Up next: untreatable E. coli.

For some reason Adele was vehemently against the month of May. She acted like it didn’t exist. So for example, May 15th = April 45th & so on

— Adele’s Ex BF (@AdelesExBF) February 19, 2012

So this is happening.

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To…

The counterrevolution.1
This vision.2
The future.3
Equilibrium.4
Extinction 5

Neutrality.6
Spinsterhood.7
Obscurity.8
Oblivion.9

Kelowna.10
The Kremlin.11
The newly renovated Madison Square Garden.12

The fridge.13
The toilet.14
The orifice.15
Orgasm.16

To see the queen.17
Wolf Biermann’s world-revolution.18
Consolidating Grenada as a clone of Cuba and a base for the Soviets.19
The Conan O’Brien show in Toronto.20

The execution.21
The network computer’s funeral.22
A temporary dump.23

The meltdown.24
The moon.25

1 Packing the Court, James MacGregor Burns [source]
2 The Fast Track to Profit, Lee G. Caldwell [source]
3 New York, “I Want My 500 Channels” [source]
4 Statistical Visions in Time, Judy L. Klein [source]
5 Our Haunted Planet, John A. Keel [source]
6 Masters of Illusion, Frank S. Ravitch [source]
7 The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, Joel Kotkin [source]
8 The New York Times, “Against Odds, Web Site Finds Niche” [source]
9 Essays on Business and Information II, Scott M. Shemwell [source]
10 From Consent to Coercion Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz [source]
11 Complete Idiot’s Guide to Nazi Germany, Robert Smith Thompson [source]
12 The New York Times, “Surprisingly, Offense Is a Knicks Weakness” [source]
13 Wealth Strategies, Todd Duncan [source]
14 The Shame of Me, Ryan Lefebvre [source]
15 The Dance of Deception, Harriet Goldhor Lerner [source]
16 Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong, Russ Kick [source]
17 Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, Timothy J. Shannon [source]
18 On the Barricades, and Off, Melvin J. Lasky [source]
19 The Age of Reagan, Steven F. Hayward [source]
20 Meltdown, William Krehm [source]

21 Jewish/Christian/Queer, Frederick S. Roden [source]
22 Computerworld, “A Worthy Legacy” [source]
23 Congressional Record, V. 146, Pt. 3, March 21, 2000 to April 4, 2000, Congress [source]
24 Echoes on the Hardwood, Michael Coffey [source]
25 The Rough Guide To Conspiracy Theories, James McConnachie and Robin Tudge [source]

Related: It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged… and On The Internet Nobody Knows You’re A…

Elon Green writes supply-sider agitprop for ThinkProgress and Alternet. Photo by Ben Hussman, via Flickr.

What’s your favorite cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”? Mine is probably the Marisa Monte version, followed closely by the sloppy R.E.M. rendition. Anyway, here’s The Kills. [Via]

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Ars Poetica for the Future

The Rapture came
and went without incident,

but I put off folding my laundry,
just in case.

Also, from my inbox this morning,
subject header

“Lesbian Torture Camps.”
The mind ricochets like a fly —

is there anything left
for people to do to people?

Meanwhile, my boyfriend
looks forward to the apocalypse

like a retirement party
he pretends he won’t be

attending, like those idiots
in the movies who climb the highest

building, wanting to be the first ones
to welcome the spaceship. In this world,

I’ve given up sleep for dreaming
and art is still our only flying car,

but I can’t recall when anticipation
became the substitute for hope.

Recently, C. said “Now we begin
the poems of our Great Middle Period.”

I imagine digging a series of small
holes, burying poems in Ziploc

baggies. I imagine them as baby teeth
knocked from the present’s mouth.

Erin Belieu’s most recent book of poems is Black Box, from Copper Canyon Press. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, and is a co-founder and co-director of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

Oh the joys and delights that await you right here, in The Poetry Section’s vast archive! What a wonderful time to be alive!

