Stacy Higa's Website

http://www.stacyhiga.com/

Kunstler's Latest Prophecy

There will be so many assets up for sale across the USA in the months and years ahead that the very sun in the heavens will take on a K-Mart blue-light-special glow. Houses with miles of granite countertops, Maybach automobiles, cabin cruisers that burn thirty gallons of diesel an hour, and much much more. There will be so much slightly used (or barely "pre-owned") stuff for sale that manufacturing another unit of anything (or importing it) will seem like a sick joke. Alas, there may be very few buyers, at least here among the current natives of North America. And so you get "new pricing," and a deadly downward spiral.

Of course, all that creates a problem for the masses of human beings who theoretically support themselves by working to produce new things of value to be bought and sold . But let them watch Nascar! Let's take whatever little remains of our tax revenues (or bonding ability) and build a dozen more speedway ovals around the country, and tweak the stock car engines so those suckers can run on ethanol, and shower the fans with Little Debbie snack cakes as they count the laps. ...Believe me, the public will be so deliriously entranced by the spectacle, they won't notice anything else going on in the background of our nation.

This is how America enters the Long Emergency -- in a Nascar rapture...I apologize for what has been a rather excessive spewage of mixed metaphors this week, but the extreme abnormality of events has just got me going. The bottom line, though, is simple and straightforward: things may appear normal for the moment, but we are heading into a shit-storm as sure as Sam Walton's descendents contracted to buy all the three-ringed loose-leaf binders made west of the international date line. America, you're about to go back to school the hard way.

Back in School

Eight years after I graduated with a baccalaureate in English I'm enrolled in two classes at the local community college. Both are held Mondays and Wednesdays. One is in the mid-morning, the other in the late afternoon.

In other matters, welcome back, Hattie.

Hipster Neighborhoods

On a whim many days ago I took The Hipster Handbook (New York: Anchor Books, 2003) off my bookshelf, and have been reading it off and on ever since. Page 93 lists the "Indigenous Zones of the Hipster in the United States and Canada." The title isn't quite accurate as "indigenous" implies that hipsters always have been living in these neighborhoods. I took the liberty of alphabetizing the cities' names, and providing links and comments. This is the 1997 Utne Reader list of the fifteen hippest neigborhoods in North America, from which the Hipster list is apparently adapted.

• Atlanta--Little Five Points and Cabbagetown
• Austin--Clarksville
• Baltimore--Mt. Vernon and Fells Point
• Boston--Davis Square
• Brooklyn--Williamsburg (the most famous hipster neighborhood)
• Chicago--Wicker Park
• Cleveland--Coventry and Tremont
• Detroit--Hamtranck
• Knoxville--Fort Sanders
• Los Angeles--Silverlake
• Manhattan--Lower East Side
• Miami Beach--Lincoln Road
• Milwaukee--Riverwest
• Minneapolis--Whittier
• Montreal--The Plateau
• New Orleans--Lower Garden District
• Philadelphia--Old City
• Richmond--The Fan
• San Francisco--Inner Mission
• Seattle--Belltown
• Toronto--College and Clinton
• Vancouver--Commercial Drive
• Washington, D.C.--The U District

Broadsheets Not So Broad

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003621758

7 August update: Ann Althouse opines:

It feels like the first step toward the seemingly inevitable day when there will be no paper version. You know I still feel bad about the downsizing of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. What great fashion magazines these were back in the 1970s when they were huge and you could see what was in the photographs. [And I remember the oversized issues of Interview when I was a subscriber in the early '90s--P.Z.] What's the point of getting fabulous models and clothes and lighting and poses for a Newsweek-sized format?But the effect of shrinking the NYT is almost nothing... until you get to the editorial page. I can't shake the feeling that the editors are encroaching on the letter writers.

Bob Grumman and Foetry

This is a link to a collection of Bob Grumman's reviews of poetry zines and websites in Small Press Review. http://www.geocities.com/Comprepoetica/spr-stuff/index.html

29 July update: I just found Foetry is defunct, hence this post's title change.

I'll be going through my previous posts and update what needs updating.

31 July update: Jeffers Studies is devoted to Robinson Jeffers.

On Translation and World Literature

This article in New York on some of the best books yet to be translated into English has piqued my interest in world literature. I haven't heard of any of the eleven authors. Except for a Francophone Egyptian writer, Africa has been entirely overlooked, despite outstanding work from Somalia to Senegal and from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Oceania is totally off the map, and Asia is represented only by South Korea's Jo Kyung-ran and Israel's (technically part of Asia) Gabriela Avigur-Rotem. This list of novelists includes Tayeb Salih (Sudan) and Mario Benedetti (Uruguay) ("He is not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of Latin America's most important living writers."--Wikipedia)


A Guardian blog post about literary translation points out that "Only three per cent of books published in the UK every year are originally written in another language." (Of course, the situation is comparable in America as this chart about comparative literature indicates.) The Guardian goes on to say:

Language is identity. Across the whole world, millions of people live their whole lives in a mental space that only marginally involves English. Yet these people are not intellectual cripples. Far from it. They can often communicate internationally using English, and still have a reserve of their own - their mother tongue.

