Robi Draco Rosa's Vagabundo

Some mood music for your Halloween season!

Robi Draco Rosa and Ricki Martin were both members of an '80s Puerto Rican boyband named "Menudo" (literally: "often," as in how frequently they swapped out new members each time a singer turned 16).   From their mutual origins in disposable teen pop, Martin went on to pursue success as an adult pop singer state-side, singing "Livin' La Vida Loca" and other such approximations of Latin pop-fluff that continues to linger on various Adult Contemporary radio stations.  Robi Draco Rosa, to put it mildly, took a decidedly different course.

When I was young missionary in Puerto Rico, trying to build relationships of trust with the local youth by discussing our favorite music, these Puerto Rican teens would in hushed, reverent tones share Robi Draco Rosa's 1996 album "Vagabundo."  We missionaries all quickly learned why--this is an album of haunting memory, fear of death, lost love, and sheer musical genius.  Other CDs I bought in Puerto Rico I got for primarily nostalgic reasons--but "Vagabundo" I got because it was just so awesome!

The misleadingly-entitled first track "Hablando de Amor" ("Speaking of Love") is a brief, minor-chord guitar number set against nocturnal noises, which sets the tone of haunting introspection that will pervade this entire album.

That quiet quickly gives way to the raging distorted guitar riffs of "Madre Tierra" ("Mother Earth") that lays down the gauntlet for new listeners; another post-Menudo pop-singer Draco Rosa is not!

"Llanto Subteraneo" ("Subterranean Weeping") calms things down again, but only slightly, with a menacing sense of dread waiting to erupt.  A subtle Spanish trumpet creeps in to enhance the tension, marking this rock album as uniquely Latino.

In the title-track "Vagabundo" ("Vagabond") he describes himself in a desert dying of thirst, with sand and scorpion, "tu y yo/en un mar de fuego/bajo el beso de la noche," "camino/camino," "trono sin rey/templo sin dios/un vagabundo" ("you and I/in an ocean of fire/under the kiss of the night," "I travel/I travel," "throne without king/temple without God/a vagabond").

"Penelope" seems to at last cheer things up, but only if you don't know the lyrics--it's a song about love lost, years after the fact, and waking up one morning only to remember her yet again.  How often have I found myself singing along to "Que lejos tu/que legos yo/los escombros de mi vida se deslizan con la lluvia/olvidando a Penelope..." ("How far are you/How far am I/the crumbs of my life dissolve with the rain/forgetting Penelope...").  Perhaps the only reason I know that "Naufragio" means "shipwreck" is from this song.

"Delirios" ("Deliriums") speeds things right back up, opening with a sound of panicked panting, then exploding into a whirlwind Punk riff of fury and angst.

"Para No Olvidar" ("To Not Forget") resembles a late-80s Metallica drudge, and gets straight to the core of this album's overriding obsession: the haunting fear of death. He wails "Morir es olvidar/sed olvidado" ("To die is to forget/be forgotten").  I learned how to conjugate command-form from this song.

"Blanca Mujer" ("White Woman") is a sad piano ballad about a heart-broken young man in New Orleans 1994, wanting to die, who is told by a mysterious, angelic White Woman that his time is not yet come.

"Vertigo," while not as rip-roaring as "Delirios," still captures that same level of dread.

Then comes what I think is the album's highpoint: "Vivir" ("To Live").  The song opens intriguingly with Chopin's “Concerto in D Minor," whose free-wheeling sense of wildness weirdly works as a perfect intro. Draco Rosa wonders if he lives only "por dejar mis huesos/y grabar mi nombre en un altar" ("to rest my bones/and record my name into an altar").  The key-signature changes, and then the Spanish trumpets barrel forward with passionate suffering--this is existential turmoil you can dance with your lover to.  He sings like only a Latino can, "Que bailen los dioses..." ("May the Gods dance...")  I first understood the meaning of the Spanish word "jamas" ("never forever") from this song.

"Brujeria" ("Witchcraft") is perhaps the most Halloween-appropriate song on this album; I don't think you even need to know Spanish to understand the fear that permeates it.

We then get this strange, intentionally half-formed little number called "La Flor del Frio" ("The Freezing Flower"), sung as though by a broken man banging halfheartedly at a bar piano.  

