riley dog

And that "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" seem like transparent attempts to create out of thin air holidays that are nakedly about nothing but celebrating consumer consumption at its rawest, most primal. Or, greedy. I observe in this regard that all local media in the NYC area yesterday sent reporters to the Valley Stream WalMart where raw consumer consumption last Black Friday got someone trampled to death. This year you will be relieved to know, as every goddamn local TV and radio station reported, nobody got killed on their way to enjoying the bargains they need in order to correctly celebrate the holiday that Fox News informs us is properly understood as a celebration of Christ, as opposed to something not Christian, but perhaps pagan, or maybe pro-big government and anti-free-market.

And people bitch about Kwanzaa being "phony." Maybe they should call it Cyber-Kwanzaa Wednesday and give everyone 15% off tube socks and Wiis. Legitimacy at last!

The other thing is, for a world-historical triumphant ideological titan, capitalism sure seems to need a shitload of silly propaganda to keep people believing in it.

Just the other week I was driving into NYC and heard some goofball on one of the news stations explaining how "nobody ever knows they're in the middle of a bubble," which may be true, but is hardly the same thing as saying that bubbles aren't totally fucking obvious to people who aren't getting rich off nonsense. (Toej: "Nobody on coke realizes they aren't actually incredibly cool.")

If you missed the imbecility of the 90s internet bubble, say, well, how hopelessly dumb were you? The housing market stuff of the oughts also was kind of obvious, and not even in retrospect. A "bubble" doesn't mean anything else but a lot of people buying into a lot of happy horseshit and then flinging it around. Guess what the people who said "nobody could have seen that coming" are covered in.

Mention the word "slush" to anyone who's worked in publishing for longer than five minutes, and you're likely to get an expression of sheer horror. Slush pile is a term used to refer to the collective mass of unsolicited manuscripts and query letters—novel or nonfiction synopses with a few sample pages attached—that daily deluges the offices of agents and editors throughout the industry. Occasional hits emerge from the morass: Twilight began as an unsolicited query. But far, far more often, the slush pile's contents are a cross section of the staggeringly mediocre and the truly deranged, the balance of humdrum-to-nutball shifting depending on the week, the season, and (I swear) the phases of the moon. As an assistant to a literary agent, my job is to act as a human spam filter, picking out the rare promising tidbit to pass on to my boss and deflecting the rest with a polite but firm form rejection.

The world of the unsolicited query is a strange one, populated by renegade aliens, evil Russian scientists, and improbably large-breasted women. Apocalypse is often pending. Aliens figure prominently, as do the Mafia, strong and silent men, vampires, demons, angels (fallen, guardian, tempted/ing, various degrees of smutty), disturbingly racist visions of extremist Muslim terrorists, passive and lascivious women from a variety of tropical locales, black gangsters, and money-grubbing Jews. Potential audiences in the millions are cited (e.g., "There are 3,456,787 people who like horses in the United States, all of whom will read my book Love on Four Hooves"). The query's author is regularly the next Dan Brown/Stephenie Meyer/William Faulkner or some combination of the above.

Any given morning might bring the Old Testament rewritten by George Bush Sr., a management guide whose author is possessed by the spirit of Nikola Tesla, a 200,000-word epic about a Nazi-­battling rocket scientist, picture books featuring woodland creatures with nauseatingly alliterative monikers (Tippy Tommy Turtle, etc.), erotic poetry about Santa Claus: book ideas so startlingly awful I cannot even make them up, but must wait for them to arrive in the inbox one after another with the regularity of a metronome.

the coming of
THE WASHING-UP ARTIST

He is trampling out
THE CLEAN HOUSE ARTIST

where the grapes of wrath are
THE BATH ARTIST (II)
The truth is, I accidentally let out the water, though not the bubbles, from the tub. Refilling, with more soap, is what yielded that superior foam. Art is the genius of utilizing accident.

ARMSTRONG: Exactly, exactly. There's a running sore of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has been festering for so long, and has become symbolic of everything that Muslims feel that is wrong with the modern world. Just as here, in the United States, fundamentalists have symbolic issues, abortion, uh, and evolution, which they can't see rationally, but they've become symbolic of ... of the evils of modernity. The state of Israel, which meant that Palestinians lost their home, has become for Muslims a symbol of their impotence in the modern world.

It wasn't always like this. At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. Some of them even said that the Europeans, they didn't know about America yet, that the Europeans, uh, were better Muslims than they themselves, because their modern society had enabled them to create a fairer and more just distribution of wealth, than was possible in their pre-modern climates, and that accorded more perfectly with the vision of the Quran.

Then there was the experience of colonialism under Britain and France, experiences like Suez, the Iranian revolution, Israel, and some people, not all by any means, uh, some people have allowed this ... these series of disasters to corrode into hatred. Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

MOYERS: On a cross, crucified.

ARMSTRONG: The cross, crucified, and that turned into victory. Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength. But against the West, it's been able to make no headway, and this is as disturbing for Muslims as the discoveries of Darwin have been to some Christians. The Quran says that if you live according to the Quranic ideal, implementing justice in your society, then your society will prosper, because this is the way human beings are supposed to live. But whatever they do, they cannot seem to get Muslim history back on track, and this has led some, and only a minority, it must be said, to desperate conclusions.

MOYERS: You said once that you felt the fundamentalists were trying to restore God to the world.

ARMSTRONG: Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.

MOYERS: They drag God back into the political world by denying democratic aspirations.

ARMSTRONG: Yes.

MOYERS: I mean, do you think democracy and fundamentalism are, uh, can co-exist?

ARMSTRONG: Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

It must have been the last drink
that made me feel like this.
A woman looking in a store window
stood the way you do;
a man drove a truck with a child
in his lap and somehow this touched me.

I saw everything with such affection,
it had to be that last drink
that made me think of love as a relief
instead of the relief of nothing to love,
and I flirted with a waitress to celebrate
but she never came back.

The women I thought about
always had someplace to go,
and guessing where you were today
only made me drunker:
the loveliness of being held;
the quiet in which you are reading.