According to Marianne Wiggins, one of the fiction judges for this year’s National Book Awards, “As for Pynchon, it was patently obvious it wasn’t a contender.'”
Year / 2006
Orhan Pamuk!
Bechdel/Thompson Update
According to Tom Spurgeon, the library trustees voted against keeping the books on shelves (at least for the time being). More in the thread over at Alison Bechdel’s blog:
At the meeting tonight of the Marshall Public Library Board of Trustees, the Board President proposed that the board appoint a committee to revise the library’s materials selection policy. That proposal passed, but with at least one “no” vote. I was sitting in the back and could not see all the hands, so I don’t know how many voted against the proposal.
Here’s the problem, as far as I am concerned: While the committee works on a new materials selection policy, the two books (”Blankets” and “Fun Home”) will be removed from circulation. They will be unavailable. There was no mention of how long the process will take.
When the Board President asked which of the Board members wanted to serve on the committee, apparently most of the hands went up, because we heard her say, “Well, I guess the whole Board could be on the committee.”
There’s nothing yet at the Marshall Democrat-News, but if I find anything specific that we can substantiate, I will report on it.
[UPDATE: A reader from Marshall notes that the books are “temporarily removed” as a materials collection policy is being drafted and that the case is at a standstill. The Marshall Democrat-News is an afternoon paper and I will update this post as more qualifying coverage comes in.]
Give Me Harding’s Windbag Speeches Over This Spineless Incoherence Any Day
This is the President. And I think it can be said with absolute certainty that George W. Bush is the worst President in United States history.
Imagine if this sputtering drivel came from your attorney in front of a judge. Or if this inarticulate marsupial was speaking on behalf of your company to shareholders. You’d shitcan the guy without a second thought. You wouldn’t even give him a golden parachute. Hell, you’d convince the Board of Directors to leave this incompetent to rot. No severance. Call security. Don’t even let the blackguard clean out his office. Throw the bum out into the street and let him dumpster dive. Let him struggle. He screwed you over, and he screwed you over bad.
But this is a man who is responding to a question involving the deaths of 650,000 Iraqi lives. Not a mere civil suit or a bad business deal. And he doesn’t even have the temerity to stare right back into the eyes of the reporters and tell them that, yes, Iraqi lives were lost and that he knows what he’s doing. Hell, even Lyndon Johnson had balls when he was saying utterly despicable things about Vietnam. This is the man who so many voters voted for because they would prefer to have a beer with him? I wouldn’t trust this guy to pick up the tab.
It’s bad enough that this tyrant is responsible for mass deaths and who knows how many grieving families, all in the name of a connection with WMDs that has never been proven, but that he so systematically destroys lives and, with that, any lingering impressions that the United States of America means well is inexcusable. Unpardonable. No different from a Pinochet or a Stalin.
He will never listen. He will never find a halfway point, even if it means bombing any country with a tenuous connection to al Qaeda into the Stone Age. He is an outright menace that every decent citizen must vote against by voting Democrat (if there is a Senate race) in a few weeks’ time. Someone must stop him, even if it’s a gang of pussyfooting Democrats whose political relevance is deeply in question. Particularly as they stare doe-eyed into the headlights and risk becoming as soulless and vacuous as our Dear Leader, who just so happened to kill a few hundred thousand Iraqis.
The reporters sitting in that lovely garden ought to be ashamed of themselves for not giving this murderous rodent the third degree. What, me worry?
Cryptographic Protocols, Complex Quantum Mechanics: Just to “Fool Around”
While looking for something else, I discovered this episode of Radio Zero. About sixteen minutes in, there’s a story involving Richard Powers, a VR lab similar to the one depicted in Plowing the Dark called “The Cube” (where apparently Powers tinkered around with on the keyboard, just to “fool around”), and Wired‘s Steve Silverman. I can find no trace of the Silverman article mentioned.