David Bromwich: The Dying Art of Political Explanation

David Bromwich: The Dying Art of Political Explanation: "Foreign corporate dollars are being used to take American jobs away from Americans. It sounds a little different when you put it that way. The drain will be good for American owners -- those not inhibited by sentimental patriotic feelings -- and bad for American workers. The Republican party and rich Americans who don't care how they get richer will thus acquire a new power and, with it, a dangerous detachment from American life. What is at stake then, in the talk about the Chamber of Commerce, is not only the future of the Democratic party but the fate of American workers. In this case, their interests happen to coincide."

David Bromwich: The Dying Art of Political Explanation

David Bromwich: The Dying Art of Political Explanation: "President Obama continues to think himself a victim of circumstance; and whether the Republicans win a small or a large victory in November, he expects they will come into the next congress more willing to deal with him than ever before:"

Arianna Huffington: Choking on Its Contrived Objectivity, the Media Refuse to Take a Stand on Sanity

Arianna Huffington: Choking on Its Contrived Objectivity, the Media Refuse to Take a Stand on Sanity: "The media didn't take positions on the most insane events of the last ten years, so, the thinking seems to be, why start now? It certainly explains why, as our political process becomes more and more insane, the media act like guests at a dinner party ignoring the fact that the guy sitting at the end of the table is proceeding to set it on fire. You want to say, 'Uh, yeah, the wine is very good, thanks, but does anybody else notice that guy over there with the gasoline and the Zippo lighter?' But pointing out the insanity would be 'partisan.' Better not to rock the boat... even as it's sinking."

Tea Party Frontrunner: Abolish Public Schools | Mother Jones

Tea Party Frontrunner: Abolish Public Schools | Mother Jones: "It's fairly common for conservative political candidates to support eliminating the federal Department of Education. But in California, tea party darling and congressional candidate David Harmer has gone further. He's advocated eliminating public schools entirely and returning education to 'the way things worked through the first century of American nationhood,' when educational opportunities for poor people, African-Americans, women, the disabled, and others were, to say the least, extremely limited."

Lincoln Mitchell: Rahm Emanuel's Legacy

Lincoln Mitchell: Rahm Emanuel's Legacy: "One of the reasons why the Obama candidacy was so refreshing was because it created the potential for a Democratic president who could recognize the limits and problems of the Clinton presidency. This was particularly important with regards to the economic crisis where understanding that the roots of the dreadful state of the economy when Obama came into office were in the economic policies of both Clinton and Bush, although the latter to a greater degree, was necessary if real reform was going to occur. Without embracing this reality, the possibility of fundamental change was inevitably very slim. The appointment of Emanuel was the beginning of the end of this possibility."

tuxguys has made a comment on TEN WHEEL DRIVE Eye of the Needle: Yup, it don't get no bigger than this... I have lived with this cut for almost exactly 40 years... It is an epitome of its time: Iron Butterfly meets BS&T meets Janis... ...and it is, also, timeless.

NEW REVIEW ON KINDLE FOR ELEPHANT

Meticulously well researched and wonderfully written; historically accurate yet containing all of the elements of (true) high drama. Experiencing Consider the Elephant is like savoring dark chocolate in a world of imitation cocoa. I wish I could see this brought (intact) to the big screen or HBO. Aram Schefrin has captured everything; the times, the people, the events. Simply a marvelous work of story telling. Bravo Mr. Schefrin!

THE NIGHT BLOOMING CEREUS (from the opera "Mrs Lincoln in Chicago")

FILLMORE EAST SCHEDULE

TEN WHEEL DRIVE FEATURING ANNIE SUTTON: WHO AM I?

MORNING MUCH BETTER - TEN WHEEL DRIVE

TWEET ON ITUNES

Three songs by Tweet Petite's Onions - "There It Is," "Twice In My Life" and "Where's the Heart?" - are now available on iTunes, Amazon and other internet download sites. The collection is called "Hype Vaccine." Come on. Show Tweet you care. He's gotta find some way to make some money off this blog.

THERE IT IS

TWEET PETITE SINGS!

The 112 year old guitarist gets together with Ten Wheel Drive.

RADIO FOR CATHEDRALS

WCBS FM DJ Joe Causi has started playing "Cathedrals" on his radio show and has been introducing it as "The greatest dance classic of all time!"

AIRFARE

They're playing "Eye of the Needle" on Airtran, Expressjet, Frontier and JetBlue.

TUESDAYS WITH DIOGENES (9/22/09)

1.

