The Daily Kos hates me

As those of you who read it regularly are probably aware, this is not one of those political blogs that are so fashionable these days-- or, I should say, "were so fashionable three months ago," since I think the political blogs are going the way of Friendster. And after the experience I had this week, it's not hard to see why.

As I say, this is not a political blog. But that's not to say I never think about politics. In fact, just a few days ago, I had an idea about the subject, one I thought was rather good. Briefly, my idea was that all the big liberal advocacy groups-- groups like America Coming Together and Moveon.org-- could start providing charitable relief to the veterans of the current Iraq war. During election season, these groups boasted of being able to raise $5 million in about 2 days-- and they did it, too. Why not bring that fundraising prowess to bear on the plight of the poor bastards who are getting their limbs blown off in this war we all profess to hate so much? This would accomplish two things:

1) It would greatly help young families in need of great help-- when you get home from the war at 20 years old and your new name is Lefty, Righty, Stumpy, Eileen, Russell, or Bob, you're pretty much guaranteed to need more social services than the current administration seems inclined to provide, and

2) It would demonstrate that the American Left actually cares about veterans, while the American Right doesn't.

The second one is key. By helping these people out-- and remember, the Bushies are already abandoning them-- we can show that we in the progressive movement aren't just paying lip service to the concept of "support our troops," we're actually doing it, with real help and real money.

I can hear you asking, "But, Marty, aren't you just trying to buy the love and respect of a generation of American veterans, swaying their political affiliation toward yours through cash gifts and logistical assistance?" Yes, of course; that's exactly what I'm trying to do, numbnuts, THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT.

I'm sorry I called you numbnuts. It's not you I'm mad at, it's the people over at the Daily Kos, a political blog much better suited to this kind of discussion than this one is. I posted the above idea there a few days ago, under the headline, "What can we progressives do to help the troops?" I pretty much spelled it out just the way I presented it above: In the same way that way labor unions used their money and influence to show workers which side their bread was buttered on two generations ago (Christian charities do the same thing now, by the way), progressive organizations should stop thinking in terms of media buys and recounts and start thinking in terms of giving people some reason to like them. One way to get people to like you is to give them money, especially if they genuinely need and deserve it, and these vets do.

You would think that a bunch of straw-grasping progressives, many of whom still believe Kerry will find a way to win in Ohio, would at least have an opinion about this idea. But apparently, the ramifications went completely over their heads. I got maybe 8 responses to this posting, all of which completely missed the point. One suggested I sign an e-petition (those always help), another suggested I buy a book for a soldier in the field. Ever the patient, helpful teacher, I posted a response in which I spelled out the idea again, this time in words of less than one syllable. To date, I've gotten zero responses to that.

Look, I'm not saying my idea is going to change the world. I don't even know if it will work-- hell, I don't even know if it's possible. I just want someone in this putatively influential blogosphere to take notice of the idea and tell me what they think of it. That's all. Tell me why it won't work, or can't be done, and I'll shut up.

Sigh. I guess I'll have to try again. Of course, it couldn't possibly be that I didn't express the idea clearly the first time. But, still, maybe another go wouldn't hurt. Watch this space for further developments,as Marty Attempts to Save the World.

I sing the body electric

When I was in high school, there was a concert given every year by members of what was then known as the "MCHS Jazz Choir."

Ugh. I don't know if I can even tell this.

Okay, so there was a concert given by the Jazz Choir. This concert was really nothing more than a talent show featuring those students whose ability to carry any sort of tune at all (or even to curry favor with Mr. Rann, the choir director, which is how I got in) qualified them to be in the Jazz Choir class. Each student (or small group of students-- I seem to remember a goodly number of duets featuring songs by acts like Ashford & Simpson and DeBarge) got a number to do. Since I couldn’t sing, and was a geek beyond even the not inconsiderable geekery of being a member of something called the MCHS Jazz Choir, I did a Tom Lehrer song. (I fucked it up, not that anyone noticed.)

At the conclusion of the program, we all got on stage and sang, I shit you not, "I Sing The Body Electric" from the "Fame" soundtrack. These are the lyrics:

God help us all

I sing the body electric,
I celebrate the me yet to come,
I toast to my own reunion,
When I become one with the sun.
And I'll look back on Venus,
I'll look back on Mars,
And I'll burn with the fire
Of ten million stars.
And in time, and in time,
We will all be stars.

