|
||||||
The Ugly, is the story of Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth, a member of a lost tribe of boulder-throwing Slovaks living in the mountains of Siberia whose land is stolen by American lawyers. He is sent on a quest to Harvard Law School to learn how to defeat the lawyers. Represented by the
Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency.
 The River Lena, first chapter of The Ugly, published in Transition Magazine, Breadloaf nominee to Best New American Voices anthology. Pulling Shadows, published in Fiction International Fiction International, winner of PEN/Nob Hill award. Bureaucracy, published in Literary Imagination: a Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics Metropolitan Avenue, in Chicago Quarterly Review. Before the Law: a Rebuttal, in Chicago Quarterly Review. Rain, in Phantasmagoria.
 Art as a Lifestyle, published in C-Arts Magazine. Handbags of the Apocalypse, in C-Arts Magazine. Astari: Hers, in C-Arts Magazine. Suklu: Reading Objects, in Gaya Art News. Synthetic Times: Media Art Now, in C-Arts Magazine. The Other Shoe, in C-Arts Magazine. Asia Unbound: New York's Asian Contemporary Art Week, in C-Arts Magazine. Art and Automobile: BMW's Art Cars, in C-Arts Magazine. Michelle Swayne: Magnet Bali, in Harper's Bazaar. Made Wianta: Sharp, in Gaya Art News.
 Michelle Swayne: Yellow, But Not The Sun, in C-Arts Magazine.
 Indonesian Art and the Primordial Androgyne, in C-Arts Magazine. Michelle Swayne: From Tennessee to Indonesia, in The Tennessee Tribune.
 Sisi Puitik Pada Seni Rupa Michelle Swayne, in Suardi Magazine (pseudonymous).
 Yellow, But Not the Sun, in Gaya Art News.
 Nino Mustica: 11 Totems, in Gaya Art News. Anti-Aging: 15 Cemeti Artists, in Gaya Art News.
 Art Review: Filippo Sciascia, in Harper's Bazaar.
 Dinosaurs on the Roof, in The Globe and Mail.
 Earthquake in the Himalayas, in Shambhala Sun.
 Bali: Paradise Lost, in The Globe and Mail.
 Paradise, in Liberty.
 Nepal Porters, in The Globe and Mail.
 Ethics, Morals and International Law, in The European Journal of International Law, Oxford University Press.
 The Development of Legal Culture in the Czech Republic, in The Golden Gate Law Review.
|
A response of sorts to Stanley Fish’s column, Fathers, Sons and Motorcycles. I have never in my life had a sentimental attachment to an object — I’ve never spent more than four years of my life in one city, and leave objects behind constantly. But then I bought my motorcycle. The New York Times recently reported that Asian-Americans are following the Chinese approach in choosing male children over female. With the senators of Montana suddenly terrified over the prospect of terrorists being housed in maximum-security prisons within their borders, with Cheney going into fear-generation overdrive, and with John Podhortez at Commentary asserting that “Fear was an entirely responsible response to September 11,” I think it’s time to take an step back and ask, “Is it really?” Even with statistical spikes like 9/11, over the past fifty years the same number of Americans have been killed by lightning as by terrorism, both of which are dwarfed by deaths from food allergies, drowning in your own bathtub, or even lying in bed doing nothing and getting killed by, say, a collapsing roof. There would have to be one 9/11 per month in order for terrorism to equal the risk of driving even on the world’s safest roads (rural highways in the West), and two per week in order to equal the risk of driving in India. Continue reading Fear was NOT a reasonable response to 9/11. In finishing up my new science fiction novel I went through a lot of research on Laplace’s Demon. In the process, I stumbled onto the computational limit of the universe. Based on the minimum amount of time you need to move data across the Planck length, at the speed of light, there’s a limit to the computational power of the universe that’s about 10-to-the-power-of-120 bits (actually 10^120 operations on 10^90 bits of data). Anything needing more data can’t be computed in the fifteen billion years or so that the universe has existed so far. Ergo, omniscience is impossible even for a computing organism the size and age of the universe. You know that the age of big brother, or big spouse, is truly here when no-fee and no-registration websites spring up for the purpose of tracking your partner. I’m not going to embed this link, because the URL says it all: http://www.trackapartner.com/ North Dakota, always the cutting-edge of enlightened thinking, just passed a law that would punish parents criminally if their children skip school.
