the pet child of calamity

nota bene

Wed, 06 May 2009 03:06:48 GMT

the Duke and the King live at WDST. Simone Felice is cultivating a truly admirable set of muttonchops there. It's good to see him out and about.

Handful of Dust by Paul Abruzzo. It's a great story, it's got a girl and a bar and a jukebox in it, which is frankly all a great story needs. The rest is just shading.

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things that keep me up at night

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:11:23 GMT

so far as I know the Felice Brothers' new album Yonder Is The Clock has received pretty much all A+ reviews across the world, which is wonderful and I'm happy for my guys, and if one more writer or blogger says that Boy from Lawrence County is about Jesse James, I'm going on a cross-country shooting spree. (there is a Lawrence County in Missouri, but it's nowhere near Clay County, which is where James was from.) the song is about betrayal:

tell me, Judge, what's the bounty
on that boy from Lawrence County?
he's a friend of mine.
if I had a way to trap 'im
would you swear to pay up, Cap'n?
he's a friend of mine.

but the friend is never named. the reference that these morons seem to fixate on is actually a simile that shows up about a verse and a half later:

roll on silver river through the iron rain
past the sleeping trains that wait
gold and amber petals in your water waves
like the band of Jesse James in wait

this is the kind of lazy interpretation that makes me homicidal. I'm sure that using a reference to James in a song about a friend's betrayal was no coincidence, but it also wasn't the point.

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Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:29:46 GMT

Notes on Conceptual Fiction, via ALDaily.

whenever I hear "serious" used by a literary critic, I am
reminded of John McEnroe taunting the umpire at Wimbledon in
his whiny voice: "You can NOT be SERIOUS?"

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i had no intention of talking politics in this space

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:44:36 GMT

I recently read an opinion piece that suggested semantics was the first step in combatting Indian Ocean piracy -- that if we started calling them "maritime terrorists" it would strip away the romanticism from the concept. Please. Please. Terrorism isn't about economics, and piracy isn't about ideology.

Somalia has been without a practically functioning government for almost 18 years. (If any concept needed to have its romanticism stripped away, it's anarchy.) The men and boys who turn pirate in Somalia don't do it because they're trying to prove something, to influence or to frighten or control. They don't do it because they hate America or Israel or any idea or construct. They do it because they are just that desperate. They do it because there are literally no other viable options on land. You can't get a job when there is no economy to offer one.

Bombing Somalia would be a horrific mistake, and I don't want to even dream that President Obama would make it. President Bush invaded and occupied sovereign nations -- that was bad. Really bad. If this administration authorizes air strikes on people whose main crime is poverty? Catastrophic. I like Obama a whole damn lot, but I wouldn't forgive him for that.

It's an unfortunate coincidence that Somalia is the only Muslim country in sub-Saharan Africa. Reprisals against the nation would almost certainly be read as reprisal against Islam by the rest of the Islamic world, and we do not need that shit. The repercussions would be global, and Ms. Dickinson is right that al Shabaab would retaliate against the Somali people, leading to further conflation in the minds of Westerners that this is about terrorism and not about economics.

The answer is stepping up support for the Somali government. Not necessarily in terms of financial aid (google Dambisi Moyo for an eloquent explanation) although Somalia is an exceptional case that could use some funding to aid in stabilization, but in terms of political support. Somalia needs to break down al Shabaab. Somalia needs to rebuild its economy. What specific kind of support would assist in its ability to do those things, though, I can't quite say. It's almost three in the morning, and I'm just a writer.

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bienvenue

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:19:54 GMT

Writing about writing about writing, eventually. Well, the writing, anyway.

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