The grand finale is "Amantes Hasta el Fin" ("Lovers to the End"), and seems to form a resolution of sorts, as Draco Rosa describes two dead lovers in a marble sepulcher buried under water.  Did the tomb sink into the sea during an Earthquake? Or a volcano?  Or a shipwreck?  These questions, like all the other questions of death and mortality this album addresses, are left alone, left at peace, like these lovers beneath the waves; what matters more is that these two are finally together forever at last, "no mas lagrimas/no mas dolor" ("no more tears/no more pain") under the peace of the ocean, where they will never be separated again.

"Mientras Camino" ("As I Travel") ends the album as he began it, picking his guitar through the haunting voices of the wild.  

Seriously, this album is a masterpiece, and I don't use that term lightly. I give it a spin at least every October.  Enjoy!

Why Derrida Should Be Read as a Poet

My contention that Derrida should be read as a poet is based in part, frankly, on my slow realization that his theories, once you untangle all his jargon and linguistic labyrinths, are really rather self-evident:

Anyone who's ever tried to learn a new language already understands that the signifier is arbitrary;

Anyone who's ever sent a sarcastic e-mail that was misread as sincere already understands slippage;

Anyone who's ever had a Freudian slip, or who has played with puns, already understands freeplay;

Anyone who's ever had a substitute teacher replace the regular teacher understands that the center is a function, not a being--and any group of rowdy students that takes over the class and drives the sub to tears has already demonstrated that the center isn't immutable;

Anyone who's ever clicked on an endless series of Wikipedia links, approaching but never reaching the final, stable definition of a word, already understands that the signifier never touches the referent;

And anyone who's ever found themselves babbling and rambling as they try to describe an experience for which you really had to be there, already understands how the structure of language inherently collapses.

I speak from experience: every time I've tried to explain to non-English-majors why Derrida is a big deal, they always end up looking at me and saying, "Well, yeah, isn't that obvious?"  And they're right.

To be clear: I'm not arguing that Derrida is wrong--oh, he's most certainly right--only obvious.  I don't mean "obvious" as a slight; as I've often told my own students, half of all good writing is stating the obvious.

What's more, the obvious here--that words have no intrinsic relationship to the things they represent--is a fact that is ignored all too often, e.g. I remember only too clearly arguing with evangelicals who tautologically insisted that "The Bible is the word of God because the word of God is in the Bible!"

But in retrospect, I can't get too mad at those evangelicals: their assumption that words contain the things they describe is a very ancient philosophical error dating back to Plato's Republic, wherein Plato justified artistic censorship in his "ideal" society by claiming that words were some sort of spoken telepathy that directly communicated ideas into another person's mind, sans mediation.

Hence it shouldn't surprise any us why Plato's error has persisted so insistently: the powerful have likewise long justified their censorships and imperalisms by assuming that language possessed the reality they similarly sought to control.  No thought could be more threatening to the powerful than to realize that their words do not contain, or even reflect, reality, and that their power structures inherently collapse. Remember that Jacques Derrida was an Algerian Jew--he especially would be interested in deconstructing the colonizer's claims upon him.  His linguistic liberations were political liberations, too.

Derrida throws a brick through a window with Post-Structuralism, waking everyone up to the too-long-ignored obvious; he is in effect the Will Ferrel character from Zoolander, shouting at everyone: "Doesn't anyone notice this?!  I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"  I honor and respect Derrida for that. 

So when I say that Derrida should be read as a poet, I'm saying the focus should not be on the fact that he states the obvious, but rather how. Any poor grad student who's ever had to navigate "Structure, Sign and Play in the Science of Human Discourse" or On Grammatology, knows that Derrida performs within his own prose the very slippages, shifting-centers, and deconstructions he claims are inherent to language.

Performative language: that is the realm of the poet, not the theorist.  Just the fact that you have to untangle his writing: hidden meanings are also the purview of poetry, not expository writing.  Even his blurring of the boundaries between theory and poetry is performative of his larger linguistic-deconstruction project--and performance is part of poetry, not theory. 

Read Derrida as a poet, try it out.  In the spirit of Derridean freeplay, consider recontextualizing the following quotes from "Structure, Sign, and Play" not as theory, but as verse, and notice how your relationship with the text shifts:

"The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center."

"In opposition to epistemic discourse, structural discourse on myths- mythological discourse must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which it speaks."

"The absence of a center is here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author."

"superabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to which this superabundance can refer."

"he must “brush aside all the facts” at the moment when he wishes to recapture the specificity of a structure"

"For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing."

What exactly do any of these selections mean?  One could spend semesters immersing one's self in Post-Structural theory to untangle it, but in the mean time, one could also just enjoy the delightful insanity, the Monty Python-esque lunacy, of Derrida's language itself!  Treat Derrida the same way TS Eliot termed his own "The Waste Land," as a series of "rhythmic grumbling" which, while it first doesn't seem to mean anything specific, does still seem to approach something primal about the human condition.

Ironically, for such a revered intellectual, you feel Derrida before you truly understand him--but then, according to his own theories, you'll never truly understand him either, for language will never quite signify just what we mean!  But poetry is less about what it means than how it means.  Few things are as irritating as when someone spoils the affectation of a poem by trying to pin down just what it means; Derrida's writings liberate us from the tyranny of singular definitions and the mundane.

Let his words wash over you--not for what they represent, but for what they are themselves.  Worry less about "getting" him or deifying him or understanding him.  Rather, let him trip and tangle up your tongue; let him, like Viktor Shklovsky said all art should, defamiliarize the familiar, so that you have a fresh new relationship with all the words you've taken for granted for too long.

Double Teachers' Salaries

Slate has an article today from a Professor who no longer writes letters of recc. for Teach For America.  Her reasons? Studies clearly confirm that poor and marginalized students are best served not by inexperienced, uncommitted, untrained kids of privilege padding their resumes, but by professional teachers with years of experience. In retrospect, that was embarrassingly obvious. My goodness, even The Onion knew that!

A very antiquated, classist, patronizing and condescending idea undergirds TFA: it's that old European Aristocratic notion that somehow the privileged are innately qualified to instruct the lower-classes.  Not even contemporary Europeans believe that anymore--and we're supposed to be the free, egalitarian United States of America!

But TFA is even more insidious than that--as the Slate article explains, TFA is part of the de-professionalization of American schools, wherein we replace highly-trained, experienced teachers with what amounts to a bunch of young temps who bail out before they actually become effective at their jobs.  Higher education (especially my field, English) is likewise plagued by "Adjunct-ification," wherein highly-paid, full-time professors are replaced with poorly-paid, part-time workers.

And then we have the nerve to complain that our schools are failing our children! 

I have a solution, and it's something that Japan, Finland, and every other Industrialized Democracy that regularly trounces us in education already knows: you need to make Teaching as respected a career as, say, Medicine or a Law; you need to attract top minds to the field who will take it seriously; you need to keep the dedicated teachers from being poached away to private schools or private sectors; that is:

You need to double teachers' salaries.

Across the board.  Kindergarten teachers through College Professor.  Middle-School, High School, community college adjuncts: double their salaries.  Whatever it is now, double it.

Inner-city public school teachers?  Pay them triple.

I've noticed that the sort of folks who favor cutting education budgets tend to be free market advocates.  This logic should be right up their alley: the better you pay teachers, the better talent you'll attract.  That's the logic behind ludicrously inflated CEO salaries, right?  You get what you pay for, Public Education not excepted.

Those better-educating countries?  They don't waste time with these ridiculous Public-vs-Charter debates.  They just pay their teachers better.  Finland doesn't even have private or charter schools--or even standardized tests--and their students are the best performing on Earth.   Not coincidentally, their teachers are also better paid.

"But teachers shouldn't be motivated by profit!"  Actual students of mine have argued that to me.  And I quite agree with them: the best teachers are motivated by a higher sense of purpose.  So are the best doctors, but certainly no one advocates paying them a public school salary, right?  Of course not, they're highly trained professionals that perform an essential labor.  As are teachers.  Pay them as such.  Double their salaries.

Certain blessed souls will be teachers no matter what the pay.  It's their calling.  We've all had at least one in our lives.  A truly skilled teacher is as thrilling to behold as a Michael Jordan in action.  But they're also just as rare.  We need more of them.  Attract them.  Cultivate them.  Reward them.  They do more to help America than, say, the CEOs of Enron.

"But we can't solve the problem by just throwing money at it!"  A tired argument; who said anything about throwing money at teachers?  They're an investment.  You get the teachers you pay for.  "But it's those Teacher Unions!"  Gain concessions from the Unions, make it easier to fire bad teachers, by offering to double their salaries.  Double.  Whatever it is now, double it.

