The Book Meme - 8 April 2005

Kicking, Screaming & Grinning
This is all thanks to Lance, of course:

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be [save by memorizing]?

Pale Fire - I can be Text, Commentary, and Index (a jewel in that crown) all at once, and read myself back and forth, and dress as an athlete in scarlet wool. How other people are gonna read me is strictly up to them. Always bothered me, that F451 conceit - I mean, the Book-You, do you just rattle off in sequence? Do you allow questions? Are your readers allowed notes, or will that infect their own booky essence?

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Matho in Salammbo - the ultimate lovestruck hunk.
Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady - in much the same way as Ralph, of course. So American this thing, wanting to rescue people who want to rescue people.

3. The last book you bought is?

Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton - you have to get this from Canada!

4. What are you currently reading?

Ian McEwan - The Child in Time
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty - (as I have a platform here, I strongly recommend The Folding Star, too)
Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver
Gene Wolfe - The Wizard
Alan Furst - Blood of Victory
Neal Pollack - Never Mind the Pollacks
Guy Gavriel Kay - Sailing to Sarantium (per Brad DeLong)

all of them quite slowly - uninterrupted reading time is precious here, and rare.

5. Five books you would take to a deserted island?

Complete Shakespeare - it still contains the world (I'd take the Riverside edition, btw, or the complete Ardens)
In Search of Lost Time - Proust - the Aleph in a cookie
I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) - Alessandro Manzoni - melodrama at its best
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia-Marquez - the snake bites its tail
Wind in the Willows - Grahame - ripping yarns of great purity, and finally, comfort - or comfortable yarns of great purity, and finally, ripping - I dunno.... This is not a sop to LM; one thing that you loved very early, and that holds up as well as WITW , would be welcome on that fucking island.

Now, if I was going to cheat and add a 6th it would be
Journey to the West - the Tony Yu translation. Link is to Vol. 1 - there are (of course) four volumes.

6 April 2005

Bellow
The first time I read Bellow was in high school, and it was Herzog - was that naive, or what? - and it was as difficult (and as wonderful, as incomprehensible) as anything I'd ever worked through. I re-read it twenty years later and Moses's skin could have been my own. By the second reading I'd lived in Hyde Park and Chicago longer than I had anywhere else, been schooled to know the minds he was writing obsessively to, and had had enough experience to be half-cracked myself. I was standing in line for a movie in LA with a doctor friend when I told him about the clarity of the second reading, and he said, "Well, you know, he's having a psychic break..." Shit, I had become used to everyone being like that; why do docs have to be such diagnosticians?

You start thinking seriously and you get restless. Bellow's people (Augie and Henderson and Herzog and Charlie Citrine, among others) are running, far and near, physically and mentally, not from but to. The body's appetites can be strong, but the mind's are even stronger - and sometimes you lose a lot in the fight to satisfy them. If some of his people run into walls or dead ends, it's head on.

I never met him, though I saw him often ay UofC and heard about him constantly. He'd come into Soc Tea with some lovely girls in tow, very dapper, a small man with a large head and big, alert, polished brown eyes. Everyone seemed to know if he'd fastened those eyes on someone else's faculty wife. He wanted to come over and read from an unpublished manuscript at the home of a professor (I was rooming there that year), and Mrs. Professor had doubts:

- (Mr. Professor) - What's the matter? Do you think he might start thinking of
you as the next Mrs. Bellow?
- (Mrs. Professor) - Well, (beat), yes..

Another professor, one I worked for, was old friends with SB's wife of the time and a frequent guest; it was a foregone conclusion that there was a limit on these things. As I said, restless.

Alfred Kazin, as I recall, thought that the influence of more conservative colleagues like Edward Shils had made Bellow recoil from a politics and culture that had been, perhaps, too liberal for its own good. Ravelstein is based on Allan Bloom, who, now famously, saw more loss than gain in the destruction of the high/low categories that the market triumph of popular culture brought with it. Bellow married high and low, too. I wish all of them had stuck around long enough to see how seriously they are taken by us little barbarians. We're restless, too, and we will find more and more in Herzog's letters to the dead thinkers whose ideas remain alive.

SB with Green Dragon.... 

4 April 2005

Musing
Amanda over at Pandagon is celebrating National Poetry Month, so here's one from me, by Elizabeth Bishop:

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seemed filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look (Write it!) like disaster.

- from Geography III, 1976

3 April 2005

Off Balance
David Neiwert has the latest on C-SPAN's botching of discussion of Deborah Lipstadt's book History on Trial. He links to Charles Taylor's fierce piece in Salon about the book and the contorted defenses David Irving still seems to enjoy in the name of free speech. [For my small circle of readers, David Irving has made a career of Holocaust-denial and Hitler apologetics, and took Lipstadt to libel proceedings in the UK for her documentation of his shoddy scholarship and distortion of sources. He lost.]
C-SPAN seems to have wanted Lipstadt to replay the entire game over again, confronted by Irving, and you really have to ask why. Is there that large a Holocaust Denial constituency out there that C-SPAN is nervous about not booking a formally repudiated liar? If this was an isolated case, I suppose I would only find it a bizarre aberration, but it's not - witness the airtime the Intelligent Design folks get, the incomprehension with which TV anchors meet the word "theory" (as opposed to "hypothesis") as it is understood in the sciences, the ignorance of medical assessment and procedure in the Schiavo case. It's a fucking endless parade of sloughing off any editorial rigor, of being gutless wonders and proud of it.
Sure, academic history and science aren't the meat-and-potatoes of your average American, but neither is civics, which - one would think - hits closer to home. Yet people are buying a book about the evils of the judiciary in numbers sufficient to put it on the NYT Nonfiction Bestseller List, (it's 7 this week, up from 8) - Dahlia Lithwick, bless her, shreds it here. Trouble is, it's just another piece in this debris flow of propaganda, phony scholarship and incendiary bullshit against which the wusses at C-SPAN and their cable news and broadcast cousins appear to have no defenses left at all. Why do they still have jobs, and what the hell is the job description?

