In Defense of Bill Cosby: “My crimes that afternoon were two. I committed the transgression of wearing a tweed jacket, black sweater, black slacks and glasses, a no-no for the ‘thug barbers’ there because to be an appropriate African American by their standards was to wear saggy pants, sport jerseys and doo-rag caps. My second transgression was to bring a book, James Baldwin’s Notes of A Native Son. It didn’t matter that Baldwin was one of the greatest prophets on race relations in the history of the 20th century. The fact that I brought a book to read deeply offended their sensibilities, because to read, in their mind, was acting white.” (via MeFi)
Month / January 2006
Merging Chains, Growing Pains, Shaking Up is Hard to Do
I have know idea if the Village Voice Media/New Times merger has anything to do with it, but the SFist’s Jackson West reports on the bad juju going down at the SF Weekly. Factual errors, rolling heads, and names disappearing from the masthead without so much as a note. Can a dead body be far behind?
Twain & Dubya
Maud Newton has written an article on Mark Twain for the American Prospect. Being a Twain junkie and a regular Maud Newton reader, I of course read this article and tried very hard to believe every word of it. But I cannot subscribe to one of her assertions.
For one thing, there is no way that Twain, even with his prodigious imagination, could have anticipated the ascendency, let alone the second-term victory, of such a volatile and ridiculous figure as Geoge W. Bush. He is, even now in the 21st century, too surreal, incompetent and dangerous a cattleman for even the most cynical of spirits to conjure up.
During Twain’s time, of course, the high watermark of presidential insanity was Theodore Roosevelt. As Twain wrote in a letter to the New York Times (March 6, 1908):
Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.
If Twain were alive today, it is likely that he would have blasphemed Bush for similar reasons, but I am not certain if his constitution would have weathered the stunning fear and remarkable self-immolation with which the American public rushed to the ballot boxes a little more than a year ago.
Inspiration Soup or Blood Cocktail: You Make the Call
Weight Watchers cards from 1974. Truly disgusting, truly funny. (Thanks, Ingrid!)
Perlman — For Later Reference
One of the five books (this is a regular thing for me; please don’t freak out) I’m reading right now is Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. I do plan to discuss its rather interesting structure (which is not without its problems) when I finish the book, but for the moment, I direct all interested parties to Book World and a discussion at a blog I hadn’t heard of called Classical Home.
I’ll only say for now that what Perlman is up to is very ambitious and that, as such, he was predictably ridiculed. I do, however, agree with Daphne Merkin, when she writes, “It makes you wonder about the nature of literary ambition and the immense vulnerability of any writer who attempts not just to describe the cacophonous everyday universe we live in but to impose a pattern — a semblance of meaning — on it.”
I’ll have more to say about literary ambition and vulnerabillity when Megan and I finally compile our Black Swan Green discussion at some point next week.