features
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We have to deal with the fact that we're all alone in this world, lonely gears spinning away as time passes (even if we somehow manage to crawl back into the substitute womb of a family). And then take responsibility for exactly how and how much TIME we spend with ourselves and in turn with other people. Buying into brands, boyfriends, girlfriends, celebrities, mobile phones, mortgages, websites, countries, TV programs or whatever/whoever else wants to get into our fragile minds (and eventually pockets) will only hand over to other people our ever so precious HEADSPACE. Since we're essentially only a brain, jacked-in to the experience of living, our headspace is the only true asset we've got to offer to other people and thus to the whole world at large.
My Fitzgerald professor sold everyone on the view of writers as tragic geniuses, “trying so hard to be one person.” And at one point he even defended alcoholism among the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. “They spent all day writing,” he shouted. “They had to turn off their brains!” As a very young writer at the time, I wondered what “access” I shared with this camp of authors who drank throughout the night. I wondered if I’d have to become an alcoholic to keep up. Through the “Lost “Generation,” my professor saw all writers as sensitive and vulnerable, struggling against vast emotional disturbances, and above all miserable—except when writing or drinking. Meanwhile I asked myself if I’d have to vacuum my room so that I’d have a clean, well-lighted place to write because Hemingway said so.
The problem with art in this day and age is that it could be anything, really. Give someone the luring self-righteousness of money and a somewhat "Warholean" ego-detachment and they'll seem perfectly appropriate to be one of the top 25 artists to look out for in the next Art Review magazine or to open a "critically acclaimed" solo show in London's White Cube 2 gallery. Perhaps, then, art and culture have just become another substitute for religion? At times where nothing is sacred except maybe a trademarked company logo, artists and celebrity status attract almost godlike attention.
In this new world money is primarily being made on the Internet. Catchphrase "attention based economy". If we get the hits, we will also get the money. The big corporations of course understand this new game very well, so they buy the fattest cows like MySpace , Flickr and YouTube in an attempt to pester their innocently surfing visitors with sometimes more, sometimes less slutty advertising. For us it doesn't really matter whether our online experience is being spoilt by corporate bullshit since in this "New World", above all, it is all about becoming visible in the first place.
Perhaps grown ups are becoming rather anachronistic when faced with the technical savvy of their offspring: watching little Suzy text on her Sidekick with total awesomeness while Dad struggles to turn on his new Blackberry. Sure, your kids aren’t frolicking in the bygone hi-jinx that made your childhood so memorable, but at least they’re spending the better part of their waking hours safe in make believe Playstation worlds. It’s more than enough to launch any ex-cardboard Apollo pilot onto a nostalgic shame spiral.
Why must God be good? It is difficult to see why we would or should follow a non-good god's commands, other than fear of divine punishment for disobedience. But, while fear of punishment may be a motivation, it does not seem to be a particularly moral motivation: If you do something only because you fear the consequences of not doing it, you aren't doing it because it's the right thing to do: You might do it even if you believe it's the wrong thing to do, if the threatened punishment is dire enough. But acting from fear of punishment does not automatically make an action good if it would otherwise be bad.
My own experience in living my gender androgyny, which is at times gender ambiguous, has certainly been awkward, frustrating, and disappointing, but I believe it is better for me to endure that than to be false to myself, forcing myself to present clearly and consistently as a woman, or for that matter, a man. It seems to me that based on my reading and discussion with a few individuals that I have similar emotional and sexual inclinations as male to female transsexuals, but at the same time my temperament is that of a tomboy. Thus, much of what is associated with femininity is a turn off to me - high heels, frilly clothes, and so on.
More to the point, it is simply false that atheists hold their beliefs as a matter of faith. For one, atheism is best characterized by a lack of beliefs (of a certain sort): There is simply little to nothing in atheism for one to believe in, as a matter of faith or otherwise. And even when atheists do have beliefs about gods and such, simply having a belief is not the same as "believing in" something: The latter phrase implies an attitude or commitment characteristic of faith and entirely lacking in atheists' beliefs.
“Just when you think you’ve thought of everything,” Gregoire Bouillier writes in The Mystery Guest. “You forget the book sitting right there on your bedside table.” That’s how Bouillier came into my life. Specifically, how Bouillier became important in my life. As 2006 turned muddier and the muck thickened into something sure to carry over well into 2007, this slim tale of love and literature offered more hope and promise than I could have ever asked for.
What is perhaps hardest to capture is the mood of this city in flux. New Orleans was always a place where people reveled in the moment but paid little heed to the future. It’s an easy place to fall in love with, but a hard place to build a life. Perhaps this is truer now than it ever was. Its libertine spirit was in part the residue of its unique historical and cultural heritage. It was also the natural reaction of a population whose expectations for the future were slight.