I will now enumerate just a few of the many ways in which this is totally pathetic:

1. You didn't hear it with the music.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to isolate the most embarrassing of these admittedly extremely embarrassing lyrics. While the image of some shimmering, ectoplasmic choir geek floating through space looking back on Venus and Mars certainly beggars the imagination, clearly the most painful line, the one that is the psychic equivalent of chomping into a big ball of tinfoil with a loose filling, is the one about how "in time, we will all be stars."

Of course, that's the line we hit the hardest. After lurching through the horrible verses-- I think there were two-- we wrapped the thing up with an even more horrible sort of fugue, to assure the justifiably incredulous audience that we were really, in fact, saying that in time the members of the MCHS Jazz Choir would all be stars. As I recall, my part (it was one of those majestic, layered, multipart arrangements, like the final number of a Disney film) went something like, "And in time, and in time, and in time, and in ti-i-ime, and in time [several more "and in times" omitted here for sanity's sake], we will a-a-aaallll, be-e-e, STA-A-A-A-RR-R-S!" We belted out this last line in unison, as Mr. Rann sweatily pounded out the big finish on the school's lone, battered, upright piano. It was indescribably awful.

2. We did not all become stars.

This probably goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway: Not only did no one from the Jazz Choir go on to appear on television, perform on the Broadway stage, or star in big-budget action/comedies opposite Salma Hayek, there was absolutely no reason to believe that any of us ever would. "MCHS" stood (and still stands, I suppose) for "Mascoutah Community High School," a depressing blond brick building on the edge of a depressing Midwestern farming town whose only claim to cosmopolitan culture was the fact that some of the students from the nearby Air Force base had lived in Germany for long enough to learn how to play soccer. The Fame school it wasn't, and the marginally competent teens comprising the Jazz Choir were about as likely to become stars of stage and screen as the teachers were to become Nobel laureates-- that is, not very fucking likely.

Horrifically, some of the Jazz Choir's more popular members formed some kind of god-awful a capella group called "Clientele," whose dearest aspiration was to perform their repertoire of cheesed-out arrangements of "Trickle, Trickle" and "The Way You Look Tonight" at the dinner theater by the freeway overpass next to the mall three towns over. I don't know if they ever realized this dream, but even if they did, I contend that this is not the type of stardom promised by the composers of "I Sing the Body Electric."

3. Being a star is kind of stupid.

I suppose this is going to sound a bit sour-grapes coming from one of the cruelly disappointed non-stars of the MCHS Jazz Choir (we whose dreams of stardom were so meretriciously egged on by the creators of "Fame" and the eight million or so movies just like it), but being a star-- at least, the kind of star that high school juniors want to become-- is pretty lame. Sure, it's cool to make a lot of money, not have to work very hard, and go to glamorous places. But you can also have that kind of life by inheriting money, and nobody makes movies about a young female welder's struggle to crack her trust fund before she turns 30.

No, the reason that high school kids want to be stars is to have the kind of recognition, cachet, and access to exclusive events that they believe accrues to those who achieve a certain level of success in the entertainment industry-- the same qualities that most high school kids aspire to in their daya-to-day lives under the general rubric of "popularity." And frankly, if you're an adult who is still trying to be popular the way high school kids are popular-- well, that's pretty fucking lame.

4. I am still trying to become famous.

Notwithstanding all the above, I am still trying to be cool in a high school that, for all I know, burned to the ground in 1989. Please read my magazine and buy my band's records, then write me fan mail. Thank you.

Dizzy spells

Yay! I'm back online. I don't know if you've ever not paid your phone bill, but if you haven't, let me tell you right now: they can be total dicks about it.

Anyway, I was offline for a couple of days. Aside from some vomiting, nausea, pain in the joints, fever, and dizzy spells, I'm none the worse for wear. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to celebrate, since right now I have to go to work (another thing "they" can be total dicks about), but I'll be back in the wee hours tonight to give you what it appears from my writing style at the moment will be the Outside Scoop!

Refried Blog, pt. 2

This is the first chapter of a book I was going to write, but I changed my mind because the idea was a) dumb and b) too hard. I was going to rewrite the "Essays" of Montaigne without actually reading the original. Kind of a stupid idea, I guess.

