Dark Knight Rises = Incoherent Fascism

WARNING!!! PLOT SPOILERS!!!

Media pundits assumed that fans would be disappointed by DARK KNIGHT RISES aka DK RISES no matter what, due to the absence of (dearly departed) Heath Ledger. Ledger's performance of the Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT was deservedly lauded by everyone and their mother, and common wisdom leading up to the release of DK RISES said that Ledger would be irreplaceable.

But while it's true that Tom Hardy's performance as the villainous Bane won't win another Oscar, he's nonetheless the best character in the film. This is not much of a feat. The problem with DK RISES is not the absence of Heath Ledger. The problem is that it's a jumbled, incoherent mess. (It's also explicitly fascist, as explained in this excellent article, but that's a problem for political critique, not film critique.)

An analogy will help. Does anyone remember X-MEN 3: THE LAST STAND? Aside from fundamentally incompetent direction by fundamental incompopoop Brett Ratner, the film fell apart because it was rumored to be the last in the series, so the producers shoved it freaking full of every possible character, trope, and subplot from the X-Men mythology that they could think of. The movie devolved into a series of cameos and lame, referential one-liners (last line in the film: Wolverine says of the Beast, "Not bad, furball." SRSLY?!?!).

DK RISES is also the last in the franchise, and it suffers from the same kind of overstuffed, inelegant plot. The story goes something like this: Batman's been retired for eight years. He spends the first third of the film limping and moping around his house in a bizarrely silly-looking mustache, then comes back from retirement for...well, no reason in particular, I guess (although if you read Frank Miller's comic DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, upon which DK RISES is based (among others), Batman unretires because an attempted mugging reminds him of what adrenaline feels like). The plot wanders for a while until Bane breaks Batman's back, blows some shit up with his army of fanatics, plants a nuke (built out of a fusion reactor, in a vacuously topical nod to Iran) in Gotham, and establishes a state of mob-rule a la Reign of Terror. Meanwhile Batman is rotting in an underground jail in Egypt or somewhere. (Best scene in the movie: Batman's cellmate says, "There's a vertebra sticking out of your back. I must fix it" and then punches him in the back and fixes it [AAHHH!! OBAMACARE!!!]). Batman mopes some more in jail, then escapes and returns to Gotham, where he teams up with Commissioner Gordon and Catwoman to defeat Bane and another surprise villain.

In DK RETURNS as in DK RISES, Batman is old, comes out of retirement, gets his back broken by a muscly skinhead, does some soul-searching, and uses his smarts to beat the skinhead. But in Miller's comic this arc is tight and plausible. In Nolan's new film, on the other hand, post-retirement Batman spends way too much time driving a poorly-rendered CGI flying car and having tearful conversations with his butler Alfred. These conversations revolve around dramatic tension the audience is expected to recall from the previous DARK KNIGHT film, and as such works as an example for how DARK KNIGHT RISES exploits its predecessor rather than telling a story of its own.

Other Character Stuff:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets his own subplot as a Gotham cop, which turns out to be totally irrelevant to the main storyline. We find out just before the credits that he's destined to become Robin, or Nightwing, or something, in some future film that will probably/hopefully never get made. Anne Hathaway's Catwoman isn't too bad when they're not giving her awful lines. BUT! Taking his cue again from DK RETURNS, director Christopher Nolan writes Catwoman as quietly queer...and then ends the film with Batman and Catwoman running away together as lovers. I'm not making this up. This is the conclusion of the film. Batman cures her lesbianic tendencies.

