FolioDeux Blog

FD went to the Iowa off-year caucus today.  FD feels lucky to live in Iowa, where the caucus system gives every member of a political party the opportunity to be directly involved.  Alas, the off-year caucuses don’t attract much interest.

In 2008, when the presidential nominees were being chosen, more than 500 people attended the caucus in FD’s precinct, one of more than two dozen in this town.  Today, in a non-presidential year, there was still stuff to do at the caucus, and an opportunity to influence politics here and, by extension, throughout the country.  But only TWO people, FD and a woman who had volunteered to chair the precinct caucus, showed up.  Throughout the middle school where the caucuses were being held it was similar — other precincts were represented by 4 or 5 or 6 people.

Neither FD nor the other person who attended in our precinct are “party activists.”  We’re just people who appreciate the opportunity, and feel a responsibility, to be a part of the governance of our state and the country.

It’s just another sad event in a sad week for US politics.

FD has been unhappy about a bunch of big and small things lately:  Haiti, a friend’s cancer diagnosis, the ice storm that’s made the sidewalks so treacherous, the Supreme Court’s strange idea that corporations are like people, the weakness of elected Democrats, and more.

None of which makes for a great blog topic.  Today is “Blog for Choice Day” and FD is a fervent believer in choice.  FD thinks everyone should have choice, including those who want/need to end a pregnancy and those who don’t want/need to.

But, since FD is too mentally exhausted to write anything of real interest on this — or any other topic — we refer those who would like to read a passionate, individual, discussion to Amanda Marcotte’s commentary on Pandagon.

In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, which is set in New Orleans, the narrator and a friend go to see a movie, a fiction, but one that was filmed in New Orleans.  They see streets and neighborhoods thy know and share an idea:  that when you see a familiar street or neighborhood in a movie, it becomes “certified,” and more real, to you.   The narrator says, “If  [a person] sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

FD thinks things are very different now.  Watching the seemingly endless images from Haiti are not making that part of the world more real, but rather less real, and FD would argue this is true even if one has been a frequent visitor and knows those streets and neighborhoods.  The way in which both the “networks” and the 24-hour news channels pour images out into the world seems to FD to make what we see on them less and less real, not more real to us.   Images on the screen that are of “real” events and places are sometimes interrupted by fictional images of a fictional reality, and always by advertisements that may even be animations that do not even pretend to reality.  Surrounded, engulfed, by these images, we become more and more immune to any real response to them.

Actually, this is probably a food trend of the last decade — too much hot sauce.  Not  Sri Lankan cuisine or other foods that are traditionally highly seasoned.  No, FD is thinking about the way in which hot sauce seems to be added to too many foods, in too large quantities.  It is a failure of imagination when the only way a company or an individual can think of to improve the taste of a food is to add hot pepper.

FD should somehow make a book/writing connection here:  let’s see.  Perhaps the analogy would be the way in which writers of thrillers have to invent more and more bloodier ways for serial killers to injure their victims.  Where is that going to end?

FD has been reading the NYTimes Book Review since the 1970s.  Sometimes as part of the Sunday paper, and for some years when getting the paper delivered wasn’t easy here, FD had a separate mail subscription.  For many years, it seemed important, even necessary, in order to know about new books.  Now of course, there are so many great book blogs and so many other on-line reviewing sources, that no one actually needs the NYTBR.  But if you still like to read on paper, it’s one of the few reviews left.  And, FD is back to getting the paper delivered, so the review is always in the house.

But lately, FD has been slow to read the weekly issues.  Yesterday’s essay by Katie Roiphe about sex in the novels of some old white guys and some young white guys provided a hint as to why the Review is no longer a must read.  What a boring essay!  (so boring we’re not linking to it, but it’s easy enough to find…)  FD read Updike and Mailer and Roth as a very young woman, when those books were new, and even then rejected the idea that the specific male-centered analysis of sexuality these guys were selling could have anything to say to women — or a lot of other males!  It’s not clear to FD now why the Times, or Roiphe, thinks there’s any interest in revisiting those very time- and culture-specific musings.

As usual, the attention was on a tiny group of white, male, heterosexual, US-born writers, as if the whole world of literature was that tiny.  But it’s not, and that group doesn’t have the power it did, except, perhaps, in the New York Times Book Review.