Posts Tagged ‘J.D. Salinger’
Monday Night!
* The latest Detroit atrocity: Detroit mayor shoots down idea for Robocop statue. When will that poor city finally get a leader with some vision?
* How “The Fridge” lost his way: Elegy for William “The Refrigerator” Perry.
* Football vs. labor: Will the NFL play next year?
* Dystopia watch: Disney Now Marketing To Newborns In The Delivery Room.
* David Cole plays “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?”—almost by name!—in the New York Review of Books.
As Judge Hudson sees it, the health care reform law poses an unprecedented question: Can Congress, under its power to regulate “commerce among the states,” regulate “inactivity” by compelling citizens who are not engaged in commerce to purchase insurance? If it is indeed a novel question, there may be plenty of room for political preconceptions to color legal analysis. And given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, that worries the law’s supporters.
But the concerns are overstated. In fact, defenders of the law have both the better argument and the force of history on their side. Judge Hudson’s decision reads as if it were written at the beginning of the twentieth rather than the twenty-first century. It rests on formalistic distinctions—between “activity” and “inactivity,” and between “taxing” and “regulating”—that recall jurisprudence the Supreme Court has long since abandoned, and abandoned for good reason. To uphold Judge Hudson’s decision would require the rewriting of several major and well-established tenets of constitutional law. Even this Supreme Court, as conservative a court as we have had in living memory, is unlikely to do that.
The objections to health care reform are ultimately founded not on a genuine concern about preserving state prerogative, but on a libertarian opposition to compelling individuals to act for the collective good, no matter who imposes the obligation. The Constitution recognizes no such right, however, so the opponents have opportunistically invoked “states’ rights.” But their arguments fail under either heading. With the help of the filibuster, the opponents of health care reform came close to defeating it politically. The legal case should not be a close call.
* Did Bush cancel a trip to Switzerland out of fear of criminal prosecution? Probably not—but isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party finds another RINO: godfather of neoconservatism Bill Kristol.
* The end of the DLC. My inclination is to say “make sure you bury it at a crossroads so it can’t come back,” but of course Ezra’s more or less right: the DLC can safely disband because it won.
* The city-states of America, “those states where the majority of their populations lie within a single metropolitan area.” Via Yglesias, which has some light speculation on the politics of all this.
* On the Soviet Union’s rather poor plan to reach the Moon.
* Star Wars, with all those pointless words and images taken out. Note: falsely implies Chewbacca received a medal at the end of the film.
* Charles Simic: Where is Poetry Going?
“Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own,” William Hazlitt wrote. One hopes that a poem will eventually arise out of all that hemming and hawing, then go out into the world and convince a complete stranger that what it describes truly happened. If one is fortunate, it may even get into bed with them or be taken on a vacation to a tropical island. A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. Compared to the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in the dark. That’s why the travel they prefer is going to the kitchen to see if there is any baked ham and cold beer left in the fridge.
* An evening with J.D. Salinger. It ends pretty much exactly as you’d expect:
The three of us got into the cab. Joe gave the driver my address and when the cab began to move Salinger began walking, then running, alongside, still asking us to change our minds. He hit the cab—with his fist, I supposed—and the driver braked.
Joe said, “Drive on!” Salinger was looking in through the window beside me. “Stop. Please come back!” He was shouting now in the quiet street.
The cab moved and got through the intersection. Joe said angrily, “He’s absolutely crazy.”
* And the headline reads: Global food crisis driven by extreme weather fueled by climate change. Enjoy the century.
No More Interviews
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. Breaking in from a hectic day to report some sad news: J.D. Salinger has died.
Monday 1
Monday!
* The trailer for the SF-infused Paul-Giamatti-as-Paul-Giamatti comedy Cold Souls causes io9 to ask whether “Charlie Kaufman” is officially a genre yet.
* Kari in the comments directs us to a defense of Holden Caulfield against the spurious assertions of irrelevance I blogged about yesterday.
* Bruce Schneier: SF Writers Aren’t a Useful Aspect of National Defense—a followup to an article I posted last month. Via Boing Boing.
* Also not useful: classifying “protests” as “low-level terrorism activity.”
* The Art of the Title Sequence considers the end of Wall-E. Via Kottke.
* What’s wrong with the American essay? I’m not sure anything is, but certainly not this:
The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.
“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer, the first American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a good sermon we hear our own “discarded thoughts brought back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. And this is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas.
It doesn’t seem to me at all that American letters suffers from a lack of hypotheses confused for certainties.