Structural problems aside, there are plenty of technical inconsistencies in the story. For example:
*Robin: how did you know to run to the sewer duct just in the nick of time to rescue Commissioner Gordon, who had disappeared earlier several blocks away?
*Catwoman: how did you know precisely when (i.e. just in the nick of time) and where to drive through the wall into the room where Bane was about to kill Batman? Especially considering that you'd been several miles away, and the room was amidst a giant street battle??
*Cops and Fanatics in said street battle: every single one of you is carrying a gun. Why is there no shooting? How is you Braveheart-esque melee-battle even a little bit plausible?
*Miranda Tate: so if you're really Bane's lover/ally, and you just pretended to be a foxy philanthropist for eight years in order work as a double agent against Bruce Wayne et al, why didn't you show your true colors after Bane apparently defeated Batman/Wayne and subjugated Gotham? Did you know that Batman would escape from prison? If so, why didn't you move to stop him?
*Lucius Fox: so you built a fusion-reactor-machine-thingy to create cheap, clean power for the city, but you and Bruce Wayne wouldn't turn it on because you were so worried that someone might turn it into a bomb, yet you stored it in a giant empty room with zero security, directly underneath the city? Dude, were you worried it would be dangerous or weren't you?
*Batman: so at the end of the film you put the nuke into your flying car and flew off over the ocean, so that the blast wouldn't hurt Gotham. It'd already been established that the cruise control was broken. So you died, and everyone cried a bunch, but then in the last minutes of the film we saw that you'd actually fixed the cruise control and only pretended to die. So...WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? What possible character motivation could you have for such an elaborate, pointless fake-out? Did you read the script? Were you just faking-out the audience? IS THIS MOVING BECOMING SELF-AWARE???

My final gripe is how the film flirts with the 2008 debt crisis and the Occupy Wallstreet protests in a superficial way. Bane's mob-state in Gotham leads to pogroms against rich Gothamites: we see workers and valets dragging pinstripe-suited rich dudes from their mansions. The problem with this tactic is that the character of Batman is fundamentally opposed to social justice: he's a ne'er-do-well billionaire who spends money on high-tech weapons to fight (not solve or mitigate) crime, which is presented as an elemental force rather than a socially-produced phenomenon. Class warfare is a foreign concept to the ethos of Batman. And so, naturally, the film ends up equating class war with terror and death: if you reject American fascism, you'll get foreigner fascism. For Batman and DK RISES, the only alternative to stable inequality is chaotic murder. I could go deeper into this, but Noah Brand has done a much better job in this piece from the Good Men Project explaining how DK RISES, and Nolan's Batman trilogy in general, is explicitly and dangerously pro-fascist.

DK RISES isn't an awful film. Tom Hardy does a great job as Bane, especially in a hair-raising first scene, and there are a few fun moments here and there. But as a follow-up to BATMAN BEGINS and DARK KNIGHT, it's deeply disappointing as a piece of entertainment/art. And, like its predecessors, DK RISES advances a narrative sympathetic to neocons and fascists, in which good strong men battle bad strong men so that the people can enjoy stability.

Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for. Brian Selznick

Brian Selznick (born July 14, 1966) is a Caldecott-winning American author and illustrator of children's books.

RIP Alexander Cockburn

There are numerous obits scattered all over the web recounting all the well-known publications he wrote for, the scathing critiques of...everything and everyone deserving of such, the bitter feud with Christopher Hitchens...

You can read those things yourself. Please do. However, the Alexander Cockburn we knew would stop off occasionally in Olympia, passing through from here to there and back again, to relieve himself of whatever books he happened to have in the boot of his car and chat for a while about this or that. 

He was personable, charming even. He would suggest titles, authors, publishers to stock. And he would listen to you even if you'd never published more than your photo in the high school yearbook. He would listen.

Not many people do that anymore either...

"There's no one thing that's true. It's all true." Ernest Hemingway

A fine one from one of the true masters of brevity. And this Snopes piece is quite interesting, on whether or not Ernest actually authored the infamous six-word short story: "For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn."


The Nobel laureate and author of The Old Man and the Sea was born on this day in 1899.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.

