Peridyd's Progress

My good friend Greg's tribute/pastiche/appropriation of the New Yorker's Eustace Tilley's style. I especially like how Greg's execution of the drawing is suffused with his signature humor. One of the great pleasures of my professional career has been my involvement in software project teams that included Greg as the graphic designer. Any time there was a lull in the meeting, one could usually catch Greg cartooning.

I hear tell that the drawing might make its way into the magazine.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in San Diego for a few days, visiting my mom. Things are quite intense here, even in the relative safety of La Mesa. Smoky. Only recently this afternoon did we see any blue sky, despite the fact that it should be crystal clear. There's just been too much smoke to see the sky. I was supposed to get together today with a friend who lives in Lake Elsinore, but his home was surrounded by threatening clouds of reddish smoke. Given the fact that his home might be at risk, his wife (understandably) wanted him to stay close to home. Maybe next trip.

They tell us to stay inside. Not to exercise. From what I'm hearing on the news, it's not that the particulates of the burning wood, brush, etc., are particularly (cough) unhealthy, what we're most at risk from inhaling are the carcinogens from the burnt homes--more than 1600 of them--their construction materials.

The thing that I'm most struck by is how fragile it all is: our cities, our civil order. Yes, this is the worst disaster in the history of California. Nearly 1/4 of San Diego County has been burned. If the pincer of the two fires, one from the south, one in the north, had squeezed the city proper, how could services have coped?

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's no secret to those of you who know me that Salon's Gary Kamiya is one of my favorite writers. I admire him for his lucid and compelling political analyses. I've never been one who's enjoyed standing in the choir and being preached to. It's one of the reasons that I let my subscription to The Nation lapse. The fact that I can depend on Kamiya to teach me something new, something that mainstream voices are altogether missing, while maintaining a progressive and unflinchingly humane perspective is why he's one of my favorites.

Today he's published something unusual--a paean to editors--which, as a writer and sometime editor (usually of graduate student theses and dissertations), resonates with me.

Here's a sample from the article.

In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.

Still, editors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent -- and perhaps more training -- will be required.

I had a similar conversation with my friend Margaret the other day, who was lamenting the fact that in our cultural moment it is nearly impossible to keep up with the glut of great music that's out there on the interwebs. We talked about the need for filters, editors, if you will, who help us manage the one thing that really is new about this "Information Age": the sheer quantity of "stuff" out there, some of which we want to know about, and some which we'd rather just never got on our radar.

Editors provide that and more. Much more.

I know that a few of my readers are also fond of writing. I hope you enjoy it.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm curious if you have to be something of an English geek to appreciate the hilarity of this article from the Onion.

The article's broad applicability is surpassed only by the extent to which it speaks to the ineluctable squalor of the human condition. This despite the fissures engendered in said condition by the rigors imposed on our psyches by our fundamentally fragmented cultural moment. Vide Beckett and perhaps, more thoroughly, our more postmodern Kathy Acker.

</wink>

Thanks to my daughter Kira for sending this my way.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I thought I'd come out of my blogging hiatus briefly to share a poem that a friend's written.

More later....

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Queer History Month may have come and gone, but the struggle surrounding providing basic human rights to our friends, sons, daughters, lovers, and (most importantly) for ourselves has not.

I read a pre-election poll today that said that 57% of the voting public supports some form of gay marriage or civil union. That's heartening. But the cold reality, the stark truth, informing today's Bizzaro comic reminds us that we have still have so far to go.

--Peridyd

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I just got back from a very brief trip to Seattle. Met with some very cool people; went out to dinner and had some great Thai food in Bothell at Pen. Had a wonderful garlic chicken dish, 4/5 spicy, and boy do they ever mean that it's spicy. Despite my heavy consumption of beverages due to the piquancy of the dish, I'd highly recommend it.

An interesting thing arises when I socialize with people for the first time. Someone will inevitably notice that I don't drink. Nonplussed by my abstemiousness (is that a word?), the individual typically gives me the once-over, waiting for me to provide the "why" behind this curious anomaly. "Am I an alcoholic?" Well, no. "Then why don't you drink?" Hmm.

Those who know me know that the pat answer is "Because I'm a meditator." Yet, truthfully, I think I could quit meditating, and I still wouldn't drink. Intoxication just flat-out doesn't appeal to me any more. It once did. Now it doesn't. Being high, even just a little bit, sucks.

My point is not to proselytize tea-tottling. Nor am I interested in bragging about the fact that I don't drink. I just find it interesting to live in a culture in which the only normal reason for not drinking is alcoholism. Other non-normative, but acceptable, answers are, "I'm a Mormon," or "I'm Muslim." (Interesting how neither of those communities is fully trusted or fully vested in white Americana.) Drinking isn't just acceptable, it's a marker of normative behavior. Performing a simple substitution of pot for a drink points to how strange this is. Or better still in terms of the danger of the intoxicant to the user/abuser, substitute cocaine for booze, and it gets to the heart of the problem. Imagine asking someone when there's an eight ball of coke or crystal lined on the coffee table, "I don't understand. Why is it that you don't you want any?"

Given the fact that it's somehow unthinkable to many that I wouldn't drink, isn't it obvious why I don't?

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

First Impressionism, originally uploaded by OldOnliner.

How much more postmodern can you get than to get a town together to pay homage, pastiche, and parody one of the touchstones of the Impressionist movement?

Seurat, of course, was working against realism, and by extension, photo-realism, which is why I'd argue that this is parody--even if the parody is intending toward the honorific. Yet, I find the effort somehow admirable, in the way that Mann found the middle class to be worthy of esteem. There's something solid in the effort to recreate this. Humble and yet arrogant, both at once, with a solid dose of kitsch as well; don't you think?

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)