[Update: Neiwert has some Corrections to the post I linked to above, specifically about the WaPo coverage of the Lipstadt/Irving trial and their reporter's efforts in that regard. Doesn't affect my argument, but a worthy example of blogger follow-up.]

On parle du pape.... 

30 March 2005

Brain Party!
Gary Farber at Amygdala is such a good writer (and from all evidence, some mensch, too) that I'd gladly subscribe to him, if he had subscribers. Instead, the wonderful Alameida at Unfogged is throwing a fundraiser for him, and you should accept the invitation. There's even party swag! Go-go-go!

"Feb-'92 - Having reached the south summit, we surveyed the landscape beneath us..." 

Micro-Regionalism

My Kind of Town
Ezra has a post about feeling at home, and not, that is stimulating a nice thread of comments (to which I have contributed). I'll never shake my Portland youth, but I was not happy there - Chicago made me happy, and I fit, so it will always be golden. I yearn to get back to LA and to my extended, chosen, family, but I could be a happy camper, at best, in any new city, no matter how wonderful. Up to your 30's, everything is open to you, and any city will welcome your (ahem) penetration. After that moment, options narrow. See Neal Pollack on incipient geezer-ism.
So, you make your choices of venue - not always wisely, but they are made - and the place may welcome you, if it was a traditional port of entry. Before the Patriot Act, of course; now I'm not so sure.
One commenter at Ezra is living in Paris now. It is, to me, the city of cities, with many friends, and I am comfortable there, but I'd turn into a pet as an expat, and I might as well change my name to Gershom. Deracination can be real.
I post excerpts from The Wind in the Willows from time to time, perhaps, in part, because I know that behind all of Ratty's settled confidence, the tale of the Sailor Rat moves him to consider giving it all up. It's one of the two odd chapters in that book (the other being the Panic attack), that go way over kids' heads and sensibilities. Just shows how even as dedicated a city boy as I am can be shown his provincialism. Works all ways.

"It's Daddy, Pumpkin..." 

29 March 2005

Up from Underland
Via August J. Pollak, news from the creators that Venture Bros. [that's a link to a good fan site] will indeed have a second season - like, 1Q 2006, so catch up with Season 1 in the meantime. Bombard [adult swim] with demands for heavier rotation.
After the antics of this absurd last week, a week that could leave you speechless with trepidation and disgust, my heart is lifted.

26 March 2005

Flushing
As SZ reports, now it's bounties. Worse than even I expected last Monday. Self-referential was not exactly what I wanted from that post - it took so little imagination to see it coming - but I wish I had been simply paranoid, and wrong. The principals in this fucking case will - I pray - escape the immediate wrath of the whackos. The wrath, now federally legitimized, is not going to disappear, and it will search for some new target, in some new "G-d-blessed" case - as Dear Leader called this one the other day. The beaters are out in the field, and if they don't get blood today, they'll get it tomorrrow, or the next day, and they will never be satisfied.

A Civilised Picnic, with Ominous Assessments... 

25 March 2005

The Lay of the Land
`But isn't it a bit dull at times?' the Mole ventured to ask. `Just you and the river, and no one else to pass a word with?'

`No one else to -- well, I mustn't be hard on you,' said the Rat with forbearance. `You're new to it, and of course you don't know. The bank is so crowded nowadays that many people are moving away altogether: O no, it isn't what it used to be, at all. Otters, kingfishers, dabchicks, moorhens, all of them about all day long and always wanting you to do something -- as if a fellow had no business of his own to attend to!'

`What lies over there?' asked the Mole, waving a paw towards a background of woodland that darkly framed the water-meadows on one side of the river.

`That? O, that's just the Wild Wood,' said the Rat shortly. `We don't go there very much, we river-bankers.'

`Aren't they -- aren't they very nice people in there?' said the Mole, a trifle nervously.

`W-e-ll,' replied the Rat, `let me see. The squirrels are all right. And the rabbits -- some of 'em, but rabbits are a mixed lot. And then there's Badger, of course. He lives right in the heart of it; wouldn't live anywhere else, either, if you paid him to do it. Dear old Badger! Nobody interferes with him. They'd better not,' he added significantly.

`Why, who should interfere with him?' asked the Mole.

`Well, of course -- there -- are others,' explained the Rat in a hesitating sort of way.

`Weasels -- and stoats -- and foxes -- and so on. They're all right in a way -- I'm very good friends with them -- pass the time of day when we meet, and all that -- but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and then -- well, you can't really trust them, and that's the fact.'

The Mole knew well that it is quite against animal-etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it; so he dropped the subject.

Feel the Wrath of The Monarch! 

24 March 2005

The Mandelbrot Map
What I love about The Poor Man's wrap-up today is, especially, that fractal map of events, large and small, that are yet always the same to some eyes; that poor butterfly whose wings flap into a hurricane on the other side of the world must Hate America, and Freedom, and Life, and the Preznit's testimony to his taste in cheesesteak.
Probably a Monarch....

Hubris -> Agon -> Nemesis

Tragic Progress
I have never seen Dahlia Lithwick as incensed as today. Have any of these jerks in Congress ever taken an LSAT? What the fuck do they (or the constituencies to whom they pander) think laws mean?
While I have nothing more than suspicion to support my fears, in this or a similar case there is going to be some whacko emerge who will take it to the next level - go after another judge or advocate or jury or whatever - and it may take that atrocity to persuade the country that these sops to the insane Right have gone too far. What else can brake them? This is incitement, IMO, and we had better be ready to hold responsible those legislators who stood behind it.

