Sunday, May 25, 2008
Anne Boyer
The Romance of Happy Workers
Coffeehouse Press
2008
90 pages
Softcover
$16.00
Ever since Flarf™ burst onto the writing scene in all of its socio-paranoid, inter-reflective glory, the highpitched, pop-cultural, and desperate utterances of a world gone mad have been Rorshached back at us, with little mercy, with little ironic winks, and loud, vulgar Guignolian effects. It has since moved onto a Style of Writing and should, at some point, find its way into an updated version of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, completely processed, noted, and homogenized, like organoleptic butter.
Flarf probably couldn’t be happier if this would happen, as it is an artfom of authorial identity deconstruction, ultimately. Flarf yearns to be everything, and so conjoins its authors—the anonymous Google-based authors’s snippets and the Flarf authors own—into one. The premise is a kind of intentional authorial suicide, of traditional I-ness drowning out in plurality, into the totality of I and Thou-ness. The author’s identity/identities—if this/these is/are even actual—has/have died into a meta-world of collage artist, of assembler. Yet, there is an inner ruse to the whole thing, because while the content is a site of plurality (many authors), it is still, like all things written, a construct of one, unless it’s a joint construction.
Every few months, there will be a new sighting of Flarf, like the Missing Link crossing the highway, and someone will say, “Flarf is not Dead, I just saw it, crossing a highway.” Flarf is actually alive-dead, at this point, hanging out in a kind of Marienbad. But the people involved from the beginning, in the middle, at the end, have continued writing, thankfully, and in any case, with some still writing based on cut-and-pastes from Google searches, others moving on to a combination of classic Flarf conventions and newer experiments, others have abandoned it, and so on.
The Romance of Happy Workers is Anne Boyer’s first full book of poetry—she has some chapbooks. Boyer’s poetry is continually other—it moves into new words, new horizons, each one left behind for alive-dead. Metaphors pile up into drifts of semblances, into a maze of associations, until one just takes her word for things. The poetry’s basic philosophical frame is that of change, of flux, of disappearance-reappearance. Here, for instance, is the beginning of her poem, “Lob”:
Stand fast. Grief is a gondola, a compulsive
label, a root canal—not a question of a single
switch at the center of things, but billions
of neurons, endorphins, titans rubbing
their wings. Let the monster wander. See a movie.
*
Here “grief” is, singly, at least five things all at once: a gondola, a compulsive label, and a root canal; it’s also “not a question of a single/ switch at the center of things”; and it’s “billions of neurons, endorphins, [and] titans rubbing/ their wings.” The question, of course, becomes, what does one do with all of this information? Does one process each claim, check it out against the others? How is grief like a root canal? How is it both a compulsive label and yet billions of titans rubbing their wings? Should we care?
My guess is that we shouldn’t—at least not as claims. Boyer has her eyes set on other things. This is poetry of experience, of wonder, of exuberance, of immersion in textual adventure. The author herself often ends up in historical relationships, jarred from chronology, asking questions directly of Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, like where his head might be, or mentioning to him, in a breathlessly comical turn, that she’s read Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. In another poem, “The Romance of Happy Workers,” she straddles Woody Guthrie on a Bolshevik mattress, listens to his “propagandas,” however badly he might smell of pomegranates.
The book displays a heavy interest in history, philosophy, art, and the literary, with a poem involving Keats (“Ode O”), another poem, “A Reader for Those Who Do Not Live in Cities,” made up entirely of lines by Carl Sandburg and Bertolt Brecht, while others are dedicated to fellow writers. The contents of poems refer to El Cid, to Linnaeus, John Locke, Goya, Vermeer, and Hercules. However, these olden figures will be in a mash-up environment of Iowa and Kansas, where Harvester, John Deere, and Pioneer farm equipment dot the horizons. The local becomes universal, and vice-versa, all over again.
One would imagine, given the timewarping, that it would be quite difficult for the poems to be taken seriously, as something more than stunts, but they do achieve this through a palpable drive/passion/power/etc. that acts as the underlying convincing agent. The reader “goes along with” Boyer because she’s certain in tone, because she repeats her convictions, because she gets to the messier, powerful places of lust and violence that govern us, and she’s entertaining along the way. This is not an easy thing to do.
While I have made much of the brasher aspects of the book, there is also significant space given over to touching pieces, free of sentimentality, but not of feeling, like “Sunsets Off.” Here it is in its entirety:
Nothing, too, is a subject:
dusk regulating the blankery.
Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,
fill in the metaphorical smell.
The horizon leaves the same
impression as runway: jet but air.
I wake to a grain bin, the end is near:
jimson and ditchweed, hog and trough.
The first beer can is making
high hopes out of everything.
No wheat is safe from chaff of this,
hullwrecked in Hugoton, thinking of sod.
*
There is a stately confidence to the piece, right from the opening declaration and through the hope for more, for something other to be (note the double “fill in”). The author obviously wishes to be somewhere else, letting us know humorously that the sight of a grain bin is a signal that the end is near. (One can hear Berryman’s “Life, friends, is boring” somewhere beyond the ditchweed.) We note the careful sonic arrangement of “hog and trough,” and the gleeful delay after “making,” and the ringing –ing rhyme with “everything.” This is poetry of what’s in front of one, so to speak, when the texts and historical connections drop away, and one is left with one’s factual life and factual circumstances. Robert Creeley made a career of writing “states of mind/states of mind in states of place” pieces like this one, and they were somehow, amazingly, never boring. Like Creeley’s seemingly simple pieces, Boyer’s “Nothing” above is definitely “something.”
We must not end things here, though, because there is another element of the book that needs mentioning—Boyer’s playfulness. This playfulness can exist in the forms of plot, with our heroine, for instance, dining on quince paste with Woody Guthrie, or by humorously refashioning one of her pieces as similar to an Ezra Pound broadcast (“Poundcast”), or at the most rudimentary level of phrasing, with such oddities as those that fill in her poem, “You Will Want Like Cowboys,” which begins:
I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.
You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.
Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,
words?
*
The words themselves convulse, break apart, sidestep, loosen, run away feverishly in many poems, but mostly they want to be counted, like the humor wants to be counted, like the adventure does, like the silos do, like the nods to Marx do, like the palpable Desire does. Boyer’s poetry challenges us to not sit still, to not allow for the familiar to lose its mystery, and to be in the world, which includes her poetry, as in beginning of the final poem “Valediction Forbidding Apocalypse,” where she says:
Dear tiny autumn of lizards,
dear pigs in attic marble,
dear pit/ quarry/ basement,
dear rock, dear stone, dear flesh:
remarkable this world
drowned anyway—a mass
transiently—this product
of the porous
The Romance of Happy Workers
Coffeehouse Press
2008
90 pages
Softcover
$16.00
Ever since Flarf™ burst onto the writing scene in all of its socio-paranoid, inter-reflective glory, the highpitched, pop-cultural, and desperate utterances of a world gone mad have been Rorshached back at us, with little mercy, with little ironic winks, and loud, vulgar Guignolian effects. It has since moved onto a Style of Writing and should, at some point, find its way into an updated version of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, completely processed, noted, and homogenized, like organoleptic butter.
Flarf probably couldn’t be happier if this would happen, as it is an artfom of authorial identity deconstruction, ultimately. Flarf yearns to be everything, and so conjoins its authors—the anonymous Google-based authors’s snippets and the Flarf authors own—into one. The premise is a kind of intentional authorial suicide, of traditional I-ness drowning out in plurality, into the totality of I and Thou-ness. The author’s identity/identities—if this/these is/are even actual—has/have died into a meta-world of collage artist, of assembler. Yet, there is an inner ruse to the whole thing, because while the content is a site of plurality (many authors), it is still, like all things written, a construct of one, unless it’s a joint construction.
Every few months, there will be a new sighting of Flarf, like the Missing Link crossing the highway, and someone will say, “Flarf is not Dead, I just saw it, crossing a highway.” Flarf is actually alive-dead, at this point, hanging out in a kind of Marienbad. But the people involved from the beginning, in the middle, at the end, have continued writing, thankfully, and in any case, with some still writing based on cut-and-pastes from Google searches, others moving on to a combination of classic Flarf conventions and newer experiments, others have abandoned it, and so on.
The Romance of Happy Workers is Anne Boyer’s first full book of poetry—she has some chapbooks. Boyer’s poetry is continually other—it moves into new words, new horizons, each one left behind for alive-dead. Metaphors pile up into drifts of semblances, into a maze of associations, until one just takes her word for things. The poetry’s basic philosophical frame is that of change, of flux, of disappearance-reappearance. Here, for instance, is the beginning of her poem, “Lob”:
Stand fast. Grief is a gondola, a compulsive
label, a root canal—not a question of a single
switch at the center of things, but billions
of neurons, endorphins, titans rubbing
their wings. Let the monster wander. See a movie.
