Category Archives: Censorship

Thomas Pynchon on Thomas Pynchon?

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From Amazon, via Slate, via Gawker. It’s already gone so meta it’s almost closed the circle.

And then the Rapture.

Is This Tomorrow?

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 ;)

historical hoodies

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Fascinating accounts of Victorian criminality, rescued from the oblivion of the humble dumpster. From the Daily Mail, via Fark.Wee Georgie Sayers

Little George Sayers was scarcely a hardened criminal. Just 13 years old, small for his age due to malnourishment, his little face screwed up in an expression of bewilderment, he faced the police camera in May 1900 fearing, quite rightly, that he would be beaten for his crimes.

George was accused of stealing handkerchiefs, rugs, skirts and shirts worth three pounds and ten shillings from the Newcastle shop where he was employed as an errand boy.

When he heard the charge, he burst into tears. One of some 14 children, whose father had deserted his 52-year-old mother Emma, leaving her to feed and clothe her huge brood alone. He was accused along with his mother, who admitted she had put him up to his petty thieving. ‘I told him to take them. Don’t blame the boy,’ she gallantly told the police.

Another of the pair’s methods was to steal clothes off the neighbours’ washing lines, whereupon Emma would whisk the loot around to the local pawnbroker where they were hocked to get money for the family. It was the pawnbroker who tipped off the police when he became suspicious.

These stories, and some 300 others, all equally poignant, have just been uncovered by retired North Shields policeman Ken Banks.

Every now and again a new study comes out, saying exactly the same thing as every study ever commissioned on the same damn subject: the majority of crime is committed by young men.

And every now and again, someone says “Well, now that we know who’s responsible, we can take action.” And they go on to say exactly how, in minute detail and at great length, particularly if they’re paid by the word. No actual progress in reducing the crime rate so far, even by those who are looking to lay a Putin on the skulking minors.

The problem transcends culture, race, and even time itself; look at the historic documents and legends of any culture on the planet. It’s always the damn hoodies!

The solution is not to ban rap music. The solution is not to blast ultrasonic waves or Wagner into the park at night, annoying the neighbors and turning the usually peaceful squirrels into raging Clockwork Orange Lodge Members in good standing.

The solution, my friends, is to ban young men.

Simple, elegant, and utterly effective. Rather than wait several years until they’re eligible for trial as adults and real (and really expensive) prison time, I suggest that we just pre-emptively lock them up from the ages of 12 to, say, 21.

I know what you’re thinking.

Half of my readers are thinking, “Well dammit, isn’t that what we’ve got tv and meaningless after-school activities for?”

While the other half are thinking “Well dammit, isn’t that what we have boarding school and University for?”

And quite right you both are. With the half-life of a hoodie at only five years, containment IS solution.

Gawker o’ the North: Journalistic Scuttlebutt from Victoria

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Reporter reporting.via Kitsilano, James’s Up in Ontario blog, to be specific. Seems that old church/state separation idea doesn’t go over big with the bigwigs at the Times Colonist. Visit the site to read James’s take on it, along with the original article, plus the breaking news from Sean Holman.

A snippet from Up in Ontario:

Smith wrote a column raising questions about the value of visiting some well-established Victoria tourist destinations and suggested some alternate, free attractions. Tourism industry representatives sought and got a meeting with the Times Columnist publisher, Bob McKenzie, and a day later Smith was sacked.

Now, a commenter on Up in Ontario has objected, saying the story had no place being published at all, as it was an opinion piece. It may or may not have been slanted, but the Times Colonist is no stranger to slants and, as I pointed out, if the tourist attractions are overpriced, that in itself is news. If free attractions that are interesting are available, that, too, is news. And the decision about whether or not a story belongs in the paper rests with the editors, not the local business capos.

As was put very well by a journalism prof on Public Eye Online:

In an interview with Public Eye, associate professor Klaus Pohle, a specialist in media ethics and newspaper management at Carleton University‘s school of journalism, said it wasn’t surprising publisher Bob McKenzie declined to comment on the situation, explaining “I would be totally embarassed to admit” to cancelling such a contract just after meeting with “the vested interests in Victoria…It’s a terrible conflict. A terrible conflict. And it sends a terrible message – not only to the journalists at the paper but to the other media and the readers and the advertisers. It sends a message (to the advertisers) that I can interfere anytime. And that’s a very, very dangerous situation to be in.”

Sure Victoria is a small town, but it’s got at least two horses, and so is too big to be indulging in these Pottersville-type shenanigans, particularly in a CanWest Global publication. Or are they planning to take this strategy national?

Dear Ann Coulter, from Henry Rollins

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The New Vidal and Capote

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“Doug, you tiny little fairy, you arrested boy, I will break your back over my knee in the press and I will push your face inside out in private or public . . . Mention my name anywhere ever again, and we’re going to find out two things: First, whose word means anything anymore in this town. Second, how many times I can slam my fist into your face before someone pulls me off you.” He signed off: “Now you wait for it.”

and here it is, at Toby Young’s book party.

Spiegelman vs Dechert

Gawker has the whole slideshow.

Jacob wrestles with an angel. You pick who’s who.

We hate these events, these self-importantant celebrations of a crowd’s collective arrogance. But once every three or four decades, something genuinely interesting happens. In this case, at Toby Young’s book party tonight at Soho House, the crowd was treated to two writers working out their mutual hatred like twelve-year-old boys. Former Page Sixer Ian Spiegelman lost his job in 2004 ostensibly because of a threatening email he sent to [insert sketchy adjective here] writer Doug Dechert (more backstory here). Tonight, these two were reunited and, after the right amount of lukewarm liquor, they worked their issues out with fisticuffs. There’s more to explain later in the forthcoming party crash, but at this hour the pictures are story enough. More bloodshed — or the drink-throwing sissy journalist version thereof —here

and a little background on the party here, from the Huffpo. If I could find it in the debris that is Diary-X, I would post my own review of Toby Young’s first book. All you really need to know is that I used the expression “Three-orgasm Schadenfreude.“