red alert!
Well, see what the White House has done. Now we can treat terrorism just like tornadoes, which I guess is soothing to a certain type of mind, but who comes up with these schemata?
The Washington Post has a Great American Vegetarian Debate. Honestly, I've never seen it in such stark terms, since self-righteousness of any sort always comes back to bite you in the ass, but I suppose it's different if you're vegan. And I'm fortunate to live in a nice liberal college town, even if it's also prime pig-farming country. Vu chews his way through carcasses and we all smile & coexist.
Denis Johnson, Robert Stone and Jim Shepard get psychoanalyzed. It's an interesting idea, but the analysts' responses are surprisingly crude and still mired in Freud. And I know Freud's influence is incalculable, and I do think he was right about a lot of things, but you'd think they could do better than describe the Hindenburg as a giant hydrogen-buoyed phallus. Or their take on Johnson's "Emergency":
The narrator has no name. People get lost. The orderly does not know how long he has been wiping the floor. A man walks in with a knife in his eye. People sleep on bunnies. These are dehumanized people. Bad things are done, and everyone pretends everything is all right. But there is hope through the little rabbits. Blood can be wiped away. Milk can be found for the little rabbits. Despite soul murder, there is resilience of spirit to overcome the demonic ecstasy of death.
Any of us could have come up with that as high school seniors—except maybe the phrases "soul murder" and "demonic ecstasy of death," which I've put on probation. It just goes to show that once you paraphrase art, you eviscerate it. Technical language is so crude: like using a bulldozer to study orchids, as they say.
