a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Thursday, July 31, 2003 GreendaleNeil Young has a "musical novel" coming out, set in a fictional California coastal town called Greendale. Greg McIlvaine just saw the story-show live at the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:02 AMFisking the (relative) leftDean Allen fisks his Aunt Mary. I know I came late to this party — the post is almost a year old — but it's still hilarious. The thing to know about Allen is that he lives in France and elsewhere on Textism refers to Instapundit, Sullivan, Lileks, et al., as a "dank neo-con circle jerk." For some reason at Radio Free Mike we strive to be fair and balanced; Allen takes no prisoners. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:57 AMTuesday, July 29, 2003 PlogBobbie Allen has posted a resonant, witty hypertext poem on her plog. Scroll down if the permalink won't work. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:47 PMMarket WisdomIf markets are "smarter than any single person," how come this idea sounds so stupid? The terrorism futures market, maybe not surprisingly, was another John Poindexter project. Somebody should put him in a box. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:40 PMWednesday, July 23, 2003 Why are we in Iraq?A nuanced analysis can be found (where else?) at Josh Marshall's blog. Longtime readers of Radio Free Mike know the drill: We invaded to set up a footprint in the Middle East, to start a long-term transformation of the region, not (primarily) for oil profits or to get rid of an evil immediate threat to American interests or freedom. But we did it without a serious gameplan. "If you're wondering why so little planning seems to have gone into what on earth we were going to do once we took the place over," Marshall writes, "it's because so little of the debate leading up to the war had anything to do with these questions or for that matter what we were actually trying to achieve by invading the country." Exactly. Meanwhile Pakistan, a nation with nuclear weapons as well as profound, undeniable links to Al Qaeda, and probably 9/11, festers. "It is no longer a question of whether Pakistan is going backwards or forwards," a regional expert is quoted as saying in this long but essential piece. "It's a question of how rapidly it's going backwards." And Bush is tough on terrorism? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:12 PMTuesday, July 22, 2003 Oh, screw itMy friends keep asking why I think Al Qaeda had a "relationship" with Baghdad, as if the word "relationship" implied something intimate and deep, like a love affair. I don't mean it that way. I just think there's a lot of evidence that says a link between them was not a wild, impossible dream of the right. But the real unfortunate pile of evidence is here, on the relationship between Al Qaeda and Pakistan's ISI. Depressing, depressing reading. When and if Al Qaeda finally gets its fingers on a nuclear weapon — from Pakistan — the U.S. military should be no use at all. It'll be too busy in Iraq. You might call that a flypaper strategy, of some kind. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:53 AMFriday, July 18, 2003 Too Much of NothingAssuming my novel gets reviewed, I predict three things: 1) One or more snarky remark about my name being almost like that lefty film director's. 2) A joke about Mark Twain. 3) A veiled accusation that I somehow ripped off The Lovely Bones, a phenomenal bestseller which happens to be narrated, like my novel, by the ghost of a teenage kid. "The fictional innovation of The Lovely Bones, the stroke that must have writing school graduates everywhere wondering why they didn't think of it before," Rebecca Mead wrote in the London Review of Books late last year, "is that the book is told from the point of view of the dead Susie: it is a coming of age story told by a character who isn't of age and never will be."That makes me cringe. It tosses me into a hypothetical tank of frustrated MFAs trying to play catch-up with this fabulous new idea that Alice Sebold invented. But I'd been working on Too Much of Nothing for six years before I heard about The Lovely Bones in early 2002, when my (finished) manuscript was making the rounds in New York. I'm not, thank God, a "writing school graduate," and I never labored under the illusion that my idea was original. Mead and the other writers who panned or cheered The Lovely Bones in 2002 for its "innovation" of a dead narrator showed off their leaky memories: None of them remembered a novel from 1991 called Murther and Walking Spirits, by Robertson Davies. (Davies is not such an obscure writer, when you think about it; merely Canadian.) I got the idea for a ghost narrator from that book. I thought it would be fun to move Davies' conceit away from haunted old Toronto into the glaring streets of southern California, where ghosts have as hard a time as screenwriters. UPDATE: Bobbie Allen backs me up on this. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:52 AM Tuesday, July 15, 2003 Howard Dean... is blogging over on Larry Lessig's site while Larry and his wife Bettina go on vacation. So far it's not very inspiring, just boilerplate stuff for a Net-literate audience. But don't miss the image of Howard Dean superimposed over Larry's brooding face. It looks like the Lessig blog got boarded and hijacked by a smiling, suited corporate pirate. ARRRGGGHHH! (Sorry, Howard.) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:27 PMFemme? Really?Is our editor femme? Bobbie over at Loudmouths and Dillettantes has listed him in a roll-call of femme guys that includes David Bowie, Oscar Wilde, and Johnny Depp. Gosh. Is it shameless flattery, or some kind of cruel joke? With our editor's friends it's sometimes hard to tell. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:15 PMMonday, July 14, 2003 MeanwhileEvidence of a relationship between terrorists and Saddam — poorly researched or even suppressed by Washington — mounts. Follow all the links. They build a strange, perplexing picture. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:13 PMFall GuyJosh Marshall, as you'd expect, is all over the story of George Tenet taking the fall for the White House's credibility problems. (Just keep reading him from the linked post on down.) Bush defenders from Donald Rumsfeld to Instapundit think the Niger-uranium thing is being blown way out of proportion — it wasn't the main reason we went to war, just a plank in the platform, etc. — and in a way they're right. We've known the Niger-uranium argument was bogus ever since March, before the invasion, and the scandal unfolding now is just a superficial, ready-for-prime-time placeholder for all the other things a certain leader has done wrong. But so was the case for war in Iraq.Politics is a messy, inaccurate business. Most of us at Radio Free Mike saw through the trumped-up charges of weapons-hoarding last winter, but weren't sorry to see Saddam go; now we're content to let this administration twist in the wind. In a democracy you don't treat your citizens like babies in order to bring them to war. Liars get canned. That's the whole point of democracy, remember? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:12 PM Sunday, July 13, 2003 Love and Theft"Here are some phrases that Dylan apparently lifted from the English translation of Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza (translated by John Bester) and used on Love and Theft," writes Chris Johnson on Dylanchords.com. Johnson proceeds to list about a dozen quotations from the book, right next to lines from Dylan's terrific 2001 album. Example: Where the Yakuza (or Japanese gangster) in Saga's book says, "There was nothing sentimental about him — it didn't bother him at all that some of his pals had been killed," Dylan sings, in the rocking "Lonesome Day Blues," "My captain he's decorated, he's well-schooled and he's skilled, / He's not sentimental, it don't bother him at all how many of his pals have been killed."The LA Times has a good piece on this (via Golgonooza). Some people are accusing Bob of, well, theft. Of course it's not. On the same album you can hear plain echoes of old blues and folk songs. Saga himself is "flattered" by the borrowings, and the Times piece quotes a Rolling Stone editor who points out that folk and blues singers always borrow and change lines from other sources. "It's the tradition of Woody Guthrie, who borrowed freely from Irish ballads to create his original songs," says Joe Levy. Exactly right. The album title itself comes from another book: Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott. But Dylan doesn't like it when people do the same thing to him. It goes against that free-borrowing folk ethic to support the so-called Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, as Dylan did in 1998. That law keeps his work — and mine, and Walt Disney's — from lapsing into the public domain for a stunning 70 years after his death. (The law was passed just in time to keep early drawings of Mickey Mouse from becoming public property.) As long as an artist lives, of course, he should be paid for his stuff: Dylan's publishing company drove a stern but reasonable bargain with me for the use of his lyrics in Too Much of Nothing. But the Sonny Bono law, which our friend Larry Lessig tried to fight in the Supreme Court last year, says that authors like me who want to quote a few lines of Dylan in their novels will have to go on paying for the privilege — to an estate or corporation — even after Bob's grandchildren have retired. That's silly. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:41 PM Saturday, July 12, 2003 Liberate Liberia? 2More on Africa, Bush, and oil. In theory there's nothing wrong with stabilizing a nation we essentially founded, like Liberia. But let's not pretend Bush is a humanitarian. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:21 AMWednesday, July 09, 2003 Loudmouths and Dilettantes 2Below, I mention the lack of good poetry blogs, like this one. Blogmaster Bobbie Allen says the lack may have to do with the fact that "poetry blog" has almost no poetic resonance. True enough. Her husband Steve thinks "plog" might be a better word. I'm with Steve. Anyone with a good plog should send me a link. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:39 AMTuesday, July 08, 2003 Liberate Liberia?Jesse Walker has an editorial connecting the dots between Iraq and Liberia. "With the national-security arguments for the Iraq war in tatters," he writes, "the only remaining justifications for that war are the nastiness of the Ba'athist regime and the alleged benefits of American nation-building. And those, adjusted just slightly for local conditions, are the arguments we hear for sending U.S. troops to Liberia." This could really go on forever. Is it rude to point out how many Chevron ships have sailed under a Liberian flag? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:32 PMMonday, July 07, 2003 Government Information AwarenessThe Media Lab at MIT is assembling the people's answer to the Pentagon's "Terrorist Information Awareness" data-mining project. It's called Government Information Awareness, and the idea is to build a catalog of facts on politicians and government outfits, searchable by anyone who wants to understand how they work together. Great idea. Here's an article. Via Instapundit. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:24 PMLoudmouths and DilettantesPicking up the blogging slack for Steve over at Golgonooza (who says his computer's been "down") is a newish site by his wife, Bobbie, called Loudmouths and Dilettantes. Bobbie's a poet, and there are not enough good poetry blogs around. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:21 PMFriday, July 04, 2003 StrangeWhy is Saddam acting like Bin Laden? His strategy seems to be the same as the Taliban's: Collapse, run for cover, then try to reorganize and wage guerilla war. Even if Al-Qaeda was never in cohoots with Baghdad, it's weird that Saddam has the same M.O., and that he's now using the word "jihad." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:43 PM | |
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 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
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