Hattie's Web

To hell with it

Sitting here in Seattle, I have the pleasure of fuming over what's happening in Hilo. I might as well give up on the Hawaii County League of Women Voters, because we're being totally cut out of the loop. The faux alternative newspaper, the Big Island Weekly, completely owned subsidiary of the only newspaper in town, the Hilo Tribune Herald, which is owned by Las Vegas based Stephens Media, is putting on a mayoral candidates' forum on May 28, months before the one we had planned. We have been struggling to put something together and have run into big personality problems among the members which may lead to us having no forum at all. We can't compete with the big guns anyway. This is how outside interests, while appearing to provide local services, actually gun down local organizations.* Whereas they have infinite resources, we have only ourselves. In a moment of institutional weakness they move in and take over. So our little operation gets swept away, just like a mom and pop store.

What's perhaps even worse is that the county clerk has decided that we will not be allowed to register voters, even after some of us recently attended registrar certification classes. It has not helped that one of our members, a very aggressive person and recent arrival from one of the more belligerent parts of the country, has managed to get county officials angry at us by using our name and e-mailing list to more or less call them all a bunch of crooks. Worst of all, she used our e-mail list to urge us all to vote for the county council candidate of her choice! We are a non-partisan group, but she doesn't "get" that. She may have ruined our reputation in her single minded desire to at last bring democracy to our benighted little town. The first time I talked to her I knew she was a whack job, but my peers, who are all nicer than I am, just thought she was a little, well, intense.

I give up. The bad news is on Hunter Bishop's Blog. The only good news he has to report is that at least the county is refusing to accept money for marijuana eradication efforts.

*The Big Island Weekly is trying to run the real alternative paper out of business. The Hawaii Island Journal is our only news source not controlled by Las Vegas based Stephens Media, which also owns West Hawaii Today. They are putting up a facade of caring about local concerns, which is similar to Wal Mart's claims of being "for you nice folks in your unimportant towns." Their strategy is market driven and has nothing to do with actual local needs, especially the need for diversity of opinion in the press.  This is how we lose democracy, in these little struggles lost. 

What next?

Good Lord. Is that Clint Eastwood? Time certainly has caught up with him.

Mildly jet lagged, I'm sitting here blogging in the early a.m. I'm in Seattle, and it is quite lovely and pleasant, overcast but mild. I like this kind of weather. And getting away from the worries of the economic situation on the Big Island and the possible worsening of our quality of life due to the vog is also pleasant.

My grandchildren are wonderful. I shop for food and cook. And cook. And cook. What a hungry mob they are.

Well, Hillary Clinton is still in the race to the extent that Obama backers in the Huff Post find it necessary to continue to vilify her. My 70+ years old friend is now grousing, "I'm waiting for more than a lot of vague statements. What does he plan to do?" A couple we know are great Obama enthusiasts of the type who really annoy non-yuppies. They say things like, "I am a social liberal and a fiscal conservative." They look down their noses at ordinary people, the kind who have kids and mortgages and whose lives lack glamor.

Now I'm one person with a very limited point of view who never presumes to speak for anyone but herself, but honestly among most of the people I know what I'm hearing is that we have got to get a Democrat in the White House, not that we have got to get Obama in the White House. And our diehard neighbors across the street will vote for McCain, even though they don't really mind Obama, because they can't see voting for a Democrat. Of course they are very old, but their four kids are also going to vote Republican, because it is their family tradition.

In any case, it is not going to be a cakewalk for Obama.

George Will, male hag

Here is the latest outrage from Will about how Hillary Clinton ought to dry up and drop dead. I thought she was a U.S. Senator, sixty years old, in good shape and with a lot of years of public service ahead of her still. Does this poem, from which Will quotes a snippet, really describe Ms. Clinton?

Provide, Provide

The witch that came (the withered hag) To wash the steps with pail and rag, Was once the beauty Abishag, The picture pride of Hollywood. Too many fall from great and good For you to doubt the likelihood. Die early and avoid the fate. Or if predestined to die late, Make up your mind to die in state. Make the whole stock exchange your own! If need be occupy a throne, Where nobody can call you crone. Some have relied on what they knew; Others on simply being true. What worked for them might work for you. No memory of having starred Atones for later disregard, Or keeps the end from being hard. Better to go down dignified With boughten friendship at your side Than none at all. Provide, provide! Robert Frost Will exemplifies the entitlement of a certain class of white men. If you are going to talk about people who have overstayed their welcome, he seems like a perfect example of that. I have a lot to say about George Will if you want to use the search thingie on the sidebar. More, from social commentator, Julia Keller,   as found on  Shakesville. Keller pulls a lot of stuff together about Hillary Clinton and concludes that the message is that she should drop dead.