21 March 2005

His Shortness - 1924-2005
Without Bobby Short, I doubt I'd know a tenth of the words and tunes of classic American popular songs I do - the period in which they were written, per Alec Wilder, was before my time. I doubt I would have read Alec Wilder, for that matter. And it was almost a fluke that I picked out that Cole Porter collection and acquired the taste for it so quickly - on first hearing, it was kind of a shock. The musicality was obvious; the manner, the intimacy, the gaiety were different. Pleasure, charm and wit are much devalued - they can rekindle your spirits when something more massive or serious (and perhaps more moving) is just too much.

I saw Bobby Short just once, in Chicago, in the cavernous Auditorium, and he made the place feel like a living room - he even killed the mike to test the famous acoustics on Ivor Novello's "And Her Mother Came Too" (one of the songs Jeremy Northam did so beautifully in Gosford Park, playing the composer). Not a word or a gracenote was lost. I'd heard many recordings already, and none of them quite caught the ring in the older voice - it was subtle and lovely and it reached out to you. He really seemed there to have fun, and you were included.

That's what's wrong with Woody Allen's sticking him into movies like Hannah and Her Sisters - there he becomes a test of taste; if you don't respond to him, there's something wrong with you. Utter bullshit. I trotted back from a few years' absence from my family with some Bobby Short in my bags, something I wanted to share with them, and they thought I was nuts - if they didn't connect with the style, that was fine (I had already had my moment). I had also already had a romantic evening in which an early recording of his of The Carioca figured prominantly - there was some bourbon, too, but saloons are made for hooch, even if they are only a bedroom, right? - and that I will always remember. For that night alone, I thank Bobby.

O yeah - there are some things he did that I think are perfect - try "Not a Care in the World" from the Vernon Duke set on the second Town Hall concert with Mabel Mercer. You can taste it! The pleasure the servants in Gosford enjoyed on the stairs for a few moments, smoking and relaxing and being embraced by a song - Mr. Short could do that. Small can indeed be beautiful.

Cabaret in the Sky 

19 March 2005

For My Sister, Nefertiri.....
Valet Chariot Parking - 85 shekels....
Love ya, Babe!

The Dogs of War
This blog wasn't up when the excerpts from James C. Dobson's The Strong-Willed Child: Birth Through Adolescence were being drawn out last December. (You can get it at amazon now for, like, 9 cents, used and new! The customer reviews are insightful.). Posting about our dachshund, however, reminded me of this post from Digby. And then Eugene Volokh pops up with a defense of the satisfactions of torture and executions for the edification and entertainment of the mob (or the masses or the volk - I get lost there...), from which he seems now to withdraw. It's difficult to say what Volokh is defending, with all the caveats and defenses, but I don't think he's in favor of beating doggies - just, under certain circumstances, men and women and children if we think they are bad. I don't know what new class of bad people these villains constitute, but they must be worse than any Commies or Nazis we have ever seen in nearly a century, or we wouldn't even think about subjecting them to common 16th or 17th century executions - public celebrations of retribution, revenge, and moral catharsis. The feel-good ceremony of the day, exclusively on FOX. And bring the kiddies.

Where the fuck did this notion come from? [I have a good idea, but I'm leaving the field open until the next post.]

17 March 2005

The Love of Low Dogs
TBogg has a splendid memorial to his first Bassett today, which moved me to post an almost-picture of our dachshund, below. Don't have any real ones of Noodles, but this comes awfully close. This household would be seriously diminished without him - he's friend, therapy dog, and an essential buffer between caregiver and patient. He has an uncanny ability to know who's most stressed on a given day, and distributes his services accordingly. I am amazed at his aplomb - not one of the yippy ones, and a perfect host to guest dogs - but his appetite for company (and being on top of any events) is insatiable.
Nearly all of his tricks are useful ones (he learned how to use carefully placed boxes as stairs to a bed in minutes), but he has his Dog of Mystery side. Used to break into an unused sitting room and battle the throw pillows from time to time - never saw him do it, just picked up the evidence and put them back in place. Not a mark on them, either. He saves fury for his toys, which he caches in 2 or 3 corners around the house. I gave up on squeaky toys that resembled animals of any kind, as he'd bite off the ears (and most of the head) within 24 hours and goodbye squeak. An unguarded paper towel is in danger, too.
I'm going to miss him when I move on, and I'll post a real portrait as soon as that's possible. He's worthy of the honor.

Noodley's Stand-In 

16 March 2005

Yummy
Alameida at Unfogged describes an Oyster Roast, and so returns us to civilization and its simple pleasures. Ratty and Mole would not a problem with this, and if you have any taste-memory at all, it is bliss to read.
There's a lot going on out there today. Counting to 10 here....

Meanwhile, back at the Ritz....
Sarah Lyall reports in Slate on the British Press Awards; my favourite line, "The mood became increasingly feral." - and that's only halfway through.....

The Riverbank
He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before--this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver--glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

As he sat on the grass and looked across the river, a dark hole in the bank opposite, just above the water's edge, caught his eye, and dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug dwelling-place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijo riverside residence, above flood level and remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.

A brown little face, with whiskers.

A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.

Small neat ears and thick silky hair.

It was the Water Rat!

Then the two animals stood and regarded each other cautiously.`

Hullo, Mole!' said the Water Rat.

`Hullo, Rat!' said the Mole.

`Would you like to come over?' enquired the Rat presently.

`Oh, its all very well to TALK,' said the Mole, rather pettishly, he being new to a river and riverside life and its ways.

The Rat said nothing, but stooped and unfastened a rope and hauled on it; then lightly stepped into a little boat which the Mole had not observed. It was painted blue outside and white within, and was just the size for two animals; and the Mole's whole heart went out to it at once, even though he did not yet fully understand its uses.

The Rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held up his forepaw as the Mole stepped gingerly down. `Lean on that!' he said. `Now then, step lively!' and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat.

`This has been a wonderful day!' said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again. `Do you know, I`ve never been in a boat before in all my life.

'`What?' cried the Rat, open-mouthed: `Never been in a--you never--well I--what have you been doing, then?'

