When in Taiwan and reading my Wordsworth facsimiles of Sherlock Holmes stories (1992, 1996 eds.), I’d use the old newspaper illustrations and “quoted captions!” as an oracle on unsuspecting Americans. Think of a Question! Then call out a number between 1 and 450! I’d say, and they would. The book had abt 450 p. So I’d thumb through and stop on a page near the number they’d called out that had a captioned illustration. They’d have thought of their question, and the newspaper artists from 1890 would answer them like this, but with a caption like “On the double, Watson! He’s shimmied up the chimney!”:
So their private questions would be answered with he’s shimmied up the chimney, and they’d have to make sense of that.
Recognize: it’s a slog. A zine article, a book review, a story in a journal of a small state U, maybe a little magazine play. Then you do a book and it sells 200 copies; but that don’t pay no rent, hoss.
But you still write. It’s what you bloody do.
What happens (I think and I hope) is that you get so disabused of the notion of fame or money that you do, actually, begin taking your work very seriously. Suddenly, uninterested or unable to please anyone but yourself, you start telling your truth. Then you get good, and you get serious.
Feel happy? All topped-off on hope? Like, that’s really cool and stuff. But don’t let yourself forget that warrantless wiretapping is still very much in effect. Not even my spellcheck knows what to do with the word: red crinkles all up under warrantless.
@ WIRED:
Heads spun four years ago this weekend, when AT&T was accused of funneling every one of its customers’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — without warrants.
A Jan. 31, 2006, lawsuit alleged major violations of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. Such a sweeping breach seemed far-fetched.
Yet months after the lawsuit was lodged, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produced internal AT&T documents allegedly outlining secret rooms in AT&T offices connected to the NSA, which was siphoning all internet traffic, from e-mails to Voice Over Internet Protocol phone conversations.
But four years and a mountain of court briefs and rulings later, the legal system has never addressed the merits of the allegations — and likely never will. Even Congress has weighed in and passed legislation to prevent the allegations from being heard.
The Guardian reports that schools in Southern California have removed the dictionary from classrooms because it contains dirty words. No, really. I think this is how civilizations collapse:
Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms…after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for “oral sex.”
Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate.”
The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.
Just, excitedly, picked up Little Brother. Just put it down again, too, on abt p. 27. Heavily laden w/ exposition about technology and (some where in page-teens) has a total misread of the importance of arphids in libraries. I forgive the library / arphid thing. But, as a reader interested in the constant and visceral experience of my protagonist, can’t so much forgive that we only get a physical description of D on page twenty-whatsit.
Must try some of his other books sometime, I guess.
Or maybe plod along doggedly in this one for the hope of pay-off.
Got a bunch, maybe all, Baum’s Oz books on Kindle in one bundle for like 99 cents.
Finished the first one.
I wish I’d read it when I was 8 years old. I would have become a better and more interesting man. But I’m very glad to have read it now in my 30s, anyway, b/c it’s funny and sometimes startling. On the same page it can be charming and cute, and also horrifying and mysterious. It’s damn good work, that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The movie version does it only a half justice.
“I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.”~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan. November 12, 1816
The 
