There Are Prudes And There Are Prudes

Ooh, look at me! I found Kafka's stash of porn! "Academics have pretended it did not exist.... The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol." They're all sure gonna be shocked now! Porny porn porn! My "book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a 'quasi-saintly' image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals." Not a saint? Nobody's ever thought of THIS before! I'll show them all!

And can you believe Kafka kept it at his parents' house! Under lock and key! And Franz's dad Hermann wasn't such a bad guy. He hardly hit him at all. Why's Franzie so sensitive about it? It's almost like he's psychologically disposed to key in to the hidden cruelty of small slights and humiliations, and spatial constrictions with the ever-present threat of physical force. I bet he never really turned into a monstrous vermin either. Except when he was reading that stash of porn.

Oh, those horrible prudes all venerating their saintly idol! How I hate them all! Just look at how enlightened and mature I am for talking about this really vile, contemptuous, and really kind of ugggghhhh stuff in this archive. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

/

Look, I don't know what's in those ellipses that the TLS wouldn't print. Maybe there's something in there that's really truly shocking. But "girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant"? How old are you? Have you actually read any other modernist literature? I mean Bataille, Genet, Joyce or Henry Miller even? Have you ever read Sade? Have you ever, I don't know, read pornography that wasn't a softcore Harlequin romance?

What a joke. Unless you're going to put the whole series of the porn Kafka subscribed to into print, stop wasting my time.

Why the Celebrity Attack Works

Sean at FiveThirtyEight asks why the "Obama is a celebrity" attack doesn't wither in the contradictory face of the "Obama is a closet ____" attack or vice versa.

How can someone being portrayed as "the biggest celebrity in the world" also be painted as radical and out of the mainstream? Either Obama is like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton: a fluffy, substanceless, mass-consumed but empty celebrity-for-celebrity’s sake, or he is an unfamiliar and dangerous other with a hidden anti-American agenda.

It’s hard to reconcile the two. By trumpeting Obama's popularity, McCain is calling him – by definition – a safe, easily digestible consumer product, broadly acceptable in the mainstream. Thus, McCain boxes himself into a corner when he wants to make the argument not to elect Obama because he’s so far outside the mainstream.

And Andrew Sullivan concurs:

When these kinds of attacks contradict each other, it's a good bet that both are being made not because the McCain camp actually thinks they're true, but because they're just trying to find anything to bring the guy down. You throw it all until something sticks. Just like the Clintons did. And that worked out great for the Clintons, didn't it?

But I don't see these two claims as contradictory at all; in fact, they're more damaging taken together than separately.

First there's what I'll call the negative unity of the two attacks. Both attack Obama not for what he is but what he is not: a regular hardworking traditional American with traditional hardworking regular American values, like John McCain, and like you, gentle television viewer.

Second, there's the positive unity. Americans don't freak out over celebrities who are vapid and digestible. They freak out over celebrities who are a total mess, who turn out (or are whispered) to be secret drug addicts, Scientologists, homosexuals, criminals, wife beaters, wife murderers, adulterers, or child abusers, who break each others' hearts to have affairs with each other or who believe in reincarnation or Kabbala or (yes) Scientology.

Remember that other nice young talented black man with a beautiful voice, phenomenal talents and positive message whom white America welcomed into their hearts?

John McCain isn't saying Obama is Britney Spears. John McCain is saying that Barack Obama is Michael Jackson.

Like A Thunderbolt

The most sublime and terrifying moment in parenting is when, after a day of dealing with tantrums and beauty and idiosyncrasies and discoveries and danger and moments of quiet, you lay your child down to sleep, pause a moment to stroke the back of their head and watch their quiet breathing, and glimpse a tiny fragment of the impossible knowledge of what it must be like to love yourself.

Aspects of Writing (For Teaching, Research, Writing)

Always remember:

• Writing is / Writings are.
• Writing is a language.
• Writing is a document, a recording.
• Writing is a technology. (Writings are technologies.)
  
• Writing is visible and visual.
• Writing is an art.
• Writing is a metaphor.
• Writing is physical.
  