`Is it so nice as all that?' asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

`Nice? It's the ONLY thing,' said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. `Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING--absolute nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: `messing--about--in--boats; messing----'

Boats - the Glory.... 

13 March 2005

The Critic's Art
I continue to fail to understand why the work of talented critics seems to taste like medicine to readers (and too many editors) when it can be as tonic as David Thomson's review of a new bio of Christopher Isherwood in the 3/21 TNR (and, damn, it's subscription only on-line!). It's a positive take on the book, but it's so sustained by what Thomson himself brings to the feast - his own knowledge of Isherwood's work and life, his own insights into movies and the photographic record and how we read them, and a good deal more - that even if you have no prior investment in the subject, it looks so luscious, smells so good, you want to run out and buy it and have a taste yourself.
A piece like this isn't flackery, and it isn't snark; it throws off flares of its own, and - to my mind - it's generous to the reader, throwing lifelines to a host of related subjects. The synthesis is, itself, exciting. Googling can't reproduce that kind of critical sensibility. I am still pissed at Salon for dumping Charles Taylor, because he has similar reach (and you can reality check me here by going to his stuff in their archives). Writers like Thomson and Taylor bring back the savor, and make you realize that every flavor isn't articifial.

Aristocracy
Sometimes you need a shot of the hard stuff (it's been one of those weekends around here), and with a nudge from Norbizness, and a link from The Agitator, I got to hear Cartman deliver The Joke ("Just wait, Kyle.") - [7/30 - that link does not work anymore - f&%k!]. The notion of variations on this one in a 90-minute doc is pretty overwhelming - I hope they stock stretchers at the theaters to carry out the wounded.
[And I don't know where it went, but Wolcott [Correction: it was Frank Rich - my bad! Apologies to VF for suspicions...} had a recent post on this subject that seems to have disappeared - sticky fingers at VF?]

11 March 2005

"What is this? Tang?"
PZ has a cool post on secretions - the kind of thing you might encounter in a handful of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans - but he doesn't talk about taste.
I confess to collecting quotes from Venture Bros., for just this sort of occasion - watch for them. There may be prizes!

Is There an Echo in Here?
Seems to be catching up with Kevin Drum, too....he's feeling as I did last Tuesday.

Happy Birthday, Ma! 

Blood - from this.... 

9 March 2005

The Vig
The Bankruptcy Bill - Digby (the heading is his) here, and Majikthise has wonderful pictures (Doré certainly suits the age). I take this one personally, not because I've filed for bankruptcy, but because I've escaped doing so, narrowly. I was sick a few years ago, could be treated as an outpatient, but I lost work and there were certainly late fees and penalties on what debt I had. I've managed to pay down a couple of those accounts since, even with the sub-market money I make on this gig - what remains still accounts for more than 30% of my income. With this bill, I have zero hope that I'll gain any advantage in interest rates on any debt I retire, and the prospects of any gap whatsoever in employment, or the consequences of another illness or accident, are dire.
And watch out for checking on your credit reports, kids - every inquiry takes points off your score, your own as well as any associated with applications for new credit. I'm in no shape to assume any more credit lines than I already have, and I tear up new card offers fucking daily, some with interest rates that even an idiot would find insane.
See illustration, above.

8 March 2005

Hollywood Aunts [Dept. of Amplification]
In last Saturday's post on St. Louis (and, by extension, my Missouri relatives), I seem to have demoted by great-great aunt, and my Dad corrects me:

"A quiet correction: You now list, in your
Blog, your great great aunt (Stella Watts) as a [s]eamstress in Hollywood
in the twenties, early thirties. She was MUCH more important than
{t}hat. In that period, Stella Watts was a [f]itter and designer for the
"Holly" Stars. She, also, was a very successful designer for private
couturier contracts. She did {it} for years among the people
who could afford the practice. Yes, she knew Crawford, Lombard, Loy,
Harlow, etc.[,] but her work credits were deeper than
that.

Seamstress? Not quite!"

And a welcome correction it is; I wonder if I'd ever found out if I wasn't publishing this stuff?

Aunt Stell was, however, legendary in the family for her strength of character, adventure, and good sense - I heard about those often. I can recall meeting her only once, when I was very small, on a trip to LA. Her house I remember as shadowed and green, but she was luminous, in the manner of very old ladies whose vitality of spirit shines even brighter as their bodies wither. More than the white hair, you know. For that impression alone, I am grateful.

Listless
I could see the debris flow of issues gathering over the weekend, and stood as if mesmerized by the oncoming disasters - Bankruptcy Bill, Bolton to the UN, &c. By now, some have already hit, so more on them later this evening. God, this is going to be a long year!

5 March 2005

In Like an Idiot
Update: couldn't even keep the month straight on this post in the original - it's now corrected.


Coupla Slices
Digby reminds us that Orcinus needs some yummy herring - now how hard is that? Quarter of a pizza, at most....and you get award-winning essays!


Compass Rose
Michael Bérubé has a marvellous post on a recent visit to St. Louis. It's been years since I was there for a Thanksgiving weekend (down from Chicago), but it sounds like the same combination of wonder and dismay, and his commenters appear to back that up.
My crew was visiting a friend who had just started teaching at Wash U, but we were given a thorough tour, certainly enough to recognize that here was the meeting of North and South, East and West. You could see it in the architecture, smell and taste it in the public market, despair where the center had not held. I thought that Chicago might have retained something of that earlier character if it hadn't burned (my own neighborhoods - Hyde Park and Woodlawn, were suburbs in 1892, more than 20 years later, so they don't count). But MB notes that St. Louis was already more established, and richer, when the Water Tower was young and licked by flames. Has there been a comparative history of the two cities' development? I'd sure like to see one.
A branch of my own family comes from within the orbit of St. Louis - it just didn't hold them. My great-great aunt ran off to Chicago, and then to Hollywood, where she was a seamstress at MGM (to Crawford, among others, I am told). My grandmother shipped out to Idaho. What happened after that World's Fair? The chateaux, the castles, the Tudor manses are still there, facing the old Fairgrounds park - amazing follies, and tributes to aspiration and wealth, but the engine that made them left, too.
These places nourish us as a nation - MB shows us some stars - shouldn't we pay more attention to our losses, and regret them more?