I admit that I was working on something different for this post, but I started writing it and realized that it might actually turn into something halfway decent if I put a little more effort into it, so I'm going to actually put in that effort. If it comes out okay, you'll see it here. If it comes out really good, you won't because, hey, I've got a magazine to fill.

Anyway, here's the first chapter, called, just like Montaigne's...

I. OF CUSTOM, AND THAT WE SHOULD NOT EASILY CHANGE A LAW RECEIVED

Let's get right to the point. As the educated reader (if he's still with us-- I do understand he's been in poor health lately) will hardly fail to note, the table of contents of this volume is identical to that of a number of popular editions of the collected essays of Michel de Montaigne, noted French Renaissance thinker, essayist, and, doubtless, a mean thrower of quoits in his day. Montaigne is widely regarded as one of the finest minds of his time, and is often credited with the invention of the modern personal essay.

Well, good for him. I'm sure it was all very well at the time, but let's not overlook one important fact: people in Montaigne's time were stupid. Okay, maybe not stupid-- they probably had the sense to pour piss out of a boot if provided with instructions printed on the heel (hint: if you turn it over to read the instructions, you're better than halfway home)-- but ignorant. You can tell they were ignorant because they didn't have microwave ovens or televisions or GameBoys or any of the other things we have today that prove what a genteel and civilized society we've become.

Montaigne was ignorant, too. Maybe not as ignorant as everyone else was when he was alive, but still pretty ignorant. Everyone just thinks he's smart because he's been dead for 400 years.

One boring dead guy

Hasn't anybody noticed this besides me? All a writer has to do is die, and-- if he can just manage to stay dead for long enough-- everyone will line up to kiss his dusty, mouldering ass; it doesn't matter a whit how much of a witless blowhard he was.

Take Homer-- Homer, greatest poet of all time, father of Western literature, right? Wrong. Try this: Homer, guy who's been dead longest. Period.

Admit it. If Homer brought The Iliad to a modern literary agent, she'd laugh right in his face. "All right, look; you've used the phrase 'wine-dark' to describe the sea two hundred and seventy-nine times in the first 5 chapters. Couldn't you just occasionally use a different expression? Would that kill you? And what is this 'Catalog of Ships' crap? It's 7500 words of utterly irrelevant detail. You think Saving Private Ryan would have won an Academy Award if Spielberg had stopped in the middle of the first scene to list the name, rank, and serial number of every swinging dick in the entire U.S. Army just so he could tell us what boat they floated in on? I don't know. Cut the whole thing down to a 12,000 word short story and maybe-- maybe-- I can get you $250 dollars from Soldier of Fortune or something."

The literati pluck at their lacy sleeves and bemoan the fact that a great writer like Homer would never be published today. Well, they're right, and a good thing, too. If I had my way the boring old fart would be out of print tomorrow. Damned worthless waste of trees.

Then, of course, there's Shakespeare. The greatest poet the English language has ever produced, or so they say, and God forbid you should disagree, or they'll flunk you out of college so fast you won't know what hit you. But who, really, deep down, wants to read him? Here, for example, is one of the big laugh lines from his comedy Twelfth Night: "By my troth, thou hast an open hand. These wise men that give fools money get themselves a good report--after fourteen years' purchase." Fourteen years purchase! Stop, you're killing me.

I'm not just picking the clunkers to prove my point; they're all like that. I defy you to find a single line in any of Shakespeare's comedies that is even half as funny as, say, a monkey smoking a cigar. The tragedies? Sentimental dreck. The histories? Even English professors can't wade through them.

The educated classes claim to read and savor these ancient works like fine wine, they profess to understand and enjoy them, and doubtless some believe they really do. (And if you don't agree with them, it only goes to show that you're a dirt-munching hayseed who's not fit to slop out their 17th-century Venetian spittoons.) But let's be honest: there's really no difference between pumping iron every night to impress the chicks at the beach and plowing though Chaucer to wow the grandees at the MLA-- either way, you're doing something tedious now so you can show off later.

