My friend Jason has just moved his blog, What Happens in Maryville onto the NoCategories server. There, he will serve up a fresh, hot, helping of his patented political thoughts and observations, seasoned with not a little bit of ketchup.
Archive for November, 2004
Apocalypse Playground Issue #10
Apocalypse Playground Issue 10 was probably one of our very best issues.
I have just recovered the .pdf file for your printing, and bathroom-reading enjoyment. Only a fragment remains of the source file for this issue but it’s still a good read. By the tenth issue, the column by Lady Dementia had been renamed “The Mess that Scalpels Make,” the zine had a poetry editor and a graphic designer.
Litblogs on Politics
Yesterday, the day after the election, all the literary weblogs that I read were either on hiatus or openly mourning the results of the election. Today Conversational Reading and The Reading Experience have both commneted on that.
Questions come to mind about the relationship between literature and politics. Is it really all that out-of-the-way for literary people to have thoughts on politics? I don’t think so.
On the other hand, comments about comments about politics are not exactly comments about literature, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Runaway Daydreams
I’ve already gotten sick of this country once, and I have expatriated before. I might even be able to make good money, now that I am (semi)qualified to teach English.
Today Harpers published an article: “Electing to Leave: A reader’s guide to expatriating on November 3”
So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options.
The article listed a variety of options.
- Renouncing your citizenship
- Heading to Canada or Mexico
- The coalition of the willing
- Indian reservations
- The high seas
- Micronations
- Imaginary nations
Its food for thought, anyway. On a more humorous note, I suppose I could always marry a canadian.
Projections
There was a party last night, where a dozen or so of my fellow students crowded around a tiny, borrowed television set. Some of us are the always-barefoot, the long-haired, dread-locked, the hecklers. It seemed a little bit artificial to be waiting for the projections of election results on television, especially since we had to borrow a television. None of us own one, but that was only our excuse for being together. More importantly, we were waiting to know about out future.
My mind wandered. History is a text, one with as many authors as participants. I thought about what role, if any, a vote has in the composition of that text. Or, is it that we are all too interested in writing our biographies to think fairly about writing in a different text, with a different way about it. Is history really just the average of our biographies. What kind of authorship was my vote anyway? Did it count? I have yet to see the person I have voted for go to office.
Nearly all the people I read have had their own something to say about Election Day. In a post called “Ouch”, at least, I think its a post about Election Day. Mark Bernstein says
Ouch
That could have gone better.Time to roll up our sleeves. There is much to do.
Thanks for your optimism Mark. I needed to hear it. I left that party early, before the fists flew through the dorm room wall, before the results of Ohio’s election were determined. I saw Larry King, too old to be up so late, and showing it, the poor man — still asking sharp questions, though few and far between, I saw his face and I felt tired myself. After all, I have homework to do.
History can put constraints on whatever path you may wish the plot of your biography to take. Dr. Jill Walker posts “Disappointment”
I spent so much time hoping Kerry would win that I forgot to consider what the world would be like with four more years of Bush. Really, I mean.
I guess I forgot to consider that too. It just so happens that the last few months of my college career will occur during the transition between terms, and its starting to look like these will be two terms shared by the same president. What does this mean with regard to the start of my life after college?