Limited

I just signed the contract for the book. I know these are great problems to have and I sound ungrateful bitching about the need to do all this paperwork but I’m a very limited person. Outside of physiological necessities  (of which blogging is one), literally all I want to do is spend time with my family and work on my research. I feel resentful when I’m forced to do anything other than that.

Permissions

First, I was told that I should be seeking copyright permissions for every text from which I cumulatively quote more than 500 words. So I did. Now it turns out it has to be everything that’s over 300 words. 

Thank goodness I can still use the word “and” without seeking copyright permission.

I know I’m like a broken record but it’s deranged. I am doing these authors a favor by quoting their work. I’m not seeking any monetary gain. I’m not preventing them from selling their work, just the opposite. But every publisher (except for a small independent poetry press) is making me jump through endless hoops get these permissions. 

So damn annoying.

Prediction

In under two years it will become clear that Trump won’t bring the [non-existent] industrial jobs back but people won’t care because he’ll distract everybody’s attention by starting some idiotic war with whomever the Russians tell him to attack: Iran, the Saudis, etc. Everybody will burn with patriotic enthusiasm, and the economy will be forgotten. And then, after Trump and his cronies steal everything there is to steal, we will have a global economic crisis.

Yes, it happened already, in very recent memory. But people tend to repeat the same dumb mistakes as many times as possible.

More on Losing Iowa

Another part of the recipe for “how not to win Iowa” is doing things like adding whenever Tim Kaine’s name is mentioned an invariable “although he’s not great on choice.” 

Save for marching around in a T-shirt saying “Abortion Is Grand”, Kaine did everything, violated every principle of his denomination to be supportive of choice. And still many Liberals were making faces and criticizing. What message does it send to people who are pro-choice but not pro-abortion, people who used to have reservations but no longer do, people who are still trying to figure it out? 

And this is just one example. 

Constant spectacles of policing each other’s orthodoxy (or “calling out”) should be discontinued immediately. They scare people off. And the word “privilege” should be forgotten. It will never win any elections bigger than an election of the president of the Society for Spoiled Rich Brats.