Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Oh, crap... What really annoys me is that there's more than enough reality-based angst to be had around North Korea pretty much telling the UN to go fuck itself. Putin's increasingly autocratic and (possibly) murderous regime in Ruslia, the determination of governments from Wellywood to Washington to squint past China's malfeasances at the hint of market access etc. without spinning off into paranoiac conspiracy mongering,
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That is one of my big fears in life, that I'm gonna die, you know, and my parents are gonna come to clean out my apartment, find that porno wing I've been adding onto for years. There'll be two funerals that day.
Heh, anyone with a sense of humour should acquaint themselves with the work of Florence King- the world's funniest misanthropic bisexual feminist conservative :)
The Florence King Reader is still in print (I think) and a bloody good place to start, containing extracts from her brilliant and brilliantly caustic autobiography, essay collections, columns and book reviews. An added bonus is the whole of her hilarious - and sadly only - novel, When Sisterhood Was In Flower which has something to offend everyone.
But as Miss King says in her author's note:
I did not include any samples of my true confessions or porns. [...] In any case, I threw [them] out years ago and kept only the contract letters, It was a matter of pride. Living alone as I do, I started to worry that if I should die suddenly and the authorities had to enter my apartment, they would find the porns and think I read them. I don't care if people know I wrote porn, as long as they don't think I read it.
Well, I see her point.
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Now the bonus round, Darryl: Are you a wonderfully well-educated literary man, with a fine memory, or did you Google it? Hey, you get the virtual sweet anyhow I'm just curious. Love Larkin, but his stock seems to have devalued enormously since his death for all the wrong reasons - bad politics, misanthropic, something of a chateau-bottled shit when it came to women etc. Bad day when our poets have to be saints as well.
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Sorry for the self-promotion, but I've got a take on the Virginia Tech shooting that has nothing to do with gun control, Islam, geographical confusion (Korea, China, whatever), or whether I'd have the stones to take on a lunatic armed only with a fully-loaded fountain pen and a legal pad.
Along with the podcast, there will be (when I pull finger from arse and get it finished) a transcript, along with special extra features: Links to stories alluded to, other pertinent and thoughtful commentary, and some rather moving commentary from the more obscure corners of the blogisphere.
Also, if anyone is feeling pretty masochistic, I'm finally about ready to re-launch my not dead, only resting blog High Windows (virtual chocolate fish to anyone who knows where the title came from). The idea is to try being someone who can be passionate without being shrill and self-righteous, political without being a total ideologue, and something like Wordsworth's a Happy Warrior. Failing that, let's see if I can be an amusing pleasant way to waste a couple of minutes. :)
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And how quickly does tragedy turn into a black farce? Try lthis:
Pastor Fred, a/k/a/ Fred Waldron Phelps Sr., who refers to himself and his grown children as “the most hated family in America,” claims he and his Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist ‘church’ –which is made up almost entirely of his own offspring– are heading to Virginia Tech in order to ‘protest’ the funerals of the slain students and professors. He claims he will use bullhorns and that his family will carry large placards saying some version of “God Hates Virginia Tech.” He claims his ‘gospel’ for the occasion will be, ‘God is glad that the students and professors at VT were slain; that the massacre was God’s happy retribution for the USA’s love of homosexuals.’
Pastor Fred’s modus operandi is to appear, rather like Rodan, over funerals at disaster sites, funerals of fallen soldiers who served in Iraqi, funerals of persons who have died of AIDS, and essentially any funeral that big media cameras and journalists are known to be covering.
His strategy is to position himself and his family in as close proximity to the funeral corteges and graveside rituals as possible, to position himself and his family within crystal clear hearing of the grieving families and friends….all in order to unleash an acid screed on the innocent mourners.
My God... there are times when your faith in the fundamental decency of man, and democratic values that say you cant kick the crap out of people exercising their democratic freedoms in a manner you find repugnant, are sorely tested.
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I found the wall to wall coverage of Cho's video and 'manifesto' pretty disgusting - isn't it just giving that loser what he wanted?
Yes, but I bet NBC News's ratings, website hits and trackbacks, Google ranking, Nexis-Lexis hits etc. all went through the roof... and that's all that really matters, isn't it?
But to be honest, what really disturbs me is the amount of parlour psychoanalysis going of Cho going on - and being someone who's been involved in the real deal, I don't think this is going to be a very good time to be a male who is either depressive or just socially inept on campus.
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Yes. These things look at lot clearer with hindsight.
Hum... I don't know if you're going to much like my PA Radio piece this week. Hindsight is invariably perfect, but again I've got to wonder whether shovelling the shy, lonely and depressed into compulsory counselling on the precautionary principle is much of an improvement. I don't envy any academic who is going to have to work the mother of all highwire acts in a litigious and therapy-crazed culture.
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Also, VTech has highly-wired students who do stuff like setting up survivor clearing houses on Facebook. That story got a lot of coverage, and the student cellphone video (which was made compelling by the steady series of gunshots echoing on its track) was aired on CNN.
Yes, I saw the item on Campbell Live tonight, and I had a rather mixed reaction to it and Facebook in general. And anyone who has access to Triangle should make an effort to catch the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Sneer all you like at the American media, but if TVNZ or Three were producing anything half as good I'd be a very happy chap. Don't know about anyone else, but as someone who's had recourse to professional psychiatric counselling the amateur profiling of Cho Seung-Hui, going on is pretty disturning.
JEFFREY BROWN: Let me ask you, staying with you, the harder question here. And it was raised in Gwen's discussion, as well. If you can look at a lot of common traits like this and study a lot of cases, is it predictive at all?
STANTON SAMENOW: You see, I don't think we're there. Again, after the fact, sure, we can put the pieces of the puzzle together.
But what are you going to do? Every time a student writes a troubling essay, something that is dark and violent, you're going to refer him to a counselor?
I mean, I think that there really is a problem here of balancing, and I think we are heard this earlier on your program, between balancing the rights of the individuals and leaping to conclusions. You don't want to swat a fly with a cannon.
About the most sensible piece of commentary I've heard all day... I don't want to step on the punchline (so to speak) of my PA Radio piece, but I wonder what bells a certain alumni of the University of Maine would have rung if the novel he wrote his freshman year - and published over a decade later under a pseudonym - had been handed in as a creative writing assignment forty years later.
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Just as a thought experiment, does anything this this would have received the same level of media attention if (say) Cho Seung-Hui had been a totally screwed up engineering student who'd killed thirty four people by planting a fire bomb in a residential hall? And if not, why not?
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Tristan:
Bloody good idea, but I'd be even more impressed if the NRA used it's considerable lobbying clout and grassroots organisation to start pressuring legislators to put their weight behind proper enforcement of the gun regulations already on the books. You don't have to be an anti-gun nut (to coin a phrase), to have you blood run cold at another story where some killer ended up with a firearm because someone didn't bother doing the background check, didn't file the paperwork, just didn't give a shit...
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