*
Here “grief” is, singly, at least five things all at once: a gondola, a compulsive label, and a root canal; it’s also “not a question of a single/ switch at the center of things”; and it’s “billions of neurons, endorphins, [and] titans rubbing/ their wings.” The question, of course, becomes, what does one do with all of this information? Does one process each claim, check it out against the others? How is grief like a root canal? How is it both a compulsive label and yet billions of titans rubbing their wings? Should we care?
My guess is that we shouldn’t—at least not as claims. Boyer has her eyes set on other things. This is poetry of experience, of wonder, of exuberance, of immersion in textual adventure. The author herself often ends up in historical relationships, jarred from chronology, asking questions directly of Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, like where his head might be, or mentioning to him, in a breathlessly comical turn, that she’s read Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. In another poem, “The Romance of Happy Workers,” she straddles Woody Guthrie on a Bolshevik mattress, listens to his “propagandas,” however badly he might smell of pomegranates.
The book displays a heavy interest in history, philosophy, art, and the literary, with a poem involving Keats (“Ode O”), another poem, “A Reader for Those Who Do Not Live in Cities,” made up entirely of lines by Carl Sandburg and Bertolt Brecht, while others are dedicated to fellow writers. The contents of poems refer to El Cid, to Linnaeus, John Locke, Goya, Vermeer, and Hercules. However, these olden figures will be in a mash-up environment of Iowa and Kansas, where Harvester, John Deere, and Pioneer farm equipment dot the horizons. The local becomes universal, and vice-versa, all over again.
One would imagine, given the timewarping, that it would be quite difficult for the poems to be taken seriously, as something more than stunts, but they do achieve this through a palpable drive/passion/power/etc. that acts as the underlying convincing agent. The reader “goes along with” Boyer because she’s certain in tone, because she repeats her convictions, because she gets to the messier, powerful places of lust and violence that govern us, and she’s entertaining along the way. This is not an easy thing to do.
While I have made much of the brasher aspects of the book, there is also significant space given over to touching pieces, free of sentimentality, but not of feeling, like “Sunsets Off.” Here it is in its entirety:
Nothing, too, is a subject:
dusk regulating the blankery.
Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,
fill in the metaphorical smell.
The horizon leaves the same
impression as runway: jet but air.
I wake to a grain bin, the end is near:
jimson and ditchweed, hog and trough.
The first beer can is making
high hopes out of everything.
No wheat is safe from chaff of this,
hullwrecked in Hugoton, thinking of sod.
*
There is a stately confidence to the piece, right from the opening declaration and through the hope for more, for something other to be (note the double “fill in”). The author obviously wishes to be somewhere else, letting us know humorously that the sight of a grain bin is a signal that the end is near. (One can hear Berryman’s “Life, friends, is boring” somewhere beyond the ditchweed.) We note the careful sonic arrangement of “hog and trough,” and the gleeful delay after “making,” and the ringing –ing rhyme with “everything.” This is poetry of what’s in front of one, so to speak, when the texts and historical connections drop away, and one is left with one’s factual life and factual circumstances. Robert Creeley made a career of writing “states of mind/states of mind in states of place” pieces like this one, and they were somehow, amazingly, never boring. Like Creeley’s seemingly simple pieces, Boyer’s “Nothing” above is definitely “something.”
We must not end things here, though, because there is another element of the book that needs mentioning—Boyer’s playfulness. This playfulness can exist in the forms of plot, with our heroine, for instance, dining on quince paste with Woody Guthrie, or by humorously refashioning one of her pieces as similar to an Ezra Pound broadcast (“Poundcast”), or at the most rudimentary level of phrasing, with such oddities as those that fill in her poem, “You Will Want Like Cowboys,” which begins:
I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.
You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.
Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,
words?