It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him. --Baudouin I (King of Belgium)

Baudouin (Dutch: Boudewijn Albert Karel Leopold Axel Marie Gustaaf van België [ˈbʌu̯dəˌʋɛi̯n ˈɑlbərt ˈkaːrəl ˈleˑjoˑˌpɔlt ˈɑksəl maˑˈri ɣʏsˈtaˑf vɑn ˈbɛlɣijə], French: Baudouin Albert Charles Léopold Axel Marie Gustave de Belgique [bodwɛ̃ albɛʁ ʃaʁl leopɔld aksɛl maʁi ɡystav də bɛlʒik]; 7 September 1930 – 31 July 1993) reigned as King of the Belgians, following his father's abdication, from 1951 until his death in 1993. He was the eldest son of King Leopold III (1901–83) and his first wife, Princess Astrid of Sweden (1905–35). Having had no children, the crown passed on to his brother, Albert II of Belgium, following his death. He is the first cousin of King Harald V of Norway, Princess Astrid of Norway, and Princess Ragnhild of Norway. Baudouin is the French form of his name, the form most commonly used outside Belgium; his Dutch name is Boudewijn. Very rarely, his name is anglicized as Baldwin.

A line is a fuse that's lit. The line smolders, the rhyme explodes – and by a stanza a city is blown to bits. Vladimir Mayakovsky

The Russian poet and playwright was born on this day in 1893.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский) (July 19 [O.S. July 7] 1893 – April 14, 1930) was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright. He is among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. Hunter S. Thompson

Happy Birthday Hunter, from Last Word Books and Press.

The author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was born on this day in 1937.

Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author. He first came to popular attention with the publication of Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), although the work he remains best known for is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), which was first serialised in Rolling Stone magazine.


Thompson became a counter cultural figure as the creator of Gonzo journalism, an experimental style ofreporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He had an inveterate hatred of Richard Nixon, who he claimed represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character"[4] and who he characterised in what many consider to be his best book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. He was known also for his lifelong use ofalcohol and illegal drugs; his love of firearms and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism.


While suffering a bout of health problems, he committed suicide in 2005 at the age of 67.

News snippets from Citizens for a Legitmate Government

A fine news service we subscribe to: http://www.legitgov.org/


Romney flew in people to provide applause at NAACP speech Posted by Lori Price, www.legitgov.org 11 Jul 2012 Governor Mitt Romney 'flew in' non-NAACP people to provide a cheering section for him when he spoke before the NAACP in Houston, Texas, on Wednesday. Romney brought about twenty black 'applauders' into the room. (MSNBC)


Romney at Bain 3 years longer than he stated 12 Jul 2012 Government documents filed by Mitt Romney and Bain Capital say Romney remained chief executive and chairman of the firm three years beyond the date he said he ceded control, even creating five new investment partnerships during that time. Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm's "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president." Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney's state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain "executive" in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.


H1N1 vaccine linked to potentially fatal nervous system condition: study 11 Jul 2012 The swine flu vaccine used during the [lab-generated] pandemic may increase the risk nervous system disorder that causes temporary paralysis almost three fold, a study has found. Researchers in Canada have found that for every million doses of the H1N1 pandemic vaccine that were administered in 2009/10 there were two extra cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome which can be fatal in extreme cases. It was found the increased risk was between 12 per cent and three fold, due to small numbers involved.


Investigator: Arafat died of unknown poison 12 Jul 2012 The death of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was the result of an unknown poison, a Jordanian doctor who started an inquiry in the incident said Thursday. Arafat's medical reports were unable to diagnose the disease, but indications suggest that he was poisoned by a toxic substance that was not examined at the time, said the doctor, Abdullah al- Basheer, in a news conference upon his arrival to the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor, ordered the investigation after Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera aired an investigative report concluding that Arafat was poisoned with radioactive polonium.


WikiWin: Icelandic court orders Visa to process WikiLeaks money --Financial ban lifted in Assange victory 13 Jul 2012 WikiLeaks could be seeing an influx of funds after an Icelandic court ruled that Valitor, the local agent for Visa, broke the law when it stopped taking donations for the website. The court found that Valitor had broken contract laws when it stopped accepting payments sent to WikiLeaks by Visa customers in July 2011. WikiLeaks estimates that move cut its funding by 95 per cent and cost it around $20m in lost donations, leaving it chronically short of cash.

