November 2011 – Page 3 – the coffee philosopher

Posted on November 22, 2011November 22, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Will He Or Won’t He?

Challenge for Iowa, I mean.

Romney, I mean.

So far, he appears to have been discreetly pulling a McCain, i.e., skipping the Iowa caucuses. Discreetly because he’s still putting resources and staff into Iowa, but just a fraction of what invested in Hawkeye state four years ago.

Like McCain, he says New Hampshire as being where he can really shine and as acting as his electoral firewall.

But he’s looking at a couple of issues.

On the defensive side, the ‘anyone but Romney’ vote just isn’t going away. In a multi-candidate race, Romney’s consistently been hanging around 20%. But that’s been more or less enough so far, so his staff aren’t panicking. But they’ve also got to be thinking that his New Hampshire firewall could start looking a lot more flammable if someone not Romney grabbed real momentum coming out of Iowa. Even a narrower than expected victory in New Hampshire could see his might fortress turn into a collapsing house of cards.

On the offensive side, they’re thinking, ‘we don’t really want to drag this out.’ Iowa could be a chance to finish this. I suspect that Romney’s campaign has the best organizational structure of any GOP candidate. He won’t win Iowa based on love, affection, nor on any real desire to see him be president. But he might win based on tactics and organizational discipline. And if he does, he probably has things wrapped up. If he loses Iowa, but wins New Hampshire handily, things are probably still pretty well in hand for the Romney campaign, but they’ll still have to spend precious television dollars in places like Florida. Money they could stash away with a double whammy in Iowa and New Hampshire.

I don’t pretend to know which way they’ll go, but I can guarantee they are wondering whether to continue ceding Iowa, bar a token effort.

Posted on November 22, 2011November 22, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

OccuPoetry: Poets Supporting Economic Justice

Another group of poets coming out in support of the Occupy Movement and its emphasis on addressing the growing economy inequality in our country – OccuPoetry.

One of the founders is a professor at UC Davis – the university where police pepper sprayed students engaged in non-violent resistance.

Posted on November 21, 2011November 21, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Record Stores

I have been complaining about the struggles of bookstores for some time, but I’ve neglected another industry in a similar situation – record stores.

Anecdotally, I gather that some indie record stores are reversing the slide and building their business through a focus on vinyl records and a focus on the community (hosting events, supporting and promoting the albums of local bands, etc).

However, the one I remember from high school, RTO (Record & Tape Outlet) in Dunedin, Florida, closed down. It was a cool kids hangout, with classic record store geeks both behind the counter and browsing in the aisles (yes – you can be both cool and a geek, as long as we’re talking about music).

And when I lived in Hollywood, slipping down the boulevard to the Virgin Megastore at Hollywood and Highland was a great way to spend a little time, but the last Virgin Megastore closed down in 2009, so that’s gone now, too.

Posted on November 19, 2011November 19, 2011 by the coffee philosopher · 2 Comments

Paul Bowles Died On This Day In 1999

Paul Bowles died twelve years ago today.

I’ve read most of his cold, asexual and deeply alien/alienated prose. And I would offer him up as one of the great short stories of the twentieth century, next to F. Scott Fitzgerald. His novels though, we must admit, do not improve upon his short fiction by length; and his latter writings lost much of that strange and uncomfortable voice that made him best work so compelling (“Pages From Cold Point” – how creepy can you get? I still remember the sensation I got when I realized what was happening, what that unreliable narrator would never come out and say. I won’t tell you what it is – you have to read it). But that best work, ahh… it was something else.

When I was young, I went to Tangiers, but was too afraid to knock on his door. A pity, because apparently, he would often welcome such random guests.

Posted on November 16, 2011November 16, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

The Public Library Under Threat

Do you take your public library for granted?

Posted on November 15, 2011November 15, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Huntsman Not Actually Running for President In 2012

In asking this question, The Atlantic seemed to miss the obvious answer.

Jon Hunstman isn’t trying to win the 2012 Republican primary.

Okay, I mean, he obviously filed to run for president as a Republican in this upcoming election, but it should be pretty obvious that, for months now, he’s actually been executing a different plan than one intended to win the upcoming primaries.

Sure, when he jumped in, he was going for it. He thought that there might be a space for him as someone with more constancy than Romney (not a high bar) and more sanity than Bachmann (also not a high bar).

But he’s not, at least not so far as I know, an idiot.

It’s been quite clear for sometime that he was just not getting traction and that there wasn’t enough oxygen left in the room for him to develop the necessary traction.

And around the time it became clear that he wasn’t going to win the primary, he began to make a series of public, rational, centrist statements acknowledging things like global climate change and the need not to engage in constant, endless wars. He might even have once said that an American without health insurance should not be allowed to die on the hospital curb (which is apparently a controversial stance).

He is betting that in either 2016 or 2020 the electorate will have sufficiently rejected right wing extremism that a moderate Republican in the mode of a Reagan (the real Reagan – not the Tea Party caricature of him), if not a Rockefeller, would be in fashion again within the GOP.

And he probably has a point. Even if a Republican wins in 2012 (which is looking less likely than it did a couple of months ago), the turn to the far right will have to end in the next few cycles – whether from natural evolution (something that, I believe, Huntsman has expressed a belief in) or from a reaction to a painful repudiation at the polls.

Posted on November 15, 2011November 14, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

“The Anxiety Of The Forever Renter”

I also have conflicted feelings about renting versus buying:

We’re both afflicted with a dangerous daydreaming ability to envision ourselves living anywhere we step off a plane. We never take a trip and think, “It’s wonderful to visit friends in Seattle,” or “Chicago is a great place for tourists in the summertime.” We always think: What if we lived here? Maybe we should live here? We could live in Key West! My husband has never even been to Portland, but we still nurse a sneaking suspicion that we should probably be living there.

Posted on November 14, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto LXIV

Another lengthy Canto.

This one is about the disputes leading up to the American Revolution, namely the Stamp Act.

He spends a lot of time complaining about taxes and regulations (keeping in mind that “strict regulations” in the eighteenth century allowed for things like slavery).

A reminder that though Pound may be most appreciated these days by liberal lovers of literature, he was, by contemporary standards, very conservative. Sort of a Grover Norquist/Tea Party Republican.

One amusing thing, at least for the modern reader, is Pound’s use of the word “bro” in the very first line of the Canto:

To John’s bro, a sheriff, we lay a kind word in passing

He also inserts himself into the action in an amusing fashion:

Upon which he offered me a retaining fee of one guinea
which I accepted
                   (Re which things was Hutchinson undoubtedly scro-
                                                                 fulous ego scriptor cantilenae
                                                                                                          (Ez. P)

Posted on November 12, 2011November 11, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Post Mortem

Even though it is now gone (and feels long gone, too, because the death was so drawn out and because browsing half empty bookshelves during a liquidation sale doesn’t feel like being in a real bookstore), here’s a post mortem on Borders.

If you read all the way to the end, you may be heartened by the comment that smaller bookstores (2500 sqaure feet – like many independent bookstores) should remain modestly profitable into the foreseeable future. Let’s hope that’s true.