*
The words themselves convulse, break apart, sidestep, loosen, run away feverishly in many poems, but mostly they want to be counted, like the humor wants to be counted, like the adventure does, like the silos do, like the nods to Marx do, like the palpable Desire does. Boyer’s poetry challenges us to not sit still, to not allow for the familiar to lose its mystery, and to be in the world, which includes her poetry, as in beginning of the final poem “Valediction Forbidding Apocalypse,” where she says:
Dear tiny autumn of lizards,
dear pigs in attic marble,
dear pit/ quarry/ basement,
dear rock, dear stone, dear flesh:
remarkable this world
drowned anyway—a mass
transiently—this product
of the porous
Saturday, May 24, 2008
This video clip was taken on 9-3-07, on the true summit of Lassen Peak, which I refer to as Mount Lassen in the clip. The summit is at 10,457 ft. The "Lis" I refer to at the end is my wife, Lisa. I may be going to Lassen again this weekend in preparation for climbing Mt. Shasta in less than a month.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Obama's "dignity," his concerted effort of portraying himself as well-mannered, with social graces, has been cultivated as a form for political advantage. It has worked so strongly with voters due to the horrendously insensitive brutalism of George Bush and his domestic and foreign policies (that'd be everything). Americans have no doubt been aware for a few years at least that they are not popular around the world, and this environment has made it personally appealing to many Obama supporters to rectify the "image" of the United States. Obama has stepped in with his preacher voice, his syrupy nonsense of illogical class connections, and has provided a positive face for this problem. It has worked well, because I don't think Americans care so much about the reasons for the world's hatred, as long as the image is prettied up. Surface cleaning, if you will. You'll remember that Obama has voted for continuing the Iraq war every time he's had a chance, which is one of many reasons why the world is disgusted with the U.S. But as long as you're "likeable," that's all that matters.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Today marks 10 years sober. It's quite difficult for me to think that 10 years have passed since I was getting drunk nightly, but there it is.
Being born and raised in Wisconsin positioned me quite substantially in becoming an alcoholic--that seems quite plain to me. Wisconsin is routinely the state with the highest binge-drinkers in the country. It also is the state with the fewest sober people. Of course, these end up being excuses for one's own personal decisions, but the drinking environment, the atmosphere, in Wisconsin is a thing onto itself. I've lived in New York and California now, and these states are extremely mild in drinking atmospheres by comparison. In Wisconsin, it's always right around the corner. The topic is seemingly always in the air. When I was a drinker, I never noticed it; but now I see and hear it all the time.
My own iniation into the ritual of drinking began certainly and basically with being in the room of drinkers, of my family and relatives, all of whom drank to greater and lesser degrees. (The only relative who didn't drink was a recovering alcoholic). This normalized the experience. Further on, I would be given the task of fetching beers for relatives and neighbors, and therefore positioning myself as alcohol delivery person. It moved from a part of the environment to being directly in my hands. I would give these bottles to people I knew and who were friendly to me. It thus seemed to be no problem. Alcohol must be friendly as well, logic implies, if friends and neighbors liked it.
I was also distinctly raised in a German-American household. (We're also a little British and French, but the community was 95% German). Germans like to drink; it's a certain part of the culture. This culture was transported to America, to the heartland, where I grew up. I had my first sip of beer when I was quite young, probably around six or seven. I didn't drink a full beer, though, I don't think, until I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I remember getting drunk with a friend in his father's homemade wine cellar on the 4th of July, my birthday. We emerged from it, stumbling, grabbed the sparklers from our parents, and went running around on the sloping backyard hill. I remember falling down continually, and also the stray light effect of the sparklers.
High school was just a four-year drinking party, full of constant drinking and driving, blackouts, pillow vomit, headaches, parties, sullenness, sexual frustration, depression, addiction to allergy medicines (I liked feeling spaced out), virulent sarcasm, and general distancing from people. It was no surprise then when I was ticketed by the police for drinking on school property during halftime of a girl's volleyball game (another excuse to drink). The news quickly ran up to the school section, and then I had to inform my folks. All of this landed me in an eight-week course for problem drinking. I just laughed it off, unlistening to all the sobering news and statistics. The teachers who led the course must not have been amused--I'm sure they weren't being paid much to run the courses.
What followed was really just more of the same, only more alcohol was needed. I didn't realize, for instance, that I was actually having blackouts, though, until I quit drinking. It just seemed quite normal to not remember anything but compressed seconds--perhaps non-consecutive seconds--from the night before. I ended up with a frayed head eventually, which seems, of course, "normal," because the alcoholic isn't ready to say to him/herself that he/she isn't well. So, frayed head, full of disjunction, full of paranoia, full of suspicion, full of shit, with cowardly sarcasm in tow. Hi, how are you?
Attending the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse University just continued the same behavior, with the added benefit of being around some people just like me. It was like heaven, at least for awhile. But my alcoholism was really growing by leaps and bounds during this period, which came to involve drinking and getting drunk nightly, a pack and a half cigarette smoking habit, one memorable night where I was afraid to actually walk down a flight of stairs, inexcuseable behavior with women, considerable blackouts, and so on. I began to worry a lot about my sanity--this, unfortunately, isn't a joke.