4 March 2005

Release
Got maximum time out today (without which I might have gone nuts), but coming back to home and work is still stressful. Home and work are identical here. The disarray that accumulates in only 10 hours can be astonishing A family that takes servants for granted is a family of slobs on their own watch.
Good I showed up in Town, though - if I'd missed another week, friends were going to send out e-mail alarms I'm looking forward to getting a cell in the next few months - going to need it - but it will make that kind of fretting unnecessary, too.

Have to catch up on some excellent posts I saw today, so check back in the morning.

Les Girls

Pandagon Breeds!
And we thought they were an endangered species! Jesse is going to be hard-pressed (sorry, dude...) to match the brilliance of the guest crew. Goddesses of wit and science!

3 March 2005

The Paramount
My sympathies - obvious from the post below - apart, I was thrilled to see on the C-SPAN feed scans of the great hall that used to be the Paramount, the favorite movie palace of my youth. It was the biggest theater in town (I think - the Orpheum must have been close; it had a gargantuan balcony). The Paramount combined a mirror-and-marble foyer, at least 3 floors of dim, overstuffed lounges, grand and obscure paintings in huge gilded frames, and the adult stink of smoke and perfume in every fiber of horsehair and velvet. The hall itself was deep and dark and huge, all indirect lighting and an illusion ceiling, encrusted and lumenescent. Gigantic pendant lamps hung from it, to the side, unlit monsters (what if they dropped on you?). It was fucking great.

I'm glad it hasn't been torn down, like the Orpheum, or the Fox, but all that luxe has been dumped and the mystery replaced by a coat of nougat - hard, beige, unforgiving. I would likely have grown up to find it worn and dowdy and in need of fumigation, but I miss it.

Find Me a Primitive Man
Reviewing the Dean/Perle debate in Portland two weeks ago, so far still available on C-SPAN stream, I find the blow-by-blow (and even that comical interruption from the saboteur in the audience, which pretty much everyone seemed to have found amusing) less interesting than the rhetorical strategies of the principals. Perle is as unctuous and repellent as always (he recalls Mailer's description of Nixon as "oil on a scallion"), and it matters not at all that he admits that the facts on the ground in Iraq aren't what he had hoped for or predicted - there is always another threat, here tailored to his Pacific Northwest audience, of North Korean nukes pointed at their heads. Terrorists, still, must always have state support, and therefore states in which there are terrorists are supported by those states and those states are our enemies and need to be taken out, taught a lesson, kicked in the teeth, none of which actions Democrats, since my days with Scoop Jackson, may he RIP, have had the balls to back. All very smooth and compelling, until you recognize that it's built on pure assertion, and mendacity
Dean, in his introductory statement, lacks that practiced smoothness, but he punches back. Dems have not neglected defense in any ideological way, and Bush policy, on manifold levels, has weakened US influence - militarily, economically, politically, morally - but we are where we are. It is
"[f}oolish for those of us who opposed the war to somehow spitefully hope that things go wrong" in Iraq, in response to the recent elections. There are wobbles and corrections, but Dean hammers his best points, and he shines in the subsequent Q&A. Dean is not an orator, he's a battler, and he does best when he has an opponent - the combat keeps his responses crisp, and against an oily bastard like Perle he can punch through the practiced song.
Perle just cannot give up his fear-mongering in these settings - not only is that missle pointed at your head, but your Democratic (thanks god he doesn't use "Democrat") Party reps have helped to target it. While he will admit miscalculations in the Iraq War, he still expects Bush to be honored in some future Iraq, in which everyone will have come to their senses. Would the world desired to be members of the Rational Club on whose board Richard Perle sits.

Therefore, I say:

Find me a primitive man,
Built on a primitive plan.
Someone with vigor and vim.
I don't mean a kind that belongs to a club,
But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.

And that's The Doctor....

Meatwad - Pure Protean 

26 February 2005

The O's
Just a caution that there will be no comment about Them here, before, during, or after. Nada. And I will watch them - I always watch them. That is all.

Start the Day with Digby
Really - a great post, long, with a painfully contemporary excerpt from Lincoln's 1860 Cooper Union speech in the middle of the span (link to original text included). Go read it!

Slug-a-Bed
Trying to kill this tooth thingy, so didn't get into Town yesterday, therefore no news from the Portland Street. March 4, for sure! I'll pore over the Dean/Perle debate in compensation, with any observations later today.

Tweedledum Perle Victorious over Mouse Army 

25 February 2005

Prince of Darkness v. The Mouse Insurgency
I have it on good authority that a very young Richard Perle once waged a campaign against an invasion of escaped mice in his Los Angeles neighborhood. Perhaps that success went to his head. I asked a friend in UK to do an illustration of the triumph for me, and here it is, above:

The Doctor v. Prince of Darkness
C-SPAN has the Dean/Perle debate of 2/27, here in Portland, as the first segment of a long American Perspectives stream. May not be available very long, so check it out while you can. I haven't had time to review the whole thing, but we know somebody threw a shoe at Perle during the proceedings. I'll post comments when I see it this weekend.

23 February 2005

In the Teeth
First, go to Ralph Steadman's for his HST elegy.

Next, consider what the new regime at Salon has already wrought. Charles Taylor, whose fierce takedown of David Irving in a review of Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial only two weeks ago gave further proof of his critical range, has been let go. Joan Walsh appears to feel that criticism has had too much of a front seat on what is now her bus - let's all go love "America's Top Model" instead. I was attracted to Salon in the first place, now years ago, because of the depth of their critical lineup, and it's been chipped away at - or dumbed down - for the last couple of years at an alarming rate. I will still look forward to Laura Miller and Stephanie Zacharek and Andrew O'Hehir - and Allen Barra on his rare appearances - but booting Charley they will be sorry for.

