(no subject)

[vaznetti]

Hm. Bored and irritated. I'm making no progress on my syllabus. Rather than making an angry political post which will only upset people (I will make this post, but not today) I am going to go shopping. I need shoes, trousers and many other things.

[ETA: It looks like many people on my flist are also irritated or upset. Perhaps it's catching?]

Comments

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

I think it is catching. Just thirty seconds or so of the platitudes and out-of-context remarks at the Republican Convention and I want to hit something. And I'm not even political, or a member of either party. I think in the end it's the general stupidity lack of perceptiveness of so much of the populace that will actually buy this stuff that really gets me. Discourages me, more than anything. It's especially frustrating to see it from a historical standpoint, where the same kinds of ploys and tactics are used over and over and over again, and yet people fall for them every time. Seems the race hasn't learned much. Sigh.

I dislike games and dissimulation, and politics seems to be rife with both.

On a somewhat brighter note, I finished Night Soldiers the other day. It's the first time in a long while I've read really engaging fiction, so that at the end you find yourself suddenly caught up in the realization that you have to leave these people now, as if a bus has stopped in front of you and is waiting to take them away. A bit sad, that part, though a sure sign of a book that's truly engaged you. I really enjoyed the journey, though--both for the story itself and for the nuggets of understanding re various characters'/groups' mindsets I gained along the way.

Do you have other books of Furst's you'd recommend?

[vaznetti]

I think Furst's earlier books are better than his more recent work. Dark Star is at least as good as Night Soldiers, and so it The Polish Officer. I also like Kingdom of Shadows a lot (Hungarians! My crazy people!), and its quasi-sequel, Blood of Victory. Although the characters in BoV are sort of retreads of the characters of Dark Star.

The nice thing about Furst is that you see the same minor characters and the same settings again and again--each book has a scene in Heininger's, for instance, and Ilya Goldman, of whom I'm very fond, turns up again in Dark Star.

[(Anonymous)]

While engaged in the usual house meetings, voter registration canvassing, and phone banking, I have decided on two things I think I can do as my small part in the campaign. I'm putting together an "I can't vote because..." FAQ for Virginia, answering objections like, "I just moved here and don't know how to register" to "I was arrested."

And I've decided to start a political blog, maybe with the occasional interviwe and with analysis of the lies. But I have to figure out where to put that sort of political blog to attract the most traffic. And it has to be free, of course, since I am, as most fiction writers usually are, broke.

Camille--fighting the good fight.

[vaznetti]

But I have to figure out where to put that sort of political blog to attract the most traffic.

I can't help you with that--I'm still deep in news-avoidance--except to say "probably not livejournal." The level of dedicated political discourse here seems pretty low to me, although of course people who post sensibly on other topics often have sensible things to say about politics in their ljs.