JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The Republicans want voters to believe that because Barack Obama is articulate, eloquent, an intellectual, he must be deceiving them. The Republicans are prepared to unleash hatred and fear in order to cling to the power they have used to really and truly screw up America. John McCain, who is not the same man he was before he became the nominee, is clearly uncomfortable with the desperate measures his party is employing, but Sarah Palin is really into it—the glint in her eye, the metallic shriek, she’s scary. 

The editors of the New Yorker endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States, citing among his qualifications his eloquence.

“Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.”

James Wood points out that the Republicans have declared war on words. 

“In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. . .The once bipartisan campaign adviser Dick Morris and his wife and co-writer, Eileen McGann, argue that the McCain camp, in true Rovian fashion, is “using the Democrat’s articulateness against him” (along with his education, his popularity, his intelligence, his wife—pretty much everything but his height, though it may come to that). . .Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself?”

Sarah Palin’s invention of the term “verbage” seems to sum up the Republican position that language is garbage. The book of the Palin administration has already been written: it’s 1984 by George Orwell.

Defend words. Defend education. Elect Barack Obama. 

Why should we care about their elections when we can’t vote? Because what happens there, we feel right here. Besides, we know a bit more than they do about electing the unworthy and unqualified because we can “relate” to them.

“But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. … Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”

Answer: Theodore Kaczinski.

Does the name sound familiar?

He was the Unabomber. A murderous psychopath who made it his mission to kill those who would lead the world into a future ruled by machines. Sounds a bit like Sarah Connor in The Terminator, except that real life is so much more complex and messy and far less attractive than blockbuster science-fiction movies. He was a freak, but what if there’s a germ of truth in his warnings? It would be foolhardy of us not to consider the possibility. In the NYT, Richard Dooling suggests that human over-reliance on computers led to the current financial crisis. Did the geniuses of Wall Street really understand derivatives? No, they left it to their machines.

Photo: Mat sees. . .dumb movies about dead people!

Mag-ingat Ka Sa. . .Kulam (Beware of. . .Voodoo), written and directed by Jun Lana, starring Judy Ann Santos, Dennis Trillo, and TJ Trinidad.

Ernie: Why is there an ellipsis in the title?
Grungella: I. . .don’t know.
Big Bird: Mag-ingat ka sa. . .silip! (Dennis Trillo’s character goes to bed wearing boxers and pajamas.) Dennis, mag-ingat ka sa. . .akin!

(Onscreen) TJ Trinidad: Hindi mo ba ako. . .naaalala?
(Offscreen) Ernie: Ako, gusto kitang. . .maalala!

Grungella: Mag-ingat ka sa. . .continuity gaffes! (Characters inexplicably change costume within the same sequence. In one scene, Dennis Trillo gets out of bed with dark stripes on his left arm, like tire tracks. He walks through the door and voila! Tire tracks vanish.)

Ernie: Mag-ingat ka sa. . .acting ng mangkukulam! (The evil mother character wasn’t scary, but the deep-voice, big-hair, eyeball-rolling performance of the actress was.)

Onscreen, the blind child character has a successful eye transplant.
Child: Nakakakita na ako! Gusto kong makakakita ng. . .eclipse!

Big Bird: Ang ganda ng. . .outfits ni Juday! (We stuck around for the closing credits to see whose clothes she was wearing, but there was no mention of the designer. We like Juday because even with the most asinine material she can pull off a couple of good moments.)

Grungella: Mag-ingat ka sa. . .Mag-Ingat Ka Sa Kulam!

Portentous silliness, inept storytelling—the filmmakers lose track of their own plot (Did the mamaw commit suicide or was she killed?), scary bits shamelessly ripped off from The Ring, The Grudge, The Eye, etc. The Saturday night audience was really into it, though, judging from all the screaming in the theatre. Or maybe they just wanted their money back.

Favorite comedy sketch in my house: Ang Spoiled from Bubble Gang, starring Ogie Alcasid as Angelina the brat and Michael V as her yaya. It’s hysterical! Perfectly-observed and well-acted—Ogie and Bitoy aren’t just wearing dresses, they are the kid and the yaya.