Armed forces told to find extra 3,500 personnel to protect London Olympics --The extra personnel, the equivalent of an infantry brigade, means that 20,000 servicemen and women will be on duty - that is a fifth of the Army. 12 Jul 2012 Pressure is growing on the Home Secretary to explain how a blunder over security at the Olympic Games has caused thousands of military personnel to be drafted in at the last minute. The armed forces have been told to find an extra 3,500 personnel to protect the London Olympics to cover a shortfall in recruitment by a private security firm just a fortnight before the opening ceremony.

MoD fury as soldiers forced to carry out menial security tasks for Olympic Games 11 Jul 2012 Thousands more Armed Forces personnel will be forced to carry out "menial" security work for the Olympic Games, leaving defence chiefs furious. The British Army has been ordered to provide more troops for the Games to make up for a shortfall in staff provided by private security contractors. The Ministry of Defence last year said that 13,500 military personnel would be assigned to Olympic duties, with 7,500 of them in security roles at Olympic venues. It is understood that another 3,500 troops have now been told to prepare for duties at Games sites. More troops have now been given 'notice to move' orders, an Army source revealed.

Firm at centre of Olympic security shambles 'has seen fee rise by £53m' 12 Jul 2012 The company responsible for the Olympic security debacle is being paid £53 million extra for its work, after London 2012 organisers increased its "management fee" almost tenfold. Confidential Home Office documents seen by The Daily Telegraph show that G4S has had its fee for managing civilian security staff for the Games rise from £7.3 million to £60 million. The fee the company takes for running its Olympic office has risen more than 10 times faster than its spending on recruitment, the documents show.

Homeland Security gains more power through new Obama executive order --Secretaries of DHS, DOD to 'serve as federal lead' in crisis 11 Jul 2012 Should disaster strike the U.S., the secretary of Homeland Security will be in charge of re-establishing and prioritizing communications to ensure the continuation of the federal government, according to a new executive order from President Barack Obama. The executive order, signed on Friday [of course], once again expands the powers of the Department of Homeland Security - this time to include the handling of communications during a national security event or natural disaster. The order also allows for DHS to re-establish communications "through the use of commercial, government, and privately owned communications resources, when appropriate."

Navy Beginning to Implement Underwater Drones In Persian Gulf 12 Jul 2012 Amid concerns of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz during a potential [US-generated] crisis, the U.S. Navy is beginning to develop and release a set of underwater drones to find and destroy sea mines present in the Persian Gulf, according to U.S. officials. Multiple news outlets reported Thursday that tensions concerning Iran's nuclear program set in motion the reinforcement of U.S. military personnel and weaponry in the region, specifically in the form of the "SeaFox," a four-foot, 88-pound unmanned, underwater surveillance vehicle that's guided by a remote control.

U.S. moving submersibles to Persian Gulf to oppose Iran 11 Jun 2012 The Navy is rushing dozens of unmanned underwater craft to the Persian Gulf to help detect and destroy mines in a major military buildup aimed at preventing Iran from closing the strategic Strait of Hormuz in the event of a crisis, U.S. officials said. The tiny SeaFox submersibles each carry an underwater television camera, homing sonar and an explosive charge. The first of the SeaFox submersibles arrived in the Gulf in recent weeks, officials said, along with four MH-53 Sea Dragon helicopters and four minesweeping ships, part of a larger buildup of U.S. naval, air and ground forces in the region aimed at Iran.

Stephen King:

Well, you could just go to salon.com and read all this shit your selves, but since you're here you might as well let us guide your reading habits and pleasures. Read this article. Think about your own perceptions of King and his novels, but remember he commands incredible sums of money to write fiction and that said fiction causes countless preteens, teenagers and adults to sit down and read a fucking book. Have your lofty ideals about the nature of Literature, but always remember: there is no literature, no Literature, without readers to discern the difference between strum und drang. Enjoy.

