Michael guesses that I might have something to say about the poem, and he’s right, but he catches me as I’m working against a dissertation-related deadline (don’t worry — I assure you that the dissertation is in its last throes).
Until I’m better able to address his post, I offer you the following take on The Big Lebowski. It’s not quite as eloquent as Yeats’ commentary on the human condition, but it shares a vaguely similar leitmotif. I like to think of it as a gloss on the lines “Caught in that sensual music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”
The Big Lebowski - F_cking Short Version
(caution: this video contains more profanity than a G8 Summit Meeting, so put on some headphones if you’re at work, and cover the ears of your children if you’re at home)
Some people are born to run; others are born to write. A select few find a way to do both.
In his latest offering, Nineteenth-Century Cool, Neddie Jingo dreams not of running, but of staying in the same place for a very long time. His post is an ode to the natural world, and it’s also one of the finest pieces of blog writing I’ve read in a long, long time.
I’m sure that Billmon’s Whiskey Bar is familiar to you; but if, by chance, you’ve missed The Wages of Sin, hop on over and drown your sorrows in a glass of the good stuff. Just don’t blame me if you wake up with a hangover.
ULAN BATOR, Mongolia, Oct. 22 - Mongolia has 131 soldiers in Iraq, and on Saturday it received an official American statement of gratitude from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Rumsfeld came to Ulan Bator to deliver that message personally, and he was given a horse.
In dazzling sunlight on the grounds of the Mongolian Defense Ministry, Mr. Rumsfeld took the reins of the calm gelding and said, “I am proud to be the owner of that proud animal.” He immediately announced that he would name the horse Montana, because the dusty plains and mountains that ring the Mongolian capital reminded him of that Rocky Mountain state.
The entire exchange recalled an ancient era of alliance and conquest, when a warrior’s word was law and the long knives were carried in the open.
The horse, a rich latte hue with a mane and tail the color of dark-roast coffee, was described by local officials as a traditional domesticated Mongolian breed.
Mr. Rumsfeld owns a ranch in New Mexico, where the high plains and sharp peaks would offer pleasant life to an expatriate horse, even one descended from the sturdy steeds that carried Genghis Khan and his successors across the steppes and the Gobi Desert to conquer most of Asia in the 13th century.
Whoa, indeed.
I don’t quite know what we’re supposed to make of this story — I think it’s meant to be a breezy political diary, but it comes off as an awkward attempt to romanticize Rumsfeld (not to mention those dusty plains or sharp peaks). I read it two or three times, scouring the article closely for signs of irony or sarcasm; I could find none.
Among the stylistic affronts, I spy a grammatical one: I believe that this article claims that Rumsfeld’s new horse is a hue. A rich latte hue, to be sure, with undernotes of dark-roast coffee, but a hue nonetheless.
Of course, we shouldn’t be too hard on the writer here — look at the quotes he had to work with:
“I am proud to be the owner of that proud animal.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld
And I am ashamed to be governed by this shameful government.
I’m making myself talk about something other than Harriet Miers, with whom I’m becoming obsessed (and if you haven’t seen her “blog” yet, do yourself a favor and check it out; it’s a thing of beauty). And while she is the Original Sixty-Year Old Teenager, who will have a flourishing career in any number of areas besides the administration of justice, should she not be confirmed to the S.C. (talk show host, porn star, celebrity knitter, to name just a few of her choices), I’m turning my attention very briefly elsewhere this morning. I am talking, of course, about the other H-Dog, Harold Pinter, who just bagged the Nobel Prize for literature. This H-Dog is so totally gangsta (if you can imagine a playwright being gangsta, please try for a moment) he makes Suge Knight look like Diddy. Have you read The Homecoming or The Birthday Party lately? Not upskis, let me tell you. And while they’re threatening and menacing and really pretty damn scary pieces of work (imagine Interpol writing plays), it’s not entirely clear what any of them are really about (imagine Interpol writing plays), if I might use a hopelessly unfashionable way of looking at literature. I wonder if he and Beckett ever went out on the town, and what that would have been like, and if they ever rolled home at three in the morning, singing fight songs? I’ll bet that was a laff riot.
