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Showing posts from January 14, 2007

emancipation

LCC has links to articles about Representative Barbara Lee’s bill to open a truth commission about the facts surrounding the political claustration of Aristide, which is further explained here. As it happens, LI is writing a review of Madison Smartt Bell’s biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture (who was, like Aristide, kidnapped by a hegemonic power with malign intents towards Haiti). We are great fans of Bell’s three volume trilogy about the great slave revolt of Saint-Domingue, which is still mostly a blank in the American eye. In the biography, Bell translates and prints the first Emancipation Proclamation in the New World – this one composed by the leaders of the slaves themselves. It was sent as a letter to S-D’s General Assembly in July 1792, signed by Biassou, Jean-Francois, and Belair – and not, significantly, not by Toussant a Breda, as he was known at this time. Toussaint very probably had read the Prince, and in any case, he had an appreciation amounting to genius of the uses o

Bob Solomon, r.i.p.

A friend of mine died last week. I have an obit up in the Austin Chronicle. I don't know whether I want Bob to rest in peace - he was never the retirement type, and I don't like the idea of death to be of the life depicted in About Schmidt. No, I hope death brings a more complex release, Bob. EWG.

hawks shedding feathers

In the early 1840s, a Baptist named William Miller began doing some serious work on the Book of Revelation. Using his mathematical genius, Miller came up with a formula showing precisely that the world would end in March of 1843. Due to an overlooked erasure, that date proved incorrect. The world was really going to end in 1844. Miller collected thousands of followers. Unfortunately, God didn’t stage the drama he’d outlined in the book of Revelations in 1844, either. Hiram Edson, who later figured out that Jesus was coming in stages to the earth after making a tour of the universe, wrote about gathering with others on 23 October, 1844: “Our expectations were raised high, and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the clock tolled 12 at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before…” Civilization rolls onward. Hiram Edson, more savy

ka

Austin is moping under that hideous counterfeit of winter that goes by the name of a winter storm warning – or is it watch? What this means is that there is ice on the branches of the tree outside my window, which obviously took the tree by surprise – and that the streets have icy patches, and the sidewalks do too – and that we can all stay inside and listen to news about traffic accidents on the highways, and those of us who have stocked up on either hot chocolate or cider or marijuana can enjoy the forced hibernation like in a Christmas card. Those of us who, like LI, suffer from vicious ricocheting coughs, the butt end of a chest cold that doesn’t seem to know how to leave the party my body threw for it (get your coats, guys! my, the time!), have to settle for shivering and cabin fever and Kagome purple roots and fruits juice. This is no condition to ponder the Vedas. However, as we said in our post before last, or some fucking post, how am I supposed to keep up, we were going to wr

peter beinart speaks

Dear sir, Peter Beinart, nude model, here. Since I have been making some very high energy adult entertainment on location (let me hint to my fans that, for the first time, I play CHIEF STUD – that’s right, the poolboy roles that graced such films as Operation Free Lickin’ and My Master, My Decider, are now a thing of the past – and let me also say that I have learned from my mistakes in those roles – for instance, the premature problem I had in Operation Free Lickin’ is, I admit, an embarrassment, and I apologize to my faithful viewers) – but anyway, to veer this sentence back to the straight and narrow, due to this schedule I was not aware of the many unfair hits yours truly was taking from various objectively terrorist sympathizing media persons. Apparently my factotum, who I left in D.C., signed a contract for me (aka him) to appear in Time Magazine. On the face of it, writing a column for Time seems just the opposite of what, as you know, I vowed to do last year, viz., leaving pund

through the ringer with some NYT reviewers

LI is suffering from some damned confederation of leaks and clogs in his pipes – sick to you, damned sick, and I don’t, as our blessed VP put it so teeth grittingly yesterday, have to put my little fucking pinkie in the air and see what a lot of the low use population has to say about that. Sick is sick, you fuckers (the endearing phrase Cheney uses to talk about the cowardly, Islamofascist favoring populace) . Thus, I couldn’t exactly go forward with my plan to explore Ka in relation to De Quincey, the natural next step from my last post. So instead, a review of a review . LI is a great fan of the early Martin Amis – the period from Money to London Fields – and is, consequently, very much thumbs down on this ill formed, ill thought out toss off of a new novel, the House of Meetings, a sort of test tube baby that resulted from the unprotected meeting of Anthony Beevor’s Berlin and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag on Amis’ bookshelf. Martin Amis has decided that he, unlike other British comic nov