ABlog

I open the newspaper:

Harvesting of the face was complicated by the convergence of several teams to remove other organs from the donor, but the operation was complete by 5 a.m. Sunday. Before the donor's funeral, a separate team of doctors reconstructed her face with a silicone prosthesis made from a cast taken before the dissection.

"The restoration was remarkable," Corine Camby, the director of the French Biomedicine Agency, said of the prosthesis. Dr. Devauchelle rushed to Amiens with the patch of face, chilled in a saline solution to 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and began the transplant....
--New York Times, December 3, 2005, p. A8

What could be more outlandish than the preparation of this prosthetic face for burial? Fantastic as ancient Egyptian funerary rites with organs pickled in canopic jars; or the plucking out of the living hearts of human sacrifices; the fiery suicides of devoted widows; the preparation of delicacies for feeding to dead ancestores; the vision of the slain arising on Judgment Day.

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What the writers are saying:

Writer A: I went to a bookstore to hear an old friend read. This is someone who finally managed to get his latest novel published. He had a respectable career when he was younger, but lately it's been...you know....So, now he's finally got his book out. The place was packed, mostly with friends of his. It just made me think, more than ever, about the absurdity of what we're involved with. These books of ours, publication or no--they're not going anywhere.... Anyway, I've finished my novel revision. I'm sending it off to my agent.

Writer B: I applied for a couple of full-time teaching jobs in different parts of the country. You're right, I haven't even been thinking along those lines. But then I got a publication nibble, and that visiting gig for spring semester. It makes me feel like maybe I'm not out of the running after all.

Writer C: I'll let you know if anything happens with the book proposal...which I definitely do not expect.

Writer D: I'm not shelling out to enter any more $25 poetry contests. Maybe $20 contests, or $15 contests....

Writer E: I've developed a cataract. I've got to have surgery. But I can't afford to do anything about it right at the moment. My cat got sick and the vet's bill was over $2000.

Who was it that said you can tell the artists at a party by the fact that they're all talking about money? It's only the dilettantes who are talking about art.

Writer F: I've been telling my class: now that literary writers have abandoned writing about social issues, genre writing has become the only place where you can do that stuff. You get these cable series where the writers have really radical politics, and they're doing these amazing things in a commercial venue.

Running Tab

From Harold Pitner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, The Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to U.S. foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, conscious, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.