Abiding Biden

...I'm sure twenty-five thousand people before me have done that exact wordplay, but in my defense, I refuse to check.

I do want to say: I don't think Biden is a bad person. I mean, as far as I know. Who knows what dark secrets anyone hides? But, yes, okay, he has some questionable votes in his past, and the Anita Hill thing was pretty bad, and even if the Tara Reade thing isn't true (and anyone who claims to definitively know one way or the other is purely basing their opinion on what they want to be true), he definitely has problems with boundaries. And he's habitually lied about his past.

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Patricia Eakins, The Hungry Girls and Other Stories (1989) and The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste: Father and Mother, First and Last (1999)

I accidentally deleted this when I was purging the opera posts, so here it is back again.

OKAY, RIGHT. Books. They exist. When Tough Poets reissued Hungry Girls,, it included glowing blurbs from the likes of Robert Coover, comparing it to Borges and Calvino. You've gotta be at least a little curious.

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Long Overdue: New Blog

I suppose I really should have started a new blog as soon as I started reviewing operas. I wasn't quite cognizant at the time of just how into operas I was going to get, and the extent to which they'd devour this blog here. So, now everything in its proper place. I'm going to delete all the opera posts here (if they're still here as you're reading this), because I've transferred them all (with comments!) to the new blog.  This blog is coming like a ghost blog, but it seems like the best way to do things.

I wasn't sure what to call it: I kind of wanted to go super-minimalistic and just get opera.blogspot.com, but no surprise, that wasn't available. What IS a little more irritating is why it isn't available: somebody started a blog with the subtitle "about operaperformances," but it's totally blank: not a single post.  Operas? Nope. Operareview? Taken. Operareviews? You guessed it. Ultimately, I decided that it would be a good idea to emphasize the fact that mine is in fact the only opera blog on the internet, so it's called The Only Opera Blog. Please enjoy.

Test.

This post is a test.  Will it pass?  Find out soon!

A Test of Island Courage

So I've been playing StarTropics, a game I remember with some fondness. It has its problems, but it's still fun, and whatever else you can say about it, the committment to the tropical setting makes for an interesting game--much more so, for me, than the sequel, which blasts you through a bunch of historical periods in quick succession and as a result never really develops any of them. If that game had chosen one, any one, of its settings and stuck to it, it would've been a lot better. I think.

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WHY WON'T I SHUT UP ABOUT POLITICS?!?

You know, you may not like Biden, I don't like Biden, but I will say this: if you're thinking, I'm not going to vote for him! Democrats need to learn that they can't win if they keep nominating crappy candidates!--if you're thinking that...tell me, how's that going for you? If you made that calculation in 2016, were you hoping that the result of T**** getting elected would be Biden as the candidate in 2020? It seems unlikely!

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Oh god, not more politics

There is nothing more condescending than people online going "sorry your candidate lost, Bernie fans. Now, all aboard the Biden train! Toot toot!" People who say this seem to not understand that Sanders supporters have, like, an actual ideology that goes beyond "go team!" Has there been some cultish behavior around Sanders? Sure, of course. It's inevitable. But fundamentally, it's really not about Sanders as a person; it's about wanting actual substantive left change in this stupid fucking cruel and horrible country. And to just blithely glide over people's concern that a real moment has been lost: you're treating politics like sports, is what you're doing. Your candidate lost! Too bad for you, but that's just the rough-and-tumble nature of politics! Time to get with the winner!

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John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra (1934)

There was a paperback copy of this in the house when I was small, and I always found it kind of intriguing and spooky: there's a man with a happy life. Three days later, he'll be dead. This is how the back-cover copy represented it to me, and, I mean, just look at the title--that's obviously what it's suggesting, isn't it? You can run away from death, but you just further seal your own doom. But I never read it, so I've remained vaguely curious about it until now.

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Politics again, sorry. Also, I'm sorry for saying "fuck" and variations thereof so many times.

In retrospect, it's the most predictable thing in the world that the Democratic Party would coalesce around Joe Biden. I don't think there's much currency in blaming some shadowy "establishment;" obviously, Biden did have institutional help, but the voters voted for him all by themselves, so here we are.

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