So raise a sullen and morose glass, if you please, to HP, whose Chamber of Secrets is much scarier than the other HP (and in the interests of symmetry, could we please let Harold have a crack at the screenplay for the next offering of the Harry Potter movie franchise?). If we’re going to scare our children, let’s scare ‘em right.
I had to rewrite that Calla review a bit — it was just too stilted and awkward to let stand.
I don’t think I’ve ever written a music review before. Writing about music is harder than I thought. When all one wants to do is grab someone by the collar and say, “listen to this — isn’t it great?”, it’s very tough to try to pin down the sound with words. It’s doubly tough when one doesn’t have the technical vocabulary or historical knowledge needed to convey the subtleties of what one is hearing. I have newfound respect for my friend Rod, who has written for Pitchfork, and who has turned me on to many a fine band in his time.
But I guess that’s why some people get paid to review music, while others simply rant away for free on a blog.
At any rate, I hope that the revised review better conveys what I was trying to say, which is: listen to this album — it’s fucking great.
ALa points to a riveting blog post on My War: Killing Time in Iraq. The author, CBFTW, was the subject of a great deal of controversy last year when his Army commanders discovered his blog. The post that got him in trouble was titled “Men in Black”; it contrasted a bland CNN account of a battle with his own fiery, real-life experience. That post has been removed from My War’s archives, but you can still find it if you know how to look. I’d recommend doing so.
In his most recent post, One Year Later, CB describes the strong-arm tactics being used by the Army to pressure veterans back into active service.
The post begins with a recounting of a recent dream, which indicates some of the effects of war on the human psyche:
For the last couple weeks now, every night, I’ve had odd dreams like the one that I just had, and there all the same, something totally fucked up will happen, I’ll witness it, feel absolutely no emotion about it. Nothing at all, and I’ll go on with my everyday life.
CB’s disconcerting reverie is interrupted by an unwelcome phone call:
Usually I ignore phone calls like this one, but something told me to take this one. When the guy on the other end said, “Hello, is this Specialist Buzzell?” my heart sank the same way it did in Mosul on that hot afternoon a year ago today, when they said, “Load up! We’re going back!”
I didn’t answer his question, I didn’t want to. It’s been awhile now since somebody has addressed me by my last name or as “Specialist” and god knows I kinda want to keep it that way. I paused, and asked, “Let me guess you’re the United States Army right?” He laughed as he said that he was, and he gave me his name and rank (Sgt) and asked me how I was doing today, I told him “I was doing fine until you called” and as I lit up a smoke I quickly said, “Let me guess, you’re calling to remind me that I’m in the Inactive Ready Reserves right? And that I can be called up to active duty at any time now, right?” I couldn’t figure out what was so god damn funny about that as he again laughed, and mentioned that I was again correct. Since I was on a roll here, I asked him another question, “And let me guess, your going to tell me that I can be called up at any moment now, and that I probably will, and if I don’t want to get deployed and risk getting killed again out there in Iraq again, all I have to do is sign up for the Army reserves, right?”
Amazed, he told me that I was again correct, and I could avoid getting called back, if I sign up for the Army Reserves.
Bullshit.
I’m pretty sure that when this guy signed up for the army he didn’t request to be like an 11TangoMike (Tele-marketer) or something like that for the United States army. I asked him how he got put on this detail, to call up and harass guys who already put their time in, served, got out, and are now trying to get on with their lives, and try to intimidate them to sign back up again so that they could go back in, using scare tactics. He then just told me, “You know how it is.”
