Whether you agree with his politics or not, the blistering “special comments” that Keith Olbermann delivers on his Countdown show have rare entertainment value. The folks at 23/6 have boiled them down into 60 seconds.
On my walk to work yesterday I picked up one of the free copies of the New York Times that were being handed out by clean-cut young men around the city.
It didn’t take long to realize that this wasn’t the real thing — too thin and too slippery — but it obviously took considerable effort, creativity, and expense. I hear that over a million copies were handed out. Happily it’s available online as well.
The faux Times was the creation of the Yes Men, along the lines of John Lennon’s billboard “War Is Over (If You Want It). You help create the world you want by imagining it’s already here.
Greetings from Brooklyn to Boulder! Jenn and I hope you have a great birthday and many happy returns!
Some writers lose their sense of humor with age. V.S. Naipaul, for instance, seems to have lost his after publishing A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961.
Other writers, on the other hand, find their sense of humor. Margaret Atwood’s gray, earnest early novels Surfacing and Life Before Man put me off her work for some time. But The Handmaid’s Tale had flashes of wit, and some dark satire for those who know Cambridge, Massachusetts. And Oryx and Crake is hilarious in a postapocalyptic kind of way.
Payback is a highly original work of nonfiction, a look at the many aspects and mechanisms of debt. The breezy style cannot disguise the rigorous thinking in this book, and some of the darker corners Atwood explores would be hard to face without her light touch.
The chapter “Debt as Plot” looks at how money and debt drive the action of novels like Vanity Fair and The Mill on the Floss.
When I was young and simple, I thought the nineteenth-century novel was driven by love; but now, in my more complicated riper years, I see that it’s also driven by money, which indeed holds a more central place in it than love does, no matter how much the virtues of love may be waved idealistically aloft. Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights loves Cathy passionately and hates his rival, Linton, but the weapon with which he is able to act out his love and his hate is money, and the screw he twists is debt: he becomes the owner of the estate called Wuthering Heights by putting its owner in debt to him. And so it goes, through novel after novel. The best nineteenth-century revenge is not seeing your enemy’s red blood all over the floor but seeing the red ink all over his balance sheet.
Even John Updike’s jeux d’esprit give you more to think about most authors’ earnest tomes. Gertrude and Claudius, published in 2000, is a prequel to Shakespeare’s play in which we learn more about queen Gertrude’s affair with her husband’s brother Claudius, and how it led to murder. Updike draws on some of the early Hamlet legends for his version, and even the names of some of the characters — following these legends — change from one section of the novel to the next.
Updike has thought about the dynamics of adultery more than most, and his speculations about the roots of Hamlet are plausible. Gertrude, married very young to an overbearing clod of a king, is drawn to the exotic tales and dashing manner of the king’s brother Claudius, who has been spending his time in Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. The attraction deepens and becomes mutual, and Gertrude enlists the king’s counselor Polonius to lend her his country home for meetings with Claudius. The adulterous couple enjoy their affair, but when the king begins to suspect, they realize (along with Polonius) that their lives are hanging by a thread. And so comes Polonius to pour a vial of “leperous distilment” into the king’s ear, curdling his blood and covering his body with a “vile and loathsome crust.”
Well, Gertrude and Claudius shouldn’t have had an affair, God knows, and they certainly shouldn’t have killed the king. But was it really necessary that they should die too, along with Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Laertes, and Ophelia?
The killing of Hamlet’s father was arguably a matter of self-defense. The same could not be said of Hamlet’s revenge, especially when he stabs Polonius through the arras before determining who he is. In his Afterword, Updike quotes the view of the critic G. Wilson Knight, which he himself seems to agree with.
Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counsellor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.
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