At the London Book Fair we were treated to soothing words that told us that it was quite normal that only three per cent of books published in Britain are translations. At the Leipzig Book Fair a few days later, a Ukrainian intellectual spoke about the state of his culture. Yuri Andrukhovych has written one of the few Ukrainian postmodernist novels to have been translated into English - Perverzion, translated by Michael Naydan - but he is also a blunt purveyor of home truths when it comes
to central and eastern Europe. At Leipzig, Andrukhovych suggested that Ukrainians should be afforded visa-free travel to western Europe. But are they being afforded such travel into the minds of British readers?

We do, in Britain, have a number of publishers, such as Serpents' Tail, Harvill-Secker, Arc, Peter Owen, Hesperus, [not to be confused with the music group--P.Z.] Portobello and several others that promote translations of literature. But as British
television does not have a high-prestige books programme, such as the German Literarisches Quartett with the colourful Marcel Reich-Ranicki or the French Apostrophes with Bernard Pivot, British readers never get to know that there are more than a very few non-English books worth reading.

Britain is lagging behind. I fear that the fog may not be so much in the Channel, cutting off the continentals from Britain, but in the minds of those British publishers, editors and journalists that continue to take an introverted view of "world" literature, where only that written in English counts as "real".

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17 July update: Brave New Words is a blog on translation, Words Without Borders concerns world literature, and Parnassus: Poetry in Review marked its thirtieth anniversary in March with a 600-page International Poetries Issue.

Prince

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=468409&in_page_id=1773

Happy Bastille Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_14

Using the Voice You Have

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=126062

On the Fourth of July

"There is one day of the year when America should receive nothing but praise. That's July Fourth. On all other occasions, those who wish the United States well will vigorously distinguish the good from the bad, and especially from the BAD."

--Paul Fussell, BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America (New York: Summit Books, 1991)

Upcoming Works by Kunstler

Grove's Morgan Entrekin has signed The Geography of Nowhere author James Howard Kunstler to two more books, including a follow-up to his bestselling The Long Emergency and an eco-novel titled The World Made by Hand. The world rights deal was brokered by Adam Chromy at Artists and Artisans....

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6304910.html

The Daily Grunt (if I have anything to say)
July 2, 2007

Announcing my next book: World Made By Hand. A novel of the Long Emergency set in upstate New York in the not distant future.To be published by The Atlantic Monthly Press March 2008 .

"Thuggo and Sluggo"

Like many of Kunstler's posts, this is worth reproducing in full. To supplement this column, I'll add links, comments, and pictures.

July 2, 2007

Thuggo and Sluggo

As someone who spends a fair amount of time in airports, I marvel at the way my fellow citizens present themselves in public. I see middle-aged women who appear to have left home in their pajamas. But it's the costume and demeanor of American young men especially that raises interesting questions about who we have become.

The fashion and body language of male youth in 2007 comes from three sources: prison, the nursery, and the pimpmobile. It's an old story now that many conventions of gangster fashion come out of the jail experience, where they take away your belt and shoelaces so you won't hang yourself. Apparently, at some point in US history, they stopped giving the belts and shoelaces back on release, and it became stylish to wear your trousers falling down below the top of your underpants (or butt crack as the case may be). Jail being a kind of accreditation device these days, the message may be: I passed the entrance exam.

Less obvious is the contribution of the nursery. Pants that are ambiguously neither long or short, worn with XX-large T shirts, tend to make grown men look like babies. Babies have short legs and large torsos compared to grown men. They also make big awkward gestures and touch their sex organs a lot. Add a sideways hat [at left, from Beauty Tips for Ministers, an interesting blog I've just found--P.Z.] and unlaced sneakers and you have the complete kindergarten rig. Why a 20-year-old male would want to look five years old is another interesting question, but it may have a lot to do with the developmental failures of boys raised in households without fathers. They simply don't know how to be men. They only know how to behave like five year old boys. They even give themselves nursery school nicknames. But they are men, and what could be more menacing than the paradox of a child bent on homicide.

Tattoos used to be pretty much the sole fashion statement of merchant seamen or people who have served in the armed forces (or people who live in jungles). Now they are common among career girls. The tattooed guys I see down at the gym are ordinary young men who work in cubicles. Tattoos on sailors used to celebrate places they had been or people they had loved. The tattoos I see now are meant to convey fierce and barbaric statements of superhuman power: look at me, I'm a Power Ranger! It's understandable that someone who spends most of his waking hours in a cubicle wearing a telephone headset in order to swindle old people out of their savings might fantasize about rising above all that. But the tragic thing, of course, is that getting tattooed is not quite the same as accomplishing something with your life. In the end, you're just another loser with a grandiose and ridiculous tattoo.

The pimp connection is too obvious to belabor -- meant to mock normal executive attire while signifying an existence of total leisure and the enjoyment of unearned riches. The trouble is that the worship of unearned riches -- based on the belief that it truly is possible to get something for nothing -- has now become normal at all levels in American life. Everybody from the lowest whoremonger on Hollywood Boulevard to the Wall Street hedge fund managers believes in unearned riches plucked from "suckers." The catch is that men who live by this code almost always come to a bad end. They get their throats cut with razors, or go to prison, or manage to lose all their unearned riches (and the investments of many strangers, too).