I laughed. Yea, I know exactly how it is. We then talked for a bit. When he realized that there was no way in hell I’d come back in, he then got confrontational with me and said that if I don’t sign up for the reserves now, the Army would probably call me back up on the Inactive Reserves, which he said they probably were going to do, and if they called me back and I chose not to go, I’d go to jail.
Jail? I then asked him for his name and rank. He refused to give that to me. He said that he already divulged that information, so I asked him who his commanding officer was, since he didn’t divulge that bit of info to me. Even after several requests, he refused to tell me. So I hung up on him, and slowly made my way to the window and stared out at the street scenery for awhile.
A long while.
I noticed that the birds flying around here are a little bit different than the ones over there.
Thankfully, CB has not stopped squawking. He is writing a book based on his experiences; it will be published by Putnam, and is currently on pre-order at Amazon. The cover of the book features a blurb from Esquire:
“The most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq War.”
Based on what I’ve read today, that’s an assessment with which I’d have to agree.
If you’re still using Internet Explorer, by the way, please take a few moments to check out Firefox — it’s free, it’s open-source, it’s endlessly customizable, and it automatically blocks spyware and popups. Once you’ve tried tabbed browsing, there’s no going back.
I don’t agree with everything that Ochman suggests — I give blog readers more credit for reading complex sentences than he she does — but, in general, his her advice is worth consideration.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see a cottage industry of blog-writing guides spring up. As Ochman’s post makes clear, writing for blogs is quite different than writing for other types of media.
“So what does a broker do? Do you broke things? I don’t understand.”
“No, we broker things. We’re brokers.”
“You mean, like the stock market? With money?”
“No, we broker situations, people, things. It’s not exactly what you might call a palpable activity, like if we made shoes or ran a restaurant. But we take care of stuff for people, in a fairly well-actualized manner, albeit that it tends toward the conceptual, obviously.”
“I think I need an example.”
“OK, one time I had to go out to Utah with a client. She’s some kind of actress, comic actress she thinks, although others may simply beg to differ on that particular question. She was working up an audition for a show, I seem to recall that it was a Neo-Latter-Day-Saints Revue kind of thing, kind of straight-laced, but also at the same time kind of out there, you know? And she’d tried out before for a part the previous year and used the same material and just bombed. She had this idea that she wanted to invent this dentist kind of character and riff on it, something about how nobody understood how hard it was to be a dentist, kind of like an avant-garde Rodney Dangerfield schtick meets Herbie from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. We didn’t get it. The producers didn’t get it. We didn’t even get a hollow chortle at the try-outs, to be brutally frank in a tough love kind of way. It was a disaster, to be honest with you. I feel that we failed her. We weren’t interventionist enough, totally un-proactive, inert. We just left her out there to faceplant all by herself. Felt just terrible about it, as you can imagine. It would have helped if we’d understood what she was talking about, of course, but that’s our job. But nobody should beat themselves up. That’s been proven not be a productive response to abject failure. There are studies that show this. Lot of, lot of literature on the subject.”
“So how do you broker that kind of situation?”
“Well, it’s a subtle process. We go for the gestalt, mostly, and then we try to intuit our way into the center of the situation, so that we’re between both sides of the information flow, mediating, moderating, facilitating, deflecting bad stuff, re-directing good stuff, so that all the right information finds its optimal endpoint. And we check in a lot with all parties, take the pulse of the room, establish a whole lot of ground rules, always striving, naturally, for consensus, some kind of agreed-upon contract of mutually acceptable behaviors and outcomes.”
“So what happened to the Utah client?”
“You don’t often get a second chance in this business. But in this case we were fortunate. In one sense. The sense that the producers were open the following year to giving us another listen. In another sense, we were laboring under the curse of the obstinate client. She was determined to make this dentist bullshit work for her. She was convinced she had the germ of an idea, although damned if we could see it. But we did persuade the client to reform the concept in a fairly fundamental way, and in such a fashion that she thought she got there all by herself. Which is mission critical, obviously. But really and truly, this situation was a classic case of re-presentation.”
