Wis[s]e Words

Ten years of Eschaton and all I got were these lousy wankers

Published on April 17, 20121 Comment

Time flies when you’re having fun: Eschaton is ten years old today. I must’ve been one of the first people to put Atrios on the blogroll back then, having barely been blogging for a month myself; no idea how I even found him — probably via Avedon? Back then the closest thing to a liberal (let alone leftwing) voice in the American blogosphere was Andy Sullivan, he who accused the “liberal elites in their coastal enclaves” of treason while the bodies were still falling out of the WTC. The only real progressive bloggers were people like Avedon and other science fiction fans, small voices lost in a wilderness of howling rightwing insanity.

And then came Atrios and he quickly became a focal point for all those people disgusted with these wingnuts and warbloggers, inspiring quite a few others to start blogging while, certainly in these first critical years, he himself was also very good at promoting new, interesting bloggers. For better or worse, he was crucial in the establishment of the liberal blogosphere, in providing pushback against the insanity of both the warbloggers and the wankers in the socalled professional press.

To celebrate, he has put together a list of the Ten Greatest Wankers of the Decade, a veritable treasure trove of assholes and douchecopters:

Some are more active these days than other, many other worthwhile candidates were skipped (where are Glenn Reynolds or Anne Coulter?), but this parade of horrors is still a sadly accurate view of a decade that’s been more bad than good.

Pointless fetishm of obsolete technology

Published on April 16, 20121 Comment

This irritated me:

This essay is the first piece of writing I’ve done by hand, start to finish, since 5th grade, 1992. I drafted it using a Uniball Signo pen and black notebook while sitting at my desk. I edited it in the same way. When it came time to enter the essay into the computer so that it could appear on this website, I typed it in almost exactly as I’d put it down on paper.

[…]

Overall I think there’s greater variance in the quality of the writing I produce by hand. The good stuff I write is cleaner, more honest, less stylized, more well-considered. The bad stuff is more obvious, more ponderous, more self-involved, maybe weirder. In fact, this is definitely one of the weirdest pieces I’ve ever written. Writing on the computer drives my writing towards some average value — I think/write/delete/think/write until I have something that’s decent but maybe less vibrant than the ideas as they were conceived in my head.

What annoyed me is not so much the fact that this guy has rediscovered writing in with pen and paper, but the unconscious elitism behind it. Reading between the lines you can see the idea being pushed that writing longhand is more natural and simpler than writing on a computer, but in fact more people find it easier to use a pc to write: just look at the explosion of writing on the internet.

In contrast, writing in longhand is hard work physically cramps your hand, is less easy to edit, less easy to share, in short less accessible for most people. It’s no wonder most people didn’t bother with it after school until the computer and internet came along and made it easy to share your thoughts. This democratisation of writing is a good thing and I hate to see some hipster quest for authenticity endanger it.

Nescio

Published on April 15, 20121 Comment

Because the MeFi thread about the Dutch writer Nescio reminded me of the song de Nits did about him and because it is now going through my head, I thought it would be nice to subject everybody else with it as well.

Nescio has just recieved his first English translation, roughly a century after he wrote the first of his most famous stories, the Uitvreter/Titaantjes/Dichtertje trilogy.

De Nits were a Dutch pop/art rock band, who had a couple of hits with Nescio, In The Dutch Mountains and J.O.S. Days and who share some of the same melancholy that Nescio specialised in in his stories.

No, Jim Balent has nothing to do with this

Published on April 14, 20121 Comment

Now here’s one of the reasons I shelled out five books for a subscription to Metafilter, posts like these leading me to blogs like Busty Girl Comics and cartoonists like Rampaige. I love the artwork on these cartoons, it reminds me of Chynna Clugston’s art on Blue Monday, loose, somewhat manga influenced and cute.

For all the annoyances the internet can bring you daily more faster and more often than traditional media could, you have to thank it for something like this. Fifteen-twenty years ago a series of cartoons about the real problems large breasted women face would at most have been a self published mini comic, maybe getting half a paragraph in a TCJ column, mostly gone unnoticed otherwise. That’s progress.

Freebird

Published on April 13, 2012Leave a comment

Right, so the popular image of the American South in the fifties and sixties had been of rednecks, klansmen and big white cops beating up and shooting at peaceful Black civil rights activists. If you came from the south and were white, you were ignorant at best, stone cold racist at worst. Politically you had that old rotten to the core southern Democratic Party as the flag bearer of that image of the old south, corrupt, segregationist and resist to all change while the country was changed around it. In short, not a nice time to be white, from the south and not a stick in the mud bigot.

And then the seventies came and things changed. The south got less racist, you got a new generation less redneck, more hippie, less racist but not ashamed of being southern either. The south seemed to move away from its past, experience somewhat of a boom as cities like Atlanta attracted new businesses and inhabitants alike as the region got richer and less yokel. Meanwhile Nixon’s great southern strategy –as thought up by Lee Atwater[1]– by which he appealed to that core of racist old Democratic voters by well, stoking their racism, has started to work, which means that the Democratic party in turn can be cleansed of its racist past, become more like it is in the rest of the country.

And so you have this vision of a New South in the mid seventies: young, optimistic, integrated, liberal, proud of its heritage but no longer mired in its past. With the culmination of that vision being Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976. Here you have the first true southern president since the Civil War, somebody both a liberal and from what rightwingers like to believe is their heartland, a Southern Baptist even, but liberal, who had southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers Band campaigning for him.

Is it any wonder that Republicans hate Carter, even now hate him even more than they hate Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, two other Democrats who “stole” their presidency from them? He represented a vision of the south, of their American heartland in direct opposition to what they wanted it to be, a south in which racist dogwhistles would no longer get their core voters worked up. He was a direct threath to their power and they would go to any length to make him lose the election, even going so far as to make deals with what they themselves would call an evil country, Iran, to make sure that the release of American hostages would not take place before the election so that Carter couldn’t profit from it.

The problems facing America today — educational, social, environmental, economic — are problems that should have been tackled the the Seventies, but were instead allowed to compound and fester over thirty-five years of neglect, denial, and bullshit short-term fixes with grotty long-term consequences. Even worse, the few areas in which meaningful progress had been made have become the preferred whipping boys of dimwitted ideologues seeking to restore a status quo that never fucking existed in the first place.

that’s Andrew Weiss’ judgement of the seventies and while he may be bitter, he is sadly more right than wrong. The seventies is when the Republicans got their pretty hate machine really going, first used it to kill off Carter and the New South, then just kept dragging the whole of America ever more rightward into the mire, in the process replacing the real south with their Disneyfied, Nashvilled simulacrum of what they wanted the south to be.

[1] Lee Atwater in 1981: You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.