Finally, I have a monstrous toothache (the view south from my left eye shows a puff that wasn't there yesterday), so I will tough that out and hug any other grievances until the swelling goes down. The beefs will keep.

Presidents' Day

Fear & Loathing Come to Call
They seem ever more with us. Hunter S. Thompson saw them very clearly - perhaps too clearly - and now he's gone, may he RIP. Jesus' General has generous quotes in a fine post, and you should keep an eye on Ralph Steadman's site - there's already a sweet passage starring HST there from last November. Steadman's images of HST I can't separate from the man I never met - their Day of the Dead (a celebratory occasion) quality is like an x-ray of their subject.
And for a vision of an America full of Mickey Mice packing automatics that both Steadman and the Dr. would recognize, see Saul Steinberg. It is upon us.

About the writing, it strikes me as a dangerous model, because it was absolutely personal, and to adopt the style it is to be in HST drag. But a fearless nose for bullshit and a love of liberty (not the Liberty™ kind, either), those were his gifts to us, and those we must use.

[Update: Don't miss two posts by Steve Gilliard, here and here, better and deeper than anything I could say.]


The Father of Our Country
So, you win some, you lose some. My head aches.

19 February 2005

Interlude - with Pictures!
It's still a bit tricky, but image posting is now possible. After the events of the last couple of weeks (and too much more to come, one fears), I went for comfort and the promise of a new season. It's even greener here in Oregon than what Rackham illustrates for Mole, below. And Mole will shortly discover the River, and make a friend of Ratty, and learn something of boats. May the sun shine warmly on you all.

The Mole had been working very hard

all the morning, spring- cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said `Bother!' and `O blow!' and also `Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, `Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.`

This is fine!' he said to himself. `This is better than whitewashing!' The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side.

Early Spring Cleaning 

18 February 2005

Cracking a CPAC
Good one from Michelle Goldberg on the Conservative Political Action Conference this week (she must have wonderful camo - she's done this kind of thing before...). And Digby adds his usual trenchant notes.

Shoofly Pie
I haven't seen a transcript yet, but the Dean/Perle meetup Thursday evening featured some shoe-leather, according to this from The Oregonian. The paper's Odd Blogger says nothing very interesting, so I hope a few of the other 2800 in attendance get on the stick. Perle, with his various legal troubles, hasn't been much in evidence lately, though I doubt very much if his influence has abated, where it counts. Some floats, no matter what.
I am more interested in Howard's performance - both demeanour and argument - as he settles into the DNC chair.


More Sweet Dreams
What bliss to put head to pillow and not have an ear cocked for the sound of the tinkling bell, and the rustlings of the baby monitor! 10 hours a week is just not enough time off, readers, and this last one hasn't even been eventful - just a grind. Hate to miss seeing my friends, but a call to Town reassured them that I'm alive and will see them next week - except for B, who's taking off for Thailand and Vietnam for 3 weeks. Have an order in for some Vietnamese cinnamon - suggestions for its use will be appreciated.

17 February 2005

"Strike Him from the Roster, Dr. Girlfriend!"
I'm glad Maureen got the Valentine's Day lament off her chest, because today's spiel is terrific. Nice to know that the White House press vetting operation has their shit in order for....well, someone. Maybe it was all hair-envy (Ari Fleischer, J/J Gannon/Guckert....), 'cause MoDo has a beautiful mop.

16 February 2005

Scorchin'!
John lights the propane....

Spare me your sanctimonious bullshit now that those of us in the gay community and on the left have finally - finally - started to fight fire with fire by simply holding you to the very standards you legislate over us. We are simply giving the GOP the sex-less utopia it's always wanted. How does it feel?

Like he said - finally!


Early Signs
Actually, I'm with Chris on this one - I passed up the final episode of Brideshead Revisited to watch the Oscars the year they aired simultaneously [it wasn't like I was missing anything, I'd already read the Waugh...]. My roomies were appalled at my tastelessness (they chose deathbed epiphanies in the Chinese Bedroom), but that was the year Bette Midler showed up in that goofy dress, and not that long afterward I met her assistant, and, well.....pffffftttttttt! Je ne regrette rien!

In Praise of SZ -
And she certainly does deserve it for this self-help title:

Felony Convictions!: How to Know When You're Dating
One of the FBI's Most Wanted

I did that (or he should have been), so I know, and I ignored all the flags, too. Ask my friends. Fucking ex's....

15 February 2005

Elephants

"I'm still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut."

Oh, yeah? As Digby says about making hay of the Manchurian Beefcake:

"Paraphrasing a comment I read somewhere yesterday (apologies to the author) "pay no attention to the naked gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values white house living room." Goldberg affects a jocular dismissiveness for a reason. He knows what a real story is and he knows how they work. And he is trivializing this one because it is actually quite dangerous.

Meanwhile, on the left we have much handwringing by commenters over this not being a "gay" story and how we should concentrate on the national security angle and how it's really about access etc, etc. We too are ignoring the naked, gay conservative prostitute in the midde of the family values white house living room. And this is where they get us."

He's right, of course. It's been amusing to see the pundits get all shy about the Guckert/Gannon-connected websites and ads that have been uncovered in the last few days - nothing particularly shocking to your garden-variety gay man, anyway, and a lot less weird than the str8 porn spam that crreps into my Inbox from time to time. Where's the prurient interest angle gone, anyway, especially regarding such an honest, dignified, upright and moral White House like this one? Someone sponsored this guy into his Press Room Day Passes, someone with White House connections, outside and/or inside - otherwise, it's the most porous gateway we have, excepting maybe the Canadian. It's Journalism 101 to ask the obvious questions, and I see nothing wrong with pressing the professional Press to complete the assignment.

