Who cares? I would imagine maybe 2 or 3 people care. The usual number of people who care about my opinions. If anything, this post might boost "South Park" viewership, because that's the way the world is. I don't think Trey Parker or Matt Stone will lose any sleep because I've decided they're dicks and that watching their show will from now on just remind me about what complete dicks they are.
It became too much for me a couple of nights ago, partway through the episode "Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow," from 2001, in which the kids reunite Terrance and Phillip for the South Park Earth Day Brainwashing Festival. I don't remember when I changed the channel, but it wasn't long after Clyde said, "Ah, excuse me? My Daddy is a geologist and he says there actually isn't any concrete evidence of global warming." Ah, excuse me, Clyde? Your Daddy gets paid to lie by oil companies. I don't think Parker and Stone have that excuse. I could be wrong, but whether they're getting paid off or they own a lot of Exxon and BP or they're actually that dumb, or whether they actually do realize that global warming is real and they do shit like this just to spite Sean Penn DOESN'T REALLY MATTER all that much any more to me.
It's the message of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Mother Night again, the one I've quoted so often in this blog, the one which has become almost a mantra for me: "We are what we pretend to be." In the introduction to Mother Night Vonnegut said he didn't think it was a particularly deep message. I must disagree. It's very deep, and its applications and implications are wide. I did a bit of research for this post, trying to find something concrete about Parker's and/or Stone's views on global warming. A quote, one way or another, "I think global warming is a hoax" or "Of course we know global warming is real and catastrophic, we're just torturing Sean Penn." A massive donation to the Republican Party or the Audubon Society. I found squat. Besides being done with "South Park," I think I'm done with RationalWiki too, which claimed that Parker and Stone are climate change skeptics and offered no evidence for this beyond "South Park." And I'm sorry I ever saw Encyclopedia Dramatica in the course of searching for info on Parker and Stone. Again, it's the we-are-what-pretend-to-be thing: if Encyclpedia Dramatica isn't a neo-Nazi website, it's pretending to be one convincingly enough that it actually is one.
I'm not telling anybody else what TV shows they should watch. Some people can't watch movies with Tom Cruise or John Travolta, because of Scientology. In some cases some of those movies used to be among their favorites, but in the meantime they learned more about Scientology, and now they just can't stand those movies anymore. I have no problem watching movies with Cruise or Travolta in them. Scientology doesn't bother me nearly as much as global warming. To me the main difference between Christianity and Scientology is that Scientology is a lot newer. But if people want to boycott movies with Cruise or Travolta, or keep watching "South Park," that's fine with me. I understand. Sometimes I can separate art from politics, as I do when I read Eliot and Pound and Yeats. I can understand progressives who love Wagner and progressives who can't listen to Wagner. I can separate the art from the politics.
Some of the time I can. But not all of the time. Not with Parker and Stone, not any more. Not with the treatment of environmentalism on "South Park," not with Parker being a Libertarian either, and not with Stone saying stupid shit such as that W and Michael Moore are equally clueless and that Alec Baldwin is even worse.
It would be great if one of them had a big come-to-Jesus moment about the climate, and they started to have a huge bitter public feud over the environment. That would be awesome. "Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow"-in-real-life-level awesome.
I tried really hard to find out that Parker and/or Stone was an anti-vaxxer so that I could pile more contempt upon them in this post, but no luck. I'm not saying they're not anti-vaxxers, I'm not saying that it would surprise me to learn that they're anti-vaxxers. Anti-vax is truly rampant in Amuurkin show biz, probably more widespread per capita than in Amurrkin trailer parks, but I have no evidence to show anti-vax tendencies on the part of either Parker or Stone. At this juncture.
Anyway. Trey, Matt: screw you gazz, I'm goin' home.
Showing posts with label kurt vonnegut. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kurt vonnegut. Show all posts
Friday, July 3, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2009
Writing
I've been writing a lot of stuff since the age of 11, if not longer. I believe that was when I wrote my first short stories. I turned 11 in 1972. Not much more than a decade ago, I was still writing mostly with a pen on paper. Then, in 1997, I started to become curious about this Internet thingy, and everything changed...
