Quote of the day

Mostly, it felt like there was a book that had already been written years before and then fed through a paper shredder one sheet at a time. It was as if I had the pile of thinly sliced strips covering my desk, and all I had to do was reassemble the book that was already there. After all, it was already there. Living your life is the hard part. Getting it glued down on paper in the right order is tedious, but in comparison to the living, it isn't that hard.

--Ann Patchett, on writing Truth and Beauty (which, if you haven't read, you should. Right now. I'll wait.)

Severance update

I finally got to read Severance a couple of weeks ago. It was a much quicker read than I had expected (I guess it makes sense since each piece was only 240 words), and I was mostly impressed. Generally, the more historical or fictional the figure, the more I liked them--there were a couple that made me uncomfortable. I've been meaning to listen to Butler's NPR interview and see if he mentions them.

One was in the voice of someone who died in the collapse of the North Tower on 9/11--the person (I can't remember now if it was a man or a woman; I think a woman) is given a name and I wasn't sure if she was real or not. I've read some 9/11 or post-9/11 fiction lately and been okay with it, but those were straightforward novels and usually dealt more with the aftermath than an eyewitness account of the events.

The other one that bothered me was the Nicole Brown Simpson one. Again, too recent? It was very direct--I don't know many people who believe OJ is innocent, but calling out his guilt in print from her point of view is pretty ballsy. And I think the idea that she was a real person with a real family who's still out there made it questionable for me. I was never completely comfortable with the definition of a public figure that they gave us in journalism school.

I thought of that today when I read this blog entry about the upcoming Fox special where OJ speculates about how he would have killed his wife. If he actually had, of course. The whole concept is incomprehensible to me; the fact that even the world's sleaziest network was willing to air it makes me wonder about the nearness of the apocalypse. Most of what I've read on the Internet expresses similar outrage, for what it's worth. I can't imagine it'll be yanked from the air because of a little disgust. But what the hell? At least the Butler piece was artful and (dare I say) sensitively done. I can't imagine the Fox thing will have any redeeming qualities.

At least no one asked if it was my first time voting

Just returned from my polling place, which is always interesting. I invariably go in the morning, whether I'm gainfully employed or not, because otherwise I worry about it all day. It's possible that the judges in the evenings are a little less clueless; the morning ones scare me a little. Old and crabby. When I went to check in the woman stared at me until I finally said "I want to vote." Somehow I thought that was implied.

Cook County is slowly embracing the newfangled voting technologies; up until this year I had a punch-card ballot, but in the primary this time around I got one of those color-in-the-circle paper ones. This morning they gave me a choice between paper and touch-screen, but when I chose paper, they taunted me until I gave in and said I'd use the machine (like all the other young people are doing). Then I stood there like an idiot waiting for direction until they told me to go figure it out. Sigh.

All signs indicate that my votes registered correctly and were actually cast, which is better than some reports I've read about the touch-screen machines. I'm stil nervous, though. But at least I got all the way through to the end on the first try, unlike the guy next to me, whose screen mysteriously went dark while the paper record was being generated. When I left they were still waiting breathlessly to see what would happen, but apparently this was the second or third time this machine (one of two) had malfunctioned today.

Normally I'm much more excited about the whole process; voting today left me cold. It seemed like every race was a choice for the lesser of two evils. And there were so many judges up for retention! Thank God for the bar association ratings. Not that it matters much, I suppose; I heard on NPR that they generally get something like a 75% yes vote for retention no matter who they are and what they've done, because we're too uninformed to know what the hell we're voting for.

We also had two referenda--an assault weapons ban and and minimum wage increase--and two advisory referenda, both of which were the same question--should we get out of Iraq? One was countywide and one was for the town I live in. From our lips to Bush's ear, right?

Bill Maher gets out the vote

The election is four days away, and I'm through dicking around with you. Here are your talking points:

1) When they say, "Democrats will raise taxes," you say, "We have to, because some asshole spent all the money in the world cutting Paris Hilton's taxes and not killing Osama bin Laden."

(via Salon)

Quote of the day

It says something pretty cool about our country that, when caught using an unfortunate choice of words, it's considered an excellent defense to say "No, no, no! What I was trying to do was insult the intelligence of our leader!"
--Eric Zorn, on John Kerry's failed joke and the resulting backlash

Civic duties

Last week I sat in on an instruction session for a freshman composition class. The session itself was pretty straightforward -- I think they were working on pretty basic research papers. Before they got started, though, the professor got up and went over some housekeeping issues related to the larger course. Namely, making sure that everyone had successfully registered to vote, because that's part of their grade. She had apparently registered all of the students who lived on campus or in the area, and she was following up on registrations that didn't go through, as well as a few with non-local addresses. Then she announced that the theater in town was screening An Inconvenient Truth and that she'd give extra credit to anyone who went; she urged them all to attend, even if their topic wasn't global warming.

I was impressed, to say the least. I remember talking about the election in high school civics, but not much more than that, and in college I barely paid attention to the local elections because I was registered at home. To see a professor to get that involved in making sure her students were exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens was pretty exciting to me.

Not that it's an easy election to vote in. I've read a couple of things recently on the idea of a "none of the above" option on the ballot -- basically saying that all the candidates suck and we want new ones. It might be a step up from the lesser-of-two-evils style of voting that we're faced with in a lot of the local races here this time, but I'm concerned about how long the whole thing would be dragged out before someone came up with a candidate that sucked less.

In the Trib the other day there was an editorial cartoon showing TV newscasters announcing the election results -- I can't find it online now, but basically Obama had been elected Cook County Board president, governor, state representative, etc., etc. He's been getting some crap here lately, but I'd still take him over pretty much any of the idiots running for various offices that are up for grabs right now.