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(Mostly of interest to BC Alums) BC kicks off football season tonight at 6 PM against Central Michigan (viewing: ESPN 2).
I won't suggest that Central Michigan is going to have its a** handed to it, but it's going to have its a** handed to it.
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Taijin kyofusho - the fear of interpersonal relations, which can be broken down into four sub-categories:
Parasaito shinguru - a.k.a., parasite singles - Japanese individuals that live with their parents until their late twenties or early thirties in order to enjoy a carefree lifestyle.
Hikikomori (see also) - social retraction syndrome - the withdrawing from social life, particularly by adolescents. Similar to agoraphobia.
Red Bank, NJ (Circa January 2006).
Not all of my statue photos are in good taste. I set up this one just for the dirtiness of it.
Via Bob the Corgi's Three Things About Bruce Springsteen, I see there's a Red Bank, NJ based blog with which I haven't been familiar (but that's okay, since it's less than a year old). Redbankgreen seems to be similar to what the Barista of Bloomfield Avenue does for Essex County. At the very least, it seems to prove my previously unmentioned theory that it would be safer to be a NYC cop than to commute on the Garden State Parkway. I'll add it to the blogroll and see how it develops.
But it's easy (and may even be necessary) to outgrow Bukowski's self-mythologizing lowlife pose/prose, just as it is to move beyond Judy Blume or Tom Robbins. How many people still read Bukowski in their 30s, 40s and beyond? I sometimes imagine him as a case of arrested development -- as if the Tom Waits of the '70s, who made boozy atmospheric records like "Closing Time," "Nighthawks at the Diner" and "Small Change," had never developed the richer, more mature and poetic music of "Rain Dogs," "Alice" and "Blood Money."
Jim Emerson, Review of Factotum, rogerebert.com (Aug. 25, 2006).
I was never a devotee of Charles Bukowski. It always seemed too obvious. Tales of dank bars and boozy exhortations seemed, eventually, limiting, as if there was only one way to depict nihilism for Bukowski (and, sadly, only one way to live it). Bukowski could make this point - perhaps only this point, as his alcoholism chained him to the public house - while other, similar-yet-better writers like Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff go farther, exploring the consequences of nihilism or duplicity, or looking to the question of hope (and here, in particular, I think of Carver's heartbreaking story A Small, Good Thing, which won the 1983 O. Henry Award). Other writers, those that seem to have never bellied up to the bar, address issues that make Bukowski a one-note troubadour. Richard Russo has succeeded in creating a niche for himself by being one of the few modern writers to address the question of Christian (particularly, Roman Catholic) compassion. He has also succeeded in allowing humor - sometimes sublime, awe-inspiring humor - to be the art it deserves to be. He is not burdened by the dreaded seriousness of life (see, e.g., Jonathan Franzen, particularly his painfully self-important essays How to be Alone).
The question becomes, when considering Bukowski, why he has so much appeal. What is it about the derelict that is so fascinating? Is it the self-control, albeit maintained via self-destruction?
all I've ever known are whores, ex-prostitutes,
madwomen. I see men with quiet,
gentle women I see them in the supermarkets,
I see them walking down the streets together,
I see them in their apartments: people at
peace, living together. I know that their
peace is only partial, but there is
peace, often hours and days of peace.quiet clean girls in gingham dresses..., from Love is a Dog from Hell
Reading this I think, "I know, I know, you long for the good clean life," also well aware of the fact that, whether Bukowski would admit it or not, he - the literary "he" - denied himself such a life.
Bukowski is the ham-on-rye of the exploration of the modern American condition. He is in no small sense a cliche. Outside of reading Camus, the Bukowski-obsessed seem to say, there is no way of depicting emptiness or darkness without incorporating a bar or an unpleasant depiction of promiscuity. This is, of course, not the case. Cormac McCarthy's recent work, No Country for Old Men, demonstrated that the questions of meaninglessness can be addressed under the bright sun of Texas' border country. The novel has an ending I wish I never read, not because it is "hokum," as one critic wrote, but because it bothers me so intensely. McCarthy took seriously the question of the absence of meaning and put it before the reader in a setting where the characters were striving, desperately, for meaning, rather than a setting where the characters were striving desperately for another round.
In the end, one looking at Bukowski is left to question whether the stories of drunken disaster must be repeated ad infinitum until bleary eyed readers curse and say enough. Is there some other way to ask the question of nihilism, one that may take a stronger position in the current vernacular? Or, better still, are there more important questions to ask? Can nihilism be overcome, and, if so, with what? If these questions are worth examining, it seems that the readers must move away from the adulation given to Bukowski much as was done with the "glory of the road" and Kerouac. We don't need to ask this same question, over and over. We answered it last round.
My essay has stalled completely. I can't figure out how to bridge the beginning and the end without making the essay much longer than I want. I'm going to sit on it a bit, and instead focus on the fifteen rolls of film I finally developed. Some go as far back as January of this year, when I was in New York City for the Chinese/Lunar New Year's Celebration. The majority, though, cover my photos from Cape Breton.
I managed to transfer my photos from August and September 2005 to this site from Those Dark Trees. It's a little weird, seeing that year-long gap between August 2005 and this month. I'm going to work on filling that gap by transfering over the pictures. I don't know how much, if any, of the text blogs will make their way over here, but I imagine a few will.
In between doing this, work, teaching a good friend how to sail, and you know, the basics of life, I'm also working on an essay about those things that should have been in Adult Life 101 or some similar class in college. You know, things like not overextending yourself. In any event, the essay should be forthwith shortly.
The mainstream media insist they are far too savvy to fall for crude manipulation like this. And yet, proof keeps coming up that that is exactly what is happening: The media are falling utterly for all of the images coming out of Lebanon, and their critical thinking abilities aren’t even in gear. Lame excuses are offered for serious breaches of editorial oversight.
When even the pictures of bodies being taken out of the rubble are turned into propaganda victories for Hezbullah, you have to wonder—how many pieces of rocket launchers and other evidence were removed from the sites of such bombings?
Link: Yourish.com » The enemy is winning the propaganda war.
More on Hezbollah's propaganda here:
The Washington Times however went on to point out that CAIR could not be categorically held responsible for the independent actions of one of its members, and commended it for its condemnation of extremism and terrorism, while at the same time suggesting that "unsettling connections between certain CAIR officials and extremist groups" continued to exist and that CAIR's defense of high-ranking members convicted of terrorism amounted to a "dishonest campaign to create the sense of a widespread inquisition against Muslims and Arabs in America that simply doesn't exist."
In August 2003, CAIR's former civil-rights coordinator, Randall "Ismail" Royer, along with ten other men known as the "Virginia jihad group" were indicted on 41 counts, including training and participating in jihad activities overseas. The group had connections with Lashkar-e-Taiba and five of them possessed AK-47-style rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Four of the men plead guilty while the other seven were charged with 32 new counts, including conspiring to provide material support to al Qaeda and to the Taliban. He pleaded guilty and is now serving 20 years in federal prison.
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