Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly — and with very little financial encouragement — saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, except perhaps the bicycle.” Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate, quoted in Boneshaker, Issue 42-400.
Consider this an open thread.
(via)
Good on Nick Kristof for admitting this (and for writing about Central Africa in the first place), but it’s bullshit and he should stop (via Oliver Willis):
[V]ery often I do go to developing countries where local people are doing extraordinary work, and instead I tend to focus on some foreigner, often some American, who’s doing something there.And let me tell you why I do that. The problem that I face — my challenge as a writer — in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo, is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I’m writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that’s the moment to turn the page. It’s very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that.
One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character.
The main reason this bothers me is not that it’s condescending to people in developing countries, it’s that it’s condescending to Nick Kristof’s readers. Worse than that, it is antithetical to the spirit of journalism, which should first and foremost strive to present things as accurately as possible.
Also too, and maybe this is just my own warped psychology, I don’t find that I can relate to Americans that go halfway around the world to help out some people they’ve never met before (though I greatly admire them, obviously). The story of someone trying to pull shit together in their own country seems more, not less, compelling and universal, at least to me.
Update. I agree with the ending of the piece I linked to up top:
He (Nick Kristof) has chosen a beat that’s far more challenging than those taken by his op-ed colleagues Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, who — when they do venture forth from their offices to do an interview — often just go to someone else’s office, bigger than their own.
Having said that, there’s wisdom in the question posed to Kristof on Friday. We think he would do well to ponder it and push himself to question his ongoing narrative. Maybe he’ll find a different storyline that reflects even more courage and vision, and puts aside his homegrown American heroes in favor of the richer yarns found on the ground.
A bunch of things highlighted to write about, but this is the general mood in the house right now:
I’m having a late lunch of fried green tomatoes and scrambled eggs and then settling in for the game.
BTW- I’m rooting for Spain. I think they have a very pretty playstyle that is fun to watch. The other reason I am rooting for them is because I think that von Bommel for the Dutch is just a goon with the mentality of a hooligan. Cheap SOB who just runs around fouling everyone and inexplicably gets away with it. The rugby pitch is over there, jackass.
Sorry- I forgot to throw this up.
The Merle Haggard piece was a little slow.
One of the dozen or so books that forged my understanding of the world and literature was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, which I first read when I was eight or nine. Apart from Huckleberry Finn and possibly Puddinhead Wilson, I’ve always thought Twain’s “journalism” (commentary, essays) better than his fiction, so I’m really looking forward to finally reading the unexpurgated version of his autobiography being released by the University of California Press:
… Whether anguishing over American military interventions abroad or delivering jabs at Wall Street tycoons, this Twain is strikingly contemporary. Though the autobiography also contains its share of homespun tales, some of its observations about American life are so acerbic — at one point Twain refers to American soldiers as “uniformed assassins” — that his heirs and editors, as well as the writer himself, feared they would damage his reputation if not withheld.
__
“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed them in 1906. “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.” …
__
In popular culture today, Twain is “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” Ron Powers, the author of “Mark Twain: A Life,” said in a phone interview. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.”
[…] __
Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.
__
In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”
I do have one question about the NYTimes article, though — is Tom Sawyer actually considered high school reading material these days? Back in the early 1960s, it was assigned to my third-grade class, along with selections from Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticutt Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Both of my parents were Twain fanatics (he may have been the only writer they both adored), and they gave me Life on the Mississippi and The Innocents Abroad when I complained that Tom Sawyer was a cruel, repulsive, self-important little goniff who was probably going to grow up to be a snake oil salesman.
Early Morning Open Thread: Twain in His Own Words, At LastPost + Comments (54)
I have company and am heading to a birthday party, so behave.
*** Update ***
Got sucked in to Public Enemies and didn’t make it to the party yet, but before leaving, I really need to flame this movie. Talk about taking a compelling story and destroying it with shitty camera angles, long unnecessary pauses, and filters on the lenses that make it look like some shitty film noir. I seriously hope the guys who scorched all the Star Wars movies branch out and give this piece of shit the beating it deserves. I an’t count how many times during the movie I thought “Why the fuck am I supposed to care about any of these people? How are they central to the story?” And the music. Feh.
And has there been a worse accent than Christian Bale as Purvis? WTF was that? By the end of the movie, I was ready to give Costner an Oscar for Thirteen Days.
Utter shit.
Pretty interesting point by point piece on what happened in the financial meltdown.