If Only She'd Had My Vote to Lose

The City of Wasilla, home of Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, has responded to "a flurry" of requests and begun today to release public files to the media. Anyone with access to the internet can access the documents through the City of Wasilla's website here.

One item of interest to me is the city's response to requests regarding Palin's book-banning attempts. According to The New York Times, Palin attempted to have Wasilla's librarian fired for "disloyalty" (apparently a big Palin peeve) after she resisted the then-mayor's suggestions that book-banning ought to be considered. The firing attempt was blocked by public outcry.

According to the city's records, no books were actually banned as a result. Good. Nonetheless, this raises some serious questions about Sarah Palin's commitment to democratic (small d) ideals.

For now, there's plenty to dig through. Kuddos to Wasilla for releasing these documents to the public. Assuming they weren't thoroughly scrubbed.

It's Funny How the Truth Sounds Like Poetry

Picked up a copy of Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse today in the Barnes and Noble discount section. It was marked down from $26 to $4. Meanwhile, reality show DVD's were selling like full-priced hot cakes.

Neither here nor there.

I'm 12 pages in and already the prose pounds like a machine gun playing Bach's own harpsichord. Here, look:

"The day before I wrote this, Carlos Arredondo, 44, of Miama, Florida, jumped into a military van, dumped out a five-gallon canister of gasoline over himself and lit it, burning up half his body. Minutes before, the MPs who stopped the van at his house told him his only son was shot dead in Iraq. Neighbors said Arredondo went crazy. I don't think so. I think he went sane."

Harry Potter and the Order of the Crazypants

Dude. James Carville is totally Voldemort!

Although if James Carville is Voldemort, then George W. Bush is not, which means that John McCain is not his horcrux after all.

This theory requires massaging.

Myriad-Minded

When I was small, my parents, in their (I have come to increasingly realize) great wisdom enrolled me in a wide variety of extracurricular activities ranging from clarinet to karate, from riding horses to rowing canoes. One of these activities was acting, and I remember spending one summer taking classes from the fine thespians at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre.

The only problem with taking acting lessons from actual actors is that you're taking acting lessons from actual actors. I assume anyone who has ever met an actual actor will take my point. One day in improv class (the sort of painful activity in which a room full of 12-year-olds pretend to be donkeys and CEO's) our instructor burst into an utterly unsolicited monologue (or was it some sort of schizophrenic soliloquy?) in which he bemoaned the lack of soul, soul, in our performances and decried the shallow, materialistic culture that was clearly responsible for superficial and desultory acting.

Midway through what was probably the first nervous breakdown I'd witnessed, our poor instructor cried out "Have any of you even read any Shakespeare?!?!" Painfully geeky, painfully honest, it never occurred to me to do anything other than pathetically raise my hand and assure the poor man that I'd read Julius Caesar out of curiosity when I was 10. Tears literally sprang to the man's eyes, at which point he spun himself into some sort of fit involving shouts of "Children in Africa are starving to death and only one of you has ever read Shakespeare! Oh the HUMANITY!" Predictably, the 20 other children in the room stared at me as though I'd suddenly spouted an extra head (the contents of which they perhaps would have required to successfully crack a tome of the bard, but that's neither here nor there).

The lesson I took from all of this is that unashamed intelligence, while occasionally appealing to the acutely insane, or the insanely acute, to the well-socialized it is off-putting at best. And that I didn't want to be an actor.

Actually, the classes were pretty great once I got a Romulan cloaking device for the second head (and if American electoral politics teach us nothing else, Americans have very short memories). But some days I think I'd recommend canoeing.

Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes

When I was small my father began to feed me a steady diet of science fiction — Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkein, Le Guin. I read the greats (and great I found them). But the book that unquestionably struck me most on a visceral level, on an intellectual level, on a "bring it to your creative writing class on share-an-author day" level, was Harlan Ellison's collection of short stories, I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream. The name alone is the stuff that most writers would sacrifice a limb to have invented, but the short story by the same name is one of the most wretchedly fantastic dystopian tales I have ever read. That story made me feel like my brain had been transformed into violin strings upon which something angry and Bach-ish was being furiously bowed.