And that's not all: by and large, even these supposed connoisseurs of fine old literature don't spend much time actually reading it. Having already read, and professed to delight in, Wycherly, Congreve, and their ilk, these Serious Readers are now free to spend their evenings curled up with the latest, highly literary Vintage Contemporary, whose plot just happens to revolve around the adventures of young man coming of age as he travels through a series of 19th century East Asian bordellos. ("Well, yes, that is a nude on the cover, but very tastefully done, don't you think? ")

All right, all right, not all ancient work is totally without merit-- but a vast quantity of it is grossly overrated. As to why-- well, we'll get into that in a later chapter. The point is that the more culturally removed you are from the author, the less likely you are to understand what the hell he's talking about. (When was the last time you read the Rosetta Stone for pleasure?) If we could somehow pluck a 11th-Century Mongolian peasant out of his yurt, drop him into the middle of a fashionable Manhattan cocktail party, and get him to tell the one about Temudjin, the yak, and the Turkic virgin, I guarantee you no one would get it. Oh, I grant you, some of the guests would laugh knowingly anyway. And you know which ones? The same ones who'll go to their graves defending the beauty of Homer's verse.

All of which brings us back to the undeniable antiquity of Montaigne's writings. I am willing to acknowledge that, in his heyday, Montaigne probably wielded his quill with cunning and verve. By all contemporaneous accounts, when it came to commenting on the institutions and mores of 16th-century France, there were no flies on Montaigne during his prime. (At least, no more than there were on anyone else, in France, in 1575. Which, when you think about it, was probably quite a few.)

But, entomological concerns aside, even his staunchest admirers must grant that times have changed since Montaigne roamed the streets of Paris, his keen eye ever on the prowl for fresh morsels of truth, which he would unerringly skewer on the point of his razor-sharp wit and then-- oh, I suppose he'd probably grill them over the barbecue of his searing intellect or something.

In any case, Montaigne has, like Homer and our aspiring Mongolian comedian, gone out of date. When this alleged genius' pen was finally and forever stilled in 1592, the King James Bible was still a work in progress, the Industrial Revolution was an unimaginable mote upon the distant horizon, and ladies of quality routinely urinated in the street from a standing position without arousing comment. (Though one wonders what those present during such an occasion must have thought when the conversational waters parted to open a gap of silence, during which passers by could hardly have failed to notice a faint, but audible, trickling sound.)

In my view, it's high time this alleged master's works were updated for a modern audience. While concerns like typhoid, bloodletting, and phlogiston theory were doubtless riveting to the reading public (such as it was) in Montaigne's time, one can hardly help but notice that they seldom crop up in casual conversation today. The days of Provencal poets, itinerant bards, and dancing bears are behind us, and the time has come to put a 21st-century spin on the timeless issues of which Montaigne treated so ably in his day-- childrearing, drunkenness, thumbs, and the many others that this immortal (though dead) essayist took as worthy of his attention.

We shall therefore take, as the law received, the necessity of new commentary on the self-same topics that the original essays dealt with-- after all, if Montaigne thought that thumbs were worth devoting 12,000 words to, who am I to say he was wrong? We shall also take, as custom, the manner of commenting thereupon, the personal essay. (Pretty slick the way I steered us back around to the actual subject of the chapter, eh? Later, I'll show you how to make a match burn twice.)

This task will, of course, require a writer of tremendous wisdom, brilliance, and erudition; a modern-day Renaissance man whose grasp of human nature is rivaled only by his unerring command of literary style, a man who can truly be said to rank among the most forward-thinking and ingenious prosodists of the millennium.

Sadly, no such individual is available, so I have no choice but to do it myself. The reading room down at the county slam may not be the Library of Congress, but that doesn't mean a fellow can't learn a thing or two in there. (Anybody ever read "Old Yeller?" Man, now that's a book.) The fact that I am announcing right now that I may well have to break some of my own so-recently-imposed rules and change the title of the essay, "Of Some Verses of Virgil" to, say, "Of Avoiding Unwelcome Acts of Sodomy Through Poor Rectal Hygiene" doesn't mean I'm not qualified to rewrite Montaigne from the ground up, does it? Does it?

