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  hardie karges 8:42 am on July 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Crusade, Iraq ( 2 ), ISLAM ( 67 )   

  The Iraq war drags on and on endlessly, no end in sight. 

  They don’t want us there, so why don’t we just leave? Politics. We can’t leave until we’ve created something there in our own image and likeness. All for the love of oil we dust off our ideals and polish our principles. Unfortunately it’s much bigger than Iraq. It’s the new Crusade between Islam and everyone else. They want the world in their image and likeness every bit as much as Bush. There may not be a compromise possible to the Muslim issue. It’s hardball politics. They’ve got oil-derived wealth and intend to use it for political leverage. They feel they have a right to convert moderate Islamic states into religious theocracies with medieval fundamentalist overtones and undercurrents, regardless of who is inconvenienced and aggrieved. The situation reminds me of the American Indian’s encounter with Europeans. There is a just a fundamental clash of goals and values. Only now the stakes are higher, with Soviet-era surplus nuclear weapons unaccounted for. We’ll just have to wean ourselves from oil first, and then let the politics sort itself out. We’ll have to do it sooner or later anyway, so the sooner, the better.

   

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  hardie karges 6:51 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), Europe ( 19 )   

  America itself has seen better days. 

  It’s lonely at the top, pretending to know what’s best for everybody else when you can’t even solve your own problems, pretending you’re on the side of history when you haven’t even read the book. It’s lonely at the top, bullying the rest of the world into submission for their own good, whether they like it or not. I want my revolution back. I want the moral upper hand. I want to carry the flag of peace, love, and understanding through the streets demanding justice. I want to solve the world’s problems and still maintain the standard of living to which I’ve become accustomed. Europeans have got the best of all possible worlds right now- high standard of living, cheap Slavic labor, and potentially the world’s most powerful single government, if and when they decide to commit. Let the US fuck up first; there’s no hurry. I guess they deserve it, after all they’ve been through. It’s hard being the world leader. Nobody appreciates it; everybody resents it. But it seems like somebody’s got to take the lead, and I can’t say who I’d rather have, except maybe Europe. I fear the US is falling behind Europe intellectually. Country people may be the nicest people in the world, but that doesn’t mean they’re the smartest. Now that Europe has finally and unequivocally thrown off the yoke of the Church and the Party, they’re the standard bearer for liberal democracy, while the US increasingly looks like a frumpy old housewife and her grumpy old redneck husband. Processing kids through school, pass or fail, does not set new standards of excellence. Society pays for it in the long run. Urbanity does not guarantee intellectual achievement any more than rural life prevents it. It’s a matter of intent and discipline. There’s no shortcut to intellect; you gotta’ do the work.
   
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  hardie karges 10:10 am on July 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 )   

  America is a rural nation, corn-fed and sex-starved, 

  finding satisfaction in a Bud and a Bible, leaving the heavy thinking and the hard drinking to those who gravitated to the bright lights and the long nights. America is a cow grazing on fields of time, clock ticking. The Northeast is the brains; the Pacific Coast is the business end of recycling and reproduction, fucking and farting. The Midwest contains the internal organs and heavy machinery; the South is the seamy underbelly, tits to the task; the West is a vast side of beef, awaiting the day of reckoning and rendering. America wants common sense back in the world without realizing that there was never common sense in the world. Our ancestors crowded onto boats with little thought as to what lay on the other side except that it couldn’t be any worse than what lay at home. The days of amber waves of grain and purple mountains majestic are numbered and available for hire. Automated tractors turn circles in circular fields while conveyor belts carry eggs to market. Tourists flock to the mountains to see if there’s anything they forgot. Things have never been better for the average individual.

