The Invisible Library

It is midnight in Manhattan and a line of mourners stretches all the way from 42nd Street to the foot of the Empire State Building. Each bears a single white candle before them. The glow haunts their sorrowful faces. And why shouldn’t it? For this grave looms over all others. Marble white and full of fear, the magnificent sarcophagus of the fallen Gorilla God stands four stories high and takes up two city blocks– a slab of cruel stone surrounded by a fence of wrought iron in the Art Deco style. Etched into the side of the tomb is a single word, so large, you can read it clearly all the way from the Brooklyn Bridge:

Beauty

On this night, wreaths of jungle flowers will be laid at the foot of the tomb. Snake skins draped over the iron fence, in triumph. Virgins in white will swoon against the wall until dawn. Donations are accepted. Vandals will break into the Museum of Natural History and in the morning, Dinosaur teeth will be found amidst the candle wax and other offerings.

Christian writes:

Baghdad - September 10, 2004

The third anniversary of September 11th is tomorrow.

What change three years has brought both for the good and for the bad! Both successes and mistakes.

It was three years ago that I decided to join the fight to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. That fight is still very much underway and I am now in the middle of it.

I’ve been back in Baghdad now for just over a week. I returned from Greece safe and sound. Having gone on my first R&R leave, I came back extremely refreshed and with a new burst of energy to come back into the game here in Iraq. My role is now changing. I am taking more financial duties and will be helping to track the finances of our ongoing projects. New tasks, new responsibilities. I am very excited. However, I am still doing some PR work and I include this link to highlight a piece I wrote on the Transportation/Communications Sector for the PCO website.

Read the rest.

I have to give Bush credit for this one. He had us all fooled. We thought he was a moron and he played that card over and over again, like it came from a deck with five aces. It’s true, he is a liar, a cheat, a failed businessman, war monger, and an all around enemy to the English language. But he’s just smart enough to hire Karl Rove. And Rove is a shrewd son of a bitch. He knows how to exploit the ignorance of the general populace, that most citizens have become so inebriated with trivia that with just a hint of uncertainty, he can send us all into a whirlwind of doubt.

They’ll turn us all into existentialists if they have their way. We’ll be so preocupied with our own navals, arguing about ligetures and obsessing over whether or not IBM had devised a typewriter that could handle proportional spaced fonts by 1973, that we’ll completely ignore the fact that they’ll have stolen a second election, killed another thousand soldiers for no good reason, trampled our civil rights, undermined our national security by exposing spies for cheep political gain and lied to us in countless other ways, big and small. But at least we’ll have figured out whether or not an IBM typwriter form the seventies could have handled Times New Roman at least as well as a modern word processor.

It’s not the font, stupid. Or even the weight of the paper these documents are printed on. It’s the fact that while in the Air National Guard, George W. Bush ignored a direct order by his comanding officer. The man is guilty of least Dereliction of Duty, if not outright Disertion, and during a time of war. The first gets him jail time, the second makes him eligibe for corporal punishment. And, to add insult to injury, all this comes to light after Bush has spent the last month shitting on the name of a decorated war hero (whose complete records are on public display, unlike our supposed Commander in Chief’s).

“Oh, well, Kerry may not have diserved one of his three purple hearts, or that Bronze Star because some guy who also went to Vietnam was paid money by Rove’s buddy, Mr. Regnary to publish a book saying that John Kerry is a poopy head. It’s all over the internet, and in Times New Roman, so it must be true.”

Arg!!! I need a drink… I hear England has some good beer.

ON SUNDAY MORNING, ALICE WICKERMAN excuses herself from breakfast and teeters into the hall. Frederick, her father, goes about chewing his sausage and dipping his pancakes in pools of syrup until he hears the distinctly unappetizing sound of retching coming from the direction of the downstairs bathroom. He sets his fork down, sausage still dangling from the end, shuffles over and knocks on the bathroom door. “You OK in there, honey?”

His question is met with more vomiting. Pushing the door open, he finds his daughter kneeling before the toilet, pale as a fish dredged out of an ocean trench, fifty thousand fathoms down. “Oh, touch of the old flu, eh?”

She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand and smiles weekly at her father. “Nope. I’m just pregnant.”

This comes as quite a surprise as Alice, a devout Catholic since she forced her father to have her baptized at the age of seven, has a reputation unimpeachable, even by the most jaded skeptic’s snickering. Faith, pure but hardly simple. That her virginity remains intact is a matter of faith to which Alice’s Priest, Father Jose can attest, as he has been her confessor since she signed herself up for catechism class at age eleven. Ever since she hit puberty six months later, the girl’s near constant visits had rattled the poor Fathers mind on its hinges, so detailed are her confessions of even the most trivial transgression of the most esoteric edict of the Holy See.

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Read More…

I caught Lucy mid-stretch. she seems startled a bit but doesn’t seem to mind, the ham.

President Thomas Jefferson spoke three languages and read five, including Greek and Latin. His private library, the largest in the Thirteen Colonies, became the original collection for the Library of Congress¹. President James Garfield was a professor of Classical Languages. It is rumored he could write Greek with one hand while at the same time, write in Latin with the other. President Theodore Roosevelt was a Conservationist and War Hero and is considered one of the greatest orators of the early 20th century. President Woodrow Wilson taught at three colleges, including Princeton, his Alma Mater. He was a major advocate of University Education and spent a great deal of his presidency promoting education and literacy.

