There are a couple of lines from Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary that occasionally find their way back into my brain, from time to time. This is one of them, shared here and now apropos of nothing:
I have no valid complaint against hustlers, no rational bitch, but the act of selling is repulsive to me. I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.
While the Boston Globe dropped the ball with its coverage of the education bill passing through the state House of Representatives, The Somerville Journal picked it up and ran with it. I’m not asking for anything impossible, here, if a local newspaper can pull off what a big, lumbering dinosaur like the Globe apparently finds difficult.
‘What ho!’ I said.
‘What ho!’ said Motty.
‘What ho! What ho!’
‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
I report, you decide.
So I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov lately — mainly on my lunch breaks, so it’s been taking a while –, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot, despite the length. To be honest, Fyodor Karamazov’s rantings annoyed the piss out of me at the beginning, and so do Dmitri’s; however, Alyosha’s character is fascinating, and the crime plot, once it started managed to grab my attention.
Anyway, I just hit the chapter that introduces Kolya, the rather precocious teen-aged schoolboy, and his unique perspective on the world. Kolya is going around mocking the peasants that he sees, and offers this advice to one of his schoolboy compatriots. Does it remind you of a certain three-headed Kerberos of Science Communication at all?
Some things can’t even be explained. A peasant’s notion is that schoolboys are whipped and ought to be whipped: what kind of schoolboy is he, if he isn’t whipped? And if I were suddenly to tell him that they don’t whip us in our school, it would upset him. Anyway, you don’t understand these things. One has to know how to talk with the people.
My bike is in the shop at the moment with a broken crank, waiting for the replacement part (it’s a one-piece crankset, which evidently needs to be special ordered) to come in, so for now I’m T bound again. I moved recently, and my new T commute isn’t as bad as the old one, but I still want my damned bike back.
Anyway, the point of bringing it up is that I found myself on the T this morning, which means I was surrounded by people reading the free Boston Metro daily newspaper. “What”, you, gentle reader, may wonder, “was today’s cover story?” Good question! Was it Iran? Certainly, there must have been enough over the weekend to provide a solid cover story. Protests, people dying, oppressive totalitarian regimes. Front page stuff.
But no. The cover story was MOTHERFUCKING JON AND KATE AND I HATE THAT I EVEN KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE AND I WISH THEY AND EVERYONE WHO GIVES HALF A SHIT ABOUT THEIR LIVES WOULD DIE IN A FUCKING FIRE.
So there was that.
Worse still, it was one of those irritating navel-gazing stories where the paper chides them for airing their relationship disputes in the media. NEWS FLASH, DIPSHITS: you are the media. Don’t pretend you’re some objective third party when you’re reporting on yourselves. This has been one of the most irritating things about our Broderian era of journalism. The media orobouros feeds forever on itself while complaining about its bland, unvaried diet. Well, guess what, if you took your head out of your ass (the media orobouros feeds from the rear end) for a minute and actually reported one something other than yourselves, maybe you’d have other things to cover. If the whole fucking Jon and Kate media blitz inanity really upsets you, then starve them. Stop reporting on them. This is in your power. But, of course, you don’t actually want to stop, do you?
No, you don’t. You love that vapid bullshit because it’s easy. And that’s fine, because people obviously are willing to read it. Just strop pretending to hate it, stop pretending the coverage is beneath you, stop pretending you’re a legitimate news organisation.
But then they also carried, buried a few pages in, a genuinely quite good — if woefully short — article about Scientology’s President, David Miscavige, and his habit of beating the shit out of his employees.
So… Does that count for a stay of execution? Fuck no. Burn the worthless rag to the ground anyway. But save the guy who wrote that one article.
I read quite a few of Marvel’s comics, because in my opinion they’ve attracted some of the best writers of superhero fiction in the industry now and because they’ve some some pretty cool teams and heroes. That said, every time I read something Joe Quesada has said, it kinda makes me want to stop reading Marvel comics.
So, for instance, apparently Marvel has announced some “Divas” series about women in comics that looks for all the world like it’ll be Tarot-style “empowerment through gratuitous tits and ass and bondage scenes”. When actual women who actually care about comics criticised the promo materials for the book on those grounds, this is how Joe defended the series:
If you’re [a] Marvel reader and truly feel we’re sexist, then why are you reading our books? Now, perhaps you’re not a Marvel reader, then if that’s the case, I’m not quite sure what you’re criticizing if you don’t read our books?
Circular reasoning, in the true Mighty Marvel Manner!
Go eat a dick, Joe Quesada. You’re lucky that Matt Fraction and Pak & Van Lente work for you, or I’d drop your company’s shit in a heartbeat.
P.s.: Here’s a more detailed accounting of sexism in the comics industry and Joe Quesada’s defence of it.
P.p.s.: I got both of those links from brinstar’s Twitter, via antiheroine.
This is the part of the book where I got bored, which partially explains the long delay between my write-up of the tulip chapter and this one. I’ve actually finished the book, but I just couldn’t come up with anything interesting to say about it. Marijuana just has that effect on me, apparently, which is maybe why I’ve never tried it.
Anyway, the intoxication chapter stars marijuana not because it’s the biggest cash crop drug or because it’s the most historically important intoxicant, but because the plants itself has proved to be so malleable. Nobody bothers talking about opium or cocaine varietals, but marijuana connoisseurs make almost as many distinctions as wine lovers. For that matter, nobody’s figured out how to build self-contained hydroponic grow labs for opium poppies. These qualities form the bulk of the plant’s story in this chapter.
Like the chapter on Apples, chapter two of Botany of Desire uses a single human event as a springboard to discuss both a specific human desire and a plant which has exploited it as a survival strategy. In this case, the Dutch tulipomania provides numerous places from which Pollan jumps to discussions of beauty and the tulips which, in this chapter, signify it. The tulipomania also serves to explain why tulips and not some other flower became the quintessentially beautiful plant for the purpose of the chapter: Pollan needed not just a beautiful flower but more importantly a story of human desire for beauty with a flower at the centerpiece.
That said, this chapter is less structured than the previous. In the Apple chapter, the relatively linear narrative of Pollan’s search for some authentic picture of Johnny Appleseed lent a feeling of cohesiveness. The Tulip chapter, by contrast, is marked mostly by a series of digressions with the Dutch tulipomania serving mainly as a starting point. Consequently, I’ll not try to follow the chapter sequentially but rather stop to first describe Pollan’s thoughts on beauty and then on the tulips themselves.
As mentioned in my previous post about the introduction to Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, the chapter on apples begins with the familiar story of Johnny Appleseed. This focus on a human, especially such a well-worn mythical figure, somewhat belies the subtitle of the book and the introduction’s promise to provide a “plant’s eye view”. However, by the end of the chapter, the method in this choice begins to show.
The turning point, in the sense of bringing the relevance of the Johnny Appleseed story into clarity, is Pollan’s search for the original definition of “sweetness”, the desire he pairs with apples. In the days before artificial sweeteners and before affordable (and slavery-free, since some abolitionists boycotted it) cane sugar, sweetness was something elusive and even divine. Pollan quotes the Transcendentalists here, as well as Jonathan Swift’s phrase “sweetness and light”. This sweetness, as well as the more familiar sugary type, is what Johnny Appleseed brought to the American wilderness.