I don’t live in New York anymore. Which, for the purposes of this story, is just as well. When I did live in New York, about thirty years ago, the streets were full of homeless people – sleeping over the blasts of hot air that came up from the subway grates, or on broken benches in the parks, or at the Port Authority Bus Station. Sometimes you found them sleeping in the lobby of your building – particularly if you lived on the Upper West Side, as I was at the time I left town, where doormen were (then) rare.

But Rudy Giuliani kicked them out, because they uglified his city – and they were annoying too, even if they weren’t cadging for cash. Annoying by just being there and reminding you of something, like there but for the grace of God … and last week’s paycheck …

He kicked them into New Jersey, which was already ugly. If they were smart, they somehow hiked down 95 and ended up in Florida. You know, weather matters a lot when you don’t have a roof.

They don’t uglify Palm Beach, where I live. You would think Palm Beachers would let them into their town so they’d know there were people around who were uglier than they. But that’s not how they see it. They actually think they are beautiful (they should be, for what they spend on it). So they look down on people who are simply ordinary. They don’t need to feel superior to a real human mess.

Where the Florida homeless actually sleep I have no idea. But if I want to find one, I simply get on 95, drive to an exit, and come to a stop at the light.

Of course, I never wanted to find one. What the hell for? If they say they’re willing to work for food, what work do I have for them? I’m not going to replace my chef or my gardener with a homeless man; even if it turned out they were better at the work, I have a reputation to uphold, and I can just imagine what my fired chef would gleefully tell my neighbors on Jungle Road. And my butler is required to know what Palm Beach expects of me.

The good thing is that, as I’ve noticed, they’ll only walk down one or two cars when the light is red, holding out something like a KFC bucket for cash. They don’t go any further, even while the light’s still red. Either they’re lazy, as Ronnie Reagan said, or they’re pre-discouraged. They figure the thing is useless. Why court rejection?

I can understand that. I don’t like rejection myself, even though it’s been thirty years since I’ve experienced it. Well - one little one ...

So I had never spoken to one of them. Before Diogenes.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, about 2:30, on a very hot, clear September day. Temps in the low 90’s. Relentless sun. Who says Bentley knows how to air condition a car?

I don’t work – not in the sense that I have to be anywhere. My fourth novel sold ten million copies, as did my fifth, sixth and seventh. After that, I ran out of ideas. I tortured myself over that a while, until I realized that, financially speaking, I never had to write another word. And that I didn’t need to punish myself for having nothing to say. If everyone who had nothing to say did that, we’d be swimming a sea of agony. I hadn’t met anyone for two years who had had something to say. After I realized how apparently happy they all were at being idealess, I figured I could be comfortable in that state.

Of course, I was kidding myself. As I soon found out.

I usually spent some part of each day at my financial advisor’s. I forgot – they call themselves wealth managers now. In their world, if you have ten dollars, that is your wealth. Of course, if that’s what you’ve got, you don’t get through their door.

I had spent many years under the financial guidance of one or another zhlub at outfits like Smith Barney and E.F. Hutton-that-was. Until I realized that they had gotten rich having as little knowledge of finance as I had had of writing. I made a few lucky guesses; so did they. I finally figured out that if every college kid was going to work on virtual Wall Street, there had to be plenty of “wealth managers” who were dummies and had no clue.

So now that I had street cred – bundles of dough – I went looking for someone who advised only the very rich. I assumed any one who survived in that business had to be good, or they would have been found floating one night face down in the Intracoastal. Thank God I avoided Madoff – although I have to say a lot of the local Jews told me I had to go with him, and that if I did I would get invited to dinner at the best homes. I figured that anyone who did not wish to have dinner with the author of four blockbuster novels, unless he banked with Madoff, was someone it wasn’t necessary that I meet.

The guy I had now – it was a woman, actually – had given me some excellent advice. And, so far, no bad advice, which is far more important. There was something about her that made me want to sleep with her. I wasn’t sure whether it was her somewhat attractive looks – actually, her tiny turned-up nose was her only alluring feature – or whether it was her competence that was seducing me. In the end, it didn’t matter, because she said no. That was the little one.

This particular Tuesday I was headed for her office, to make another futile attempt, when I was distracted by one of my peculiarities: I needed to eat a cheeseburger at a dirty restaurant. I suppose they reminded me of happy days of yore, eating cheeseburgers in my innocence on Thompson and Bleecker Streets. Like, I happened to be in Nobody’s, on Bleecker Street, the night David Clayton Thomas got his ear bit off in there.

This was not a healthy practice – but then I had no healthy practices.

I protected my unhealthy practices furiously, since I assumed they had been one of the reasons for the success of my books. Which is why I never went to a shrink, even when I needed one. I didn’t want them to mess with the sources of my creativity, even by accident. Neither I nor they (the generic “they”, i.e., the shrinks I didn’t go to) had any real concept of what those sources were. As far as I knew, if they’d adjusted the way I flossed my teeth, my creative urges could have been wiped out by the change. As it turned out, it wasn’t my dental habits that killed them. I have no idea why I can’t write.