"But the problem is so much bigger than just teachers!"  I know. Systematic poverty and growing income inequality keeps many students trapped. We can't claim to be a free and equal land of opportunity if not everyone begins at the same starting line. To truly address the American education crisis, we'd have to fundamentally restructure America from the ground up, granting all American children equal access to quality education, healthcare, and basic services.   

But I follow the news: we can barely get health-care to those with pre-existing conditions without shutting down the government.  Forgive me if I'm a tad pessimistic.

We can't change America overnight.  But we can double teachers' salaries.  Maybe right now we can't help all students yet, but a good teacher can make all the difference in the world for one failing student--this is not an aphorism or a Hallmark card, but a fatally important fact.  We know this.  We need more good teachers.  But when we pay them terribly, we discourage them out of the field.  This is a disservice to students, to teachers, to America.  Fix it.  Double teachers' salaries.

(Mis?)Reading Pride and Prejudice

For Kristina

This year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, so I finally decided I'd put this off long enough, that it was finally time to hunker down and read it.  But frankly, this first reading felt like a re-reading, for it's a story I've already encountered in so many other formats, (the BBC version I watched with Mom after my drama teacher, sick and tired of high schoolers mimicking Monty Python, said she'd only let me do a British accent if I got the "proper" prestige Mr. Darcy accent; the Kira Knightly one I prefer cause it's shorter; the Bollywood version a girlfriend made me watch, and is exactly what it sounds like; the Zombies version which I will fist-fight anyone who doesn't like it; etc and etc),  that it's just in the cultural air we breath.

It's like the time I showed the original Star Wars trilogy to a Japanese friend--she'd never seen it before, but she already recognized half the lines and the entire story, just from having lived in America.

I'd put off Pride and Prejudice for so long in part because not only did I already know the story backwards and forwards, but because I had to read Sense and Sensibility twice in college (both as an undergrad and grad), and liked it precisely neither time.  Moreover, the stuffiness of regency England always felt so stultifying, so suffocating, that the only reason I could think of for reading about it was to remember why America declared independence in the first place.

But I really did enjoy Pride and Prejudice once I finally encountered it on its own terms.  It was a relief to realize that Austen finds regency England as insufferable as I do--and she's the poor woman who actually had to live through it! 

Austen is surprisingly sarcastic--well, I type "surprisingly," but really, her satire is obvious.  I'm frankly left scratching my head as to why her sarcasm is so often missed.   For example, no less an intellect than Ralph Waldo Emerson once said of Austen's novels, "Never was life so pinched and narrow...suicide is preferable", somehow missing that that's the whole point, that these women's only options were marriage or death!  When Charlotte marries Mr. Collins, it isn't to not die alone, but to not die of starvation!  Jane Austen ironically agrees with Emerson, except that Austen did not choose suicide--rather, she chose to mock that "pinched and narrow" life through novels.  She laughed, because otherwise she would've despaired.  How could Emerson miss that obvious point?

But then, I can't get too mad Emerson, for Austen's own fans seem to repeatedly miss the point! I can't count the number of girls I met who've said, "Ooh, Mr. Darcy could insult my class standing any day he wants!"  or who straight-up romanticize the regency world of Jane Austen, pining for a time when women were the helpless possessions of dashing men, as though that wasn't the world that Jane Austen relentlessly mocked!  How can so many people love Pride and Prejudice while so thoroughly missing its point?

For example, once when I worked at the Utah Writing Center, a bona fide English major came in for help with a paper comparing Flaubert's Madam Bovary against Pride and Prejudice.  Her thesis was that the reason why that "wicked adulteress" Madam Bovary meets such a tragic end is because she always demanded more out of life, while Elizabeth Bennett always "just accepted what ever life gave her."

I explained as politely as I could that if Elizabeth "just accepted whatever life gave her," then she would've married Mr. Collins--or married Mr. Darcy while he was still being a condescending jerk.  Really, Elizabeth Bennett is every bit as uncompromising and unyielding as Madam Bovary, if not more.  In fact, the whole point of Austen, her entire raison d'etre, is to show women that they can exercise real agency, that they can control their own destinies in even the most restricted circumstances, and not just accept whatever's given them.  That's why she still resonates, 200 years and three solid waves of feminism later--or at least, so I assumed!

