Why are government is so fucked up right now

NOTE:

I feel like when i write things like this I'm lying.

I feel like another asshole shitting stupid opinions onto bloghell.

You should just read it and feel weird and not think about it after. Just don't think about anything or believe anything I say ever.

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I think we have a voter problem.

I don't think we have 'a voter participation' problem.

Most of the people who don't vote, don't care. And having people who don't care at all, would just make problems worse.

The 1st problem is that there needs to be a constitutional amendment stating that corporations can't give millions to politicians, nor run ads independently of the person running. Like a group of billionaires can't run ads for a certain candidate.

And this is a democrat problem also.

Republicans and democrats do not have to take money from normal people anymore. They don't need our five dollars anymore.

And when you don't need someone, why care about them.

The black vote for democrats

Roe v. Wade vote for Republicans.

Unions for democrats

and Christians for Republicans

Both of the parties have a group of people that will vote for them no matter what they do.

The only one I understand is the black vote for democrats, because the democrats generally don't do anything to hurt black people, while the Republicans never even want to pass harmless Civil Rights legislation.

The Roe v. Wade is stupid. Abortion is like a bullshit political issue. No one is forcing anyone to have an abortion. Roe v. Wade doesn't cause abortions.

Unions should have stopped voting for democrats after NAFTA passed. And democrats don't even have to worry about union money anymore. I don't know why people in unions vote at all.

The Christians voting to give rich people tax cuts. The Christians voting for water boarding. I don't remotely comprehend how they rationalize that and still go to church on Sunday.

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The essence of democracy is that those who are voted have to represent those who elected them.

But we have a problem.

Those who are voted in only have to represent those who gave them the money to run campaigns to get elected.

Those who are elected are USING people to get elected and then not actually doing anything for them.



This is a Christian voting issue in Ohio

They want porn stores to close at midnight.

This was their biggest issue like four years ago.

They don't care about schools, if bridges are safe, if the roads are paved, they have no concern even for their own welfare.

All they want is fuck with strip joints, porn stores, homosexuals and to give tax cuts to people making over 250,000 a year.
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This is a major problem.

Our democracy since Reagan got elected has failed.

Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Dubya and Obama are all presidents of failed a democracy.

This is how history will record it.

The chapter will be titled, "When democracy began its decline in America."

So this is the problem.

There is no way to be radical and solve it.

A problem like this must resolve itself.

As in the way when a climate shift happens and turns a jungle into a desert over the course of thousands of years.

Perhaps there will be a time to be radical.

But not today.

Today is no day. Today, is not like a day at all. We are just alive and are dealing with a bad situation. Some know and are trying to understand the bad situation. But most don't. And the situation has no arisen for them to find out. But when they find out. It won't be what I've stated. They will find something else out. What they find out probably won't even be true. But it will be a different finding. With different conclusions besides, "Cheer myself up with doritos and television."

Political problems can last a very long time.

This one is now 30 years old.

Our democracy will not return to any kind of usefulness until

The black vote, the Roe V. Wade vote, Union vote and the Christian vote are no longer spoken of.

We need to have a congress that will be willing to propose an amendment on campaigning.

Until then.

Live in the City of God, City of Nietzsche, or City of Literature and hope for the best.

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A person may write

But we have global warming problems, we need to reduce our oil imports, we need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to reduce the debt, we need to balance the budget, we have the worse Current Account Balance in the world, when the baby boomers retire how will we take care of them, we have a health care problem, we have disabled veterans, we have a horrible unemployment rate, we have an illegal immigrant problem.

Oh we have so many problems.

Most countries do though

There has never been a time when governments didn't have problems.

But our major problem concerns voting and that our democracy no longer works.

None of those aforementioned problems will be fixed until then.

Looking for an artist

I need help

I need an artist

to illustrate Best Behavior.

Is anyone an artist

Does anyone know where to look for an artist?

I know nothing about art.

email me noah.cicero@gmail.com

Another Review

Another Review

I thought about this review.

He said something, like I have should more readers.

But I thought about what writing has done for me.

When I met my roommate 7 years ago I handed her The Human War and she thought it made me interesting, so she allowed me to be part of her life. Which led me to meeting her family and making a lot of new friends.

