I bought a pair of black low top All Stars yesterday. I paid way too much for them and I felt an acid build up in my stomach supporting Converse (which is of course, NIKE), but I closed my eyes and bought them anyway. I need sneakers. Everyday weekend running around shoes that weren't my actually running shoes and that I could slip on and off at the back door. When I saw them I had a pang of worry that I couldn't carry them off anymore. This was quickly replaced by a "Fuck that!" and so I sat through the humiliation of having some barely conscious baggy-panted dude in a striped referee's shirt ask me what size I needed. "Dude" brought me the shoes and then instantly ninja'd away to text his girlfriend and I tried on my Chucks.
I got my first Chucks in Grade 12 in 1988. They were red high tops and my boyfriend at the time gave them to me because they didn't fit him. He also gave me a pair of green low tops which didn't fit well but I bore the pain anyway. I went on to get all-black high tops in New York that I wore all the way through the early nineties. I saw Seaweed and SNFU with those shoes. I saw The Jesus Lizard and left before this unheard of band, Nirvana, played. I threw up on those shoes, spilt fish and chip batter on them and sloshed beer on the toes. I was wearing those Chucks when Bill Stevenson from ALL said he wanted to sleep with me.
And so with "Dude" no where in sight, and my nine year old daughter offering encouragement, I walked up to the counter and bought the overpriced and exploiting fuckers. Fuck they feel good. And you bet your ass I can pull it off. I just wish I didn't feel so dirty.
You're a liar. No one has read Infinite Jest.
Which is hilarious because it is probably mostly true. Infinite Jest is huge.
HUGE. It is like 2000 pages of small 10pt arial font densely compacted. It is an epic travel over four or five years of a young brilliant, drug experimenting Tennis hopeful, Hal Incandenza, in the "near but distant future". Oh, and it is about his family,friends and intertwining plot webs that connect randomly or nonrandomly over the course of these few years. Once you pick up the book and weigh its tomeishness in your hands and flip open the pages to the see the tiny tiny font, you also realize that the main chapters are really only a thousand pages. The second thousand pages are FOOTNOTES. Yes, footnotes. However, unlike most footnotes(which don't usually appear in long fiction anyway), these tell more detail of the plot in focus and begin to weave other plot angles all on their own.
The characters are brilliantly funny and tragic, the drug excursions are hilarious, and Wallace's "near but distant future" is so creative and satirical that it is both ridiculous and totally believable. To get you started, Hal starts out the story in The Year of Glad. Yes, the US (who has cluelessly convinced Mexico and Canada to form the "Organization of North American Nations" or ONAN) has finally sold the Year Calendar to corporate sponsors to make money. Just wait for The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad.
Infinite Jest is old. It came out in 1996 and I probably read it the first
time in 1997. Yes, the FIRST time. I have read it three times. One, because I have a shitty memory and the thing is huge and two, because it is that fucking GOOD. It is my deserted island choice.
So, Buy it and read it. I dare you. And then let me know, because I have actually never met someone who has read it- and I LOVE talking about it.
The statistics on women and COPD paint a disturbing picture:
-Lung Association Report 2006
- In 2005, 425,300 Canadian women 35 years of age or over self reported a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (1)
- In 2003, 4,383 women died from COPD in Canada (2). As a comparison, in 2003, 5,060 women died of breast cancer (3)
- COPD affects 4.8 per cent of women, 3.9 per cent of men (4)
November 20, 2007
New Lung Association research: Millions more may have COPD than previously estimated
Findings show deadly breathing disease remains seriously under-diagnosedOttawa, ON, November 20, 2007 – Startling research findings released today by The Lung Association demonstrate that as many as three million Canadians may have COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), Canada's fourth leading cause of death. This is nearly double previous estimates and includes over one and a half million (1.6 million) undiagnosed Canadians (1) and one and a half million (1.5 million) who say they currently suffer from this chronic lung disease.
The research also shows that the disease is highly prevalent among younger Canadian baby boomers - one in seven Canadians aged 45 to 49 (375,000) may have COPD.
