No dog is an island

On the front page of the Reno Gazette today is the obituary of Gidget the 1990's star of Taco Bell commercials. As a chihuhua she was (and I quote) a diva on and off the screen. It goes on to say she suffered a massive stroke at her trainer's home in California and was euthanized. As the poet of yore said, "Do not send to ask for whom the Taco Bell tolls...it tolls for every star in the firmament.

Bookstores, piracy and the decline of language

It seems that Amazon deleted two of George Orwell's books from their Kindle list.I've read about the mixup that was due to some illegal piracy of copyright. It was cleared up and apparently customers got their refunds and nobody had to report to the Ministry of Truth. It does show how the transistion period from print to ebooks is going to have glitches and does have a passing nod to "1984". Personally I like to browse the bookstores not so I can find a book but so a book can find me. At the same time I find myself reading letters to the editor in my local Reno paper and they do annoy me. George Orwell was well aware that political creeds are often rationalizations of emotional problems, particularly these days. Most of the letters are rants against Obama and Socialism. Here is a mature, courageous and intelligent leader who is able to articulate a new form of social protection for the country and he is clobbered with inarticulate, uneducated clap trap. When in doubt just say go to hell and declare victory. In the film "Charlie Wilson's War" Wilson, who is a congressman from Texas boasts that he can spend taxpayer money any way he likes because his constituents only want to keep their guns and be left alone. By the way Orwell worked in a bookstore himself in Hampstead in the 1930's. He wrote about it in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying".

Michael, McLuhan and the mob

I'm not immune to pop culture and I'm not a bigot like Peter King or Bill O'Reilly it's just that I've spent most of my time with jazz. The funerary arrangements for Michael Jackson have been pretty over the top and the mob in front of the Staples Center reminded me of the final scene in Nathanael West's "Day of the Locust" (but not so apocalyptic). Actually it was my fellow Edmontonian Marshall McLuhan, the electronic age guru, who said that it isn't the content of the television that's important, it's the audience. At least that was his comment on the first moon landing. The bathos (Oxford dictionary: unintential lapse in mood from the sublime to the absurd or trivial) went on and on. In an Updike poem titled "TV" he said that he turned on the tap of TV but it didn't come out hot or cold, only lukewarm and tepid".
Adman Jerry Mander's book "Four arguments for the elimination of television" is worth reading in this tv saturated age. Briefly the arguments are: 1. The mediation of experience, 2. The colonization of experience, 3. The effects of television on the human being and 4. The inherent biases of television. The funeral show was put on like a giant biblical epic, as per DeToqueville's comment that the most prevalent trait he found in America was "religious insanity". But this is the age of footage and man did they have the footage. There's nothing in the archives on the death of Mozart or Napolean. To digress, did you know that Johann Strauss II composed "The morning papers waltz"? Isn't that nice? Couldn't there be a lovely "Waltz of the Anchors"? A tv reporter once asked Milton Berle for a comment and Miltie declined. The reporter said, can't we get something and Miltie said, "Just say film at 11."