I got to meet people like Pirooz Kalayeh, james Chapman, Tao Lin, Ellen Kennedy, Sam Pink, Jordan Castro, Mallory Witten, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Zachary German, Sabra Embury, Gene Morgan, Ned Vizzini, Nick Antosca, and many many more.

Then I looked at my girlfriend who was in the room with me. She met me through my blog and I thought

It would be selfish to deny that have gained so much from writing.

I just have to think about my life before The Human War came out.

I was sitting alone, I had like one friend named Nicky that talked to me about literature. But besides that I was terribly alone.

So terribly alone.

All these PEOPLE have made my life better.

To complain about my lack of success would disregard the friends I have made.

When I look at my picture in Nylon I don't think, "Oh man, I'm in fucking Nylon."

I think, "I'm glad there is a picture taken of my friends and I taken together."

gays in the military

I like when our legislative body fails to operate and our judicial branch has to fix things.

Someone wrote a review of The Insurgent

Here is a review by Ani Smith

I think The Insurgent is based off of The Way of a Pilgrim.

What is 'intellectual'

A person on my facebook said that our movement, I guess the HTML Giant movement. I don't know if that is accurate. But it will work for this blog post.

Someone said that the movement was anti-intellectual.

I think somebody could assume that:

I feel like there is a lot of vulgarity and talking animals.

This line by Sam Pink, "I went to the cantaloupe section and looked at the cantaloupes."

This line is about Pascal's Bet.

"'whipped my dick out' while brushing my teeth, 'looked at it in the mirror a little,' maintained a neutral facial expression"

This is about Pascal's Bet.

"A Thai person with an electric guitar sat in the seat next to me. We looked at each other and he asked where I was from. I told him where I was from and he communicated that he wanted to switch seats."

This is about Pascal's Bet.

So when I review this new internet literature I see that it contains an element of Pascal's Wager.

Pascal's Wager is intellectual.

Pascal is discussed in college classrooms. Many professors have cited Pascal in their works.

According to Wikipedia

An intellectual denotes three types of ideas:

1. A person involved in, and with, abstract, erudite ideas and theories.

(I think writing stories that display ideas contained in Pascal's Wager is abstract and erudite.

2. A person whose profession (science, medicine, literature) solely involves the production and dissemination of ideas.[1]

Everyone I knows loves to disseminate. I disseminate all the time. I'm disseminating right now.

3. A person of notable cultural and artistic expertise whose knowledge grants him or her intellectual authority in public discourse.

Hmm. I don't know if any of us have that.

So I guess we are just writers.

But we aren't writers really because none of us makes enough money to pay ALL of our bills by writing. So I guess we are people who have jobs that write sometimes and then disseminate our writings on the internet and on small presses.

I think most of them do not know the God Fathers of the internet movement are Pascal and Tzara, or maybe the play Ubu Roi.

But Plato said this about poets, "When I left the politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you will be detected; now you will find out that you are more ignorant than they are. Accordingly, I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them - thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. And the poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise. So I departed, conceiving myself to be superior to them for the same reason that I was superior to the politicians."

poets don't need to know what Pascal's Wager is to write a beautiful poem that gets you through the day.



The first internet writer



I feel like Ubu Roi is the future of humanity.

THE DEATH OF LITERARY THEORY

Saw this on HTML Giant, Walker and Foer and Barthelme and other people.

I hate all these writers.

Quotes:

"What I find painters know is that kind of exploration of the qualitative relational possibilities of color, shape, and all of the things can be constructed with them. if, as I suspect you’re suggesting, they might know something else about the world, this frequently happens if they have been observant about the world, but I don’t think it’s necessary."

That doesn't even mean anything.

"In the New Republic, Dale Peck recently said you were upholding the high literary postmodern tradition, a tradition Peck claimed was bankrupt."

Dale Peck said something in the new republic, what does that even mean to call a tradition bankrupt?

Seriously

"Middlesex is a postmodern book in many ways, but it is also very old-fashioned."

This is fucking science, this is literature.

"How do you move it forward?"

by being lame.

