You many say she's a dreamer, but she'll have you know that she is not the only one. The other side of the sign said "This is The Hour/We are the ones we've been waiting for/Hopi Elders." Hopey changey elders... I have heard of you. And I know you're not the only ones. But seriously, enough dreaming. There's a time for dreaming, and a time for waking up. And I'm saying that. Me, the Althouse-y elder.
Mother Jones reports what he said to his friend Bryce Tierney: "Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question." Tierney says, "Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her." (By the way, 2007 is a year before Sarah Palin emerged on the national scene.)
Loughner would occasionally mention Giffords, according to Tierney: "It wasn't a day-in, day-out thing, but maybe once in a while, if Giffords did something that was ridiculous or passed some stupid law or did something stupid, he related that to people. But the thing I remember most is just that question. I don't remember him stalking her or anything." Tierney notes that Loughner did not display any specific political or ideological bent: "It wasn't like he was in a certain party or went to rallies... It's not like he'd go on political rants." But Loughner did, according to Tierney, believe that government is "fucking us over." He never heard Loughner vent about about the perils of "currency," as Loughner did on one YouTube video he created....
As Loughner and Tierney grew closer, Tierney got used to spending the first ten minutes or so of every day together arguing with Loughner's "nihilist" view of the world. "By the time he was 19 or 20, he was really fascinated with semantics and how the world is really nothing—illusion," Tierney says. Once, Tierney recalls, Loughner told him, "I'm pretty sure I've come to the conclusion that words mean nothing."...
Tierney believes that Loughner was very interested in pushing people's buttons—and that may have been why he listed Hitler's Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books on his YouTube page. (Loughner's mom is Jewish, according to Tierney.)...
Loughner believed that dreams could be a sort of alternative, Matrix-style reality, and "that when you realize you're dreaming, you can do anything, you can create anything," Tierney says....
There's a dream journal, which I'm sure we'll get to read.
... Loughner seemed ticked off by what he believed to be a pervasive authoritarianism. "The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," he wrote in one YouTube video.....
Since hearing of the rampage, Tierney has been trying to figure out why Loughner did what he allegedly did. "More chaos, maybe," he says. "I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what's happening. He wants all of that." Tierney thinks that Loughner's mindset was like the Joker in the most recent Batman movie: "He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there's no rhyme or reason, he wants to watch the world burn. He probably wanted to take everyone out of their monotonous lives: 'Another Saturday, going to go get groceries'—to take people out of these norms that he thought society had trapped us in."
It sounds as though the movies were more a source of inspiration for his craziness than politics.
Who wrote that? I asked aloud. Meade guessed the name of one of our regular commenters.
I laughed. "Emerson! You know why I'm reading that? I'm reading this letter to the editor of the New York Times from 1853, and the reason I'm reading it is that I did an archive search — you can go back to 1851 in the archives — for 'facetious' and 'bowers,' because I was looking for that quote in the law case Bowers v. Hardwick that uses the word 'facetious,' which is something I wanted for that post about argument by laughter."
Thereupon, I read the verbose and goofily palpitating paean to nature that begins "I have a penchant for grass and trees. A facetious friend intimates, it is on account of some natural affinity — mentioning a certain color by way of illustration." And so forth. The word "bowers" is in there:
Oh! happy is the man that has many of these spots to dream over, when the real of existence becomes too real! I have a few, and they are bowered with holy feeling — as beautiful and beloved as nests of singing larks in bowers of roses.
Oh, well, okay... I think I know what you're saying in that crazy-ass pre-Civil War way. The temperature has shot up to 10° here in the northland. I don't know if the real of existence becomes too real here at my desk with my computer-screen view of the internet and my peripheral view of a wall of windows looking out onto the "liberal space" of Madison, Wisconsin. I don't think it will be such a dreamy escape from the real to go out there, but we will. It's time for that. When I'm trying to write about law and sodomy and laughing and I tumble back into 1853, the pine trees are waving to us.
Last night I dreamed that I went to class — as a student — and found that at my place, there was a manual typewriter. What did that mean? Going back to school, to old things... my obsolescence... a desire to get my hands on writing...
... I'm struck by how powerfully its form and image embody and express the idea of writing, as does almost any typewriter. Like the telephone at an earlier phase in its development when it still had a distinct earpiece and mouthpiece at either end of a handle, the fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms. Even now (but for how much longer?) a typewriter is the icon to show if you want to convey the idea of a dedicated literary life....
The point, of course, is that the computer has never been a dedicated writing tool — writing is the least of it — and everyone uses them....
Actually, I remember, in the early '80s, when secretaries had big computer-looking things on their desks that were called "word processors"... but I know what you mean....
They are somehow both more marvellous and more ordinary. That's why there isn't a shred of romance in the idea of a writer and his or her personal computer.
So what are your typewriter memories? Romantic stuff, please. Anything equally romantic with computers? Obviously, you can use a computer to get to real, in-the-flesh human beings, and you can do it quickly... like: right now. With the typewriter, it will be you and the inanimate object for a long time, and that, perhaps, is why we see the romance in the thing. The typewriter is as romantic as a lonely room.
It meant — on "American Idol" last night — that one of the male contestants would have the advantage of singing with the lone female and the other 2 males would have to sing with each other. An added complexity is that one of the males is perceived as gay.
Is Adam Lambert openly gay? It's never talked about or alluded to on the show. And — the theme was rock — when he sang "Whole Lotta Love" for his solo last night the line "Way down inside, woman, you need me" was utterly convincing — thrilling, even.
But the perceived gayness of Adam made it a special disadvantage — or should I say a special problem — for him to be paired with one of the other males, and I think that was what determined that Kris Allen and Danny Gokey would need to be the male pair, and that Adam would go with Allison Iraheta.
Or do you think that the producers put Allison with Adam to hurt Kris/Danny? The theory is: Either Danny/Kris must go this week, because you want to keep the only female and you can't lose the truly exciting Adam. (Is Adam in danger? He was in the bottom 2 last week in a shocker, but he probably wasn't anywhere near the actual last-place finisher, Matt Giraud. And the seeming close call lit a fire under his fans, so they'd call like mad this week.)
So, put Danny and Kris side by side and let people judge who is better. In the duet, it was clear that Danny was better. Unfortunately for Danny, he subsequently performed solo, attempted to sing "Dream On," and was perfectly awful. Painful, really. What happened?
The whole point of "Dream On" are the screams Steven Tyler pulls off at the end, the ones that Adam Lambert could have pulled off at the end ... and as Gokey was going through this song, it seemed like he was just going to rearrange the song to avoid them. Jen and I kept looking at each other -- now will he? -- and then, when he did, it missed as much as Scott Macintyre missed everything on "The Search Is Over," as much as Corey Clark on "Against All Odds." It was brutal. Both on his cumulative downwards slide and especially on tonight, he deserves to go home now.
Spooked by Adam's superiority, then?
Speaking of "Dream On," I dreamed I was watching the results show — yes, lame of me to dream I'm watching "American Idol" — and Danny lost — not only lost, but they ran out of time and deprived him of the farewell video montage.
But they are wrong. Supposedly. Good. Because last night, Judge Richard A. Posner was in my dream. No, not like that. He was going on about how fine a thing it was to be a judge in the 7th Circuit. If that's my unconscious, it's really, really sad.
Chuck b. has a dream. Reality shows aren't really too real. And dreams are not real. Make it a lucid dream and go all Jeff Probst and simply announce and impose some rules. Go from there. Is your life a reality show with ambiguous rules? Make some rules! Identify someone with permission to break the rules. Proceed!