In January 1st of this year, I started writing with pen on paper again, in Moleskine
notebooks with a Pilot
GS-2 Pro, on pretty much a daily basis. I enjoyed that. I found out that it was Bruce Chatwin
who had given Moleskines their name; I browsed through one of his books and didn't think it was for me, although that remains a very cursory first impression from which no-one should draw conclusions. Anyway, in May of this year I pretty much stopped with the Pilot and the Moleskines, because I had started with this blog, and I'm doing here very much the same thing that I was doing in the Moleskines, except that I'm trying to be more careful here, more polished in my prose style and more reserved with my judgements, and more discreet, because this is going public right away and that wasn't. Some of what I've written here I've copied from the Moleskines. I miss writing in the Moleskines, they and the GS-2 Pro have aesthetic qualities which this keyboard and monitor completely lack, but this blog has pretty much replaced them, whaddya gonna do. After this blog makes me a multimillionaire, I will have the option of writing in nice notebooks with nice pens again, I will be able to pay someone well for typing and data entry, right? Right. Since starting the blog, I've written a page and a half in the Moleskine. A page and a half in a month and a half, noting when I started using a new disposable razor, when I set a new personal best in the number of reps of the Upward Dog I could do in a set, and not a whole lot more than that. [PS, 15 March 2022: I thought they were called Upward Dogs, but what I was doing was going from laying flat on my back, going to a fully extended bridge, then all the way back down. That was one rep.] A page and a half. I was averaging more than that in a day.
I used to be downright hostile toward computers, in a way which seems to me, in retrospect, quite neo-Luddite. I used to say that I wanted to chisel my writing into granite, rather than enter it into a database via a keyboard. (I never have learned to chisel granite, despite those repeated blustering pronouncements.) It is clear, in retrospect, that my hostility was based in ignorance, and in the frustration of having tried a few times to use computers, and failed, a frustration familiar to many of us not that IT has spread so wide. I eventually learned to do a few things with computers and with the Inner Tubes, as have so many of us.
I can't be objective about the quality of my own writing, I never have been able to do that. It's very often painful to look at things I've written. Kurt Vonnegut's
comment about how he felt lousy about all the books he'd written, and Samuel Beckett's
comment about how to write is to fail, both resonate strongly with me. So I just get through each piece of writing as best I can, hope that it's not too much of an affront to my readers' taste and intelligence, and then get on to the next one. I can say of myself with some confidence that I'm a good reader, and I think there's often a connection between that and writing well, and so that gives me hope that it may not have been fully futile, all the time I've spent writing so many different things, two unpublished novels, large chunks of several more which I may or may not ever finished, who knows how many short stories, essays, letters, journal essays, emails, Internet forum posts, blog posts. Queries... Reflections on the pleasures of well-made notebooks and pens, on the frustrations and ironies and trade-offs of life.
notebooks with a PilotGS-2 Pro, on pretty much a daily basis. I enjoyed that. I found out that it was Bruce Chatwinwho had given Moleskines their name; I browsed through one of his books and didn't think it was for me, although that remains a very cursory first impression from which no-one should draw conclusions. Anyway, in May of this year I pretty much stopped with the Pilot and the Moleskines, because I had started with this blog, and I'm doing here very much the same thing that I was doing in the Moleskines, except that I'm trying to be more careful here, more polished in my prose style and more reserved with my judgements, and more discreet, because this is going public right away and that wasn't. Some of what I've written here I've copied from the Moleskines. I miss writing in the Moleskines, they and the GS-2 Pro have aesthetic qualities which this keyboard and monitor completely lack, but this blog has pretty much replaced them, whaddya gonna do. After this blog makes me a multimillionaire, I will have the option of writing in nice notebooks with nice pens again, I will be able to pay someone well for typing and data entry, right? Right. Since starting the blog, I've written a page and a half in the Moleskine. A page and a half in a month and a half, noting when I started using a new disposable razor, when I set a new personal best in the number of reps of the Upward Dog I could do in a set, and not a whole lot more than that. [PS, 15 March 2022: I thought they were called Upward Dogs, but what I was doing was going from laying flat on my back, going to a fully extended bridge, then all the way back down. That was one rep.] A page and a half. I was averaging more than that in a day.
I used to be downright hostile toward computers, in a way which seems to me, in retrospect, quite neo-Luddite. I used to say that I wanted to chisel my writing into granite, rather than enter it into a database via a keyboard. (I never have learned to chisel granite, despite those repeated blustering pronouncements.) It is clear, in retrospect, that my hostility was based in ignorance, and in the frustration of having tried a few times to use computers, and failed, a frustration familiar to many of us not that IT has spread so wide. I eventually learned to do a few things with computers and with the Inner Tubes, as have so many of us.
I can't be objective about the quality of my own writing, I never have been able to do that. It's very often painful to look at things I've written. Kurt Vonnegut'scomment about how he felt lousy about all the books he'd written, and Samuel Beckett'scomment about how to write is to fail, both resonate strongly with me. So I just get through each piece of writing as best I can, hope that it's not too much of an affront to my readers' taste and intelligence, and then get on to the next one. I can say of myself with some confidence that I'm a good reader, and I think there's often a connection between that and writing well, and so that gives me hope that it may not have been fully futile, all the time I've spent writing so many different things, two unpublished novels, large chunks of several more which I may or may not ever finished, who knows how many short stories, essays, letters, journal essays, emails, Internet forum posts, blog posts. Queries... Reflections on the pleasures of well-made notebooks and pens, on the frustrations and ironies and trade-offs of life.
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