"What bothers me is the question the young lady asked you yesterday, that is, why do you write novels? And I’m hard put to imagine what kind of motivation you would have other than the fact that in writing you must be converging on some approximation of the way things are or the way you think things are, either in the realm of ideas or in the realm of the way things are in The Heart of the Heart of the Country or the heart of the heart of the American consciousness. It’s hard for me to imagine any novelist not being motivated by some desire to approach some kind of truth or what he thinks to be the truth. If I didn’t think that I don’t think I’d bother to set pen to paper. I can’t imagine what I would be doing if I wasn’t doing that."

This makes my dick hurt.

I don't understand this

All this fucking theory

Barthelme's books sold because he had funny sex shit in his books. Percy wrote like one book that no one reads anymore and Foer writes topical bullshit.

See the thing is this:

There is really no such thing as literary theory.

because a theory is a system.

A theory is like a machine.

That puts out at least similar results every time.

But great literature usually comes from random personal experience or another's personal experience or you just think of a nice story to tell.

Personal experience would be like On the Road or The Sun Also Rises
Other people's would be like Tale of Two Cities or Uncle Tom's Cabin
Nice story: The Trial or The Brothers Karamazov.

Pretty generalized here

The only way literary theory could really exist

is if it was applied at least 95% of the time and it had the same results.

The results could be a low selling book or a high selling book, but the results should be similar.

But the problem is that saying something like, "Joyce wrote lines in different languages to get to the best line or something"

That implies we should all do that or something.

I have no idea.

but that is the beautiful thing about a novelist

You are allowed to make things up

You are like a spiritual leader or something

pulling shit out of your ass is like sexy.

You can't make a theory out of it

There isn't any

No theory

Stop it

Please fucking stop it

A Huge Circular Depression

Today we had to perform songs we made for geology class about volcanoes or earthquakes.

Someone performing a rap song said the phrase, "A Huge Circular Depression"

I think I want to write a book called that.

Turning 30 This Week

I'm turning 30

This is serious business

I was born in 1980

Time keeps passing

The other day I looked at the filing cabinet with all my writings previous to the human war, mostly high school writings.

There must be a thousand pages of prose and poems.

I was amazed.

I kept looking at things.

It was all bad

But I was like, "It was so easy. To make literary sentences at one point in my life."

here is my 20s in chronological order

20 to 23: wrote and lived in parents. Went to a little college. barely worked and spent time writing and reading novels. Still writing a lot. Really pumped about writing. Got introduced to the beauty of internet lit.

24 to 26: basically worked at strip joints and pizza shops. Basically was 'on the streets' observing strange behavior. Read novels and some philosophy. Writing less and less.

27 to Today: went back to college and have held a steady job. Reading only philosophy and history. I don't think I haven't a story for a year and a half. I tried to write something and I didn't care after 60 pages. I just stopped writing and felt no sense of motivation to continue with it.

So the other day I stared at all those things from high school. And just felt weird.

When I was 27 I decided I wanted to write a political philosophy book. I had no idea what I would write when I started.

my idea was that if I read a bunch of History, philosophy and political thought books I would come up with something.

i tried to give the idea of writing philosophy like three times but I keep going back to it.

it is the only thing that interests me now.

The only thing I want to read.

I currently prefer to read about Tiberius and nothing new and fiction.

The only fiction books i like are the ones people send me, like Sam Pink and scott mcclanahan

I realized that to write philosophy i have to come up with my own epistemology and then i can write a political philosophy book.

I only have two books planned, one on epistemology and one politics.

But I don't think those books will make me famous

or money.

Or get me another movie.

That is okay.

Sometimes when i think about philosophy

I can feel my whole body shake

my brain crack or make bass like noise in my head

Sometimes I have philosophical thought

a clearing

and i just need to lay down

Best Behavior will probably be the last book i write.

If The Human War movie doesn't get my books to a bigger press

I will have six novels published.

I don't think 2 or 3 can even be purchased anymore

The Insurgent, my greatest accomplishment as a human never got any reviews.

It is okay.

I will write anyway.

I will write philosophy and not fiction.

I don't have a doctorate.

And do not plan on getting one.

So I will be probably laughed at.

And it won't matter.

When I turn 30 Sunday

I will have never made above 8.30 an hour

No 401K

No health care

Driving a 1997 Saturn SL

Sleep on a couch most nights

No kids

no wife

Never owned a cell phone

or an IPOD

Not even an MP3 player

I have really thrown things away for the sake of literature

I will probably throw my 30s away for the sake of philosophy.