Today M’ris comments on an article
in Salon about Charles Bowden’s, “Blues for Cannibals”. The Salon article’s author
is
unimpressed with the book’s rhetorical tactics:

Bowden tells us that he’s telling us things people don’t want to know, suggesting there’s something
transgressive about what he’s doing. In the book’s long section about this three years as a reporter
covering sex crimes, he repeats a sentence that for him distills the widespread attitude toward his grisly
subject — “Don’t talk about it, no one wants to hear these things.”

I don’t think this is true. If people didn’t want to hear these things then JonBenet wouldn’t sell
newspapers and we wouldn’t have “Law and Order Special Victims Unit,” an entire prime time television
show showcasing a new sex crime every week.

I feel a bit sorry for Bowden… he’s trying so hard to shock us out of our bourgeois
stupor, but in this day and age, we bourgeois are pretty hard to shock. Oh, every once
in a while we get a case like the Texas woman who
ran
into a homeless man with her car, drove home with him stuck in her windshield, and let him bleed to death while
she went inside and had sex with her boyfriend. But for the most part, I agree,
shock tactics are not the way to go.

Listen, I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. I have an idea for a novel that I got
a few months ago, after listening to Jonathan Franzen on the radio. This idea
is so radical, so transgressive, that it will be beyond the pedestrian tastes of
the Booker prize and the National Book Award. Yes, I’ll be talked-about, vilified,
and made rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Are you ready? Think you can handle it?
Here it is: I’m going to write a novel that says, “Suburbia is just swell!”

Yeah, I bet you wish you had thought of it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… for the last three years at work, I’ve been stuck with
Netscape 4. But in just a month or two, the company is switching us all over to Netscape 6.2.1
(cue angelic music). Yes, our intranet (i.e. my entire client base) will be using a browser
with pretty darn good CSS2 support and a standards-compliant XML processor. Do you know what
that means? It means I can do client-side XSLT, and you can’t. Nyah, nyah!

Edit, April 2003: My bragging was premature. As of November 2002, the company had still not switched over from Netscape 4.7, and there was no publicly-announced date for the changeover either.