The portrait of the young American male in 2007, therefore, is of an impotent, infantalized being lost in grandiose fantasies of power and importance. It's a picture of men without real confidence, and no idea how to achieve it, who wish to project a transcendently ferocious image complete with odds-and-ends of manner taken from comic books and movies based on comic books, in order to be taken seriously.

The rest of the world must tremble to contemplate the picture we present. The Nazi soldiers of 1944 were glamour boys compared to the riff-raff that American young men have become. As for those who actually do make it into the army, you wonder how they appear to the locals overseas -- they're probably taken seriously as exactly what the present themselves to be: manifestly evil beings who really need to be blown up. Back home, I look around at the thugs and sluggos at my gym, and I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the same country they live in.

---------

This is known as "a pimp cup." This goblet, or "gobleet," as it's (mis)spelled in the photo's URL, has a retail price of $45. IcedOutGear's price is $19.99.

Heed this caveat: "These cups are made of plastic and you should not drink out of them."

Our New Obsession

http://808dramafans.proboards21.com/index.cgi?board=kbfdonair&action=display&thread=1175153114

More later.

5 July update: More here.

Big Island Chronicle

Hunter Bishop reports that Tiffany Edwards, formerly of West Hawaii Today, now has her own website, Big Island Chronicle.

You Make the Call

But it's the lacrosse players who look like Gregory Peck.

--Human Events columnist

Nomadic Furniture

Building your own furniture is the next DIY craze, proclaims New York magazine in its 21 May 2007 Home Design issue. A copy of this book is featured on page 83, just below a picture of a papier-mache ("the next taxidermy") antelope head by Farfelus Farfadets.

See also Swapatorium and Micasas.

Inside the Nixon Archives

Here

Plain cardboard boxes with odds and ends from the Nixon White House, including gifts given to the president — both priceless and worthless. "The gemstones in here are pink sapphires, which are very rare," Drews, a museum specialist, told CBS News correspondent Richard Schlesinger. On the other hand, "this is just an ordinary beach rock that a donor found on the beach and they thought it looked like Richard Nixon." Congress ordered all this stuff held here while all sorts of legal issues were settled. More than 30 years later, almost all of it will find a permanent home at the Nixon Library.

TV Tripe

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese367.html

The problem with television is that when the people on it are telling you one thing, they are not telling you a lot of other things.

Television is what I call a linear medium. It streams information at you one batch at a time. In contrast, a newspaper is a horizontal medium. It presents you with a variety of information in its daily package, spread out so you can pick and choose what you wish to read.

Last week, when television cable news was obsessing over the Paris Hilton non-story, it was, of course, depriving viewers of news about much more important topics, such as the goings-on in Congress, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the economy, the environment and the energy crisis. It's hard to think of anything that is not more important than a silly heiress doing her time for violating the terms of her probation. [See Project Censored--P.Z.]

Then, to compound their sin of shallow-minded celebrity worship, some of the cable news people tried to blame it on Miss Hilton. That is obscenely stupid. The young woman goes places, but she has no power over the media, no way to manipulate them, no way to set their agenda. No celebrity commands the thundering herd of paparazzi and certainly does not make assignments for cable news shows.

I once got so disgusted with the pseudo-news on the cable channels than I canceled the service. Alas, I missed the old movies and the baseball games, so I've had it reconnected. Cable news is now worse than it ever was. The amount of factual information you can glean from watching cable news 24 hours a day wouldn't fill a 3-by-5 card.

Most of what passes for cable news is really television talk shows. Some of them interview print journalists, a dead giveaway to the fact that they do virtually no original reporting on their own. They don't seem to have many reporters. They have on-camera talent, people who stand in front of the camera and tell you in 30 seconds something the government has said. They are mouthpieces for the government.

Watch, for example, something that happens in the morning and note how little the announcers know about it. Then watch that evening and note how little they still know about it. In other words, they do virtually no reporting.

The other sin they commit is mixing trivia with the thin gruel they serve as news. If they get video of a police chase, a random murder, a flash flood, a warehouse fire or a monkey that sleeps with a dog, it goes on the air. Clearly they believe their only duty is to amuse you. [See Neil Postman--P.Z.]

The trouble is, self-government doesn't work if the people are idiots. It doesn't work if you don't know what you need to know while your brain is cluttered up with trivia, tripe and non-sense. Unless you are a parent or a friend of a celebrity, there is zero need to know anything about the person.

Americans desperately need to read more, and to watch and listen less. The Founding Fathers played a dirty trick on people when they gave them a free society. You can coast in a dictatorship, but in a free society you have to work hard to stay informed so that you can make the right decisions at election time.

Newspapers have their faults, but if they vanish in the sea of functional illiteracy, it won't be long before the last semblance of a free society disappears along with them.

June 19, 2007
----
As for myself, I don't bother daily with The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, Countdown, Glenn Beck, and all the rest. I'll be posting on my media diet and how it's changed.