The Potato (Rice, Pasta, Bean, &c.) Eaters
Fine post by David Neiwert at Orcinus (via Atrios) on the Immigrant Threat. Too bad he left out the Irish in his examples - there's a cartoon here that Michelle Malkin would love, if the guy perched on the edge of the pot was just wearing a different head covering.

14 February 2005

O Joy! O Rapture!
MyDD reports on The Rapture Index today - JFC. As if I didn't hear enough of this crap from the nut branch of the family when I was growing up, now they are really getting juiced about the End of It All. I've got to observe, however, that these people have been gleeful about every war, every natural disaster for as long as I can remember - a bloodthirsty lot, with complete confidence that the tide of blood and destruction will sweep them up to Heaven. Unspeakable.
Let us pray that they will be disappointed, and if they happen to hold public office, let us defeat them, ASAP.


Snarky Sunday
No posts yesterday, owing to the usual attacks of hyper-sensitivty and family melodrama backwash my patient manifests toward the end of a weekend. After more than 2 years of observation, it's completely predictable and thoroughly inexplicable, other than to note that Control Issues are her third rail and that the voltage gets cranked up after the Sunday visit. A bad zap can last all week, and so is to be avoided.

Stupid Genome!
Great post at Pharyngula on attributing vast powers of destiny to humble genes. I often wonder why Evolutionary Psychologists even have jobs, but they should certainly suppress the impulse to drop crumbs so that innocents like Kristof ingest them and come up with these idiot columns. Every damn time I see one, I expect a chorus of "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life" to swell forth from the page.

12 February 2005

Only Connect
Let's make it a bright beginning for Howard at the DNC and show that the netroots run deep.

Contribution amount:
$

Good Question
From Steve Gilliard:

Funny, while Bush is dismantling social security, where have the Greens and Nader been? Holding their dicks? Feeding vegan dog chow to their starving pups? Exactly why haven't they been eager to join the fight? They talk a good game, but when a real fight is here, one which can't be lost, they have nothing to say.

Indeed, I'd almost forgotten about them, myself. Any answers, any tweets out there?


The Dreamers
Matt asks a question - to which I reply:

I would it were so. All that liberally redemptive power of, "..shades and gradations and all the complexities of humanity...," in art can work miracles on a student - specifically, a young student, like the one in Reading Lolita in Teheran - whose knowledge of the
world is still being formed. The flip side is the 15-year-old who never gets over The Fountainhead (let's go to The Corner, shall we?), or all those good little boys and girls who have had moral fiction drummed into their heads - Nabokov would scare the shit out of them, and they'd run screaming in disgust, casting stones as they fled.
By Garcia-Marquez's own account, Castro is very well-read, but I don't think he's takenThe Autumn of the Patriarch much to heart. And, please, Matt - Adolf's taste in ainting and architecture was monumental kitsch at its most deadening - crushing classicism. While artists must make their art, and may make extraordinary claims for its efficacy, they have no proof that it works the way they want it to work. The older they are, the less they insist on changing hearts and minds - the work and the witness speak for themselves, but by that time dictators and thugs are not, I think, assumed to be listening.

A teacher of mine held that Socrates was hostile to poets because they were, at bottom, philosophers in competition with him, by different means. I rather liked that, but it's agonizing to try to persuade people who believe fiction to be lies that it has any conceptual integrity. Music they can, sometimes, still get; pictures that don't resemble something they know, they don't. It's the warm bath notion of aesthetic pleasure. The moralists would probably object to candles around the tub, or bubbles (the least and most passing of entertainments) - more on this later, but what a bunch of fucking killjoys!

This Is Not a Test...
As Digby says, "It's not like they didn't warn us."

11 February 2005

"Manchurian Beefcake"
That's Wolcott's superb name for the Gannon/Guckert story, and I hope it sticks. There's extensive detail at AMERICAblog (and you might have seen John Aravosis on Aaron Brown's show last night, cutting to the quick...). It's looking like a fucking torte, actually, with delicious hidden surprises to come.
I'm not set up to post pics yet, or I'd add the winsomely gruff Jeff/Jim G/G in all his dog-tagged glory - I do hope we found out how many kinds of pin-up boy he has been, and in what shadowy venues besides the White House Press Briefings. He might wish he'd stuck to catering to uniform fetishists.

[Update: The brilliant and lovely SZ at World O' Crap gets props for especially comprehensive, concise and - how you say? - self-effacing coverage of this yumminess. I would bear her children if circumstances didn't make that impossible.]

9 February 2005

Already Behind....
Dan Drezner has a fun post: Pretend you're a U of C undergraduate!!
Make sure to check out the reading list and class schedule - the list may look short, but these are not selections, kids. God, quarters are short! I wonder how his class is going to cope with Nietszche's irony...?

8 February 2005

Hat Trick!
Michael Bérubé scores on a collection of the latest squabbles surrounding the academy. Wankers, beware!

Go Blue!
I'd link to the Cole and Goldberg pages myself, but then you would miss TBogg's scoring system, and that would be negligent of me.
.

7 February 2005

And Now, Another Chorus of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me"....
How long will it take the warnings to sink in? Here's Digby.

