From Cold Desert
And they’re Ann Coulter’s!!!
From Welcome to Pottersville:
Only someone like Ann Coulter can publicly applaud the nightmarish, Aldous Huxleyan jingoism that drives Israel to encourage its children to write greetings on bombs about to be dropped on top of their Lebanese counterparts. In doing so, Ann Coulter proves once again that, while Laura Bush may be America’s First Lady, she is America’s First Cunt.
From Amazon, via Slate, via Gawker. It’s already gone so meta it’s almost closed the circle.
And then the Rapture.
FYI the following was posted on the Amazon page for Thomas Pynchon‘s new book. It’s gone now, but thanks to right-thinking obsessive fans the text has been saved for posterity. And here it is:
“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.”
–Thomas Pynchon
thx tom ;)
More on the now-infamous Toby Young book party…can you ever get enough?
If he ever wants a party in Vancouver, I’m up for hosting it. Pass it on.
Here is Spiegelman, explaining how he was ready to sever his opponent’s jugular and rip his entrails out for macrame when he graciously gave way before Young’s wife’s request to “take it outside.” I mean, what’s the point of bitchslapping a rival if nobody can see you? Smart boy.
raincoaster 