America's Pastime: Archive

[Louisiana governor Bobby] Jindal declared, “Absolutely, we’re not implementing the exchanges. We’re not implementing Obamacare” following the Supreme Court’s ruling that Obamacare is constitutional.

I think this is a great decision by Gov. Jindal. What with the proliferation of health problems in Louisiana—including our extraordinarily high instances of cancer—it only makes sense to block access to healthcare for those who either can’t afford it or have some kind of preexisting condition.

Taken together with today’s announcement that the state is cutting funding from libraries, the gutting of CODOFIL’s budget, and the education issue, as well as his recent unopposed reelection, it seems like we’re in for an uncomfortable time down here. And that’s not even taking the weather into consideration.

Jun 29, 20121 note

#link #politics #bobby jindal

Jun 28, 2012

Jun 27, 201239 notes

#reblog #aquarium drunkard #the staples singers #talking heads #music

Jun 27, 201242 notes

#images #manny fresh #cash money #bling bling

“There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place—in fact, this is one condition of being at home, if you are yourself homeless. For example, it is much worse to be homeless and then to go home where everyone is at home and then still be homeless. The South was at home. Therefore his homelessness was much worse in the South because he had expected to find himself at home there.” —Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, p. 149.

Jun 26, 20121 note

#quotes #walker percy #literature #the last gentleman

Jun 23, 2012

Hot Knife Fiona Apple

I cannot get enough of this song. Until I remind myself that it’s potentially about David Blaine. But even still.

Jun 22, 20124 notes

#music #spotify #fiona apple #hot knife #david blaine

“More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him was a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor.” —

— Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, p. 16.

Here we go. Percy’s writing on honor—particularly the essay “Stoicism in the South”—is required reading.

Jun 21, 2012

#quotes #walker percy #the last gentleman #literature

“For [the thirteen-year-old Lethem], the songs resemble an ancient circle, each amplifying a cumulative mystery with their own. Embrace the fact that this text is forever closed, and describe its insular workings. Don’t make it less itself; make it more.” —

— Jonathan Lethem, Fear of Music, p. 37.

Apparently all I do now is read 33 1/3 books. There are worse ways to spend one’s time.

I love the above quote, which is the third or fourth one in its chapter alone (“Is Fear of Music A Text?”) that I’ve wanted to post. The way he describes the album’s songs remind me of Sebald’s descriptions of the events that make up The Rings of Saturn (the descriptions themselves, I mean, not the events). The Rings of Saturn is one of my favorite books; it’s a way I’d like to be able to write.

It’s unfair that Lethem can be so good at writing about music when he’s not really a music writer.

Jun 20, 20121 note

#jonathan lethem #quotes #talking heads #fear of music #sebald #rings of saturn

“You have grown up in a time when technological and commercial interests are attempting to change our principles and morality. Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. Although it is the premise of every “machines gone wild” story since Jules Verne or Fritz Lang, this is exactly backwards.”

Lowery makes about thirty or thirty-five excellent points in his open letter to a college student who has by her estimation bought 15 of the CDs in her 11,000 song library. But I’m most interested in the way he views the morality of the thing: he exposes the way that we shape our morality to wrap around and cover what we want to do, and how we then ponder with a sort-of theoretical confusion as if no other answer is possible.

Jun 18, 20123 notes

#link #writing #ethics #morality #camper van beethoven

“What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it weren’t about making cases for or against things? It wouldn’t need to adopt the kind of ‘objective’ (or self-consciously hip) tone that conceals the identity and social location of the author, the better to win you over. It might be more frank about the two-sidedness of aesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir. More and more critics, in fact, are incorporating personal narrative into their work. Perhaps this is the benefit of the explosion of cultural judgment on the Internet, where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily: by rendering their traditional job of arbitration obsolete, it frees critics to find other ways of contemplating music.” —

—Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love, p. 156.

I’m about 85% of the way there with Wilson on this one. What’s holding me back is the proliferation, since his book’s 2007 publication, of the Internet’s idolatry of the personal. While I agree with Wilson’s basic ideas, namely that our aesthetic tastes are socially composed and aren’t nearly so objective as we believe them to be, and that the role of the critic (at least in part) should be to replicate the experience of the music itself, I wonder how frequently the kind of sharing he writes about here isn’t just more self-valorization.

But of course, I still wrote the above paragraph.

Jun 15, 2012

#carl wilson #writing #criticism #quotes

Jun 15, 201296 notes

Wasted Days Cloud Nothings

Let it drive you for a minute or nine.

Jun 14, 20121 note

#music #spotify #cloud nothings #wasted days #songs

Jun 14, 201229 notes

“[Céline] forcibly washes another dreamer’s face using a wet, live kitten. (I know the feeling from her records.)” —Carl Wilson, recapping dreams people have about Céline Dion as reported to a blog that interprets people’s Céline-Dion-related dreams, in Let’s Talk About Love, p. 107.

Jun 8, 2012

#carl wilson #writing #quote #céline dion

This is what a childhood in Lafayette sounds like.

Jun 5, 20121 note

#video #links #givers #paul simon #cajun