So I turned off 95 at Atlantic Avenue, intending to go east into Delray Beach and eat a burger in a place I knew to be disgusting enough to satisfy my urge.

As I sat at the light, I noticed to my left, off the roadway under the 95 overpass, one of those big concrete tubes they use for highway drainage projects. Work on Atlantic Avenue had been going on for a while. As it happened, the tube was laid horizontal to the avenue, so I could see through it from my driver’s seat. Or almost through it.

Because curled up in the tube, like a snail, at the end closest to me, was the dirtiest man I had ever seen.

He might have been dead, for all I knew. He didn’t move. And then I saw him open his eyes and fix them on me. And even from fifty feet away I was caught by those eyes. I saw that they were brilliant, which suggested brilliance behind them. And I knew, though I didn’t understand why, that I had to talk to him.

There was no place to park on Atlantic around 95, so I pulled off onto the grass to my left, turned my blinkers on, got out and took a long look at the front left tire, which was not in the view of the traffic coming off 95. Then I ambled over to the concrete tube.

His long hair was ratty and matted. It wasn’t so much he was coated as that he was thoroughly smudged. He wore a stained Hawaiian shirt, stained khaki pants and a pair of holed tennis shoes. No socks, but nobody around Palm Beach wore socks. I figured this was his concession to local style.

His eyes continued to engage mine as I approached him. When I got nearly to him, he grinned – his teeth were surprisingly good – and said: “Okay, ten bucks, I help you change your tire. Far as I can see, it ain’t flat – but for ten bucks I will play along with your delusion.”

“It isn’t flat,” I answered. Assuring him that I knew.

“So then why you come over here?”

“Because I wanted to talk to you.”

“Talk to me,” he drawled, still grinning. “You mean to tell or ask?”

“I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

“I bet you do. But go ahead, ask away.”

I crouched, so as to get my face level with his. He didn’t look any better from closer up. But he didn’t look any worse.

“You live here?” I asked him.

“Not particularly. Plenty of these tubes all over the place.”

“You’re like a hermit crab.”

“Accurate simile.”

That set me aback. And had me leaning forward, too. “Are you disabled?” I asked.

“In a way.”

“What way?”

“That’s a awful personal question,” he scowled. “From some Bentley-driving stranger.”

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“It ain’t physical. I can walk, I can talk, I can lift my own weight, and my dick comes up when I want it to.”

I couldn’t imagine what chance he would get to use it. He knew that’s what I was thinking, and he laughed.

“You be surprised who wants to fuck me.”

“Would I?”

“Sure. Might be one of your neighbors. What they say – no accounting for tastes?” He saw that had intrigued me. “Jaguar pulls up to this corner near every other day. Parks right where you did. Fuck in the back seat. Sweet thing, always wearing pearls. Don’t take her dress off, just hike it up, sits on my lap and rolls on my Johnson. Don’t wear undies. None of them do. Secrets of the clean pristine. Come like a locomotive.”

“And after that?”

“After that? She reach out and hug me, hold me close. Sometimes she start to cry. Say she wishes she could take me home, but … “you know how it is.” I say “How is it?” But she don’t answer me. I say, “Look, if I’m good enough to fuck, I’m good enough to love.” And she says, “I do love you. Now get out of the car.”

I said: “Doesn’t that bother you?”

He laughed again. “Why should it? I don’t want to live her life. She take me home, I be gone inside a week. She have to come back here to find me, and it start all over again.”

“So you like your life …”

“Not what I like that matters. More what I want to avoid.”

“Which is?”

“You want to know that, better next time bring a chair. You ain’t got the knees for that conversation.”

“You’ll talk to me again?” I said, a bit surprised.

“Yeah. Any time she ain’t here. She gets priority, out of respect.”

I asked: “Do you talk to her like this?”

“No. She climbs right on. But I would, if she wanted to. Don’t know a thing about her, and she don’t know a thing about me. Kinda sad, you know. But the fucking is glorious.”

"That’s rare,” I chuckled.

He picked up a hand and stuck a finger out at me. “That what you think? Nobody’s fault but yours, Bentley. Every fuck is glorious, far as I’m concerned. She could stink of puke, it still be glorious. She letting you up in her innards. She giving her secret to you. You understand that, and you give her back what she giving you, ain’t no such thing as an inglorious fuck.”

Wish I’d known that thirty years ago.

“What’s your disability, then?” I went on.

“I don’t think like normal people do.”

