crazyfish

uh-oh, you thought it was something else ... that isn't good. I'm going to have to rework that.

Probably too late now that the story is nearing the end, but ah well, any discussion about the story should go here. [sharedmedia=stories:stories:3557]

Through the amber mist in the fridge, Alex peered and ruminated on the eggs he had forgotten to buy, the indecipherable smell that would take hours to pinpoint, his thirst that would not be slaked. And the dinner he was supposed to be preparing … Dinner was supposed to be simple: Pasta, a jar of Alfredo sauce, three cans of tuna, and then plates and cutlery and glasses of tea, buffoonish entreaties to have his mom eat more, Susan’s complete obstinacy to gratitude and his jocular goadings to have

Whom we love is as much a statement about those whom we reject. In the glut of romantic fiction out there, a lot of books gloss over the rejection inherent in the romantic love because really why do we want to feel sad for the poor sod when there's a ooey gooey love to gush over. We gloss it over. We find ways to minimize it. Or we turn the rejected character into an asshole, someone who deserved it, a crazy idiot, or worse, an other. This brings me back to the book I was reading Bitter Eden. The story is much about pure love as it is about the cruel rejection that made the love possible. Warning, there are spoilers. Actually it's the whole plot summary. Either way you're warned. The narrator Tom is a masculine, single, POW, and by default straight. He first bonds with the married Douglas, who is effeminate and mothering. No one in the prison camp really likes the fragile Douglas. Even the self-identified gay prisoners don't like him. Tom eventually comes to accept Douglas because underneath his fussy mothering ways, Douglas is loyal and honorable. After a year of being Douglas' 'mate'(all platonic), Tom is more open to his queer side. He's part of a theatre group run by a gay pow. He regularly submits himself to have his portrait drawn by another gay prisoner who 'studies his face but draws his genitals.' Then he runs into another british pow, married Danny, who's a man's man and is for all intents and purposes straight. Danny is simply more fun. The bond between Tom and Danny is natural, quick, and goes deeper because they both share wounds of childhood traumas. And oh, Danny can't stand Douglas in the slightest. Tom rejects Douglas for Danny. Make no mistake, the rejection is cruel and pure aggression. And you know if Tom hadn't learnt to accept Douglas, he would not have had the capacity to love Danny. The latter half of book is sweet as much as it is bitter, Tom and Danny blossom albeit in their sly not-overtly sexual way while Douglas goes insane. Throughout the latter half of the book, Tom grapples with his responsibility in Douglas' demise. Yes every man is responsible for his own heart, but was the rejection necessary for true love to flower? I kept hoping the men would look beyond myopic delineations of his and mine and use the spark of love to forge something more universal. You know like a brotherhood of sorts, but that wish is a fantasy really. When the death, hunger, torture, stare at you daily, the urge to possess something for yourself only is all that there is. The rejection speaks to the struggle between the feminine vs the masculine that permeates the whole book, and how being masculine means the rejection of femininity. When Tom decides to play Lady Macbeth, the experience almost breaks their relationship as the pair go to absurd lengths to re-affirm their masculinity. The irony is while Tom is more willing to explore the queerer side of himself and Danny much less so, it's Danny who wants to continue the relationship after the war ends. But Tom is too afraid. He gets married and doesn't speak to or hear from Danny again until after his death. A sad book yes, but a real and touching book. Douglas' tragic end rings through to the last pages when Tom in his older years is trying to find some resolution to his complicity. Not only did he let Douglas down, he let Danny down big time. It's sad how it takes extreme circumstances to discover hidden dimensions of yourself, but as soon as the pressure goes away and the situation returns to the mundane, your expanded horizons shrink back and everything resets to a bland and stifling normal. In the end Tom wishes to go back to the Bitter Eden of the pow camp. The possibility of creating a new Eden in the midst of his homely, freer, normal is not one he seriously grapples with, and that's just sad.

Through NetGalley I got a copy of Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika. I'm still working my way through it, but I would definitely recommend it if you're looking high brow queer fiction.. Yeah, yeah. it's literary fiction, but this is the literary fiction done right. Deep and vivaciously haunting with its imagery, yet without the dreary pretentiousness or unlikable characters associated with literary fiction. No, the book isn't easy to read, but you would want to slow down anyway to enjoy its every word. The story is simple enough,set in WWII , a first person's account of a South African POW captured by first by the Italians in North Africa and gets transferred to Europe. There's quite a bit of bleakness and frankness about death. There's a cruel betrayal. but also there's a lot of affirming male bonding and queer happenstances in his all-around male milieu.