Of course it is possible to be popular and good. Those who hate Stephen King aren't reading closely enough

Look, is there any easier target than Stephen King, the self-proclaimed “Literary Big Mac” of American popular fiction?

As I read Dwight Allen’s piece “My Stephen King Problem,” my personal bat signal went off when I came across the reader comment that “this is the most rambling, dull, unfocused and self-absorbed piece I’ve ever read in Salon.” Hey, I thought, some guy is stealing my act! And then, suitably outraged, I read the article. Which brings up an entirely different kind of outrage.

How shall I put this diplomatically?

Allen’s article isn’t just a bile-drenched, meandering hatchet job, it is a hatchet job with a rusty, dull blade, devoid of insight into anything other than the insecurities of its writer.

It’s hard to understand why someone would want to write a 4,500-word essay about an author’s life work and then boast about how unacquainted you are with the details of that work. It’s clearly theidea of Stephen King that gets under Allen’s skin. A writer who has never condescended to his audience, who literally lived in a garret (OK, trailer) suffering for his art, and then hit it big in ways that Allen can only dream. And now, and this is what really drives Allen crazy, King is being recognized for the vitality and enduring literary quality of his work, by fellow snobs who Allen thinks should know better. This is clearly not fair. It’s one thing to be a rich writer, but, an acclaimed one? Perish the thought.

Not the Harvey Pekar Graphic Novel You'd Expect

Isn't it wonderful how prolific the dead are? Just think of how many albums Tupac put out after his death, or the number of novels Hemingway put out after the shotgun had it's say.

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Harvey Pekar had been collaborating with the comic book artist JT Waldmanon a book project, one that charts the journey from his Zionist upbringing to his questioning of Israel’s role in the world. But Pekar died in July 2010. Still, Waldman continued to work on it, and now it’s about to be published. Peter Kuper describes Not the Israel my Parents Promised Me as “an insightful look at one of the burning topics of our time. With Pekar’s scholarship and humor and JT Waldman’s stylistically varied art, this graphic book is both visually entertaining and highly informative.”

Photograph by Michael Dooley

I met Waldman when he presented to the Association of Jewish Libraries convention in Pasadena a few weeks ago. He was half of a “Jews in Comics” session (I’ll get to the other half, with Arlen Schumer, in an upcoming column), and discussed his assembly ofNot the Israel, both with Pekar and after his death. And as he previewed his pages, I was attracted to the variety of illustration techniques and design layouts he employed, which are much more ambitious and imaginative than the tedious, monotonous drawings and grids so often found in American Splendor stories.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012. Salon is proud to feature content fromImprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America's oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now tosalon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

Hipsters Won't Save Us

Quick little read from salon.com about hipsters. We love articles about the modern, urban elite. Of course, being snobby doesn't necessarily make you elitist, or important. Still, worth reading.

Are 20-somethings with fixies and funny mustaches not America’s true urban saviors? According to a few recent broadsides aimed at “creative class” urbanism, alas, they are not.

In May, an analysis posted on the blog Createquity titled “Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem” asserted that there’s scant data showing a causal link between arts and urban prosperity. A month later, the literary magazine Thirty-Twopublished a first-person essay in which the author cited studies, researchers and his own personal experience as evidence that the premise of the creative-class theory is bunk. (Richard Florida, the urban studies theorist who leads the Creative Class Group,rebutted the essay on his own website, then the author rebutted the rebuttal. Ah, the Internet.) Finally, this week, the literary journal the Baffler took aim at urbanism’s fetish for “vibrancy,” and calledthe coolness-will-save-us model a “Ponzi scheme” that needs to be stopped.

“It is time to acknowledge the truth: that our leaders have nothing to say, really, about any of this. They have nothing to suggest, really, to Cairo, Illinois, or St. Joseph, Missouri,” wrote the author,Thomas Frank. “They have nothing to offer, really, but the same suggestions as before, gussied up with a new set of cliches. They have no idea what to do for places or people that aren’t already successful or that have no prospects of ever becoming cool.”