I have just finished reading Brian Aldiss’s autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, published in 1998. Brian Aldiss b. 1925 has long been my favorite science fiction writer. Even when I knew nothing about his life, I sensed a strong affinity with him which has to do with something about his imagination that I click into. For him as for me the outer life illustrates the inner life, not the other way around.  Imagination is paramount. His central psychological dilemma is the same as mine: dealing with parents who treated us, their children, in a cold and arbitrary way. And never understanding why they couldn’t be kind and loving.

As well, in Aldiss’s case, his growing up years, especially his experience as a foot soldier, cannon fodder in Burma, during WW II, added to his neurotic burden. 

Aldiss attended the kind of second rate “public” school that middle class English people sent their children to where he was, improbably, quite well educated because some of the masters had fine minds. Unfortunately, these schools also taught the arts of bullying and herd behavior so necessary to soldiering. Nowhere was heard the voice of conscience. No boys spoke up and said, “I say, that’s not fair. That’s poor sportsmanship. That’s wrong.” Certainly not little Brian.

As he says, life in the grimmest circumstances as a young soldier in the Far Eastin WW II was not much different from being a boy in a public school. There were compensations, however. There was the license soldiers enjoyed: to steal, to destroy, to use girls and women. He availed himself of all these opportunities. Like the poor, what the foot soldiers did did not matter, so they just got what they could out of the situation. The important thing was to station oneself as high on the pecking order as possible, and of course to stay alive.

He and his mates witnessed the ruination of the Far East during and after WW II and did their part to contribute to the chaos as well. He describes in excruciating detail the “jig-jig winter” of 46-47 in Hong Kong when hundreds and thousands of destitute young women were reduced to selling their bodies on the street for pennies. This is not the kind of noble picture of the heroic allies who saved democracy that we have grown up with. It is obvious that Aldiss and many others never really readjusted to civilian life after the absolute license of those days, in spite of the advantages they enjoyed in the prosperous post-war years.

Aldiss also picked up the habit of heavy drinking and became a “working alcoholic,” that is, a person who can remain functional at high levels of alcohol consumption. Oh, yes, and there is his sex addiction. His writing gives me a good picture of a man who has inhabited his time in the most intimate way, “seen the world.” I do not like his morals much, and his sexism is of the type that leaves the women in his story (and in his life, I suppose) with very little agency. This does not mean he did not love his wives and children, of course. In the U.S. we have de-glamorized alcoholism and sex addiction, but Aldiss sees these traits of his as the wellspring of his creativity. I take no sides, except that I think the real source of his excellence is in the lonely hours of boyhood that he spent reading and thinking.

His heroes seemingly have no internal life, or at best an internal life that lacks clarity. They do not understand themselves. Other characters are known only by their behavior. People work, play,  observe, experience, muse and reflect, but they do not think much, nor, would I say, do they feel very strongly. Depression stalks them.

So what is it about his work that haunts me? Here is a short list. Its variety, its visual power, good stories, action and adventure, realism and plausibility even in the strangest circumstances, constant authorial “presence,” sense of dialoguing with the reader, philosophical and social content, humor. At his best, brilliance.

Many critics have complained about much of his work seeming careless or unfinished, and that’s true enough, but his best work is top drawer. For me in the end it is his imagination that reigns supreme.

A good place to begin with Aldiss is to read his early books, Hothouse and Non-Stop.  If you like these you might want to go on reading.

His short work, Supertoys Last All Summer Long was adapted as the basis for Stephen Spielberg’s film, AI. Aldiss's verdict on  the film was that it was "crap," but I thought it was a pretty good remake of Walt Disney's Pinocchio.Of course I hated Pinocchio. Oh well.   

You can read  Supertoys  here in its entirety.