Having finally read the book, I wonder now more than ever why it gets so relentlessly misread.  Whence cometh this chasm between an author and her audience?  Why is she so often adored for the very things she writes against?  I ask sincerely.

(All images from the webcomic "Hark, a Vagrant!")

Happy Government Shutdown, Ya Filthy Animal!

(As a cathartic exercise, David and I hosted yet another insane, comically-escalating facebook thread, this time concerning the recent and unnecessary govt. shutdown.  Preserved here on my lame blog as a historical curioso).
 

DAVID HARRIS: You know what, Jacob Bender? The thing that bothers me the most about the shutdown is that NASA's Mars Relocation Initiative is now stalled. I wonder how many people are going to be left behind on Earth during the Nemesis Event because of stupid Beltway politics!

• Maxwell Leland Dean: they have a mars relocation initiative?
• Jacob Bender: Not to mention all the Martian colonists who are now left without wifi! And just WHO will nuke the moon now, I ask you!
• Jacob Bender: Moreover, those raptor/shark hybrid super-soldiers ain't goin' to clone themselves! Who else will be able to withstand the quantum fluxes when the portal opens? Maybe CONGRESS should battle the multi-headed beast if they can't get their act together!
• David Harris: But the weather control system is still up, right? The Russ-Amero-Canuck Food Cartel needs to continue warming the globe to increase our total share of arable land, and to punish our mortal enemies, The Maldives and Macronesian Alliance!
• David Harris: Meanwhile, Kosovo has stationed peacekeeping troops in Yellowstone and Ellis Island. I guess we deserve that.
• David Harris: This just in: Due to Phantom Zone Prison budget cuts, the AntiChrist has escaped and is now running for Congress in his home district of Miami, Florida.
• Jacob A Trimble: And all I wanted was some sharks with friggin laser beams on their heads!
• Jacob Bender: The Antichrist?! You don't mean Dean Pelton! And we can't even recapture him since the Sentinels were destroyed by the X-men after they were deactivated during the last sequester!
• Jacob Bender: AND SG-1 is trapped in Andromeda due to the shutdown, and they're the only ones with the virus for the ID4 mothership! We would send in MacGyver, but apparently only congress gets paperclips anymore.
• Jacob Bender: This just in: Boehner last seen being dragged off by an angry mob just before CNN 's live feed went down during a bombing run by Rwandan peacekeepers. The ruins of Fox news has an unconfirmed report that Harry Ried was crucified on the Washington memorial. And though the camera phone footage is grainy, Obama was seen in a strangling match with McConnell a top the flaming capital rotunda, at least before YouTube's servers went down.
• David Harris: I am glad that the shutdown has halted the Irish Re-purposing Program. Jonathan Swift would not be proud.
• Keith Klemas: Master Chief will save us all. I know this with every fiber of my being.
• Ryan Nielsen ...and somewhere, a little boy with autism shakes and wistfully stares at a snow globe.
• Carrie Lamkin: ^^^ i just read keith's comment as "Master Chef" and that was just a WHOLE other thing.

    

  (On a side not, in case you wondered, David leans Libertarian, and is of the mind that if "Obamacare" is really so bad, then Republicans, rather than shoot their poll-numbers in the foot with these Congressional games of chicken, should just let Obamacare run and fail, and thus improve their chances of retaking the Senate and White House in 2016, at which point they can then repeal the ACA democratically.  I can get behind that.)

  (As for me, I'm more of a Leftie, and I consider that the Tea Party, by fanatically supporting measures that would leave the poor and pre-conditioned uninsured--not to mention leaves hundreds of thousands unemployed--have in effect declared that they are willing to let human beings die in order to maintain their ideological purity, much like Chairman Mao during the "Great Leap Forward" and Josef Stalin during the Ukrainian famines.  That is, the Tea Party are the very dictators they claim to hate--there's is only a difference of degree, not kind.  Jack Johnson was right: "We are only what we hate."  That is all.  Have a nice day!)

Independence Day Remembered

(Sometimes my friend and I will start random facebook threads.  The goal is to start with as insane a premise as possible, then just randomly escalate from there, as the Spirit moves us.  Here's one we did yesterday, preserved for posterity).