Whether or not you adhere to the type of urbanism Frank is criticizing, it’s a smart essay, and he makes some sobering points that even many true believers have likely quietly thought about. You hear out there, in dribs and drabs, some angst that much of today’s urbanism, even when its goals are lofty, is too muddled with buzzwords, corporate-speak and privileged points of view. “My New Year’s resolution is never to use the word ‘placemaking’ again,” read one tweet that appeared in my feed last January. “If I hear the term ‘create a new narrative’ one more effing time….STFU,” read another last week.

A lot of this is semantics — the Baffler piece delves deeply into the meaning of “vibrancy,” for instance, and the word “revitalize” is enjoying a resurgence as everyone tries to avoid saying “gentrify.” But the linguistic acrobatics only seem to reinforce the gist of these stories, and suggest there’s a concern, not often talked about, that some of this stuff — the streetcars, the pop-up cafes, the activated spaces, the “vibrancy” — is frivolous and insubstantial. But there’s rarely a real conversation about this, because it’s sort of a touchy subject. No one wants to feel like they’re participating in a movement that’s just a distraction from more pressing problems. Or worse, siphoning off valuable resources for causes that, it turns out, aren’t as important as was hoped. And so the dissent that you do hear is usually from small publications, written by people who aren’t as invested in urbanism as a movement, and briefly acknowledged (if at all) before getting back to business as usual.

This is how it was half a century ago. By the mid-1960s, local activists had been writing for years in community newspapers about the destructiveness of urban renewal policies, that they were doing more harm than good. Meanwhile, the New York Times was still running Op-Eds promoting “the long-standing national goal of tearing down all slums and providing every American family with ‘a safe, decent and sanitary home.’” The Times, along with some of the brightest minds of that generation, was wrong about cities. Some of the ideas that are being implemented might also be wrong — obviously some people think so. So maybe the takeaway from the errors of urban renewal isn’t just that cities don’t need housing projects and freeways, it’s that we don’t know for sure what they need. There’s no shame in discussing this. There’s a lot of gray area between Ponzi scheme and perfection.

Will Doig writes the Dream City column for Salon

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. E.B. White

Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985),[1] usually known as E. B. White, was an American writer. He was a long-time contributor to The New Yorker magazine and a co-author of the widely used English language style guide, The Elements of Style, which is commonly known as "Strunk & White." He also wrote famous books for children, including Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life. Marcel Proust

Happy belated birthday Valentin!


Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

SWAT Raids Organizers of Occupy Seattle

SWAT raid on organizers of Occupy Seattle and E4E By kasama 10 Jul 2012 Early morning July 10, SWAT police forced their way into the Seattle apartment of organizers from the Occupy movement. The sleeping residents scrambled to put on clothes as they were confronted with automatic weapons. Neighbor Natalio Perez heard the attack from downstairs: "Suddenly we heard the bang of their grenade, and the crashing as police entered the apartment. The crashing and stomping continued for a long time as they tore the place apart."

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (née Anne Spencer Morrow; June 22, 1906 – February 7, 2001) was an American author, aviator, and the spouse of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh. She was an acclaimed author whose books and articles spanned the genres of poetry to non-fiction, touching upon topics as diverse as youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment, as well as the role of women in the 20th century. Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea stands as a seminal work in feminist literature.

Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day. Glen Cook

The author of The Black Company was born on this day in 1944.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. Wisława Szymborska

Wisława Szymborska-Włodek [viˈswava ʂɨmˈbɔrska] (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist,translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, which has since become part ofKórnik, she later resided in Kraków until the end of her life. She was described as a "Mozart of Poetry". In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors: although she once remarked in a poem, "Some Like Poetry" ("Niektórzy lubią poezję"), that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art.

Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality". She became better known internationally as a result of this. Her work has been translated into English and many European languages, as well as into Arabic,Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self. Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (German pronunciation: [fʁants ˈkafka]; 3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was an influential German-languageauthor of novels and short stories. Critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as among the greatest writers of the 20th century. The term "Kafkaesque" has become part of the English language.

Kafka was born to middle class, German-speaking, Jewish parents, in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The house in which he was born, on the Old Town Square next to Prague's Church of St Nicholas, now contains a permanent exhibition devoted to the author.

Most of Kafka's writing, including the large body of his unfinished work, was published posthumously.

I love the random smattering of books that folks pick out from Last Earth Distro

Here's a good order a gentleman placed the other day:

Complete Hand Grenades

Principles of Improvised Explosive Devices

Brown's Alcohol Motor Fuel 

Treehouses

Techniques of Safecracking

One is happy once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience. George Sand

Amantine (also "Amandine") Lucile Aurore Dupin (French pronunciation: [amɑ̃tin lysil oʁɔʁ dypɛ̃], later Baroness (French: baronne) Dudevant (Paris, 1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand(French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ sɑ̃d]), was a French novelist and memoirist.

How to be Civil to Wolves, pt. 2

(Here's a link to How to be Civil to Wolves, Pt. 1)

I was hit in the face on my way to work last week, cutting my nose in two places and covering it with blood. The person who hit me was either crazy or drugged or both: as I walked to meet my carpool at 5:40am, I saw a tall black man* muttering and pacing and gesturing. I nodded to him as I walked past; he said "You wanna roll?" (or something similar; my memory is scattered); I said, "No thank you." Before I knew it, he'd walked up to me and backhanded me. Shocked, I continued walking, around the corner. After a minute, I went back to talk to him, but he was gone.

*(Admission: it's an American cliche that when middle class white folks get mugged by large black men, all they can remember is that they're big, black, and armed. A character on The Wire called this "BNBG: Big Negro, Big Gun" syndrome. Similarly, I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't remember the facial features of the man who hit me, though this fact just reinforces what I already knew: that as an American, racist ideology is inside me, whether I like it or not. I do recall that he wore rings on his pointer- and ring-fingers.)

After my ride picked me up, I saw the man again on the side of the road and asked to pull over. I got out and tried to engage him, saying "Excuse me, can I talk to you?" He was not willing, or able, to talk with me: he just kept cycling through outrage. I wasn't able to understand most of what he said, but it included something about "Aryan nation" (did he think I was a skinhead?). I told him, "You hurt me," and he replied, "And how do you like it?" Winning against me seemed very important to him: he told me to say, "I'm the bitch," and I did, hoping that by refusing to act like a threat to him, I might convince him to engage me. To no effect: I finally just got back into the car and went to work. My coworkers speculated that he might have been on crystal meth; evidently Olympia is a former national capitol for that drug.

I'm proud of my response, and I think it had a lot to do with my background as a caretaker for people who were sometimes violent and irrational. On the one hand, I didn't escalate the situation: I didn't try to fight him or threaten him. I swallowed the impulse to prove my masculinity by fighting a crazy person. On the other hand, I didn't run away, and thus allow his violence and threats dictate my behavior: I just kept walking, and then tried to talk with him. I neither engaged in force nor bowed before it: I refused to participate in violence, and instead tried to reframe the relation between us. In ethical terms, I did what I could to treat him as a person, rather than a threat or adversary or object (and I treated myself as a person, and not an instrument, by being ready to run or fight or get help if I needed to). And though I failed to engage him in dialogue, I can at least take comfort in the fact that I didn't reinforce his use of violence as a way to engage other people.

I'm unable to find a source for this, but I seem to recall Vietnam-era Secretary of State Henry Kissenger famously saying something to the effect that "Our air-bombings against the Vietcong are our way of communicating with them," and I think that this is an important observation. Violence is a kind of discourse, a sort of "language" or norm of communication. Violence is symbolic; it means something beyond itself.