* And Shia Labeouf may live to ruin Y: The Last Man after all.
Sunday
Some links for Sunday.
* Robin Sloan has a filtered #iranelection Twitter feed with most of the repetition and chaos stripped away. Via Boing Boing.
* Salinger and kids today: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ” Via MeFi.
* Another ruins of the modern world roundup. This one has some repetition but also a few I hadn’t seen before.
* Advantage: chubbiness. People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.
Late Night Shouldn’t-Have-Taken-That-Nap Links, Round 2
A second round of late night shouldn’t-have-taken-that-nap links.
* Why GM failed; link roundup from Kottke.
* A.O. Scott vlogs the awesomeness of Rushmore. Via TRA. It’s vlogtastic.
* Mrs. Santorum is a very lucky woman.
* The headline reads, “Secret US Nuke Site List Accidentally Published Online by US Gov.” Whoops!
* Handicapping the 2012 Republican field at Open Left.
* The median number of tweets by a Twitter user is one. This and other Twitter bubble factoids via MetaFilter.
* J.D. Salinger sues to block the publication of the unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel. I feel torn here between my liberal attitude towards copyright and my sense that said sequel can only be an abomination.
* “It’s remarkable, what we’re unable to do as a country”: Wire creator David Simon on BBC Radio 4, via Edge of the American West.
Monday Night Bloggity Blogs
Monday night bloggity blogs.
* Samuel Delany’s “The Star Pit” as a radio show. Really good.
* More on the surprise Dollhouse renewal, including word that “Epitaph One” will likely be aired after all and an interview with Joss. Too bad about Terminator; Bill Simmon links to a Fox executive explaining the one had nothing to do with the other, except insofar as it did.
“[Sarah Connor] has completed its run,” Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly confirmed at a press conference this morning. “I think it had a nice little run. It was a good show. It was not an either or [with Dollhouse]. We did see it tailing off a bit [in the ratings]. It had a nice creative core, but, ultimately, we made the bet on Dollhouse, so that’s it for [Sarah Connor]… We make no apologies. We gave it a lot of support and some consistent scheduling. We tried and thought it was time to move on.”
* Benen and Yglesias explain how the right’s schoolyard strategy on Pelosi and torture may be making a truth commission much more likely.
* Rick Perry has abandoned neosecessionism. Score one for the Northern aggressors.
* I was so outraged by the very idea of this I completely forgot to blog it: someone’s written a Catcher in the Rye sequel and their name isn’t J.D.
“Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he’s not at a prep school, he’s at a retirement home in upstate New York,” said California. “It’s pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He’s still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he’s disappointed in the goddamn world. He’s older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn’t have all the answers.”
Bunch of phonies.
* Maureen Dowd plagiarizes Josh Marshall and everyone has a really good time with it.
* The New Yorker covers the sixth mass extinction event. Print edition only, because analysis of an ongoing mass extinction event isn’t something you just give away for free. A few more links at Kottke.
* Kos and Yglesias on epically bad ideas to save newspapers.
‘When Books Could Change Your Life’
When books could change your life: why what we pore over at 12 may be the most important reading we ever do. Via MeFi.
There is a kind of no man’s land in the literary landscape that can’t be called “children’s” or “young adult”–it’s recognized as serious literature, if a little patronizingly, by the adult world–but which has a specific and perennial appeal to adolescents. I’m thinking here of writers such as J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., those staples of the college dorm. We reserve a special reverence for these authors that is qualitatively different from the respect, even awe, we feel for undeniably great writers like Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy–it’s less rational or open to critical discussion. The reaction to revelations of the usual mundane human failings in recent biographies of figures beloved from childhood, such as Ray Bradbury or Charles Schulz, has been not just the surprise or sad worldly shrug we might expect but hostility and denial–a sense that we ought not to have been told such things, as if we’d been told once more that Santa Claus wasn’t real or Shoeless Joe threw the series. And Joyce Maynard and Margaret Salinger’s troubling memoirs about Salinger–we didn’t want to know. Salinger and Vonnegut both give voice to the adolescent passion for justice, their dogmatic, almost fanatical, fairness and decency, and their blooming disgust at the epiphany that the world adults are foisting on them is neither fair nor decent.
Unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness
New Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer at io9. Meanwhile, Cynical-C has J.D. Salinger’s review of Raiders of the Lost Ark:
Have seen no good movies, except The Last Metro, which wasn’t exactly indelibly fine, but Deneuve herself maybe was, or came close. I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors.
Gerry Canavan 