The majority of our Presidents have been not just economic elite, but Intellectuals as well. The ones who weren’t rich were consumed with public service². All this changed in 1961 when the first made for TV president took Office, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was neither very intellectual, nor overly consumed with the Public good. He did start the Peace Corp, but compared to predecessors like Wilson, he is small potatoes, only remembered today for being tragically killed while in office. Had Kennedy not been assassinated, it’s likely he would be remembered primarily for getting us into Vietnam, a fact that would have more than overshadowed his only other noble achievement: sleeping with Marilyn Monroe.

The advent of the Made for TV President, who is elected based on his likeability instead of his ability, has been the major problem of our Presidential Elections for the past fifty years. In that time, we have gone from the competent leadership of Kennedy, to the ineptitude of Johnson, the flagrant chicanery of Nixon, and the shadowy vacuousness of Reagan and Bush Sr. to the downright contemptible imbecility, corruption and degradation of Bush Jr. Not even the poor befuddled Jimmy Carter or the charm of Clinton can make up for the fact that We The People have, for the last fifty years, placed our worst in office instead of our best. We’ve substituted substance and leadership for the shallow prepackaged images of a PR campaign. Our presidents lack not just substance but intelligence (except Clinton and Carter, who, for all their personal faults, at least tried to follow the Jeffersonian ideal of the Thoughtful President). Jesse at Pandagon put it nicely:

In America, the goal is that anyone should have the opportunity to become a doctor when they grow up. That doesn’t mean that you get to take advantage of that promise when you’re 32 and you failed high school biology. You may be a nice person, be culturally in tune with a vast swath of the American population, but real life isn’t a Disney movie. No matter the populist affinity we might feel for a fictionalized narrative of an “average person” shunted to the presidency, it is not a job that requires an “average person”. It requires an exceptional one, or at least the most exceptional one we can reasonably come up with. I don’t want the president to be an average person. I don’t care what a president eats, what he watches on TV, what his favorite band is. His or her life should be almost nothing like mine if they’re doing their job correctly.

Like Jesse, I want the President to be smarter than me. I don’t care if he’s a nice guy. He could be a total dick for all I care. I just want him to be well read, capable of grasping nuance and changing his mind in light of newly discovered facts. I don’t want some fervent jackass who barely can grasp even one language - his native tongue at that, and refuses to change his mind ever, about anything, even and especially when contrary facts are handed to him daily.

I don’t think John Kerry is the uber intellectual the Right makes him out to be. But he is a smarter man than George Bush and that’s a start.
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1. He also developed his own cataloguing system which laid the foundation for the LOC system used today.

2. Except Grant, who was a cheat and a liar, as well as a warmonger. In the light of History, we see whose shadow George W. Bush stands in and it isn’t Reagan’s.

Hi, there.

I’m Jay. Jason, really, but the digital revolution is all about brevity, right? I’m a friend of Keith’s. We met as part of the original staff of the first Barnes & Noble in my hometown of Savannah, Ga. It didn’t take long for Keith and I to realize we shared not only a love of strange books, movies, conspiracy theory, exotic food, radical politics, and the kind of productive langour Emerson might have given a pretty name and for which Cotton Mather would have had us bastino’d. No, our shared and secret shame was not of choice. You see, Keith and I share erotic surnames.
Keith Kisser. Jason Love.

And though we realized it was not in our cards to become the greatest creative duo in the history of adult film, we knew that our mutual curse would eventually lead to collaboration in some arena, and here you have it.

It is my pleasure to participate in The Invisible Library.

Thanks, Keith, and Hello, Kevin.

Bilious Political Invective Coming Soon!

Last night, your favorite rock band died. They were coming out of church when they spotted a kitten meowing in the second floor window of a burning house. Every member of your favorite rock band � lead singer, lead guitar, bass player, drummer, backup guitar, keyboard player, and the guy who plays the cow bells and the maracas � swung into action. The lead singer and the bass player joined hands to hoist the lead guitarist up onto the trellis, from where he climbed onto the roof adjacent to the awning below the window where the cat was calling out. The drummer and the backup guitarist climbed the moleberry tree that hung over another awning adjacent to that window. Meanwhile, the lead singer, bass player, keyboardist, and the guy who plays the cow bells and maracas headed into the house to try to get up to that room to block the cat from running back into the fire to get away from his rooftop rescuers. Once everyone was either on top of or inside the house, the roof collapsed, killing all but the keyboard player, who died later that night of a heroin overdose while in bed with a handful of fourteen year old groupies, who also died that night, but of natural causes. The cat’s fine.

Read Girls Are Pretty, every day. It’s good for you.

Our weekend at the Lake was quiet, peaceful and very enjoyable. We swam, paddled around in a conoe and generally layed about. It was great and I’m much more relaxed now, thank you.

We’ve got some new things going on with the blog that I’ll be mentioning soon, I promise. They’re super exciting. Just wait. You’ll see.

I’m such a tease.

Anyway, catching up on work today, more blogging later…

Kevin has invited me to his family’s cabin in Connecticut The Poconos for the weekend so the Library will be closing down until Tuesday (no wifi on the lake, don’tcha know). Enjoy the holiday, kids. Turn out the lights as you leave.

Update 9/6: For some reason, I heard Kevin say Connecticut when in fact we were in Eastern Pennsylvania. How odd. Anyway, we’re back and tired but had a good time. Full report tomorrow.