The story is a bit on the unconventional side. There's no central plot, just a series of vignettes in Yinka's week, which culminates to a tragic conclusion. There are strong paranormal, mystery, and romantic elements. I'm still tweaking this, so I'm interested in you guys think.

A missing teenage girl, a boy dying with cancer, a man clinging to life in a critical care unit, and at the center of it all, Yinka is just trying get through his week without blowing up over his ex-partner's bullshit.

Despite his tri-annual testimonies to God’s grace, Yinka still did not believe in God. His atheism was not the careful result after a delicate balancing of the ledgers on faith and reason. An opulent joke, he preferred to think of it, something to titillate the God that probably existed, at the very least the brothers and sisters of the church he regularly attended. But really the reasons were more mundane. Laziness was more like it—the laziness of his spirit at failing to grasp the miracle of t

I'm with Bieber on this one. Was that an interview or a deposition?

The gardener must have pissed him off, planted the wrong color roses or something .

I dunno. It's not at all clear that the drug will save the kid. And if the drug causes a deadly reaction in the kid, and are the parents going to turn around and say, "EVIL DRUG COMPANY killed my baby." Are they going to scurry a battalion of lawyers to demand compensation? As for cost of drug development ... If aspirin was discovered today, the FDA won't approve it. If penicillin was discovered today, the FDA won't approve it. The precautionary principle doesn't help so much when it comes to finding new drugs. But no one wants to be one shafted with birth defects because their mom took thalidomide. The paternalism of the FDA policies denies dying patients their human right to try experimental drugs, literally adds millions to the cost of drug development. I'd happier if FDA become more of an auditing agency than an approval agency. And let the public decide how much they want to gamble with their health. But most people don't see it my way. They prefer to have a big daddy in the person of the government making things safe for everybody, so that they don't have to think, or rather so they know whom to blame when shit goes wrong. I just wish more people saw that deadly costs associated with guaranteed security.

Not with an irregular occurrence, Alex’s father would sigh a little wish to own a houseboat. Whether it was enjoying the freedom to get lost in the Pacific or the rollicking insecurity of water living or the putative community of ne’er-do-well houseboat owners, nothing about owning a houseboat made sense to Susan. Alex remembered the summer road trip to Phoenix, the town of Quartzite wavering in a steel glare, and his mind hiccupping with apoplectic wtf’s as they drove past a giant white ‘Q’ bak

I have so many unfinished books on my kindle. I can't just read one book at a time. Here's the top three on my library list. Kinder than Solitude by Yiyun Li. Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

As much as I might not mind teenagers watching porn, I do mind if they start getting desensitized and start looking for harder videos to get off on. Before the internet, finding the harder videos was relatively difficult. In this day and age, 'three girls, one cup' is one click away.

Say what you think but come with a spirit of dialogue. Authors want to communicate. They want to discuss their work. But if you come after them in attack mode, the communications shut down. I'm a weak and silly and vain. If you attack me, I'll shut down, I raise up walls and whatever nuggets of heavenly wisdoms will be cast to the swine. Yeah poor me, stupid me. However, gush over so and so in my story and follow that with a 1000 page evisceration of my story, I'll read it all. I take it all gladly! Yeah, my fickle self. Show that you care. Show that you are genuinely interested helping me, and I'll swallow up every one of your criticisms gladly! But you might say, it's not your job to handhold authors. Honesty! Truth! In my day we ate nails for breakfast! Yeah well ... what are you interested in? Dialogue or Venting? Increasing the chances of making said story better or the chances the story remains the same unpalatable dreck? Decide what you want and proceed accordingly. Of course not all authors can handle criticism even if you serve it with buckets of sugar. Some will shut down, others will open up. As long as you've done your part to ensure good vibes along the way, what more is there? After all just as authors are obligated to take all criticism with graceful politeness, the reviewer is just as obligated to take all responses to their opinion with graceful politeness.