You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Did you know that the nature of fame is different now Because The Internet? Of course you did, you’re not an idiot. You’ve thought about these things. But consider this:

First, on the Web we sometimes make people famous for inexplicable reasons. For example, one of the first Web-famous people was Mahir Cagri, a Turkish photographer whose home page (remember them?) welcomed viewers with a big “I KISS YOU!!!!!” message.
Mahir’s page was the opposite of slick, and his enthusiastic explanation of his interests was in less than perfect English. There was absolutely no reason… for his page (which had been slightly “enhanced” by hackers) to go viral. But it did. Certainly some who passed around the link did so to make mean-spirited fun of a man who turned out to be something of a sweetheart.
But many who shared the link to Cagri’s page did so in part because it asserted that we the audience could make an obscure person famous overnight. It was “sticking it to the old media” that had for so many years rammed commercial nonentities into our brains. And it’s happened countless times.

Leaving the contentions of that argument aside, let me ask you this: What year did “I KISS YOU!!!!!” happen? Click through for the answer, which may, as is the case with so many things in life, surprise you.

The other morning I was walking my kid to school and we crossed Court Street in Brooklyn in front of a car that had an interestingly shaped air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. It was hanging at a slight angle behind the windshield, and so I looked at it for a good few seconds, in effort to confirm that it was what I thought it was. Sure enough: it was a cardboard air-freshener in the shape of fist with a raised middle finger. Like the giant foam hands they sell at sports games or Key West or wherever.

The guy driving the car had a Yankee cap pulled low on his forehead, and there was a kid in the passenger seat who looked to be about the same age as my kid. I figured they were on their way to school, too.

Silly as it was, the air-freshener gave me a chuckle. I enjoy dumb jokes and foul language and the expression of dissatisfaction with the world. So I had a smile on my face when the driver and I made eye contact. I’d been staring through his windshield for a bit longer than people usually do, I realized, and he’d have had no way of knowing that it was the air-freshener I was looking at. He glared at me. As I should have only expected.

I felt compelled to let him know what I was smiling at, though. To let him know that I was not some creepy goofball — or, well, that I was not some creepy goofball making faces at him and his kid through their windshield at 8:00 in the morning for no reason at all.

Of course, there was nothing to do. I was not going to pull my kid over the car and ask the guy to roll down his window so I could explain myself. I considered for a moment that I could make a fist and extend my own middle finger, and point to it and then to the air-freshener, while widening my smile to say, “No, I’m just complimenting your taste in interior auto decor!” But that seemed likelier to exacerbate the situation.

So I just turned away and finished crossing the street.

But I’ve been thinking about a lot since, because of the way the experience (which, haha, that’s a big word for it, isn’t it?) epitomizes what I see as the dominant characteristic of the human condition — the extent to which we’re all cut off from each other all the time, walled off by the fact that we can never fully understand other people and what’s going on inside their heads, and so essentially alone in the universe. Here’s this guy in his car, inside this box of metal and glass, and he’s with a kid, presumably his own kid, and in many ways probably just like me. And there I was, ten feet away, visible to him but sealed off by the metal and glass, but also with a kid and simply wanting to express something friendly, a unifying sentiment: It’s okay to both have kids and also be cranky and find joy in foul language and aggression. (Light aggression, at least from my point of view. I don’t know — maybe the guy goes around punching people in the face in real life.) But there was no way I could get this across. Not in the situation as it was. Probably never, actually. It was like the internet, too, with its famous exacerbation of the difficulty of conveying subtlety and tone. Everything is just so ripe for misunderstanding and strife. Everyone is lonely.

I’m making too much of this, I realize. But it reminded me of a favorite passage from a book that I read recently, Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day, which is wonderful and great and I highly recommend reading. The book tells the story of a man reaching a crisis point in his life because he is struggling with money and has invested a lot of money with a man he is not sure whether or not he can trust. It’s a sad book because the protagonist is a sad man. It’s also about the anomie particularly associated with New York City, where it takes place. And the real core of his sadness comes to light toward the end, on page 91.