Ortega y Gasset wrote that society, like every collective, is a great soulless entity. It is humanity that has been mechanized, almost mineralized. And that, in a nutshell, is exactly what went wrong with the housing bubble. Continue reading An anarchist solution to the banking crisis The origins of modern Law stem from the Holy Roman Emperor, who in the 12th century sought a way to define his power for all to see, but without giving the role to the Pope because he feared that that would define the Pope as a greater power. So he declared that the right to define an Emperor’s power belonged only to the Law, which was in the keeping of a community of Masters who studied the principles of reason in an Ivory Tower in Bologna. The Emperor declared these scholars to be independent of his own power. In exchange, they announced that, according to Rationality and the Law, the Emperor was the only true representative of the only true Law, so whatever pleases the Emperor is the Law. And the Pope was left out. Continue reading Was Bush good for the rule of Law? The Indonesian version of Candid Camera recently did two skits back to back that showed the two sides of living here. In the first skit, fifty men ran down the road and grabbed an unsuspecting stranger walking alone down the street in Jakarta. They picked him up, jiggled him around, carried him for a block, and then put him down. A few of the “victims” tried to fight at first, but all gave in very quickly. Candid Camera Indonesia did this skit five times with five different men. When they were put back down, four out of the five joined the mob and ran amok with it to find new victims, having no idea that it was all a joke. So David Bennett lost his 77lb bag of lizard poop. “To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard shit, but to me it represented seven years of painstaking work searching the rainforest with a team of reformed poachers to find the faeces of one of the world’s largest, rarest and most mysterious lizards.” Continue reading Gross negligence I saw the types of people who became president of the Harvard Law Review. Sometimes, very late at night, the whole lot would pass by, in and out of whitewashed little Gannet House, on skinny pale legs permanently damaged by a year of subciting — Hieronymous Bosch figurines amputated by Odd Nerdrum. They were not the type of people who knew how to throw a punch. Continue reading Obama meets Odd  Just found out that “more attention to breasts builds long-term bonds through a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides.” And this after years of being told “I’m up here,” after conforming to the weird cultural taboo that said looking at the ocular regions was morally superior to looking at mammary regions. It has always seemed a weird religious leftover to judge the face as more “me” than other body parts — stunted leftovers from Neoplatonism via the Scholastics and Descartes (basically everyone who twisted philosophy in the service of religion) and all the other mind-body dualists. Sure, the face deserves some attention — it has a higher sensory density than most other body parts. But so do the hands and genitals. Continue reading Ode to ogling So far I’ve found three downsides to atheism besides the obvious, if cynical, problems with being on the losing end of Pascal’s wager: 1. Nobody to talk to during sex.  I’ve counted 14 colonies of ants attacking simultaneously. Tens of thousands have died, but they keep coming. Continue reading Ants! I was at the gym a few days ago, and a man came up to me out of the blue with perhaps the one sentence, of all possible sentences, that I was expecting to hear least: “You look like you’d make a good Buddha.” A few days later, a different man told me, “You look like you’ve bludgeoned a few people.” It started to make me wonder whether — are the two mutually exclusive? 
The Times reported today (Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk) on a study that showed 3 to 5 cups of coffee lowered the risk of Alzheimers by 65%. Two cups of coffee did not have the same effect. More than five could not be studied because of small sample size. Continue reading Moderation leads to dementia, coffee cures you I asked my three-year-old son for a word that starts with “A.” Samson said, “Asshole.” I said, “There’s no such word.” He said, “That’s strange, the asshole exists but the word doesn’t.” |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2009 Ugly Blog - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
My favourite hamburger when I was in law school was called “The Heart Attack” at a little 4-stool dive called The Tasty run by a sour Iraqi man, with oil dripping and spritzing everywhere. But the Iraqi man didn’t have good legs and the burger didn’t have 8,000 calories and I can no longer pretend that The Tasty was the Platonic ideal of the hamburger joint.