 

 

 

 

There’s a story by Irwin Shaw in which a character chooses books by checking out the author’s photo on the back cover. If she finds the author attractive, she buys the book. But how many authors have the bone structure of Sebastian Junger? I usually rely on book reviews (I like Michael Dirda of the Washington Post because he said he would ask to be buried with The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, and Christopher Hitchens is brilliant even when you disagree with him) and friends’ recommendations (Tina got me into Stalin-era Soviet literature. I periodically leave the gulag, but she’s still in there).

NYRB Classics have me at the logo. If the book is from NYRB, the only reservations come from my wallet. Their book designs are simple and elegant, and the monochromatic spines line up beautifully on a shelf.

Published by the New York Review of Books, NYRB Classics are translations and reissues of nearly-forgotten masterpieces. These are books no one else would think of publishing. In recent months I’ve acquired (and not yet finished reading—I’m savoring them) several titles including Kaputt, the strange and astounding World War II memoir by the disaffected fascist Curzio Malaparte (Actually the author’s name was enough to sell me the book. Later I found that the odd-looking house in Capri in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt was Malaparte’s); Soul, a collection of stories by the suppressed Russian author Andrey Platonov (the story “The Return” is a killer); and Memoirs Of An Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori, the scion of an aristocratic Austro-Hungarian family in decline (He doesn’t hate Jews; he honestly addresses his feelings of attraction and repulsion towards them, the attitudes that made him complicit in the horrors of the last century).

NYRB Classics are available at Powerbooks, A Different Bookstore, and Fully-Booked. Oddly, no one thinks of arranging them on a single shelf. Yesterday I asked my contact at National Bookstore if there was any chance we could get NYRB Classics at National branches. She says they carry a few titles, and will get more in the coming months. Dibs!

According to the New York Times, more and more guys—heterosexuals—are getting cats as pets. According to the writer, these guys are more secure about their masculinity so they don’t have to prove it by taking their dogs for a run around the park. (Taking your dog for a walk in the park at 2am is another story.)

Photo: Koosi demonstrates diva-ness.

I think that with Wall Street in chaos, the Times is hard-pressed to find stories that aren’t related to the crash. Hence this fluff piece about a so-called trend. The writer admits there are no figures to support the claim.

Not that there’s anything wrong with guys adopting cats. I’m sure it’s great—until he starts dating a girl who also has cats. Then we’re talking territorial wars. Also, I’ve noticed that cat owners have diva tendencies, and cats are by nature divas. You take two divas and their respective pet divas, and the household becomes pure Gotterdammerung.

One of my all-time favorite novels is Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I read it in high school, and I still remember every turn and twist of the plot. 

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is about a pretty young country girl named Tess Durbeyfield. She comes from a poor family and her father drinks too much. One day, he runs into the parson, who addresses him as “Sir John”. He demands to know why the parson keeps calling him “Sir John”. The parson explains that while looking into the family trees of his parishioners, he discovered that the Durbeyfields are descended from a line of famous knights called D’Urberville. Little does the parson know that this bit of historical trivia is going to screw up Tess’s life forever.

There’s a wealthy landowning family called D’Urberville in another county; Tess’s parents conclude that they must be relatives. What they don’t know is that the rich people are not really D’Urbervilles—they only bought the name for social-climbing purposes. The Durbeyfields—who are the real D’Urbervilles—decide to send Tess to their “cousins” in the hope that they will help her find a good job or a proper husband. This is the part in Tagalog movies where the parents decide that their pretty daughter is their ticket out of poverty. In any case, her leaving means they have one less mouth to feed.

So obedient little Tess goes off to meet the fake D’Urbervilles. What do they do with their supposed cousin? They hire her as a maid. The D’Urbervilles’s son Alec, who is sort of attractive but a heel (cad, walanghiya, manyak), takes one look at Tess and that’s it, she’s doomed. Guess what happens next.

You Are What You Read: Thomas Hardy. In Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.