I’ve decided to attract as much traffic as possible to my blog, drawn from people who are looking for something else. Other than the Prozac Klatches of paranoid housebound agoraphobes that overpopulate the intertubes, filled with blog posts detailing in excruciating, misspelled logorrhea how
***insert innocuous political figure here*** is Hitler,
then inviting their MeTooLegions to use the word “definately” and some grade school swears one more time in the comments section, there’s really only one way to get misdirected misanthrope traffic to your blog. And you know what it is.
But I don’t do “Blue,” as you might have gathered, so I can only get people to come here by accident, by accident, as it were. But I figure this ought to do the trick. I give you, ladies and gentlemen,
FACE RUMP.
Face rump. Face rump. Face rump. (Are you getting this, Google? I said face rump!)
I need to work on a description of the hot babes out front. Nothing comes to mind.
No, not have three children. I mean read a regular newsprint newspaper with any kind of interest. Now that I think of it, forget “any kind of interest;” I can’t remember the last time I read one at all.
It was not always so. If the newspaper was a bank account, I’d be retired and rich now. I can assure you that I have read more newspaper than any editor at the Boston Globe has, even though I stopped completely decades ago. I got an amazing head start.
My Father was a creature of the newspaper. He brought them all home from Boston every day. Boston used to have a lot of newspapers. I used to read the Globe, of course, but the Herald used to be several newspapers, and we read them all. I remember the Record American which was two different newspapers itself not long before that. There was something called the Herald Traveler, too. Some of these papers had more than one edition a day, too. Eventually it all got mashed together into what is now the Herald. And my father would bring the Catholic newspaper, The Pilot, home too. I’d read every last item in every one, do the crosswords, and generally wallow in it all until my hands were black. Books were still an expensive luxury then, and the library was a car ride away, so newsprint mattered.
When I got older, a young man, I used to read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal every day. I was considered sort of odd by my classmates in college for doing so. But I was already a man, and they were still children, even though we were more or less the same age. I was used to being different. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had held numerous jobs, been around some, and I wasn’t any sort of tabula rasa. I started to notice something.
I noticed that there were two sorts of topics in the papers. They were topics I had first-hand knowledge of, and things of which I knew little. And I noticed that without fail, articles written about anything I had intimate knowledge about were absolute nonsense. And I began to notice the little word shifts and shimmies and angles that the authors and editors would use to grind whatever sort of ax they had. And I’m pretty dumb, of course, just like God made us all, but I figured out that it was unlikely that the newspaper was only getting the stuff I knew about wrong, on purpose. And by looking for the method of obfuscation I recognized in things I knew about, I could see what they were trying to fool me with in things I knew nothing about.
You can read the newspaper and find things out, still. But the process is like panning for gold. There’s a lot of sand you’ve got to swish around to get the tiny, glittering pieces of information. And so I abandoned the papers with a heavy heart, because I loved them so. They were the nursemaids of Twain, and Mencken, and Bierce, and a multitude of others that I adore. The people working there now can’t even spell, or figure out the difference between nouns and verbs. I wouldn’t allow them anywhere near an adjective, even though if they could, they’d print only adjectives. Nouns and verbs lead to the reporting of facts. I think they’d get a rash if they tried it now.
The New York Times et al., like to tell people that the internet is killing their business. Please. I can’t be the only one that noticed that the front page is the editorial section now, and the editorial page has the quality and usefulness of unhinged rants. I’m not really in the market for either. And I’m too young to read the obituaries.
I certainly do get my information in glittering pixels every day. But as usual, they’re either fooling themselves, or trying to fool you. I buried you, Mr. Newspaper, in a shallow grave, a decade before I saw that magnificent arial text on that tiny little 486 intel computer over a modem. And I’m not interested in whether they’re fooling themselves, or trying to fool me, trying to blame the internet.
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. Jack London
My son reads Harry Potter books. I’m told many adults read them. I don’t get it.
Actually, I do. Harry Potter is in his author’s idea of unsatisfactory circumstances. He believes himself to be very special solely by the virtue of his birth, and is encouraged by weirdos to change his circumstances by simply wishing they were not so.
Sounds like the lament of many people. And it’s just as passive as the average person has become. I wish things were wonderful because dang it, I’m special.
You’re probably not. Special, that is. Few people are in any meaningful way. Besides, most people who are considered special now are not worthwhile human beings in even the most minute way. They just manage to gain notoriety any old way they can cadge it.
I read Jack London books when I was little. People in Jack London books didn’t hang around expecting that their innate wonderfulness would be acknowledged if they just wished hard enough. They went out in the world and made their way. That world was not some foppish boarding school where nothing much ever happens. And entire industries of thought devoted to the idea that you’re deserving of praise and a medal because you manage to flick the lightswitch by the door, then bravely make it into your bed in the dark, seems to indicate a sort of invertebrate outlook on the world.
You don’t have to go to the Yukon, son. Just don’t think you’re going to accomplish anything by wishing it would happen. That’s a politician’s job, and I’d prefer you’d avoid that sort of outright criminality, even if you’re not… special.
[Eagle eyed commenter Sam espied Glenn Reynold’s interesting and insightful essay on Elvis Presley at TCS: The King Of Anti-Fascism. He’s right, sorta. My father used to go and see James Michael Curley lead parades and orate in Boston. Politics used to trump entertainment, or be the entertainment, until quite recently. But Elvis belongs with the likes of Bing Crosby and Sinatra. He did not trump them, he just piled on the bobby soxers.
