can you tell the answer from the ants


garry winogrand, new york city, 1972

* The Rude Pundit: Why Ann Coulter Is a Cunt, Part 2609 of an Endless Series. excerpt:

"There's so much that's fucked up about Ann Coulter and her latest 'book' (if by 'book,' you mean, 'Extended projectile vomiting retched out by a pencil-legged harridan scratching semi-words in her own puke') that it's hard to know where to start. There's the title of the 'book,' Godless, which quite intentionally must exist to make you think, as you walk into your local Barnes and Noble and glance over at the shrieking, howling display of volumes with Ann Coulter's picture on them, 'Goddess.' One might think no human being could be that needy, but, then again, Coulter's gotta compete with your Malkins and your Ingrahams and other conservative fuck dream demi-babes.

"And the Rude Pundit's not gonna get into the whole 'oh, Ann Coulter's wrong about this' argument, 'cause that would mean what she says merits any response other than: Are you really that fucking crazy? No, seriously, are you that...fucking...crazy? What else would you ask someone who writes, as Coulter does in the first chapter, freely available, regarding 'fears' of water shortages: 'Liberals are worried we’re going to run out of something that literally falls from the sky. Here’s an idea: Just wait. It will rain.' Beyond the fact that most of Coulter's arguments seem to stem from understanding liberalism from 20 or 30 years ago, the sentence is breathtakingly, self-evidently stupid."
...
"But what really pisses the Rude Pundit off is that not only is Coulter a shitty writer and a bugfuck crazed presence any time she is remotely challenged, but she has a bad habit. And that habit, as mentioned before by the Rude Pundit (followed up by Raw Story), is that she appears to like to copy whole sentences from other sources without putting them in as quotes or even citing where she might have 'paraphrased' from."
...
"The Rude Pundit could end on a high note here. A note where he demonstrates how he's above it all. Fuck that. Sometimes you gotta jump in the gutter and have the slap fight with the whores. Coulter is fond of saying that feminists are ugly, describing one as 'physically repulsive.' Has Coulter taken a look in the mirror lately? She looks like the crazed lingerer at a bar at 3 a.m., desperate for some fat fuck to take her home, beat her, and fuck her face. Bitch has been ridden hard and put away spooge covered, taken out the next day, stiff and sticky, and spit on to be cleaned up for her interviews before using her to wipe Republican asses. Goddamn, time does not treat the nutzoid well. The Rude Pundit wouldn't fuck her if he was given Rush Limbaugh's tiny, diseased prick to fuck her with."

* 70 things you may not know about Leonard Cohen. excerpt:

"23 His big break was meeting the folk singer Judy Collins. He sang Suzanne down the phone to her and she immediately promised to record it.

"24 He was then asked to lunch by John Hammond of Columbia Records, one of rock's greatest talent-spotters: he had signed Bob Dylan, and went on to discover Bruce Springsteen. Hammond asked Cohen to sing some songs in his room at the Chelsea hotel. He played six or seven, and Hammond said: 'You got it.' Cohen never worked out whether he meant he had a contract or merely a gift.

"25 A week later, they were in the studio, with Hammond as producer. Cohen started singing and Hammond said on the intercom: 'Watch out Dylan!'"

"26 The young Cohen's signature tune was Suzanne. He once called it 'journalism,' as the details were drawn from life in Montreal. Suzanne was a friend, Suzanne Verdal, who really did serve him tea and oranges in her loft by the river. Cohen wrote the line 'I touched your perfect body with my mind' because she was married to a friend of his."
...
"38 When he wrote Bird on a Wire, Cohen felt he hadn't 'finished the carpentry,' but Kris Kristofferson said the first three lines would be his epitaph: 'Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free'"
...
"70 In 1994, Cohen said: 'If you're going to think of yourself in this game, or in this tradition, and you start getting a swelled head about it, then you've really got to think about who you're talking about. You're not just talking about Randy Newman, who's fine, or Bob Dylan, who's sublime, you're talking about King David, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, you're talking about the embodiment of our highest possibility. So I don't think it's particularly modest or virtuous to think of oneself as a minor poet. I really do feel the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write.

"'But I don't fool myself, I know the game I'm in. When I wrote about Hank Williams 'A hundred floors above me in the tower of song', it's not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer. I've taken a certain territory, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is.'"

* "The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail." -- Don DeLillo