Amber Sparks
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Random Thoughts
December 30, 2009
I got the new Redivider yesterday in the mail. I’m very excited to read it–looks like there’s a lot of good stuff in there, including stories from Blake Butler and Dan Chaon. Luckily I have the day off tomorrow.
There is a certain kind of D.C. chick I really despise. The ones just fresh out of college with Ann Taylor pantsuits and no makeup but new, smaller noses from Daddy and $700 highlights pulled back into a severe ponytail. They’re usually staffers for some shithead conservative southern Senator who would take away all their reproductive rights if he could, and on that crappy salary, they live in an apartment I could never afford and spend all their spare time networking at lame happy hours. I hate those bitches.
I just started, and am almost finished with The Anthologist. Which is beyond wonderful. I want to find Nicholson Baker and hug him and tell him that I, also, love W.S. Merwin and yet also rhyming poems.What a fantastic book. I know almost no Mary Oliver, and have read not nearly enough Louise Bogan, but will have to investigate further.
D.C. is apparently the second most literate city in the country. Whatever. All people here read is blogs and newspapers. I did read today that Barrelhouse is going to start a reading series here in D.C. Nothing would make me happier. We need more literary events here–we’re starving for them. Well, at least I am.
I like the Beatles. I do. Does that make me lame? I don’t care. A good melody is kind of like rhyming poetry. It will impact more people and stick in your head forever, which is its own kind of artistic importance.
Many times, I think I should go back to school and get a job teaching history. Except that my friends who teach tell me how impossible it is to get a job teaching anything, especially in the liberal arts. So maybe not.
I think I will spend New Year’s Eve with just my husband this year. I am tired, tired, tired of people. I have been around people for too many weeks, now, and I am just exhausted. If I am with my husband, it’s like being alone with another me, so it’s just as good as being alone. In fact, better, because I probably couldn’t finish a bottle of wine by myself (well, shouldn’t) so two is better than one.
A Fair Trial
November 12, 2009
Last night I watched the classic film 12 Angry Men. I’d never seen it before for some crazy reason. A terrific, riveting movie, tightly shot and edited, and every single performance a reminder of what it was like when actors had faces. Not just pretty, symmetrical faces, but craggy faces, hard faces, soft, pudgy, big-nosed, squint-eyed, wrinkled up, sweaty, smirking faces. 
Anyway. The movie is wonderful not just because of the acting, or the directing, but because of the point it makes about our judicial system. At first, eleven of the men are ready to say “guilty” and go home, because the accused fits a certain type–and the crime he’s accused of is so dreadful that the jurors are ready to assume his guilt as a forgone conclusion. It takes Henry Fonda’s gentle persistence and logic to gradually change the men’s mind, and to remind them that no matter what the crime, no matter who the accused, in our legal system guilt is never a forgone conclusion, and that we all have the right to a fair trial where we are innocent until proven guilty.
Someone should remind Wolf Blitzer of this.
Glenn Beck is Oprah for Shitty(er) Writers
November 6, 2009
In promoting and boosting the sales of writers like Brad Thor, James Patterson, Vince Flynn, and David Baldacci, Glenn Beck has apparently become “the new Oprah” for puffy paperbacks found at grocery stores nationwide.
Of course, nothing he promotes could ever top this instant Christmas classic.