Elvis went up the front stairs and asked your big sister to go to the movies. He really wasn’t all that subversive. It was Chuck Berry that came up the back stairs, round about midnight, and asked your mother if your father was home. And he did it to the whole damn world. Here he is in France in 1965:]
[I wrote this on Chuck’s birthday. I stand by it:] It’s Chuck Berry’s birthday. He’s eighty. Happy birthday Chuck, you magnificent mean weird wonderful hack genius AMERICAN.
He’s all those things, surely. And not American. AMERICAN. Only America could possibly produce such as he. The rest of the world loved him, of course, but they could never cobble together a guy like him. The Europeans sent us a bronze broad to stand in our granite harbor, perhaps so something familiar would be standing there when they bolted that dusty museum they inhabit and finally got here. We sent them Chuck Berry records as a way to show them: This is how we roll.
If you read Chuck’s bios, you’re bound to find people desperately trying to minimize and pooh-pooh his criminal background. The gun he used in a carjacking was broken, so it doesn’t matter… Don’t buy it. Chuck is what he is, and never really made any bones about it. He really was kinda mean and edgy and hypersexual and avaricious and pushy and grasping and grabby. Who cares? He went to jail occasionally, and that was that. Chuck had a chip on his shoulder after he got out of jail, but then again, he had one before he went in too. It doesn’t matter.
Chuck Berry is important in the context of the 1950s. He was a big star in the sixties, too, because a whole lot of British bands adored him and mimicked him. He made a little money in the seventies by making a fool of himself with songs like My Ding-A-Ling— simply dreadful, and not very fun, really, for a novelty tune. After a while, Chuck just showed up in varying states of sobriety, with an untuned guitar, plugged it in, then blasted away with an endless procession of ad-hoc bands he didn’t have to pay or acknowledge –sometimes a few Beatles or Stones, sometimes a bar band–he didn’t seem to acknowledge the difference — just cashed the checks all the same. But the fifties; man, he defined America in the 1950s. Forget Elvis.
I offered that video with the underwater sound to show you what the fuss was about. Look at him. The stage is too small for him, and the world is his stage. America was the most important thing in the world at the turn of the twentieth century, but no one knew it. It took World War I to show what paper tigers the european empires were. America shirked the big mantle, and avoided its responsibilities as a great power until the hakenkreuz and the rising sun were waved right in our faces. So we shrugged and rolled up our sleeves and pounded the world flat again — the way we liked it. And the Soviets stood there after, leering over half the globe, and said they would bury us.
There was the sobriety of Eisenhower. The muscle of the finned cars rolling off the assembly lines. The educated children newly minted by the public school. There was Jonas Salk and a million others who beat not only microbes, but fear of sickness itself. Hollywood gilded the country in pictures, and then gilded itself. There were things raucus and fun and serious and thoughtful bubbling out of the radio, and eventually the TV. Broadway shone like a thousand Folies Bergere.
And Chuck Berry, from the center of our universe: Saint Louis, stood up like a man and looked you straight in the eye –fearless. He was full of optimism and bonhomie and his own brand of charm. I’ll strut, thank you, like the peacock I am. He didn’t wink or pinch, he winked and pinched, and meant it. No idle threats, no meaningless boasts. Chuck don’t flirt. Chuck asks flat out with a twinkle in his eye and an angel on his shoulder and the devil in his heart. And he’d put up his fists if you wanted it, and laugh with you after,too–when you were beaten.
Step closer friends. She won’t bite you and I won’t bite her. That’s my wife. Don’t be afraid to stare. Don’t worry, I’ve lost interest. She caught her dress in a spinning jenny all those years ago in the factory, and was pulled through the loom. She came out the other end, unhurt, in a sort of miracle. But she’s never spoken since, and moves like an automaton. We have the perfect marriage; a mute woman and a man that needs glasses. Don’t be shy, push right on in.
Oh, we’ve got it, ladies and gents. We’ve got the freaks and blockheads and five legged goats. We’ve got Queen Zoe Zingari the Circassian princess, kidnapped from a harem and held here against her will by the Mauler of Mecca with his scimitar. She’s got hair like a Brillo pad, and eyes that will bore a hole right through you. Step forward and see for yourself. You there, son, you look like you want to see a genuine Circassian tattoo. Will she show it to you? Give me a nickel and she’ll show you. Give me a dime and she’ll show me too!
Like pigs to the slop now, wade on in, don’t miss it. We’ve got the girl with the X-ray eyes, but when you see that raven-haired beauty you’re gonna wish it was you that had the X-ray eyes; but don’t worry, boy, there’s not that much standing between you and her. She can see through you like a bank inspector. Come on in!
We got the human pretzel over there and he’s gonna show you more contortions than a politician from New Orleans on Judgement Day. Come on now, don’t be shy. Move it on over.
Man, oh man, young lady we have the Prince of Fire and he’s come all the way from Constantinople to set himself ablaze for you. He eats brimstone for his breakfast and leaves the privy vulcanized. Inside, outside, the fire makes no nevermind to this boy. Step on in and he’ll show you who’s hot. Go on, now, go!
Oh, I know what you’re thinkin’ He don’t have a beautiful woman and a snake, does he? A boa snake from the Orinoco? Who don’t? Not me! I do! Go and see it before it squeezes that little woman tighter than you would if you got the chance. You know, I might get a little tight myself later. It’s hot in the sun. Get inside for your complexions ladies. Go!
Will you come with me to Africa? Will you come with me to Africa!? Oh, they live closer to nature there than anywhere on God’s green, don’t you think so? They’ve made themselves into giraffes and they have their dinner plate with them always, but they forgot to go to the dressmaker’s if you take my meaning, sir.
We’ve got monstrosities. Curiosities. Hell, we’ve got atrocities. Push on in, ladies and gents, and leave me alone out here to wish I knew what was going on in there. Move it on over.
Month: August 2007
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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