David Harris recently claimed that sci-fi lit has been ruined ever since the Independence Day conflict of the mid-90s. Balderdash! American letters had been stagnant under the paralyzing burden of Post-Modernism for too long. But when the Mothership came, Godot finally arrived! The Decontruction was literalized! More than just Earf was liberated that day. To paraphrase Adorno, after Roswell, it is impossible to write Post-Modernism.

• David Harris: But nothing is getting published! With the... erm... cessation of operations of most publishing houses (in LA, NYC, Chicago, Houston, London, Paris, etc.), who will publish the books? We've still got the small, independent publishers, but they can't output much volume.
  There are still those e-book readers based on the recovered technology, but I just don't trust those yet.
• David Harris: So far, all I see is a lot of bad poetry about the Mothership Debris Ring making beautiful sunsets and crap.
• David Harris: And on sci-fi: When Alien Invasion novels went from the science fiction shelves to the historical fiction shelves at Barnes and Nobel, I kinda lost interest.
• Jacob Bender: (I like all 3 of these, but I wish I could triple-like your 1st one--"with the...erm...cessation of operations of most publishing houses in LA, NYC, Chicago, Houston, London, Paris, etc...)
• Jacob Bender: Look, none of us could've foreseen the shifting of American publishing to Albuquerque, and their admittedly sentimentalist, hippie chapbooks. But I think you should give the e-readers a chance, they aren't susceptible to viruses on Windows 95 anymore.
• Jacob Bender: Although I also think there is a fundamental misreading of President Whitmore's famed St. Crispin's Day speech--the patriotic-editions of the text keep missing how nihilistic it really is! It should've surprised no one when he crowned himself President-for-life--"interim govt." my eye!
• Jacob Bender: Also, what are worried about outputing volume for? It's not like there's a huge market for books ever since the customer base...well...shrunk substantially.
• David Harris: What bothers me most about the interim government is the naming of the American ships since the Conflict. The USS Marilyn Whitmore? The USS Russell Casse? Come on! Stop naming ships after people to score a few political points. We need to name them good, classical names, like USS Enterprise, or USS Millennium Falcon. That is what bothers me the most about the interim government. That and the cessation of civil liberties, I guess.
• Jacob Bender: Well, they only renamed the USS Steven Hiller the Marilyn Whitmore after Captain Hiller defected to the Democratic Republic of Iraq, remember. Pres. Whitmore pulled a total historical white-washing (pun intended) and erased Capt. Hiller from all the photos, like Lennin did to Trotsky. Welcome to Earf, indeed; maybe the real monsters weren't from space after all! Seriously though, Iraq under Pres. Hiller looks better and better each year--religious tolerance, freedom of speech, stable democracy--only downside is you have to live in, well, the desolate deserts of Iraq! It's the same problem with immigrating to Deseret.
• David Harris: You know what's worse than Albuquerque becoming the new publishing center of the world? Provo, Deseret becoming the new film industry center of the world. *shudders*
• John Sheppard: I'd like to say 'I get' what's being discussed, but unfortunately I think I'm only meeting half-way. What I thought was one thing seems to be another. I like the comments though.
• Jacob Bender: Wait David, you don't like Provo, Deseret films? But what about all those Will Smith movies?
• David Harris: Confession: I did like the new Spider Man, the one with Donald Glover in the titular role. But having Kirby Heybourne play Young Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars Prequels was a but much, even if the plot was amazing. It's a shame Lucas was in LA during the conflict. It would have been interesting to see what he would have done with it.
• David Harris: But speaking of superhero movies... It's hard to have a good superhero movie after the Conflict. Where was Spider Man? Where was Superman? Couldn't Professor X have stopped it, or at least given us warning that it was about to happen and to evacuate? That's the problem with super hero movies after a disaster like that.
• Jacob Bender: A George Lucas version would've been fascinating, you're right. But then, it's not like it was hard to write an excellent Star Wars prequel, any monkey could've done it. Really, you'd have to TRY to make it awful--say, cast Darth Vader as a 5-year-old, or give Yoda a fight scene, or have a clone army. Of course this is all strictly academic, Lucas being long gone in the ashes of old LA, Rest His Soul.
• Mary Miller Williams: I just really appreciate this. Thank you. I understand none of it. But I don't need to. like looking at contemporary art, It just feels good knowing someone somewhere understands it, bore it, and loves it, and that makes it beautiful.