Hmm. I don't know how theatre works. But I suspect that it will be a tough thing to be an academic. I can only speak from my background in an STEM field. Even though funding is easier to get, (professors rely on slave worker grad students to do research), faculty positions in the stem are elusive. At least in my field, 70% don't remain in academia. Given our skillset, it's a little easier (only a little) to find a job in industry but the route is certainly less efficient than if we had taken a job right after a masters or the bachelors. You have to talk to your professors. Get them to talk honestly about post-graduate study. Also you need to ask to them to be honest about the average number years it takes to get a phd. Also how many faculty positions do they anticipate opening in the next 15 years? I suspect, that theartre is lot like a humanities where there's an overproduction of phds, but very, very little faculty placement. Right now, at in America at least, a lot of the baby-boomer faculty are retiring, so there's a been rash of positions opening up. But who knows in another ten years? And in the humanities and social sciences, at least in the US, departments depend on temp, underpaid adjuncts to avoid to hiring more expensive tenure-track faculty. I wondering if in theater, the departments hire mainly those with significant theatre experience or from those with phds? One thing's for sure, if a school isn't willing to fund your studies, then I'd think twice, ten times, about paying out of pocket. You have to take into account that with a theatre phd, you're basically unemployable out of academia.

I dunno. I wouldn't call Chandler a consummate comic writer. He certainly had a flair for the absurd in his style, but I never really found him funny. One thing's for sure, the reader will accept anything as long as you own it.

You know these similes could work, if you have the confident voice to back it up. For example, Raymond Chandler is famous for his strange metaphors. “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away." "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”

Sweet gregorian chant. Allegri's Miserere is my favorite I like anything written by Hildegard Von Bingen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dehwp_dRlYQ Original Chants for female voices are rare to find. In the spirit of general choir, here is a bunch of japanese boy's choir performing Polyushko Pole. That clip is from the japanese movie, Boys Choir. Watch that movie if you can find it! It's a movie about choir boys and vaguely queer angst. There's no sex or anything close to kissing that in the movie, but it is refreshingly queer in innocent ways.

Just because I appreciate Ellen Page coming out, that means I'm celebrating mediocrity? This conversation is going nowhere. Back to the thread. So Ellen page .... is her statement indulgent or truly inspiring? I lean towards indulgent. I don't think she's risking that much. For one, I don't believe as much as Thorn does that Hollywood penalizes openly lesbian celebrities. Actually being lesbian or pretending to be lesbian might be a good thing careerwise. Hell look at the new music video with Rihanna and Shakira acting gay for the camera, or Madonna's stunts for attention. Do you remember that russian group TATU kissing on stage? Either way, Ellen is a lot more open about her sexuality than I am about mine, so on that fact alone, she gets my head nod. And so we're all clear, just because she gets my head nod doesn't mean I believe she should effing win the Nobel peace prize.

I was going to say that Hollywood is a weird construction of the liberalism and conservatism. They'll be the most bleeding heart liberal until money gets involved. I find that particularly nauseating because hollywood types like to clap themselves on the back, like to claim some kind of superiority over the rest of the country, for how "progressive" and "enlightened" they are. I almost prefer a westboro hater over hollywood anointed types shilling about how liberal they are. At least I know that with a westboro hater, they are true to themselves.

That's a misreading of my post. I never claimed Ellen Page's statement is an achievement comparable to curing cancer. All I said is that the courage it takes to cure cancer and the courage it takes to come out are of two different kinds. Vastly different. Trust me I'm a scientist, a physicist actually. I can assure you, it doesn't take balls to do research or to discover that pesky Higgs Boson at CERN.(it took a lot of worker bee grad student coders) Sure, It takes an extraordinary curiosity and ingenuity and cooperation, and that in itself is remarkable, but does it take the courage in the face of adversity that might mean the loss of your job, your family, your identity, or even your LIFE? Nope. Take Alan Turing, brilliant, extraordinary scientist. We wouldn't have our modern computers, if not for his brilliant work. But he didn't off himself because of hard hard research. He offed himself because he was gay. You're the who is playing the achievement olympics. You discount everything unless it's extraordinary, and even then you don't understand how different things, no matter how insignificant they might seem, could be extraordinary in small ways. Like I said, I agree somewhat with your point. People making coming out statements when they have no skin in the game feels indulgent to me. We could argue until thy kingdom come if Ellen Page, being an hollywood type, has skin in the game On the other hand, you claim first world problems, we snipe and mutter at those rich cushy gays and lesbians announcing whom they like to fuck. No shit, first world problems, that we have the luxury to second guess the intentions of gays... In the third world, you get killed, you get imprisoned, your family throws you off the bus when you announce you're gay! First world problems indeed.

