Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Entre'acte

1. Wouldn't it have been fun to see Hillary so aggressive before her brother and sister senators when the issue of invading Iraq came up?

2. Does this recent arc of Hillary's behavior, from the teary-eyed to the vindictive, project an aura of competence or rather of Bush-like intransigence?

3. Miles Davis was thought by some critics to have been a great player in spite of his occasional fluffs. Bill Clinton is thought by many critics to have been the brightest, most politically savvy president since and perhaps even before FDR. Isn't it possible that Miles Davis and the Big Dog never fluffed a note or lost their temper by accident? You know--deliberate.

4. If a row of semi-colons begins to appear in one's blog template, resolutely resisting all attempts to restore stasis and order, it probably behooves one not do to leave one's Moleskine notebook resting on the keys of the wireless keyboard.

5. Was Tolstoy right about happy families being all alike?

6. Will future students in Freshman Comp be assigned Things-to-Like-about-Hillary themes?

7. Do we really have more things to be cynical about in 2008, or will it always seem that the present moment is the one to be most cynical about?

8. Is there really a memorial to the Sepoy Rebellion in San Francisco?

9. Which is worse, the hour glass on a PC or that whirling disc on a Mac?

10. Whose face will be most prevalent on 2008 Halloween masks?

11. If you answered Hillary to any of the questions above, go to the front of the line.

12. If Edgar Allen Poe were able to speak to us from Beyond, what would he think of what's happened to the short story?

13. Do you get the feeling that super market cashiers are beginning to laugh at you?

14. Do you become suspicious if a complete stranger telephones you and asks you right off the bat how you're feeling?

15. What's she going to do next?

16. Who will Bill get mad at next?

3 comments:

lettuce said...

yes to no.13

well, sometimes


interesting - i've been assuming that Hillary's ups and downs are all pretty carefully choreographed

No 9. the pc. pcs are always worse, end of story.

Lori Witzel said...

Another good question on a list that can send me down the rabbit-hole.

Number 12 is very interesting...I must admit, I don't know Poe well enough to know whether lapidary work would irritate him or make him smile.

I suspect metafiction would be off-putting for Poe, but dang it, I don't have enough time to read him thoroughly right now! Arrrrgggh. Must. Focus.

Given the lushness of imagery and music in his work, I wonder if Poe would not pursue multimedia in some form?

(Just step away from the question, Lori...return to the medieval illuminated manuscripts...)

R.L. Bourges said...

re 12: he would probably express amazement at the creative ways in which some of his stories were once reworded and illustrated by the mommy of a four year-old (such a pity that the mommy never quoted her sources of inspiration, since the child never felt the slightest inclination to read Poe, for some reason - it took a series of recent prompts, including this one, to identify the source of the damage from a specific fragmentation bomb set off in my imagination a long, long time ago)