Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes.
[…]
This may sound like a fantasy—but it has all happened. The name of this parallel universe is Britain.
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All the cuts in housing subsidies, driving all those people out of their homes, are part of a package of cuts to the poor, adding up to £7 billion. Yet the magazine Private Eye reported that one company alone—Vodafone, one of Britain’s leading cellphone firms—owed an outstanding bill of £6 billion to the British taxpayers. According to Private Eye, Vodaphone had been refusing to pay for years, claiming that a crucial part of its business ran through a post office box in ultra-low-tax Luxembourg.
“No, ladies in bands don’t get ANY action,” Neko Case, a woman Playboy readers once deemed the “Sexiest Babe of Indie Rock,” tweeted on Saturday. “Back me up ladies. no one believes this.”
But there was to be no life-changing climactic scene at my hockey game, no angry announcements by Au Revoire, no black roses thrown out on the ice, no outbursts or outings or murders. What happened was, when we came out from the locker room to start the third period he was simply, poof, gone from the stands, my friends and my coaches and my parents all none the wiser. I guess it makes sense — what could he have said, really, what could he have done, that wouldn’t have made him look like the bad guy, the predator, the creep, when in fact the real villain was me?
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Isn’t that the ultimate blessing of the Internet? Sure, it lets you lie and deceive. But it also lets you confess, and draw a small community to your confession, and find, eventually, a clean, well-lighted place for your real self.
Little Big Numbers
OR: Alec – How to be an Artist, and why some stories are just too fucking massive not to be told
As a writer of some of the best autobiographical fiction around, Campbell’s talent for using the right story at the right time has been carefully honed over the years, so it’s no surprise that account of the story of Big Numbers adds to the totality of How to be an Artist. The factors that prevented the series’ completion have just the right mixture of the predictable and the arbitrary, the personal and the financial, to bring Campbell’s narrative home, and you find yourself truly appreciating the depth of Campbell’s craft when you figure this out.
On a third, even more careful reading, however, you realised that How to be an Artist doesn’t just contain the story of the unmaking of Big Numbers, but that it actually is Big Numbers. Or at least, it’s Campbell’s version of it – let’s call it Little Big Numbers, for silliness’s sake.
ALEC: The Years Have Pants has my highest recommendation. At the very least, it’s very thick and will prop open the stoutest of doors.
For as Watanabe said in the film when asked why he wasn’t angry at being stymied and turned down over and over again by the politicians and bureaucrats who preferred the status quo of doing nothing rather than taking action to help others:
I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.
I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X [sic] is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.
The lampshade’s current proprietor […] won’t keep it in his home and says that, even now that it’s here, safely in storage, he feels more at ease when he knows the shade is shut away in its white cardboard box. The longer I am left alone with it, standing by a window as the daylight is beginning to fade, the more I can understand why.
He wasn’t especially careful with his repainting, which is a clue to how closely he expected people to look. Art historians have noticed his change of mind, and it has been said that before the early 1920s, Mondrian thought of his compositions as part of an infinite plane, which could go on indefinitely in all directions. Starting with paintings like this one, the canvas is the whole object, the whole universe, and there is nothing beyond it.
[…] they’ve evidently been friends for years.
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Le Guin works very comfortably under the mantle of science fiction, having penned some of the classics of the genre, while Atwood waffles, preferring to stay in the mainstream literary conversation.
With respect to SF, Le Guin is invariably right and Atwood is almost always wrong.
Atwood: “What about Star Wars?”
Le Guin: “There have been really few science fiction movies. They have mostly been fantasies, with spaceships.”
