Category Archives: Books

PSA: “Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta” Fake Writing Contest

Posted on by

Via Gawker. Ruth Shalit, Old Skool Cut 'n Paster!

Inspired by the need for quality plagiarism, the Morning News announces its “Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta” contest. This is not for the recreational copy-cat: using no less than five different books, your entry must total 750 words, none of which are your own. You may not plagiarize single words, but actual phrases, sentences, or passages, and all your material must be cited.

To remind them that this was “the moment ethics in writing died,” winners will have their story published on TMN and will receive a TMN mug, t-shirt, and a $500,000 two-book deal.

Steal This Book, and That Book, and That Book [TMN]

Classical Criticism: Football Edition

Posted on by

The OdysseyThere are some few things in this world that remind me of the late Hunter S. Thompson. There are very few things indeed in this world that remind me both of Hunter S. Thompson and Homer's Odyssey. There is only ONE thing in this world that reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson, Homer's Odyssey, and that 300-pound bundle of muscle, fat, tattoos and leather who got on the bus and sat his wide, Harley-ridin' ass down beside my English professor, who happened to be reading The Iliad at the time and expecting the worst from his new seatmate, poked a chubby, dirty finger into my prof's Penguin paperback and chuckled, "Da Iliad! I love dat book! Rumble in Troy! Ah, man, war's all about chicks, eh? Fuckin' chicks, man."

This is that thing.

Carroll apologizes to Poseidon with burnt offering, three flocks of cattle, Reggie Bush shaped golden idol
May 1st, 2006

Los Angeles, Calif. – Taking his cue from Homer's Odyssey, University of Southern California head football coach Pete Carroll attempted to appease the legendary anger of Poseidon with an offer of burnt lamb, approximately seventy heads of cattle and an 8 ft. high statue of USC running back Reggie Bush made entirely from gold…

Few critics, however, are willing to predict what will happen even if Poseidon is satisfied.

"I am of the opinion that Carroll will eventually succeed in metaphorically returning home and triumphing over adversary," Addison said. "Much like [Alfred Lord] Tennyson's Ulysses, I see in him a man whose passion for life and exploration will never allow him full rest – and though he may now appear to be 'an idle king' he will inevitably seek to 'sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars' by recruiting a class of twenty Scout and Rivals rated five star players. It seems obvious even to these British eyes that [Carroll] is a man determined 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'"

"Then again, much like Odysseus, he could opt to shoot everyone who so much as looked at Penelope the wrong way. I would probably expect a mixture of 'one equal temper of heroic hearts' and good old fashioned fairly indiscriminate slaying."

Homer...standup

Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon: the greatest obituary ever written!

Posted on by

HST, the flag, and the convertibleReally, there's nothing like a writer who knows his stuff inside and out, has made the English language his bitch, and refuses to hold back in the name of "impartiality." More evil has been done in the name of impartiality than in the name of passion; just ask Hannah Arendt.

Hunter Thompson never pretended to be anything other than a razor-fanged partisan anarchist. Neither leftist nor rightist, simply Gonzo, he was as horrified by his own fondess for Jimmy Carter as he was by the tame White House press corps that gave Nixon a free ride for so many years. And he opens his coverage of Nixon's funeral with a passage from Revelation, as is only right and proper.

Read it and weep, both for the savagery and for the loss…nobody writes like this anymore. Selah.

HST makes sure Nixon gets on the chopper

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism–which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful…

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern–but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man–evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him–except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship…

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn … pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness…toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah…nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season.

JKG: the late, the great, on The Predator State

Posted on by

JKG the Late, the GreatThanks to The Cylinder for the this. I love what you can find just hitting "Next Blog" on WordPress! Any blog that boasts a tagline "The missing rungs are in the hands of a happy few who use them mainly for attack and self-defence" is a blog after my own heart.

So here we have the late John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in Mother Jones on the fundamental change in the nature of modern wealthpower:

The Predator State.

WHAT IS THE REAL NATURE of American capitalism today? Is it a grand national adventure, as politicians and textbooks aver, in which markets provide the framework for benign competition, from which emerges the greatest good for the greatest number? Or is it the domain of class struggle, even a “global class war,” as the title of Jeff Faux’s new book would have it, in which the “party of Davos” outmaneuvers the remnants of the organized working class?

The doctrines of the “law and economics” movement, now ascendant in our courts, hold that if people are rational, if markets can be “contested,” if memory is good and information adequate, then firms will adhere on their own to norms of honorable conduct. Any public presence in the economy undermines this. Even insurance—whether deposit insurance or Social Security—is perverse, for it encourages irresponsible risktaking. Banks will lend to bad clients, workers will “live for today,” companies will speculate with their pension funds; the movement has even argued that seat belts foster reckless driving. Insurance, in other words, creates a “moral hazard” for which “market discipline” is the cure; all works for the best when thought and planning do not interfere. It’s a strange vision, and if we weren’t governed by people like John Roberts and Sam Alito, who pretend to believe it, it would scarcely be worth our attention

…

Today, the signature of modern American capitalism is neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. Instead, predation has become the dominant feature—a system wherein the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class. The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live.

Go read the whole thing. Don't worry, I'll wait. It's worth it; how often do you read an article about economics by a Harvard economist that makes you sit up straight and shout "I love this guy!" to the dustbunnies on the bookcase? And don't they look surprised?

Obituary: John Kenneth Galbraith

Posted on by

From the AP by way of the Boston Examiner:John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard professor who won worldwide renown as a liberal economist, backstage politician and witty chronicler of affluent society, died Saturday night, his son said. He was 97. Galbraith died of natural causes at Mount Auburn Hospital, where he was admitted nearly two weeks ago, Alan Galbraith said. During a long career, the Canadian-born economist served as adviser to Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, and was John F. Kennedy's ambassador to India. "He had a wonderful and full life," his son said. Galbraith, who was outspoken in his support of government action to solve social problems, became a large figure on the American scene in the decades after World War II. He was one of America's best-known liberals, and he never shied away from the label. "There is no hope for liberals if they seek only to imitate conservatives, and no function either," Galbraith wrote in a 1992 article in Modern Maturity, a publication of the American Association of Retired Persons. One of his most influential books, "The Affluent Society," was published in 1958. It argued that the American economy was producing individual wealth but hasn't adequately addressed public needs such as schools and highways. U.S. economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of the world of the past, where scarcity and poverty were near-universal, he said.