This research confirms recent global prevalence data published in The Lancet which states "…evidence suggests that rates of disease (COPD) are generally underestimated."
Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in 1970 and her M.A. in 1972. The same year she married a teacher at the university, the poet Donald Hall. After their marriage they moved to Eagle Pond Road in Wilmont, New Hampshire, which had been the home of Hall's family for several generations.
Although Kenyon was to write joyously about her life in rural New Hampshire, she suffered from severe depression throughout her marriage, and her final poems document her struggle against leukemia. Her first book, Let Evening Come, was published in 1990. She described the quiet life she led with her husband in many poems, but she and Hall were also well known through his books about life on their farm. Shortly before her death they were the subject of a television documentary that depicted their shared life of poetry and the changing seasons of their rural countryside.
Kenyon's poetry is delicate and subtle, a poetry of shadings and quiet musings. The poet Carol Muske wrote of her, "These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant."
-Taken from Bedford/St. Martin's Poetry site
There's just no accounting for happiness
or the way it turns up like a prodigal ...
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who files a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town,and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
-Jane Kenyon
Here is a little sample "Don't".
Go to www.viceland.com and read for yourself.
In the September 3 2006 Botson Globe, the Ideas section had an interview with Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, founders of Bitch magazine.
I found this segment particularly interesting:
IDEAS: Are there mainstream outlets you think are doing a good job of addressing feminist issues?
ZEISLER: Elle Magazine actually grapples with a lot of the same issues that feminists are grappling with. But in the context of a fashion magazine it's often not really seen as feminism.
IDEAS: How come?
Isn't it just the thinking that counts?JERVIS: When feminist content is stuck between the pages of how to put on eye shadow and what skirt you need to buy for next season, it can feel really schizophrenic. Feminist values, in my opinion, are in opposition to that kind of consumer-driven ethos.
ZEISLER:
The mainstream media feels the need to define stuff against the word feminism: Is it feminist, is it not feminist, is it antifeminist? A lot of people are still scared of the word. But if we can convey that calling yourself a feminist doesn't mean that you have to stop wearing lipstick or shopping or whatever, that's good. I would rather have fashion magazines acknowledge that there is no perfect idealism and there's always going to be a compromise, but you should still go out and call yourself a feminist anyhow.
Anyway, back to Elle. In every issue I have read, there has been a hard
hitting, well-written, and surprisingly objective journalist article. In the
past two months, they have had a discussion of "feminism" and actually asked the question "are you a feminist" to some prominent young women. I can't find this article online so I will scan it when I get time.
The October issue also has a review of self proclaimed anti-feminist Caitlin
Flanagan, entitled "Who's the fairest wife of all?". This is a well written and critical piece by columnist Laurie Abraham.
I am a feminist and I read Elle.
I went through all of my reading material the first few days in Africa. I found a worn paperback copy of Jarhead in my room and I haven't been able to put it down since. I am not really a big war book fan, but I have read a few spy books and being in a compound surrounded by burly Texans and Scots felt a lot like a few episodes of M*A*S*H, so it felt appropriate. I really had no idea what I was picking up. I seem to recall some sort of furor about it a few years ago, and from the paperback cover I can see that they made a movie about it (I know, I suck. Apparently I was living in a cave at the time) but that is pretty much all the background I had before starting the first page. By the end of the first chapter it was clear that Anthony Swofford is a shit-hot writer and that I was going to get a glimpse into the raw, fragile psyche of a young man who has not only seen and done some serious shit, but who has also done some serious analysis of himself and of the USMC.
The following paragraph from the first chapter has stuck with me for days. Swofford is talking about how, after getting their orders, his unit goes out and gets every war movie they can find and then they sit and watch and drink and get themselves ready for combat. Swofford talks about the ironic fact that our most famous anti war movies, movies that the general population would list as being commentaries on the cruelty and uselessess of war, are actually fuel that fires the murderous agression in these young military minded men.
Filmic images of carnage and death are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his First Fuck. It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar--the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.
