sickly afraid of death and therefore are afraid of life: they fear all that is chaotic and unruly and free-moving and changing-thus—as Amanda has said, they fear nature and fear life itself, they deny life and in so doing deny God. They are presidents and governors and mayors and generals and police officials and chairmen-of-the­-boards. They are crafty cardinals and fat bishops and mean old monsignor masturbators. They are the most frightened and most frightening mammals who prowl the planet; love­less, anal-compulsive control-freak authoritarians, and they are destroying everything that is wise and beautiful and free. And the most enormous ironic perversion is how they destroy in the name of Christ who is peace and God who is love."

-Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

I'll put a review of this up eventually, but I wanted to get this quote up right away.

I just think Sue looks very regal here. It's amazing how easy it is to improve pictures with Picasa. Just cropping is always a big help. 

I Evoke Brow XIII: Brought to You By the Number "Q"

Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country This one goes on my list "Required Reading List." That is, books that no one should get a diploma (or a voters card or driver's license) without finishing, instead of fucking "Jane Eyre" and "Algebra." A blazing fast read, it is by turns funny, cute, and enraging (at the current state of affairs, not the author). Many, many choice quotes—two I flagged:

"By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for christmas."

"We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife."

Vonnegut points out that our current leaders trick people into thinking they are wise when really they are just decisive. Interestingly, this afternoon I read an interview with Stephen Colbert where he makes pretty much the same point.

AVC: You're saying appearances are more important than objective truth?

SC: Absolutely. The whole idea of authority—authoritarian is fine for some people, like people who say "Listen to me, and just don't question, and do what I say, and everything will be fine"—the sort of thing we really started to respond to so well after 9/11. 'Cause we wanted someone to be daddy, to take decisions away from us. I really have a sense of [America's current leaders] doing bad things in our name to protect us, and that was okay. We weren't thrilled with Bush because we thought he was a good guy at that point, we were thrilled with him because we thought that he probably had hired people who would fuck up our enemies, regardless of how they had to do it. That was for us a very good thing, and I can't argue with the validity of that feeling.

But that has been extended to the idea that authoritarian is better than authority. Because authoritarian means there's only one authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to be the government, and has got to be his allies.

It's a good meme: I think it's fair to say that many people liked Bush over Gore and Kerry because while they rationalize (and let's admit, waffle), he is single-minded and he sticks to his guns. Sure, he's either simple-minded or grotesquely devious, but he does project confidence. I hate this country. Sometimes. ----- The rest of the Required Reading List, so far:

• The Cartoon History of the Universe (particularly Vol. 1)
• Animal Liberation (the New Edition)
• A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut

More will occur to me, I'm sure. ----- Listening to: Assembly of Dust 2005-12-09 Truck Farm, Sinner, Man With A Plan, Amplified Messiah, Speculator (!)