I have a feeling this is going to be a huge slaughter.
ohhleary:
brianvan:
Send them to me so I can claim more hippie idealist scalps tomorrow. Your efforts are both futile and stupid. Plus, I fully believe you are getting exactly the mayor you deserve. Shitheads!
Vote for Thompson! Because we miss the old New York… the one run by organized labor, abandoned by the rich for the suburbs, leaving no money for city services.
Plus, who needs bike lanes or bus lanes when we could spend that money giving handouts to the unions?
Oh, wait, you’re going to vote for Reverend Billy? Aw, how cute. Good luck with that.
Not sure what you mean by old New York. The New York of Koch? Just saw an ad with him endorsing Bloomberg. The New York of Giuliani? No thanks.
I’m voting for Thompson, not because I think he’s going to win or even that he’d do such a great job, but because Bloomberg a) subverted term limits, which New Yorkers voted on twice to uphold; and because b) I just can’t bring myself to vote for somebody from the party of Palin, Bachman, Bush and Cheney. Bloomberg’s been a fine mayor, but he hasn’t been a spectacularly great mayor. The city was fine before him. It’ll be fine after he’s gone.
Anyway, Chris, you and I have disagreed on this before. Que sera. I’d say let the best candidate win, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Should be interesting to see how difficult it is to navigate through Greenpoint and Williamsburg due to the marathon.
Just got home and washed the green hair dye out. Fun party, though. I took a picture of the green water as it was emptying down the drain in the tub, but then realized how dirty my shower liner is and so just deleted it.
french-moi:
mills:
From Irredenta I found this article by Julian Barnes, whom I like very much, on some new translations of Guy de Maupassant and much more; at the outset, he includes an exchange between de Maupassant and literary mentor Gustav Flaubert:
At the age of 27, de Maupassant writes:
‘Fucking women is as monotonous as listening to male wit. I find that the news in the papers is always the same, that the vices are trivial, and that there aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence.’”
Flaubert replies:
You complain about fucking being ‘monotonous’. There’s a simple remedy: cut it out for a bit. ‘The news in the papers is always the same’? That’s the complaint of a realist – and besides, what do you know about it? You should look at things more carefully … ‘The vices are trivial’? – but everything is trivial. ‘There aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence’? – seek and ye shall find … You must – do you hear me, my young friend? – you must work harder than you do. I suspect you of being a bit of a loafer. Too many whores! Too much rowing! Too much exercise! A civilised person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim. You were born to be a poet: be one. Everything else is pointless – starting with your pleasures and your health: get that much into your thick skull. Besides, your health will be all the better if you follow your calling … What you lack are ‘principles’. There’s no getting over it – that’s what you have to have; it’s just a matter of finding out which ones. For an artist there is only one: everything must be sacrificed to Art … To sum up, my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy: it’s a vice.
The rest of the article is very interesting on questions of translation, literature, and love, and offers what might be a reason Flaubert would object to some blogging : “[He] thought that for a writer to give the public details of his private life was a bourgeois weakness which should be avoided.”
Interesting. I’m reblogging this as a reminder to read it later. Although Flaubert’s last quote, [He] thought that for a writer to give the public details of his private life was a bourgeois weakness which should be avoided, if it had been more widely adopted, would’ve pretty much meant no Modernism and most worthwhile twentienth century literature. Then again, a huge percentage of Modernism and worthwhile twentieth century literature was written by the bourgeoisie.
Using the word bourgeoisie feels very collegiate, BTW.