“I think I still don’t understand.”
“It’s not easy to grasp. She was bound and determined to go with the ‘Nobody-understands-me-I’m-a-dentist’ routine, although we had yet to score a positive comedic response from any of our test audiences. So like I said, we persuaded the client to re-cast the material slightly.”
“So what form did the re-presentation take?”
”We’ll make a broker out of you yet. Well, to begin with, we thought she needed to make the dentistry angle more relevant, from a New Millennium Standpoint.”
”A New Millennium Standpoint?”
“I’d like to put that question in the parking lot, if I may. The New Millennium Standpoint is a dissertation all by itself.”
“OK, but the increased relevancy of the dentistry angle? I can’t believe I’m talking this way.”
”Right. So we pushed her in a more corporate direction, persuaded her to self-present more so as a cog in a corporate machine, a helpless part of the faceless dental monolith, if you will, lost in a post-post-everything scenario, staring into the void of toothy decay and halitosis, in really a cosmic sense. But funny. Really funny. Plus, we changed the costume. The costume really wasn’t getting it done.”
“You changed the dentist costume?”
”Kind of. But once again, it was subtle. We made her wear wellington boots and tucked her pants into them.”
“Oh.”
“She killed. We’re thinking of growing the product into a one-woman show for the fall. Really, a happy ending for all concerned. And we brokered the shit out of it. It’s stories like this one that make it all worthwhile for me, you know? Help me get out of bed in the morning and look myself in the mirror without wanting to throw up or stab myself.”
“So is this the exemplary brokerage story, or are there others that would give me a better idea of what it is exactly that you do?”
“Well, the dentist scenario is kind of the Ur-narrative of contemporary lifestyle brokerage, but we do also spend a lot of time between consumers and marketers, tilling the middle ground, brokering pricepoint harmony.”
“OK, you’ve lost me again. Brokering pricepoint harmony?”
“We visit grocery stores, get both sides in a room, and nobody leaves until we find the optimal price for cereal. You’d be amazed how long that can take.”
”I hate to ask, but how on earth does that work?”
“You start with a number. Let’s call it five dollars. Now the consumer is clearly not going to pay five dollars for cereal, but the grocer would wet himself with glee if he could get the consumer to pay five dollars. That’s where we come in. This is the perfect job for the broker.”
“I see. So you’re haggling, basically.”
”Well, that would be putting it rather crudely, and we are a sensitive breed. I would prefer to think that we enable the negotiation of the Platonic cereal market to an harmonious reciprocal conclusion, but in layman’s terms, haggling, yes. But really fancy haggling, let me assure you. We Powerpoint the shit out of it.”
“So what is the optimal price for cereal?”
“Depends. About three-and-a-half, depending on crop yields, sugar futures and conception rates amongst certain demographics with a propensity to see breakfast cereals as not just for breakfast any more, like the families who would eat cereal three times a day and four on weekends if you let them. It’s a subtle art.”
“This has been fascinating.”
“Some people think so, although, funny story, I did get a call from a journalist once asking me if all we did was talk to supermarkets, and once I’d collected myself I did have to set them straight. But really, true story. Hilarious.
“Well, thanks so much for your time.”
”Sure no problem. Let me know if you ever want to ride along. Next week, for example, we’re brokering an adoption.”
”Of a child?”
“Well, technically, no, not a child, since that would be kind of illegal, so far as we can tell, in most states. But rather, the pre-conceptual notion of a child qua child will be up for grabs in the sense that if Party A is ever fortunate enough and/or horny enough to conceive, then we would at such point intervene and facilitate the transfer of parental rights to Party B, who is historically unable and/or unwilling to have sex with their partner, although they’d clearly make fabulous parents. It’s a speculative kind of thing. The market for adoptions is very bullish right now, and people need help. We’ll call in the appropriate authorities when the time is right.”
“We’ll follow up with you on that once we’ve talked to Legal. But really, thanks again.”
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