   
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  hardie karges 9:03 am on July 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), protest ( 2 ), WAR ( 11 )   

  America is still a largely rural nation, 

  about 70%, in sharp contrast to much of Europe, where the figure is not only 90%, but it’s been that way for a hundred years. Only Portugal remains predominantly rural. As much as I like country life, cities tend to be more liberal and tolerant. I suppose a good compromise is small cities, with countryside nearby for commuting when necessary. That’s what I’ve always preferred, actually. Who wants to live out in the middle of nowhere with no access to the amenities of culture? The states that rejected George W. in 2004 rim the East and West coasts where the cities are. The Pacific Northwest is as politically progressive as any place in the world, environmentalist and independent. It has been called the “last bastion of the terminally hip”. There’s worse insults, I suppose, worse than being accused of having ideals and caring about preserving them. Maybe some of the affectations are a bit dated, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it, except for the drugs, that is. There’s plenty wrong with that. The ideals may not solve anything, just as it didn’t in Vietnam, but they help us re-define ourselves and our direction as a society. If Congress re-instates the draft, then the shit will really hit the fan. The 60’s protests weren’t really about the war, after all; they were about the draft. Selfish interest can always accomplish far more than abstract ideals. George W. may just re-kindle the whole movement with his fascist attitude. Many of us wouldn’t mind “one more time” and the kids might love it. We just need a Nixon to unite against.

   
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  hardie karges 12:06 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), communism ( 21 ), Europe ( 19 )   

  € vs $ 

  The world takes perverse pleasure poking through America’s underwear, digging through the trash, looking for anything incriminating- blood, shit, pee stains, bank statements, whatever it takes to prove what they’ve always known, i.e. ‘it’ll never work’, or maybe ‘they’re stupid’. Forget the fact that America invents the world, regardless of who ends up being the monkey on the production line screwing things up and bolting them down. Forget the fact that, by virtue of her leadership role, America has to take responsibility for nearly everything that happens in the world, whether she had any role in it or not. Forget the fact that things have probably never been better, materially at least, in the world, and that the life we live is virtually identical with what used to be called ‘the American Dream’. Now that Western Europe no longer needs the protection of America against the big bad Russians and the gray spectral cloud of world Communism, they feel free to insult us ad nauseum ad infinitum, disregarding the fact that we ARE them, genetically and culturally, though presumably the black sheep, in their opinion, I guess. Perhaps it’s a feature of human nature to disparage what is close in character but distant in geography. I hope they DO unite and assume world leadership. Let them fuck up again, as they used to do so well.

   
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  hardie karges 8:32 am on July 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), DARK AGES ( 2 )   

  AMERICA BASHING 

  America-bashing is reaching new heights in the Iraq War aftermath. I know why people hate America. That’s obvious, because she’s arrogant. What I’d like to know is: why is everybody, particularly Europeans, so interested in poking around in America’s closet? The national debt, the savings rate, obesity levels, whatever, it’s like foreigners are keeping score or placing bets or something, mostly betting that America will lose, I assume. Americans are in the game also, though they tend to be conspiracy theorists rather than outright anti-American. Conspiracy theorists look for sinister plots and causal connections to explain the evil running rampant in the world. These they will definitely find, though more likely originating in their own imagination, than in some deep dark archives. Get lives, people! Admittedly America has lost her leadership position in the world, but this doesn’t mean everybody gets to take cheap shots whenever they want. Who cares what America’s debt is? If America had no debt, then the rest of the world would have no dollars! It’s not a perfect system, capitalism. Most systems aren’t. The European attitude is obviously disingenuous if not outright jealous. They had their chance to fuck up the world, of course, and did quite a grand job of it, before almost self-destructing in the World Wars. The United States sacrificed her radical roots to police the world and save Europe from the bear grip of Communism from which it might never have emerged, thereafter to be known as the Dark Ages, whose causes would never be known. The world is looking increasingly multi-polar with America, China, and Europe jockeying for first rights. Islam is making a play, but I doubt that the world is really ready for a new Dark Age. Life’s just too good for most people, giving the lie to conspiracy, and many can still remember the last Dark Age. Of course, it may happen whether we like it or not, literally, if the lights go out when the oil is all gone.

