Echopraxia

I have no good reason to be reading the letters pages of student newspapers, and am not if such a thing is even theoretically possible. However, it has yielded this.

We don't care if you didn't know Take Back The Night was occurring. Is this routine behavior for Delta Sigma Phi? Do you regularly embarrass yourselves by running through campus half naked with a Delta Sig flag?

Posted by zerlesen at 5:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

If the perpetrator of the massacre at Virginia Tech had been white, we'd be hearing a bunch of tiresome hand-wringing about "suburban alienation" (OK, that's happening anyway) and "angry white males" - possibly even the "militia movement", remember them? - and someone would probably end up managing to blame Trent Reznor. If, God forbid, he'd been a Muslim, the asshole wing of the American right would be vigorously dancing around the question of whether it's safe to allow such people on a college campus in the first place. When it emerged that the man responsible was a Korean national, that seemed to derail a number of promising narratives. (At least he turned out to be a resident alien: this meant that the British papers could spend a pleasant few days wanking about how the iniquities of life in this terrible country had driven someone to commit mass murder, while Sean Hannity could go on TV and wonder how come the guy wasn't stripped of his green card and summarily deported after writing a terrible play in college.)

Still, the show must go on.

Police investigating the Virginia Tech killings are looking at whether Cho Seung-Hui was copying parts of a violent film when he murdered 32 people.

Park Chan-wook's Oldboy has the misfortune of being the most prominent Korean film to be released in the US in the last five years (or perhaps ever). Literally the only connection between the Virginia Tech killings and the film Oldboy is that both can be ascribed to people with Korean citizenship - although notice that the Sky News story does not mention that Oldboy was the work of a Korean director. It's a very, very good thriller which has nothing to do with a crazy person killing thirty-two people in Virginia.

And to think that this took three whole days. At this rate, the first lawsuit against Trent Reznor should be filed by the end of next week.

Posted by zerlesen at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Golly. I awake from a lengthy hibernation to discover I have been comprehensively served in the comment section, both in the sense of "being outclassed" and also in the sense of "here, have this gigantic nacho." You guys rule.

(But will my attendant sense of shame and inadequacy at having let this space fall into disrepair prompt me to update as regularly as I should? Almost certainly not. And yet, living as close to Cleveland as I do, I am also aware that one must never underestimate the power of shame and inadequacy...)

Posted by zerlesen at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Some wise and relevant words on the subject of America's pastime:

The only "problem" with major-league baseball as a consumer product is that, with the exception of the Detroit franchise, most of these guys actually know how to play the game, and now and then you want to see some Keystone Kops action in the field. Happily, the problem has a simple solution: get in the car and proceed to the nearest minor-league venue. It looks enough like baseball to count as going to a game, but it's much cheaper than going to a big-league game (especially the parking), and a grown man is going to step on his own foot and fall down. No, listen to me -- it is going to happen.

Posted by zerlesen at 3:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (70)

Heute nicht auf Deutsch. I am slowly plowing through William Vollmann's latest characteristically terrifying novel, though, the action of which is split more or less evenly between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in an attempt to demonstrate that they were both really depressing.

I was afraid that Vollmann ran out of tricks about ten years ago, but (happily) he seems to have entered some kind of career renaissance, one in which he no longer feels compelled to write quite so many gigantic books about whores. Meanwhile, professional reviewers of novels seem to have come to terms with the fact that no matter what they say, basically nobody is going to read him, which gives them license to throw their hands up and start saying things like:

I've reviewed nearly all of Vollmann's books over the years and am running out of superlatives...

Posted by zerlesen at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Previous post heading is meta, but not purely so - crickets - or locusts, or something with an exoskeleton - are massing in the trees, making an insurrectionary noise like a few thousand tiny buzzsaws. I keep expecting to hear falling timber.

So, then: after much pain and many deaths, I am back in the US. Elvis Costello once wrote an entire song about how much the city I'm sitting in sucks, but that's neither here nor there. Nothing is moving on the street except for the great North American flannel-shirted cicada, or whatever the hell those things are.

Posted by zerlesen at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Posted by zerlesen at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes political comedy is nuanced and subtle, and other times a group called "March Together for Life" puts up a post called "Murder Without Conscience" in which they take serious issue with a seven-year-old Onion opinion piece entitled "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" Then six hundred people line up to kick them.

On another note, the subhead at the March Together for Life blog is

We will end abortion through our unity and the monthly call for life.

UPDATE: A thousand and forty three people. I'm amazed that folks are still coming up with points that hadn't already been made in the first thousand comments, but there it is.

Posted by zerlesen at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Op-ed from the New Republic's Jonathan Chait on this year's fractious Connecticut senatorial race, here. Given that the left-netroots have for the most part thrown TNR under the bus during this whole business - Markos Zuniga even referred to them as part of the "vast RIGHT wing conspiracy", which made me slowly blink twice - he's unsurprisingly harsh:

The whole anti-Lieberman blog campaign has a self-fulfilling quality: They charge that Lieberman isn't a Democrat, they drive him from the party, and they declare themselves to be correct. The more ex-Democrats they create, the more sure of their own virtue they become.

(Ah, good times:

Dean tries to spin his outburst as evidence of his being "willing to say things that are not popular." But the problem wasn't that Dean said something unpopular. The content of what he said was fine--"EEEEEEYYYYAAAHHHH!!!!" is not, per se, an unpopular sentiment--but the form was problematic.

Posted by zerlesen at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The always-engaging Grover Norquist does some community outreach at the American Prospect. While finessing his positions on immigration (essentially "I would like to punch Tom Tancredo in the face.") and gay marriage, he comes up with this inspiring anecdote:

I think it's a mistake to write off any group. I was in Romania, they're having elections in four weeks, and I was organizing the non-communists. And I had them write on a blackboard Who's Voting for Us, Who's Voting for Them. And they had to list ... understand why everybody was. They had the gypsies voting for the communists, and I said, "OK, I get why the Communists are voting for the Communists, and the Army and the police and the guys with government jobs, but why the gypsies?" If I were a gypsy I'd want to live outside touchy-feely U.S. law, much less harsher communist law. And they said, "Well, the communists buy them liquor and then they vote for them." And I said, "We can do this; George Washington did this, it's OK." And they said, "No, the gypsies are scum and we won't talk to them." And I said, "OK, I guess you're not getting the gypsy vote then."

Posted by zerlesen at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)