Category: personal

The Grouch.
I’ve injured my back over four weeks ago and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. You name it, I’ve tried it: Creams, pills, exercise, no exercise, drinking lots of water, sleeping on the floor…nothing seems to work. Or rather, my back gets better for a few days and then it starts hurting again. At the moment, I’m in pain again. So I bought a heating pad, and that alleviates it a little, but I can’t very well have that on for 10 hours straight. The chiropractor cracked a few bones and adjusted some muscles, but mostly she sent me off with this advice: don’t sit. What? How can I not sit? What am I supposed to do all day? So of course, I sit. I have to work, after all. And so of course it hurts, and I get crankier. Maybe I should get a lectern and write standing up, a la Nabokov.

Turkmenistan. All I knew about the place was that it was an ex-Soviet Republic and that it agreed to let George W. access its borders for his war on the “forces of evil.” This week, though, I’m seeing the country and its leader in a whole new light.

Saparmourat Niyazov, an ex-communist who was elected president after the fall of the USSR, was declared “President for Life” in 1999 by the “People’s Council.” Niyazov was so happy with his new gig that he went on a restructuring spree. To wit:

He would henceforth be know as Turkmenbashi (meaning, Head of All Turkmen) or Turkmenbashi the Great. He decided that TV screens in his country would carry a golden silhouette of the leader at all times. He names cities, stadiums, and streets after himself. Next, he decreed that the months of the year would be renamed. January would be named after him: Turkmenbashi. Other months would be named after his political oeuvre, Turkmen poets, or national leaders. In a tell-tale sign, though, he decided that April would be named “Mother” in deference to his own mother, who died when he was young. T.S. Eliot said April is the cruelest month, and seeing how Niyazov turned out, maybe he was right. Finally, he decided to rename the stages of life. Adolescence lasts until the age of 25, and old age doesn’t kick in until age 85. Since I find that I am now in my “youth” period, I think I like his definitions better. Can you imagine conversations in Turkmenistan these days?

“Excuse me. Can you tell me the way to Turkmenbashi?”
“Why, just take Turkmenbashi down to Turkmenbashi!”

Or:
“Your little Turkmenbashi grows taller every day.”
“Yes, he will turn 5 next Turkmenbashi.”

Or:
“Do you Turkmenbashi?”
“Course I do, every day!”

I wonder what changes I would implement if I were a potentate…

Oh, look, it’s time for a Bush rant already. Let’s see…

Today he’s busy trying to look like he’s doing something about the economy, when he himself represents some of what is wrong with the economy. Things aren’t looking too good for many Americans, though they aren’t too bad if you’re in the top 1% of taxpayers. Meanwhile, most Americans don’t trust him to go to war against Iraq, and want him to get the approval of Congress and the support of U.S. allies before taking action.

All in the Eye of the Beholder.

“The man who wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” was an equally brilliant photographer. But in modern times Lewis Carroll’s achievements have been overshadowed by the widely held conviction that his primary inspiration, literary and artistic, was an unsavory obsession with little girls.
Even as scholarly revisionists have begun questioning this presumed linchpin of the Carroll psychobiography, a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is challenging viewers to take a fresh look at his photographs. “Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll” argues that if we set aside modernist aesthetics and tabloid Freudianism and view these pictures in their Victorian context, they reveal themselves to be serious artistic works less concerned with the beauty of children than with theatrics, allegory and artifice.
In other words, Carroll’s pictures reflect not pedophilia but a kind of premodern postmodernism.”
Carroll’s Artistry and Our Obsessions

Unfortunately, the show won’t be coming to Los Angeles.  And to think I was in San Francisco just this last weekend and missed this.

The Guardian‘s George Monbiot had this to say about the impending war on Iraq:
“But the US government’s declaration of impending war has, in truth, nothing to do with weapons inspections. On Saturday John Bolton, the US official charged, hilariously, with “arms control”, told the Today programme that “our policy … insists on regime change in Baghdad and that policy will not be altered, whether inspectors go in or not”. The US government’s justification for whupping Saddam has now changed twice. At first, Iraq was named as a potential target because it was “assisting al-Qaida”. This turned out to be untrue. Then the US government claimed that Iraq had to be attacked because it could be developing weapons of mass destruction, and was refusing to allow the weapons inspectors to find out if this were so. Now, as the promised evidence has failed to materialise, the weapons issue has been dropped. The new reason for war is Saddam Hussein’s very existence. This, at least, has the advantage of being verifiable. It should surely be obvious by now that the decision to wage war on Iraq came first, and the justification later.”
The Logic of Empire

Monbiot might have a point. In this article, titled The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s Closet, the Secretary of Defense is quoted as saying, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Sounds Orwellian, doesn’t it?

Today is August 6, the 57th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.  How much has changed since then? Not much. We still think that bombing each other is a good way to resolve conflict over land and resources, we still perceive people in other parts of the world as Other, and we still think that we are “better” than the Other.