During my second year at Syracuse, I met a professor who was a recovering alcoholic. He took over for a professor who had gotten ill over the winter break. Little did I know then, but this chance encounter helped change my life. At first I couldn't stand listening to him talk in bits about his sober life. It pretty much drove me nuts, to be honest. But because I was enrolled in the course, I had to sit and listen to him. He would talk about poetry mostly, but there would be side areas of his own personal life that would come through. After a few weeks, I began to like him more and more, and my initial defensiveness fell away. I would end up taking six courses with this professor, and he eventually became a good friend outside of class.
There were many more struggles to come from simply putting the bottle down, and several times I've said to my wife that if I knew life would be so difficult after putting down the bottle, I probably never would have. But most other days I'm fine, and thankful.
Being born and raised in Wisconsin positioned me quite substantially in becoming an alcoholic--that seems quite plain to me. Wisconsin is routinely the state with the highest binge-drinkers in the country. It also is the state with the fewest sober people. Of course, these end up being excuses for one's own personal decisions, but the drinking environment, the atmosphere, in Wisconsin is a thing onto itself. I've lived in New York and California now, and these states are extremely mild in drinking atmospheres by comparison. In Wisconsin, it's always right around the corner. The topic is seemingly always in the air. When I was a drinker, I never noticed it; but now I see and hear it all the time.
My own iniation into the ritual of drinking began certainly and basically with being in the room of drinkers, of my family and relatives, all of whom drank to greater and lesser degrees. (The only relative who didn't drink was a recovering alcoholic). This normalized the experience. Further on, I would be given the task of fetching beers for relatives and neighbors, and therefore positioning myself as alcohol delivery person. It moved from a part of the environment to being directly in my hands. I would give these bottles to people I knew and who were friendly to me. It thus seemed to be no problem. Alcohol must be friendly as well, logic implies, if friends and neighbors liked it.
I was also distinctly raised in a German-American household. (We're also a little British and French, but the community was 95% German). Germans like to drink; it's a certain part of the culture. This culture was transported to America, to the heartland, where I grew up. I had my first sip of beer when I was quite young, probably around six or seven. I didn't drink a full beer, though, I don't think, until I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I remember getting drunk with a friend in his father's homemade wine cellar on the 4th of July, my birthday. We emerged from it, stumbling, grabbed the sparklers from our parents, and went running around on the sloping backyard hill. I remember falling down continually, and also the stray light effect of the sparklers.
High school was just a four-year drinking party, full of constant drinking and driving, blackouts, pillow vomit, headaches, parties, sullenness, sexual frustration, depression, addiction to allergy medicines (I liked feeling spaced out), virulent sarcasm, and general distancing from people. It was no surprise then when I was ticketed by the police for drinking on school property during halftime of a girl's volleyball game (another excuse to drink). The news quickly ran up to the school section, and then I had to inform my folks. All of this landed me in an eight-week course for problem drinking. I just laughed it off, unlistening to all the sobering news and statistics. The teachers who led the course must not have been amused--I'm sure they weren't being paid much to run the courses.
What followed was really just more of the same, only more alcohol was needed. I didn't realize, for instance, that I was actually having blackouts, though, until I quit drinking. It just seemed quite normal to not remember anything but compressed seconds--perhaps non-consecutive seconds--from the night before. I ended up with a frayed head eventually, which seems, of course, "normal," because the alcoholic isn't ready to say to him/herself that he/she isn't well. So, frayed head, full of disjunction, full of paranoia, full of suspicion, full of shit, with cowardly sarcasm in tow. Hi, how are you?
Attending the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse University just continued the same behavior, with the added benefit of being around some people just like me. It was like heaven, at least for awhile. But my alcoholism was really growing by leaps and bounds during this period, which came to involve drinking and getting drunk nightly, a pack and a half cigarette smoking habit, one memorable night where I was afraid to actually walk down a flight of stairs, inexcuseable behavior with women, considerable blackouts, and so on. I began to worry a lot about my sanity--this, unfortunately, isn't a joke.
During my second year at Syracuse, I met a professor who was a recovering alcoholic. He took over for a professor who had gotten ill over the winter break. Little did I know then, but this chance encounter helped change my life. At first I couldn't stand listening to him talk in bits about his sober life. It pretty much drove me nuts, to be honest. But because I was enrolled in the course, I had to sit and listen to him. He would talk about poetry mostly, but there would be side areas of his own personal life that would come through. After a few weeks, I began to like him more and more, and my initial defensiveness fell away. I would end up taking six courses with this professor, and he eventually became a good friend outside of class.
