Blog

(or, Basquing in Stupidity)

You’ll never guess where I’ve gotta go for a conference this fall.

And I’d still rather go there than the original venue for the show, where I attended an expo last fall.

Neat article in the Times today about how forensic psychiatrists deal with the term “evil” in their diagnoses of some criminals.

I like to think that you don’t need to quantify a type of behavior to decide whether or not it’s evil, but I guess psychiatrists have to deal with that framework. Even then, it seems there are a bunch who won’t use the term. I have a ton of friends who shy away from calling someone evil, because it implies a moral judgement. Of course there’s tons of leeway about what people consider evil. But I believe that there’s also stuff that any honest person would recognize as evil.

Internet Bonus: When I call up the article, I get a vertical banner ad from Victoria’s Secret with a gigantic pair of boobs on display.

Back to those Paris Review interviews. I don’t even remember if any of the collected volumes I pillaged included the interview with Robert Penn Warren. I hadn’t read All the King’s Men at that point, and had no idea of how mindblowingly good that novel is.

Here’s a piece of Warren’s interview:

First thing, without being systematic, what comes to mind without running off a week and praying about it, would be that America was based on a big promise — a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that — the house, that’s quite a problem — particularly when you’ve got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America — you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks.

There’s another thing in the American experience that makes for a curious kind of abstraction. We suddenly had to define ourselves and what we stood for in one night. No other nation ever had to do that. In fact, one man did it — one man in an upstairs room, Thomas Jefferson. Sure, you might say that he was an amanuensis for a million or so people stranded on the edge of the continent and backed by a wilderness, and there’s some sense in that notion. But somebody had to formulate it — and we’ve been stuck with it ever since. With the very words it used.

Do you know the Polish writer Adam De Gurowski? He was of a highly placed Polish family; he came and worked as a civil servant in Washington, a clerk, a kind of self-appointed spy on democracy. His book America — of 1857, I think — begins by saying that America is unique among nations because other nations are accidents of geography or race, but America is based on an idea.

Behind the comedy of proclaiming that idea from Fourth of July platforms there is the solemn notion, Believe and ye shall be saved. That abstraction sometimes does become concrete, is a part of the American experience — and of the American problem — the lage between idea and fact, between word and flesh.

I’m pretty happy I found these interviews. Just reading them again throws me back 10 or 11 years, except without having to listen to Lucas with the Lid Off.

As promised, a couple of pix from Saturday’s trip to Providence. We went to Colt State Park and walked out by Narragansett Bay. The weather was beautiful (for the season).

Here are a couple of the water. I sorta like the “big empty” look of the sky, but you guys know that I’m crazy.

I hope there’s a statue of me someday, and that it shows me wearing a suit. This one’s of John H. Chafee, who helped the state acquire the Colt Park land during his tenure as RI’s governor in the ’60s.

This one’s of Paul, me, and the official VM girlfriend.

When I was a wee Virtual Memoirist in my grad school days in Annapolis, I used to read the Paris Review‘s Writers at Work interviews all the time. Borrowed a bunch of the collected volumes from the public libraries, and abused the photocopier at the MD DOT — where I taught GED skills to highway workers — to make copies of the best ones.

Now, the magazine is posting a whole ton of these great interviews on its site. For some bizarre reason (probably legal), they’re calling it the “DNA of Literature,” rather than “Writers At Work.”

Also, I’m not sure why certain of them haven’t been PDF’d (you really need to read the Faulkner one).

Today marks two years since I started Virtual Memories! (It wasn’t a very auspicious first post, I amdit).

The occasion really warrants a redesign of the blog (and the inclusion of some additional resources/side sites); maybe I can get to that sometime soon.

Meanwhile, you’ll have to content yourselves with my ramblings and occasional guest-posts. I’m always looking for more of those, with the intent of turning this thing into a little more of a magazine than a personal rant-fest. If my general plans for the rest of the year work out, I’ll have a bunch more time to work on that [twirls moustache, cackles hideously].

Off to Providence, RI on a day-trip. The official VM girlfriend gets to meet my buddies Paul & Deb. If I get any good photos from there, you’ll be the first to know.

My first trip up there, they took me out to see HP Lovecraft’s grave. I was hoping that the experience would confer some sorta funky powers on me, but Paul sez that it only gives you the ability to awe attendees at horror-cons. Oh, well.

I have a new favorite drink, largely because of the insanely funny commercial.

The official VM girlfriend and I simply call the stuff “ROY! ROY-ROY-ROY!”

Jeff Larkin offers the top 10 ass-kickings delivered by Chris Hitchens in 2004, including

6) On John Kerry:
“I heard that people were sending the checks to the $10,000-a-plate dinner, or whatever it was–they were sending the check, they wouldn’t come to the dinner. That’s too much. ‘I’ll pay you not to have me to dinner with the nominee.’ That may be a rumor, but it did appear in the NY Times fairly authoritatively, and it seems somehow horribly true. Also it seems to me astonishing that the test of a Democratic liberal now is to be gung ho, or have been gung ho, about Vietnam. Of all wars. And then, did he think Mr. John O’Neil had died? Did he sort of check? Because the last time he tried this, it’s agreed by all that John O’Neil gave him a pretty good run for his money back in the seventies. Whatever you think about the merits of the case.”

Enjoy.

Jennifer Weiner explains how to submit a Talk of the Town piece to the New Yorker.

Step eight: Paranoia. Decide that Talk of the Town assistant is twenty-two-year-old Brown graduate with size zero leather miniskirt and degree in semiotics who automatically shuns any book or short story with actual plot and unambiguous ending. Imagine Talk of the Town assistant as mean-faced girl from freshman year of college who corrected your pronunciation of “heinous” in front of a room full of classmates, including guy on whom you had a crush.