   
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  hardie karges 10:56 am on July 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: novels ( 2 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  The great American novel 

  is the great American travel book is the great American screenplay is the great American whatever, pretentious in concept, grandiose in scope. There’s no reason to write anything else, really. There’s no reason to do anything in life except contemplate the moment of your death. Everything else is just trivia, facts and figures, characters and plots. I can think of a few plots I’d like to put some of those characters in. They’re all fake, abstractions of abstractions, stories about stories. Not that I didn’t try the same thing myself. I did. I still do. I ran imaginary people through imaginary situations, sending them up trees, throwing rocks at them, then looking for ways to get them down. The only good parts were the digressions, the spontaneous emissions, slips of the tongue, slices of reality in an otherwise bland pound cake. I was just making it all up. There are no good novels anymore, just stories, fabrications coming out of thousands of tiny fantasy factories lining the back streets of New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, all screaming for your loyalty and your pocketbooks’ attentions. If there has to be some objective measurement of ‘what’s good’, then let it be money. Otherwise we swim in our opinions with no hope of resolution.

   
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  hardie karges 9:10 am on July 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Beat poets, novels ( 2 ), POETRY ( 12 )   

  The death of the novel 

  was proclaimed by a few pretentious college students a few decades ago. Strangely enough, they were probably right. Forget the ‘brilliant characterizations’ and all that crap. Every character in every novel not based on actual people is some aspect of the writer himself. Let’s drop the pretense of ‘objectivity’. It doesn’t exist. The only thing we know, if we indeed really even know that, is ourselves, our lives, our perceptions. Esse est percipi. The only real novels are the non-novels, reality bubbling through the filter of consciousness. Nothing really good’s been done since the Beats liberated the ink from the pen. Automatic writing is the best kind. If that’s ‘typing’, then this is word processing. Poetry is an inside joke, and as if it’s not bad enough, that the best modern art has to be explained in words to be appreciated (thank you, Tom Wolfe), then imagine the irony of poets having to hang their words from Christmas trees to be noticed. Forget dangling participles. Modern poetry closes a stanza with a dangling subject and starts the next with its almost-forgotten predicate, and loves every minute of it, almost reveling in the total and deliberate obfuscation of meaning, as if there were something quaint and entirely too old-fashioned about that.

   
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  hardie karges 8:16 am on June 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING ( 13 )   

  A CALL TO LITERARY ACTION 

  Where is the great literature of Century 21? What will it be like? As challenging as it might seem to create something that can be equally a sign of the times and a map to the future, especially in an era as highly impressive as ours is technologically, the path may lie imbedded in that very fact. I think it’s time for literature, poetry, science fiction, and ‘action’ fiction storytelling to merge into a new form. Literature is largely uninspired and uninspiring story-telling, less compelling than its poor cousin, pulp fiction. Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists. . Poetry is totally divorced from the real world of politics and Pontiacs, farther still the cutting edges of subconscious and verbal innovation. Poetry has not had anything heroic since the Beats shook things up. Since then it has gone right back to where it was before, garden parties for the upper class and their mutual admiration society. Only ‘slam’ poetry has added some new force to the field, though it doesn’t hold up as well on paper as on stage with its bro’, rap music. Even popular music in general has stagnated, reduced to formulas and re-hash. The new literature should be a combination of new science, revived poetic cutting-edge language, action story telling, and broad vision.

  maximumfiction is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    maximumfiction 11:25 am on November 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    “Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists.”

    Read the novel _Terrestrials_ by Paul West. Paul is an acclaimed stylist who, in _Terrestrials_, who bravely, if briefly, stepped into the genre. The result is stunning.

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  hardie karges 8:26 am on June 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING ( 13 )   

  TO EACH HER OWN 

  One American author whose name will go unmentioned, not because of my higher ethics but because I’ve never heard of her, has got the ironic balls to declare that a large number of award-winning authors are masters of what she calls, with no apparent self-consciousness, ‘suckitude’. She’s talking about literature, mind you, something that I doubt her tidy little plots could even pretend to. Okay, she’s been published, so one up on many others, but that’s what defines ‘hackitude’, right? It’s like the old saying “shit happens”; “shit gets published”. She even pretends on her web site (surprise, surprise) to advise other writers on the dangers of literary agents while steadily plugging her own agent and her own contrived stories of international intrigue. It’s a sad day when authors denigrate the best of their lot to exalt the most mundane, as if Shakespeare were really all about the lives and actions of a lot of distinct individuals in specific situations. Shakespeare was all about immortal individuals in universal situations. Modern literature has a chance to do one better by liberating the situations from the characters, in short: stories about nothing, writing about everything, literature without stories.