So, you know, I know he's kind of an ass (he was expelled from Ohio State for allegedly hitting a professor who criticized his writing; he has sent said professor a copy of every story he's published for the past 40 years), but I can't help but harbor a soft spot for Harlan Ellison.

This is why I found his essay criticizing the WGA (of which he is a longtime member) writers' contract so utterly delightful. Highlights include, "My gorge has become buoyant," and "While this nutty festschrift of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won't be saying nasty shit behind your back, remember this: You are their bitches."

Confessions of a Burgeoning Bookaphobe

Ye gods. I think going to college made me stop reading. I'd like a little less irony with my coffee next time, universe.

I used to read so much that it's a wonder my eyes didn't liquify and dribble right down my face. I have memories of my mother steering me across parking lots because I refused to put my book down long enough to locate the crosswalk; I remember having to read sentences in three or four word snippets as my parents' car passed under streetlights. I was that kid in that movie with that flashlight under the covers, entranced by dragons or detectives or dastardly deeds long after lights out.

Then I went to college.

Somewhere in between mathematically constructing a fractal and learning how to deconstruct my ontology, I think I forgot how to read. I mean sure, I can still technically read. I do it all the time - street signs, news magazines, cable bills. It's still a compulsion. Hand me a box of toothpaste and I'll probably read the back of it. I think my husband actually tried that once.

But I don't know how to read. I'm somewhere in between chapters six and seventeen in probably five different books, but I can't seem to keep my brain from skittering away to some other diversion. I don't know if it was the working three jobs or the crazy college newspaper deadlines or the being forced to digest and intelligently respond to anywhere from 20 to 200 pages of material each day, but something about getting all book-learned sure has made me book-leery. And if I can't read anymore, how in the world am I supposed to write?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Shut up emo kid.

Dealbreakers

I've been thinking a lot about what makes a plot untenable for me - those elements the presence of which makes a book unreadable, a show unwatchable (or a person unbearable). Everyone's got them. My sister-in-law, for example, couldn't deal with watching Trainspotting after she had children due to the creepy dead baby scene. Me, I can jive with creepy dead babies, but there are a few things that will send me walking right out of a theatre.

The first, of course, is violence against dogs. Go ahead and chop a guy's head off, eat someone's face, but shank Fido and you're dead to me. Not only is it virtually impossible for me to process on a purely personal level (because, you know, PUPPY!) but I also think it's a cheap trick. Killing a dog is a guaranteed way to tweak your audience's emotions without having to do any work. Conversely, killing off a sympathetic human character means you have to go through the hassle of actually creating a sympathetic character first. Dogs come all pre-symphathized. Much to my chagrin, otherwise decent movies and books fall into this trap all too often - I mean, did Johnny Depp really need to nail his own dog to the door in Secret Window?** Blech.

My second dealbreaker is unnecessary jingoism. Granted, you expect a certain amount of patriotic rah-rahing in, say, Saving Private Ryan. But when it shows up randomly in some romantic comedy or a comic book adaptation geared toward filterless kiddies, it officially enters the Land of Lame. The most recent offender I've seen was Transformers. There I sat, happily watching a beloved childhood cartoon made CGI-flesh, when all of the sudden I was bombarded with a slew on non-plot-enhancing pro-military mumbo jumbo. Oh! And Spiderman 3? With the gratuitous American flag cameo? Why? It pulls me out of the plot and annoys me to no end. If I wanted an earful about how fabulous the good old U. S. of A. is, I'd turn on FOX News.

My third and final dealbreaker is the presence of one Teddy Dunn of Veronica Mars fame. Or rather, "fame." This one is highly subjective, involving my deep aversion to talentless hacks. Moving on.

So what are your dealbreakers? (Nobody say spaceships or I'll cry.)

** And now your moment of Zen:

An imdb search in quest of Secret Window's title revealed that Johnny Depp's trademark is apparently "highly defined cheekbones." Huh.