There were many more struggles to come from simply putting the bottle down, and several times I've said to my wife that if I knew life would be so difficult after putting down the bottle, I probably never would have. But most other days I'm fine, and thankful.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Hillary's landslide victory in West Virginia really only points out the extreme obvious--that she can win the centrist voters, the Reagan Dems. She's proven that again and again. Obama simply doesn't play to them--there's more than a sense that he's fairly uncomfortable being around those who aren't in his tax bracket; these people are used only for airy abstractions of brotherhood/sisterhood. Hillary is wealthier, in fact, than Obama, but she doesn't seem to be. That seem is all the difference with the middle voters. He's too fluid in his movements, too thin, too in-shape, too "above it all," too polished. I think people don't trust that--they sense there's something false about it all, an image of perfection, an image of severe circumspection, while at the same time being an act of severe circumspection. His preacher tone was a later arrival to the full act, as we learned recently. Hillary comes off as less distant from her roots, I feel. There's something quite middlebrow about her, though she has the same Ivy League background as Obama, and I feel this middlebrowness, too, is something that a majority of people can relate to. The well-educated editors of newspapers and those on television don't seem to understand the group of voters outside of their direct sense of "how things should be." This is especially true, I feel, of the well-educated Obama crowd, especially the youthful end, in that they feel that their interests are everyone's interests. They're simply not.
The battle will not be for how many of the pseudo-liberal Starbucks crowd will vote--they're just a measly percentage of the vote--but how many of the Reagan Dems will vote and who they will vote for. Recent presidential history will tell anyone this is where the game is always played. Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale--all interested in gaining liberals. All losers. I'll cut Gore a break, though. Clinton, in 1992 and 96--moved toward the middle, wooing the Reagan Dems. He won. Bush plays the card of "compassionate conservative" and is helped to win in 2000. In 2004, he's at the height of his warmonger power, sliming everything in Fear and Terrorism and Patriotism, that he wins again, though barely. Kerry was quickly dispatched as liberal waffler, which wasn't true, but he didn't put up a fight about it.
At this moment, I see nothing in Obama that tells me that he's going after the centrists, and I think this will prove his undoing. If McCain can keep himself in check, if he can manage his campaign well enough, I see him prevailing. Now, perhaps the war or the economy will worsen even more, and he will be tied, rightly, to Bush--this may do enough work by itself to unsettle the Reagan Dems to vote against BushMcCain, but it won't be a positive vote for Obama; it'll be a negative vote against BushMcCain.
I voted for Nader in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. I knew the first was a pipedream, but I didn't think the second would be. I was wrong. I should've seen it coming. All of you Obama supporters, if you're diehards, you should be pressing your candidate to talk to the middle, to the centrists. That will get him elected. It's why I've been advocating for Hillary here on Esther, with her warts and all, because I feel she does do that, and this will play a bigger role in the general elections where the winner takes all of the states he or she wins.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
What's not clear from that last video is the drop "over the edge." The drop is the 6th highest in the United States--Feather Falls falls 640 feet. Here's a long view of it from the web:
In the video I am standing right where it goes over the canyon wall.
In the video I am standing right where it goes over the canyon wall.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
In case there's someone still late to the party in understanding the mediocracy's decision to elect Obama, here's that veritable bi-partisan source, John Zogby, of the frequently-used Zogby polls. My favorite even-handed remark by this polling agency CEO:
"Finally, Obama's got his groove back."
Zogby--A Name you can distrust.
*
In other news, it's interesting that the news this past week has been on how well Clinton is defeated. The AP had one today on the once-annointed now falling, the New York Times much the same, etc. Nowhere in the major press is there any mention of Hillary's huge leads in West Virginia and Kentucky. If there is any mention, it's about Oregon, you see, where Obama is clinging to a lead. Spin, spin, spin. Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid.
"Finally, Obama's got his groove back."
Zogby--A Name you can distrust.
*
In other news, it's interesting that the news this past week has been on how well Clinton is defeated. The AP had one today on the once-annointed now falling, the New York Times much the same, etc. Nowhere in the major press is there any mention of Hillary's huge leads in West Virginia and Kentucky. If there is any mention, it's about Oregon, you see, where Obama is clinging to a lead. Spin, spin, spin. Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid.