Vog update

As I was driving back from an errand in Puna this a.m. I saw what looked like a grey felt blanket thrown over Mauna Kea from about 3,000 feet (my estimate) up. There was a sharp line of demarcation between the voggy and clear areas. The trades are back, and it's clear here, as this photo from 10:00 a.m. today shows. In the distance you can see the plume from the Pu Oo eruption  25 miles from my house, which has been going on for years. The problem now is that there is so much vog that it takes very strong trades to blow the added emissions away, the emissions emanating from Halemaumau.  So in spite of the trades, areas of the Island are experiencing a lot of pollution. Where there used to be one major source of vog, now there are two sources.

(As always on this blog, click on photo for enlargement.)

Color me annoyed

Sometimes racism just irritates me rather than infuriating me. Canada has a racial designation called "visible minorities," which is actually used in official demographics. As I mentioned somewhere or other I heard a women say, when I was in Vancouver, that Edmonton is no longer a white city, because they have 18% visible minorities. This kind of language is an invitation to think in the stupidist way about immigrant groups, native American groups, and so on. In linguistic terms, "visible minorities" marks people as belonging to a non-standard group, much as "man" is the standard human being, whereas "woman" is a variant on the standard. In Canada it is "normal" to be white and "abnormal" not to be. So my Irish hostess at a dinner party I attended was considered plain Canadian in spite of her strong Irish accent, and her kids were totally assimilated, whereas the children of (say) East Indians would be considered members of an outsider group. And Central and Eastern Europeans, in spite of being very different culturally from Anglo-Canadians, assimilate rapidly.

So if any Canadian wants to talk to me about white racism, I will just point out that Canada is pretty racist too, but they are covert about it.

Now if you are considering moving to (say)Toronto, you can pull up maps that show you the exact racial and ethnic composition of any neighborhood you might consider moving into.

I myself belong to a visible minority. I am a white person living in Hawaii. If I lived in California, I would be a "visible minority," too. A lot of white people here are very uncomfortable with this visibility, out of the very natural (for them) notion that they are supposed to be in charge of everything and don't want anyone pointing out to them that the reason they think they should be in charge of everything is because they are white.

It's all very silly. 

Molly Ivins, I miss you

Here is the classic piece by Molly Ivins on the godawful swillmeister, Camille Paglia. God I miss Molly Ivins. What would she have said about the current political goings on? The feminist cause lost a great person in her.  She had the breadth, she had the depth.  No one can replace her, alas.

Misogyny, aging male writers, and so on

Can you imagine racial attacks on Obama similar to the misogynistic attacks on Clinton? Of course not.

Maybe to the point: I'm reading Phillip Roth's Exit, Ghost, which treats of an elderly famous author who is pitching the woo to an up-to-date upper class Texas girl and Harvard graduate. He grills her closely about her sex life and they talk about books. Well, this is not Roth's finest work, I'll put it that way.

The lamest thing about it, aside from the post-prostate cancer impotence of the hero, is Roth's complete inability to place convincing dialogue in the mouths of any but his Jewish characters, the old guys, the kvetching moms, the street-wise kids, the wryly ironic professional men. So the girl comes off as a totally artificial sex goddess and book lover, kind of like Woody Allen's "Whore of Mensa," but without the hairy legs. Gosh, Mr. Zuckerman, isn't Hemingway just the greatest?  D. H. Lawrence? Like my tits? Want a blow job?" Ha ha ha.

In fact, the whole "voice" is off here, the way it was in Roth's only out and out bad book, from 1967, When She was Good, which is about a blonde who goes insane. Very much of its time.

Just to show that Zuckerman (we know him pretty well by now, don't we, he has inhabited so many of Roth's books) is not just an old lech, we see a tender relationship unfold between him and the wife of a late friend of his who has had brain surgery and is a physical mess, just like him, in spite of which he actually visits her squalid apartment and even kisses her! Gosh, she was a sex goddess herself once, who stole his friend away from his first wife and whom Zuckerman always confused with Anne Frank, although she could not possibly have been Anne Frank.Wow. What a big heart he has, after all. Or is this just confusion? Oh, there's incest mixed up in all this, too, but it is not very interesting incest. Some say incest is  best, but not in this case. Well, I'm not finished, so there may be some juicy revelations toward the end.

I'll let you know.

Update: Exit, Ghost, is really really bad, as bad as When She was Good.

Here is Clive James in the NYT Book Review going on about what a great novel Exit, Ghost is.

Christopher Hitchens redeems himself in this great takedown of Exit, Ghost.

7:00 a.m.

Not a word about this in the local paper.

Hilo sunrise under the volcano