EVERYBODY can see MLK is black. We would not be having coming out statements if people can see the gay in your face. I agree, coming out statements, when there's no skin in the game, feel indulgent, like retired footballers announcing that they were gay. No, it isn't curing cancer, but curing cancer doesn't require the sort of courage that might mean the loss of respect and standing. We could argue that Ellen Page don't have any skin in the game, compared with Micheal Sam. Whether she's courageous or not, who are you to rag on the poor,weak souls who glean hope and courage from her "inconsequential" statement? Not everyone is as strong as you, not everyone is as well-adjusted as you. I'm sure, you can forgive us poor people.

Well you're a business guy. You know very well that a lot of business collusion can be traced directly to government policy favoring big guys, connected fellows, incumbents over the little guys. Regulatory capture, onerous licensing and occupations laws, dubious statutes for "the welfare of the public" allow business to collude and raise high barriers to entry. I should point you to the court case as a clear example http://reason.com/blog/2014/02/15/brew-city-taxi-wars-the-fight-for-transp There's a clear market opportunity for business to serve gay weddings. (it's as simple as going to the grocery store to get the flour you need) If times are so dire that everyone is colluding, I just don't see how government, who is a reflection of the aggregate social attitudes, could help you. You are so impatient for social change that you'd rather the government step in to force the outcomes you want. I find that at odds with conservative philosophy, which at the heart of it, at least in the burkean sense, is that change happens slowly and incrementally and naturally from the grassroots level and not by force. I'm not so impatient for change that i would have the government step in to force my views on everybody else. My belief in the primacy of the individual is just too sacrosanct.(blame the fact that I grew up in a despotic african republic) I can't help the nasty feeling in my stomach when I think of the government who, up till a few decades ago, for the "good of the republic" made it illegal for business to hire me and then turning around, for the same "good of the republic" makes it illegal to discriminate against me. It's like my rights are dependents on the whims of a government bureaucrat ... that makes me tremble. We would always be one election cycle away from a "good benevolent" government that would redefine my rights. In a pluralistic society that's particularly nasty thought. I like to think that the bill of rights guarantees the same rights whether a republican or a democrat is in power. I particularly hate the idea of protected classes getting special exemptions against discrimination. Now looking around America, I firmly believe that the public opinion isn't so tyrannical that gays are hounded out of the public sphere. For every business that proclaims their hatred, there are enough businesses proud to state their support. The fact that the people in the state of kansas are talking and debating the law right now shows that public opinion isn't monolithic. I'm not worried about gay marriages won't get wedding cakes in Kansas. There was no need for government-enforced equality to make Houston or Atlanta, one of the cities with the largest gay population in the country. Public opinion is working as it should to correct against homophobic attitudes. I would rather public opinion do the policing than let the threat of prison do the policing. I'm just patient, that's all.

I'm an unabased libertarian with a small l. I got to say libertarians are the most misunderstood wing of the republican party. Gay rights is a perfect example. Republicans hate us because we're so gaga for small government that we don't believe that the government should be in the marriage licensing business! Hell, we even believe polygamy should be legal. And since the government can't and won't get itself out of the marriage license business, then gays are entitled to marriage licenses by virtue of the natural right to equal treatment under the law. Progressives hate us because while we believe gay marriages should be legal, we're most emphatically against the government preventing the non-violent free exercise of religion. A christian photographer has the inviolable right not to photograph a gay wedding. The same government that can force you to work with a gay man is the same government that can make it illegal for you hire a gay man for the good of the republic. Remember Jim Crow laws expressly made it illegal for ALL business to work equitably with blacks. The threat of prison was what hard-encoded discrimination. Hell, I'm gay and black, here I am saying it's your right as private citizen to discriminate against me. Yeah an unpopular view. But my view is that your right to discriminate against me because I'm black and gay, is indistinguishable from your right to discriminate against me because I have tattoos. I don't care for the government to play thought police. I would rather a homophobe christian tell me openly they don't care to bake a cake for my wedding than to get a "surprise" cake on my wedding day. I don't have a fundamental right to his or her services or to even to a wedding cake. Since we are all free, I'll guarantee you, it'll be in someone else's interest to bake for my wedding! Why? There's money to be made! The only way it won't be in someone else's interest to to make me a cake, is if the government made illegal for them to make me cake. But you say social sanctions, stigma, death threats and all the like can prevent a citizen from making you a cake. If social stigma and death threats are such that every single man in town won't make me a cake, then I'll argue that the rule of law won't help you one bit. Because as soon as that sheriff steps in to force the baker to make you a cake, then the public will rise up against the sheriff. besides a sheriff who has a moral code that runs contrary to every single man in town, doesn't remain sheriff for long. Now that's how libertarians are be both for gay marriage and for the free non-violent exercise of religion.