Was everybody crazy here? What sort of people did you see? Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking. He had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. “I’m fainting, please get me a little water.” You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons. You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?

Wow! Right? Awesome! I think those are some of the most powerful, true-seeming words I have ever read! I read them again and again and they take my breath away every time. Bellow is one of a handful of writers I can think of who best gets to the fullness, the whole thing, of what it’s like to be a human being living and thinking on the planet earth. (He is sometimes a little dense for me, because I am not the strongest reader, but it’s always worth it, the pushing through.)

And so as depressing as this truth is, the fact that we are all forever cut off from each other. The punishment of hell itself, because we so badly want to be able to meld our minds with other human minds like Spock can in Star Trek — if only to be sure that the other minds are in fact like ours. If only to be sure that we’re not surrounded by robots, or that we’re not the robots ourselves, programmed to think and feel that we’re human like in Bladerunner, or the dupe in a giant scheme concocted by Ed Harris like in The Truman Show. Or even just to be able to say, “I’m laughing with you not at you” in a way that is sure to be believed. As depressing as this is, our inability to ever break through the walls of metal and glass and skull and flesh that keep us essentially alone, when someone is able to reach out and come close, by writing something that resonates to the extent that that Bellow passage does, it’s the best we can hope for. It feels like the reward of heaven.

This is a big circle, I guess, this thinking. And less profound, probably, than it seems to me this morning after three cups of coffee. I’m certainly not the first to have noted it. It’s why blues music works, too. I suppose what I’m most trying to get at is how the fact that each of us is essentially alone, that we’re all born and will die that way, that itself brings us together in a way that can actually be heartening. It’s the opposite of depressing. It makes you think, yes, actually, maybe I could be in love with almost anyone. People, with their silly, aggressive air-fresheners and the frowns on their faces and all, really are the greatest fun.

James Fenton’s highly enjoyable attack on “Downton Abbey” is… highly enjoyable. He may be largely right, that the soap opera has churches composed of the wrong stones and that certain behaviors are… at least improbable. (Also, sure, we all know the “burn victim” mini-plot was an episode of scripting derangement.) But Fenton’s Englishness makes obscure to him the American love of the show, and so he goes far astray in his central criticism.

Here’s where he’s so very wrong:

I mention this apparently gratuitous detail in order to underline the central point of Downton Abbey. The (fictional) Earl of Grantham has three daughters, none of whom can inherit either the title or the estate or — a detail that may seem recondite — the fortune their American mother (played by Elizabeth McGovern) brought with her when, like Consuelo Vanderbilt, she rescued the said abbey and its impecunious family years back. The American money has been “contractually incorporated into the comital entail in perpetuity.” This entail “endows both title and estate exclusively to heirs male.”

To most people this kind of legal technicality may belong to a remote world. But we may suspect that when the Kitchener-Felloweses sit down to dinner, this theme of injustice (the couple thwarted of any prospect of the Khartoum title) won’t go away. And if you feel from time to time that the television series is attempting to enlist your sympathy for a cause that, in your own life, might rank as a low priority (the perpetuation of a gigantic nineteenth-century house and estate) — that is indeed the case.

There could be no greater misunderstanding of the American experience of this, at least. (Those forced to reside in England may relate differently; the English have a class-consciousness and resentment that, in America, we stifle with our inherent belief that we are all rich, or at least, are about to be.) But nothing raises an American hackle like inheritance, estate taxes, wills and family squabbles over family legacy. Americans want nothing more than to keep money in the family, even if they don’t have any. And Americans, at least, naturally and even thoughtlessly identify with the inheritance plot, not least because of the estate being propped up by the American investment of capital via marriage. This is even while Americans retain a reflexive dislike of the rich, of course. We’re a complicated and nuanced people! Or stupid. Hard to say.

Which ice hotel would you stay in? There can be only one.

“How dare he say that polygamy was horrible when it was what his ancestors believed? I believe you should honor your bloodline. I have convicts in my bloodline. I don’t reject them.”
 — Loving you, Romney-torturer Helen Radkey!