Last Chance!

1.  I’m about to do my dishes and take out the garbage.  If you’d rather do them for me, you need to call or email me in the next ten minutes.

2.  Even though I had lunch with her yesterday, I feel like I haven’t seen the Professor in one billion years.  She called me while I was making dinner and she heard the pots clanking and was all "Oh, I’ll let you go" and I was a little sad.

3.  So, feminist indoctrination camp starts this week and I have to go talk to the girls… GRRRLS… on Monday about self-publishing (you know, blogging).  Anybody have any good thoughts on what I should cover?

Right now my outline looks like this:

So You’ve Got Something to Say.  Now You Want to Be Heard: A Kick-Ass Presentation on Blogging and Other Forms of Self-Publishing by Aunt B.

• Talk about copyright and how you own your shit and no one else does.
• Temper that with fair use.
• The world is full of assholes.  Keep yourself safe.

Granted, I just started working on it, rather than doing the dishes, so I’m not very far, but I suspect it’s not living up to its billing as a "Kick-Ass" presentation.

Two More Things I Have Learned from the Libertarians

1.  If the police come to my house, they will probably shoot Mrs. Wigglebottom.

2.  There’s something really funky about how we treat gun owners.  I probably don’t have this point as well worked out as number 1, but that’s because number 1 is easy to be alarmed about.  I was talking to the Professor about this at lunch yesterday and Coble brings it up again today.  Twice in two days?  Probably a good topic for blogging.

So, I’ve been thinking–why, whenever there’s some horrific crime involving guns, is the response to push for restrictions on gun ownership and not harsher penalties for the crimes or more money for police or what-have-you?

Are we, as liberals saying that we believe that there’s just a certain level of wrong-doing that’s going to occur and that there’s nothing we can do to affect it other than to keep the wrong-doers from having too-deadly of weapons?  Are we really, at heart, saying that we don’t believe that punishment deters crime or that social programs can lower crime rates or that police protection makes much of a difference?  That wrong-doing is just a force of nature, unimpeded in its ability to hurt us by anything except reducing the tools available to wrong-doers?

I don’t think we really believe that.  I could be wrong, but I don’t.

I think the impulse is actually worse than that.

I don’t think this is about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals at all.  I think this is about ridiculing and shaming legal gun owners.

I think we do this for two reasons.  1.  By and large, we don’t own guns.  We want to believe that our way of looking at the world is correct and therefore, we want gun owners to give up their guns in order to validate our ways of life.  This is stupid, but not malicious.

2.  We want to punish gun owners for being different than us, for not accepting our values.

This is an insidious wrong, painted up like a moral position.

And, I know, it’s not as if there aren’t one million things about which conservatives do the exact same thing.  You know, if we were honest, we’d just change the National Motto from "In God We Trust" to "We Know What’s Better for You than You Do, and By God, We’re Going to Make You Do It."  It’s not quite as catchy, but it’s more accurate.  We’re going to have to mint some larger coins to fit that on there, but it’s worth it, I think.

 

Having Trouble Dialing Satan?

So, it turns out that the number of the Beast is actually 616, not 666.

In an odd coincidence, the area code for Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I was born, is 616.

I’ll Trade You

I keep hearing about these mythological women who love nothing better than cleaning house and doing dishes.  Well, if you’re one of those women, do I have a deal for you!

You can come to my house and do what you love–clean up, do some laundry, and put the kitchen back in shape–and I will go to your house and do what I love–drink your beer and masturbate.

Art With and For the People You Know

Saturday, we sat in an old meat processing plant on folding chairs facing a make-shift stage, while Annie Sellick swayed in her red dress and sang to us the most amazing jazz.  Something about the whole thing just seemed so tremendously blessed.  This is a great way to hear jazz, in rooms intended for something else.

I keep quoting Ginsberg, because I adore him, and I adore him because, as far as poets go, he’s kind of like jazz in an old crumbling building right next to the river.  He’s always taking words and phrases that seem like they were intended for something else and through some raucous process turning them into poetry.

William Carlos Williams kind of does this–taking words that are intended for something else and making poems out of them.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

But Williams seems, at least to me, like he’s elevating the ordinary into poetry.  Ginsberg’s talent is slamming poetry into the ordinary.

I wanted to find online Ginsberg reading “America,” so that you could hear it for yourself, but I could only find this little snippet.  Still, click away and then check out the rest of the website.  It has audio clips, so you can hear him.