Many different lines of evidence show that people who lack belief in any god or gods are subject to more knee-jerk prejudice than every other group anyone has thought to compare them with. As an atheist myself, I have the dubious honor of belonging to a despised minority, possibly the most despised minority in the country.
If global financial markets collapsed, would we be playing video games as much? Would we want to? In the US at least, gaming would still likely be our "choice," but we know the pre-eminent role economics play in choice. Economic shifts can push a population that yesterday seemed complacent and comfortable outward, forward, and together in dramatic and desperate ways.
A little over two years ago, when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, no one knew exactly what that meant for MySpace's 22 million users. Would he use MySpace music as a platform to compete with MTV? After all, MySpace music, with its mp3 downloading features and its extensive network of musicians, had an edge on the online market. But for those familiar with Murdoch’s business tactics, this particular acquisition had another principle value. Now Murdoch had access to users' preferences, their online behavior, and their personal information.
But Steve didn’t go back to his new acquaintance’s place for sex, but rather “a movie, or something like that.” Steve never saw any of these women again, though he provided them with his phone number should any “emergency” come up, but in support of his personal definition of a one-night stand says that were he to ever have sex with any of the women again, he would still consider it to be a one-night stand.
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interviews
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Poetry was my way of finding my voice, my way to say who I was and speak my truth, and when I was a kid, to make myself real to myself, and that’s kind of what I meant when I said it was a matter of survival. This was how I understood myself to be real, not just emotionally and psychologically, but physically also, because if you speak, you have a body. If you don’t have a voice, you don’t have a body on some level.
But, as I listened to him talk, it seemed to me that Muhammad Kubwa was serious about interesting, somewhat different things. His seriousness didn’t seem dictated by the powers that held him. His perspective seemed active, alive; it wasn’t reacting in the terms offered it by the powers, foreign after all, which had descended upon him. If anything, he played down his detainment, in fact. It was a criminal waste of his time, though he claimed to have met a bunch of interesting characters along the way. He said the questions he was asked were ridiculous questions. And of course, he had nothing to say, anyway. But, the basic point was that there’s a level of cultural disrespect and an insidious violence implicit in situations which are not spectacularly violent and that kind of thing is invading people’s lives by the millions.
poetry
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I hold my banner high; no purple lick of wind/
breezing through their empty heads/
falters me, my own private Lycidas and God/
The true trinity--------not a misogynist, really/
No gothic spires from this eye seen/
Cambridge cannot exist on this plane/
No man of his like will bundle books and papers and/
the accouterments of brilliance/
and make his way across Park yard in such a way.../
Baboons knuckled alongside coeds/
En route to the bathroom./
A girl named Serena brushed her tresses/
past her ass, so much hair,/
unseemly, more unseemly than the grandfather/
baboon banging on the concrete wall dividing us.
An all vegetable, no meat, no carbs diet/
for two weeks she is dedicated/
driving me back and forth to school/
declining/
the ice cream, the chocolate, the cookies/
opting instead for carrots and greens.
She's hungry. I know she is/
glass doors and windows cannot be understood from this far away./
as we face the great, bland, pink, flesh-colored buildings/
which are quiet as a musician’s strings/
absent a musician.
I have built the best tree fort./
but,/
coming home from work,/
Uncle/
said what was said/
and looked in my eye/
and that finished/
it all./
They'd have to save all the whales before they get to prisoner's/rights. Still to protect the unborn I'm cuffed in front transported on a state bus./Will the maternity ward be pastel blue or pastel pink? It's/institutional white. I'm no angel. They are no monsters. They speak/in a hush.
He talked about her like she was a boat./
You just loaded the ship, son. Where the wind/takes it is out of your hands, hear? She’ll find/ a port to dock in. Just be glad you got/what you wanted without getting shot./Her parents were no better, as if I’d planned/to make her pregnant. We begged them not to send/ her away. Once she was gone, they moved out.
They danced with Queen Elizabeth and cronied with Frank Sinatra/
They came around the cool side of uncool/
several times and again
The red and white bermuda shorts skulked behind me/
and Jesus on our date: the boardwalk vendor with long sandy blond hair/
I knew you were there and Jesus did too.
fiction
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Color inside the lines. No! sky is blue. grass is green. What is wrong with you? two times two is four. two times three is six. two times four is eight. It just is. The world has rules, the hallway has rules: Never forget your hall pass. no running. no talking. no smiling. Get your tiny little feet in lockstep, follow the red tiles, keep the line straight. yes, yes, now you are learning. Face it, kid. Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut. Just learn to take orders and say yes sir no ma’am so you can flip a burger or shoot a gun in some backwater part of the world. Congratulations, you are now a valuable, fully-functional member of society. Fries or onion rings? Give me the rings. Don’t forget the coke.
art & photography
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