A Funky Introduction of How Nice I Am

Much like I did when I was a young man, the junior member of our household loves A Tribe Called Quest, so in his honor:

Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty

Pitchfork TV has a documentary about The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead (available for one week only). I am an enthusiastic if comparatively casual Smiths fan but I think it is mighty good.

That Rarest Of Infielders

I just caught this at UbuWeb:

"Ron Silliman was once a slow left-handed second baseman. Now he lives in a faux forest in what was once the Biddle Estate."


Poet-blogger extrasupraordinary Silliman selected some featured material from UbuWeb's archives in June; UbuWeb is awesome, and Silliman's choices are a good a place as any to start.

1. Frank Film (1973), Frank and Caroline Mouris
2.  The Name (1973), Robert Creeley
3.  Recollections of Grande Apachería (1973), Edward Dorn
4.  Reading at Goddard College (1973), Robert Creeley
5. Carnival The First Panel: 1967-1970 (1973), Steve McCaffery
6.  Black Tarantula Crossword Gathas (excerpt) (1973), Jackson Mac Low
7.  A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Matlin (1973), Jackson Mac Low
8.  Heavy Aspirations (1973), Charles Amirkhanian
9. Armand Schwerner (1973), Phil Niblock (real video .rm file)
10. High Kukus (1973), James Broughton

Also, while we're thinking about Ubu, here's a song from Pere Ubu (which is my son's unofficial anthem -- "I have desires!") and the text of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi.

Shame Of A City

Many but not all of my readers know that I'm a native Detroiter, and so have more than a passing interest in the jailing of Hizzoner Kwame Kilpatrick, but really, the most I'm willing to say about it for anyone interested is to refer you to this fine Cliffs Notes version of the story at Wordwright.

Byrne Racks

David Byrne has designed new bike racks for New York City, nine of which are being put up all over town:

In recent years [Byrne's] interest in bicycles has expanded from riding them to thinking seriously about the role they play in urban life, as he has started making connections with politicians and international design consultants keen to keep cars from taking over the city. So when the Department of Transportation asked him to help judge a design competition for the city’s new bike racks, he eagerly agreed — so eagerly, in fact, that he sent in his own designs as well.

They were simple shapes to define different neighborhoods around the city: a dollar sign for Wall Street; an electric guitar for Williamsburg, Brooklyn; a car — “The Jersey” — for the area near the Lincoln Tunnel. “I said, ‘Well, this disqualifies me as a judge,’ ” he recalled, “but I just doodled them out and sent them in.” He figured maybe they’d be used to decorate the contest Web site, nycityracks.wordpress.com.

Instead, much as when George W. Bush asked Dick Cheney to find him a vice president, Mr. Byrne ended up landing the job for which he was leading the search team. Well, almost: the competition for new standard racks is still on, but on Friday nine racks made from his own whimsical designs were installed around the city. “They immediately responded, saying, ‘If you can get these made, we’ll put them through,’ “ he recalled. “I was kind of shocked.”

He’s not just being modest: for his previous installation, “Playing the Building,” still on display at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan, he said he had to battle red tape for two years before even getting permission to look inside. This time around the agency agreed pretty much on the spot to his designs and all the proposed locations. That’s when it dawned on him: “I said: ‘Oh, that’s right, the city owns the sidewalks. They don’t have to get permission to move a stop sign.’ “

In one of those New York mysteries I will never understand, the racks will only be up for 364 days. I guess so that you run out right away to see all nine.

The best part of this article is that nowhere in it is Byrne identified as anything other than "an installation artist, author, blogger, recording executive, photographer, film director and PowerPoint enthusiast." No "Best known for his groundbreaking tenure fronting the new wave group Talking Heads, David Byrne's solo work, while not as successful, is no less adventurous, encroaching upon such diverse media as world music, filmmaking, and performance art." Just "He’s even been known to dabble in music."

Gosh, I love bicyclists.

The Music of Broken Bats

For AVG -- Popular Woodworking on the mystery of increased rates of broken bats in the MLB.

Surprisingly, neither maple nor ash but aluminum is squarely to blame.

Via Kottke.