******

Well, yes, of course, that's exactly what it means. I'm no more qualified to rewrite Montaigne than a Malayan tapir is to perform heart-lung transplant surgery. But this, of course, brings us right back to custom, specifically, recent literary custom. You're the sort who reads this kind of book, so you can hardly have managed to miss the fact that it's become fashionable of late for young writers to begin their efforts with a ringing denunciation of their work and a long, breast-beating deprecation of their gifts. These guys start right out by telling you flatly (in the most cutting-edge, ironic fashion, but still) that they can't write, their book sucks, and you shouldn't read it.

Thus having lowered the bar, they proceed to follow their disingenuous professions of modesty with brilliancy after breathtaking brilliancy, charming reader and literary establishment alike with a novel or memoir of tremendous insightfulness, wit, and beauty. Typically, these young fellows, so putatively dismissive of their talents, are in their third printing within six months, go on to win the Booker Prize or some equally prestigious award, and before you know it, they're being seen hopping into limousines with Justine Bateman.

The fact that this volume has so far shown no signs of being such a work does not keep this recent trend from playing directly into my grubby, conniving hands, however, as you set about reading what may be, for all you know, a soporific work of stunning mediocrity. Sure, I haven't shown my hand yet, but who does anymore? All those great books your buddies down at the gym keep going on about start out just like this one: "Oh, no, not me; I couldn't possibly write a decent book… no, no, move on, leave me to die here, it's fine-- no more than I deserve, really…" You've got to delve a hundred-fifty, two hundred pages into the damned thing to find out whether the author actually has anything to say, or has just been playing you for a sap the whole time. It's enough to make you feel sorry for people who can read (I'm dictating this to a temp I keep chained to my bed).

It's amazing the second chances the reader will give you these days.

You know, not so very long ago, when an individual, browsing for a bit of quality reading material, was told by the author himself practically on page one that the book he or she was about to read was a piece of tripe utterly devoid of interest or merit, said browser promptly and quite sensibly snapped the book shut and reached for the next volume.

But no longer. Now, thanks to my self-effacing (and vastly more talented) predecessors, I could spend the next three pages (I won't, but others have) insisting that reading my work is about as enjoyable and productive as blowing one's nose on tinfoil-- I may even raise my voice to a thin, plaintive wail and stamp my tiny foot for emphasis, all to no avail; I'd be a veritable dust-jacket Cassandra. Watch, I'll actually do it, just for kicks: THIS BOOK IS TERRIBLE. PUT IT DOWN. DON'T READ IT. I'M NOT KIDDING.

It doesn't get much clearer than that. But in the current climate, what can you do? You don't know any more now than you did before. All you can do is nod, force a knowing smile and read on, hoping that the narrator has indulged in a moment of unreliability as you await a tour de force that you can only hope will eventually come.

And what if it doesn't? By the time you've gotten far enough to realize you've been had, you'll have already told all your friends that you're reading the thing, and you'll have no choice but to recommend it. After all, you don't want to look like a chump. And at least you'll have read most of this book, which is more than you can say for the collection of Montaigne's essays that's been gathering dust on your bookshelf since college, assuming you didn't sell it at some point in the meantime to get money to buy drugs.

Well, that's your tough luck, chum. I've got bigger fish to fry. All you have to do is read this excrescence; I've got to write it. I'm not thrilled about it, but there it is. My friends demand it, my family demands it, my country demands it. (All right, so the State Department hasn't phoned me up with an official request, but there's a certain disappointed cast to the President's features when he speaks that I can just tell is directed at me. "Write the book," his melting, twinkly eyes seem to say, as he gazes at me from the television screen with that familiar, paternal look of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger reproach.)

Thus, finding in nature no greater monster nor miracle than myself (I probably should get out more) I invite you to join me on this literary adventure, one which, I feel it's safe to say, is the only recreation of a 400-years-dead French essayist's works ever embarked upon due almost entirely to peer pressure.

Yes, peer pressure. Hell, I'll tell you my story, what have I got to lose? After all, Montaigne, in his essays, looked inward, dissecting his own sensibilities and soul to arrive at the conclusions he expounded in his work-- supposing, one assumes, that he was as good an example of the human race as any other (and, likely, if he's anything like me, noting that writing about himself rather than others would save him countless hours of tedious research.)