6 February 2005

The Sun, Where It Sets
There's a very fine post on John Ford at Lance Mannion's blog. I was raised in the West, but it was the Pacific Northwest, not the iconic Monument Valley landscape. Neither that geography nor that son of Iowa John Wayne, who was supposed to personify it - icons my school friends from New York revered - had much resonance. That movie West was as foreign to me, and as idealized, as it was to them, but they thought it was genuine and mythic and I thought it was just too dry. The Lord of the Rings is a hell of a lot closer to what I saw, and to my temperament - I grew up in Wagnerian forests, and New Zealand mimics great tracts of Oregon.
Portland may not know it, but they also live in a transplanted piece of New England; a mere year in Cambridge taught me that. It's entirely appropriate that the town in McCabe & Mrs. Miller - my favorite Western, and to me the truest to my own experience - is named Presbyterian Church. My brother pointed out to me not long ago that Oregon place names bow to that missionary past - Portland, Salem, Medford - while Washington tended to keep, and thereby honor, native names - Seattle, Tacoma.
I don't miss the Western genre that much - god, they used to crank them out indiscriminately! - but it's kind of sad that they lost their hold on our imaginations just as they were really growing out of their triumphal romance period, and loosening up. I still find The Searchers compelling, if we're talking about John Ford, and the Peckinpahs explode all of the old pieties. And James Wolcott is right about giving Anthony Mann his due, too. And there's that singular Altman, in which community really means something. Against the grain, however, in this moment of White Hats/Black Hats. We've got a Real Cowboy to lead us, boy howdy!

5 February 2005

Go Team Venture!
Venture Bros. -
genius...impure...totally....

Unconventional
Apologies, but I have been posting ass-backwards below - newer stuff is below older stuff, which is just not done. Told you I was new at this!

Add-Ons
This is pure grandiosity, but I'm adding a Site Meter to measure all the non-existent traffic I'm already getting in less than a week. Is blogging an enabler, or what?

I suppose the next thing will be pics & graphics. Atrios has his kitties, TBogg has his bassets, and we have a great little chocolate dachshund who's stuck with the name Noodles, but is no less handsome, bright, tactful and kind for it. My only nightmare lately is that he meets Dr. James Dobson and is "corrected" for his tolerance and love. You be the judge.

Howard Dean - ex cathedra
I am posting this at Digby's too -

Rock on, HD! Can anyone remember a guy who has been so consistently mis-characterized? The radical and strident profile was, recall, started in the run up to the primaries by his own Dem opponents, and was contrary to his positions and record. Calling Bush on the carpet in the summer of 2003 was so rude; Dean showed it had power and truth, and even if he was a novice at a national campaign, he shoved the whole field in the right direction. The CW shifted seismically, and he was responsible.
That's what scared the hell out the DNC then (and the boys and girls at TNR who endorsed that sancitmonious sack of shit Joe Lieberman, he of the strangled voice and this week's Kiss of Death) - the Right just picked up the themes and cranked them up. They're still cranking, and there are still people on Our Team who are implicitly bobbing their heads to that tune.
I suspect that Howard will surprise them all - and a good thing it will be.

Bosley's Boy
Whoa! Wolcott rips Michael Medved a fresh one - but, damn, the piece he's talking about (apparently adulatory of Medved's new book about his turning Red from Blue) is in next week's NYT Book Review. As JW notes, Medved has a propensity to go intellectually limp, and to whine. In May '03 he whined to Seattle Weekly that he missed the movie criticism of Bosley Crowther, captain of the limpets and a standout on the Times' historical junior varsity of lame-o critics. O yeah, he wonders where the Legion of Decency went, too. Oy! You'd think that finding moral clarity and sucking up to the ubermenschen of the Right would give him a new confidence, but I guess not.

4 February 2005

Talk of the Town
This is my day for time off, and I'll be heading into Portland to see friends and to conduct what small business I have. Back on duty this evening to report on the waters. It's been two weeks since I've seen anyone I don't take care of, work for, or buy things from (I napped the afternoon away last week) - my exercise periods might be an exception if I wasn't always in a rush to get back. "Hello, I must be going." - that's my current tagline.

Fat Friday
I had almost forgotten that Mardi Gras is next Tuesday, until I saw guys with beads at 3pm on Stark Street, two blocks of which pass as a locus of gay club life in PDX. Brought back a few strands, but I didn't have to do anything - or show anything - to get them; standards have been lowered. I think it's all those Girls Gone Wild vids, personally.

But I can't stay out late enough (without special and very much in-advance arrangements) to play like that. The last transportation to my neighborhood from a suburban transit center leaves at 10:30pm, and according to a Service Rep from the transit system, who was taking a survey on my way in today, that may be rolled back to 7:30pm in June, unless ridership raises holy hell. Granted that I'd like to be out of this gig by then, but that kind of cutback would make doing this job almost impossible. My patient can't be left alone for much more than an hour at a time, and even now it is a stretch to get to her pharmacy and back within that window. A car, you say? I'm not paid enough to maintain one. Rx's by mail? Too many controlled substances on her list.

This is how rising fuel prices and straitened state and local budgets are being felt, folks. The route I ride isn't losing population, it's undergoing an exurban explosion of housing and commercial development. What used to be lightly travelled country roads are now jammed, and need widening for - yeah - all those SUVs. The Portland metropolitan area has, in most respects, a terrific system of bus and light-rail public transportation, but it's being starved in the competition for dollars in the Ownership Society. All thanks, Dear Leader!.

3 February 2005

Build 1.0
And haven't even achieved that, really. Next step is to get a blogroll in the left column - antecedents, models, heroes, enemies - all worth reading, of course.

Medical Oddities
Patients whose blood is well-oxygenated, but who have a history of high levels of morphine sulphate for pain, should not receive oxygen in an emergency situation. The morphined brain will read this as excessive, and shut down respiration. Counter-intuitive, no? The things you pick up on the job.....

Morning Update
Blogroll links are now up. Many Usual Suspects for a lefty (and, please, use gloves when visiting The Corner), but treat these as essentials.

2 February 2005

Day of the Marmot
Just in case we get stuck in an Eternal Return time loop - which would mean endless repetition of the SOTU address - I direct you to Giblets's takedown of Punxsutawney Phil and Jesus' General's crib on the dreaded Speech.
I'll stick to reading the transcript, though I am in suspense as to whether the Repubs will have the gall to dip their claws blue for the occasion. All the perfurmes of Arabia will not sweeten their little hands.
Update:
Yup, they did....