America the Bootylicious

Soundbites from Truthdig's interview with Mort Sahl:

A comedian today is anybody who can stand up and talk about nothing endlessly.


Intelligence agencies do log a lot of overtime in the area of suspicion and it does encourage them to find a lot of pigeons. But, you know, Hoover and McCarthy were never after communists. They were after nonconformists who might want to resist the fascist tendencies of big government. If you look at that whole blacklisting period, Judith Copeland was acquitted, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, not spying. Most of the government cases fell apart when they got to court. They were never looking for communists--they never found any. Sure, the country is in real danger of losing its soul, but it's not because of a group of dedicated nonconformists.


What they do to deter heroism in this country is they keep you on the defensive. It's a strategy. They try to tie you up, get you defending yourself all the time, [where you're] trying to prove you're not crazy. People just have to remember what we're all here for: to find our way home and to search for justice and romance along the way. Heroism is just learning how to listen to your better angels.

John Carey--can I assume it's the same John Carey who wrote The Violent Effigy, that brilliant incursion into Dickens' psycho-melodrama?--makes a critical incision into Julie Kavanagh's supermongous new biography of Rudolf Nureyev and cuts through masses of anecdotal pileup to reach some sort of character assessment. After summarizing Kavanagh's extensive rap sheet on Rudy's vulgarity, greed, vanity, spats of violence, and depraved indifference, Carey slyly, dryly observes:

Evidently aware that her biographee might seem lacking in inner profundity, Kavanagh strives to present him as an avid reader. How much he actually read remains uncertain, though, and she records nothing of account that he said about books. He sought reflections of himself in literature, and was convinced, for example, that he and Byron were soul mates, despite the fact that he was barely articulate and could not finish Childe Harold. Towards the end of his life, he became intrigued by the idea that he might be a descendant of Milton's Satan. This was wildly self-aggrandising, of course, and Milton's arch-fiend would have been outraged to find himself associated with the peccadilloes of a mere ballet dancer. All the same, in its recognition of Satan's and his own essential egotism, it shows a more accurate perception than any other of his literary comments.

The further Kavanagh's book moves away from ballet, the better it gets. She writes thrillingly about the moment of his defection on June 16, 1961, when the French police at Le Bourget airport snatched him from the clutches of the KGB. She gives a dignified account of his slow death from Aids at the age of 54, not the least tragic part of which is that, after he had been diagnosed as HIV positive, he had unprotected sex with a number of partners--all of whom, Kavanagh was told, subsequently died. There are sympathetic portraits of Nureyev's mother, who used to carry him to school on her back because she was too poor to buy shoes, and his father, a Red Army hero, whose heart was broken by his son's treason. The book's heroines are Margot Fonteyn, who shared many of Nureyev's triumphs, and who could control him at his most volcanic by treating him as a fractious child, and Ninette de Valois, who loved him even while she scorned his "senseless money-making gang of friends". Equally fine is Kavanagh's depiction of two figures whose belief in the essential selflessness of the artist was the polar opposite of Nureyev's egotism -- George Balanchine, the choreographer, and Erik Bruhn, whose final wish was to be cremated without any service and to have his urn of ashes placed in the Unknowns' Grave. All these characters come across as having greater depth and fuller humanity than the athletic megalomaniac at the book's core.

Though in fairness to Nureyev, it's no sin in his not finishing Childe Harold--like Byron's Don Juan, its verse does become something of a self-generating organism...I mean, how many Cantos can one man take?

Speaking of buggery on an epic scale, Dennis Perrin analyses the bizarre anal-anxiety pathology of the right blogosphere as represented by one of its onion bulbs, Protein Wisdom's Dan Collins:

America is filled with people like Dan Collins, some of whom may be in your own families. I recall a relative of mine arguing in favor of extensive war in the Middle East, saying that if we didn't bomb the Arabs into submission, they would come over here and "fuck us in the ass." That's a direct quote, by the way. I remember that line well because I had no real come back to it. I mean, what do you say to that: "To the contrary, they won't fuck us in the ass"? Not exactly Oxford debate material. Still, the rightwing fascination with homosexual rape and queer-tinged scenarios in general says more about their confused psyches than the actual politics of the real world. I've run into this time and time again. Hell, twenty years ago I heard similar violent and gay-oriented rhetoric from the ex-Dartmouth Review editors and writers I had gotten to know. Back then, it was the Sandinistas who wanted to fuck us in the ass. You'd think that the U.S. has the most tantalizing rear the planet has ever seen, given how many countries desire cramming their dark, uncircumcised pricks deep inside our cheeks. This is why we must kill them before they drop their pants and pull out the bad news. Call it the Tucker Carlson school of international diplomacy.