At least that's what I hear. I wouldn't know for sure; I haven't actually read Montaigne-- I've got the anxiety of influence as badly as any other young writer, and I don't want to be tainted by any foreknowledge of the predecessor whose work I'm profaning. (And don't go getting the idea that I've read Eliot's Anxiety of Influence, either-- I'm an illiterate, half-human beast-man, remember-- but there are quite a few student-molesting English teachers in the joint these days, and you can pick up a lot if you keep your ears open in the exercise yard.)

But, hypothetically, let's pose a question: If an individual happens to exhibit one talent that noticeably overshadows all his or her other talents, does that circumstance denote that this overshadowing talent is great, important, or in any way noteworthy?

Let's take an example. Young Jimmy is enrolled in an after-school daycare art program, and, on the whole, things are going poorly. His Plaster-Craft sculpture of a dog baying at the moon ends up being a multicolored representation of an irregularly-shaped boulder. His ceramic bowl in the form of a parakeet explodes in the kiln, in the process destroying the considerably more meritorious work of several of his classmates, some of whom cry. His watercolor representation of his family standing before their home is ridiculously out of proportion, the chimney juts out of the roof at a jaunty 45-degree angle, and the faces of his family are rendered in so gross and distorted a fashion that the instructor seriously entertains the possibility of ominous psychosexual trauma in Jimmy's past.

However, when the scissors, glue, and construction paper come out, Jimmy does all right. His crude collages are not significantly worse than those of his classmates, his use of glitter in these works is restrained and consistent with the conventions of the genre, and his mother does not visibly wince when she catches sight of them taped to the refrigerator door.

Now, what are we to say of Jimmy? Is he a brilliant collage artist, Joseph Cornell revisited, a budding Matisse, ready to burst into the full flower of artistic immortality? Or is he, in fact, to paraphrase Walter Matthau, a booger-eating moron who just happens to be able to luck his way through collages?

Only God knows; but if Jimmy can stay out of jail long enough, avoid the pitfalls of the family hardware store, and get the hell out of the godforsaken, Shirley-Jackson's-The-Lottery hellhole of a town where he was born and raised, maybe the world will have an opportunity to find out.

Not that any of that would have anything in particular to do with your correspondent, in spite of the fact that, at least according to friends and acquaintances, his ability to occasionally construct a coherent sentence has been the one occasional bright spot (or rather, zone of reduced darkness) in a career marked by failure in all other fields of human endeavor, from personal relationships, to pornographic video sales, to preparing a simple meal (not to mention safe-cracking and credit fraud). Thus, like Montaigne before me, I take up my pen. Perhaps, wheedles God, concealing a mallet behind his back of Warner-Bros.-cartoon proportions, perhaps this time I won't kill you.

That said, there is nothing I can find in this unspoken covenant into which I have involuntarily entered with the Creator (in whom I do not believe, but who I do find to be a convenient receptacle of blame for all unpleasant, yet unavoidable, circumstances in which I find myself) that requires this book to be ambitious, literary, or even legible. Nor, in all likelihood, will it be. It merely has to come out of me, like a particularly large and frightening piece of ear-wax, and somehow find its way into your hands, gentle reader, because if I can't do this, I sure as hell can't do anything else.

Oh, and one more thing: Though the book need not be interesting, valuable, helpful, or subtle, what it must do, above all, is generate enough financial wherewithal for the author to discharge his obligations to a wide-ranging army of federal and state revenue agencies, impatient financial institutions, drug dealers, gentlemen for whom the sporting life has become not just a passion but a profession, landlords, disappointed former business partners, bartenders, and the occasional soft-hearted prostitute.

To exist and to make money: that is all that life has required of me-- or indeed, of any of us-- and that is all that I require of this book. So, I must caution you once again, seekers of truth: seek elsewhere. Put from your mind any notion that this sad waste of wood-pulp that you have so recently plucked from the free bin at your local Borders has, or ever will have, any artistic merit whatsoever. The present work will freely and without remorse pander to the basest tastes, the most reprehensible vanities, of the book-buying public-- as far as I'm concerned, they can put a picture of Fabio on the cover, and if my publishers request that the chapter "Of Thumbs" treat almost exclusively of said digits penetrating the recta of beautiful, sexually precocious 17-year-old girls, that is what said chapter will treat of, because, at the end of the day, there is no law greater than the law of commerce. And that, as we all know, is the true received custom of modern literature.