“You mean you’re learning disabled?”

“Me?” Now he guffawed. “It’s you all who can’t learn what I know.”

And I heard myself saying: “Teach me.” And meaning it. Shocking myself down to the soles of my shoes.

“Ask the right questions,” he said. “And listen to what I respond. You manage that, you way ahead of the rest of them. You think you can do that, Bentley?”

I promised: “I will try.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. “I be in this tube next Tuesday.”

Copyright 2009 Aram Schefrin

TO READ CONTINUING CHAPTERS, GO TO TWEETPETITE.COM AND CLICK ON THE DIOGENES LOGO.

MARWAN AT MIAMI BOOK FAIR

My novel Marwan will be at the Miami Book Fair November 8-15. Check it out at the AuthorHouse pavilion.

WHERE'D HE GET IT?

I just finished reading Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." At first I found it a delightful conceit - that Israel had lost the 1948 war and that the Jews had been given a temporary refuge in Alaska. But then I read on. Chabon needed a denouement, and it's quite possible I have figured out where he got it.

The denouement begins on page 290, on which Chabon describes an armed camp surrounded by electrified fence, inside of which is a herd of cows. (See page 14, etc., of "The Tenth Cow," and page 130 etc.) On page 295 one of Chabon's cows is identified as the red heifer (TC page 20). On the same page the significance of the red heifer is explained (TC page 95). Contained within this explanation is the note that temple artifacts would have to be reconstructed for the Messiah to come (TC page 105). On page 312 a scheme begins to be outlined. On page 315 it is explained that for the scheme to be successful, the Dome of the Rock must be destroyed (TC page 118). A character, talking about the Dome, says "It isn't a mosque, Meyerle. It's a shrine." The line in TC at page 26 is "People will tell you it's a mosque, but it isn't; it's a shrine."

On page 322 Chabon begins to imply that there is a US government plot, using the red heifer, to destroy the Dome, rebuild the Temple and usher in the time of Messiah. That is central to TC, and it does not appear in any other source before TC. It suggests that the FAA has destroyed a file relating to this cow - as opposed to the Israeli agencies discussed by Teddy in TC. On 323, Chabon states that a group of messianic Jews have banded together to attack the Dome - another central element of TC. On page 324 Chabon invents the Moriah Institute as deeply involved in the plot. In TC it was the Bar Kochba Institute. Chabon states that American Jews are financing this plot - another central tenet of TC.

On page 330 Chabon describes recreated Temple implements displayed on pedestals (TC at page 103). On 331 he describes a scale model of the Temple (TC at 102 and 93). On page 336 Chabon states that the red heifer was born in Oregon and then flown into the Alaskan Jewish community (TC at 59, where the heifer is flown from Florida to Israel - and remember Alaska for Chabon is a stand-in for Israel). On page 339 Chabon states that the plot fulfills the divinely inspired mission of the president of America - again, a major point in TC. On page 342, Chabon posits that Christian fundamentalists are behind the plot (TC at page 190). On page 344 he explains that some Orthodox Jews are opposed to the plot on theological grounds (TC at page 101). On page 345 he explains that the red heifer was produced by in vitro fertilization - going not quite as far as TC did in implying that the heifer was not the result of a normal reproduction process. And, finally, Chabon implicates a former Jewish terrorist in the plot to blow up the Dome (see Shaya's father in TC) - although in Chabon's book the Dome is blown up, while in TC the plot is frustrated.

I should note that throughout Chabon's book there are offhand references to a talking chicken announcing the coming of the Messiah. In TC it was a talking carp - referencing a true story I drew from the New York Times.

And so on.

Now, it is possible that Chabon came up with this stuff through reading the same source material I did, and through the same reasoning process - although the similarities to TC are striking, particularly in how the material is fit together.

But at the end of his book Chabon lists a number of sources. Not one of them would be a source for information on the red heifer or any of the points I noted above that he made. He does say that he initially wrote a six-hundred page draft with the same characters, but a completely different story. Where did the new story come from?

Chabon's book was first published in 2007. The print version of TC came out in 2008. But the podcast version of TC - which was a reading of the book - was published in 2005 and 2006. And, if I remember right, the Tenth Cow website was put up in 2006.

So - just sayin'

TENTH COW IS IPHONE APP

My novel "The Tenth Cow" is now an iPhone app. Get it in the iTunes app store. This is an updated version to take into account political changes since the first publication.

HELP!

I have written a libretto based on Mary Todd Lincoln's incarceration in a mental hospital. I had a composer to set to score it, but he has gotten too busy. As it is some of my best work, I have posted it online here. If anyone knows a composer who would like to work with it, please let me know by commenting on this post.