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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -Aldous Huxley
You've stumbled upon the website of Jeremy Lott. (To learn more about me, go here.) I can be reached at JEREMYAL123 -- AT -- YAHOO.COM.
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wSaturday, November 30, 2002 |
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THE 'ABSORB CANADA' BUTTON: My review of Douglas Coupland's latest has been posted. I gave my "review copy" to Cosh and he was less than amused. He said the book makes "you want to grab [Coupland] by the lapels and shake him a little and say 'You are talented! You don't need to keep putting out seventy-page books full of yearbook photos and TV test patterns! Just tell us a story! Some of us liked Microserfs!'" I was, if anything, more scathing. Writing about the U.S., I wrote, "[he] turns into the stereotypical liberal Canadian snob." Here's the intro to the review:
"The photo that stands out in this odd collection of pictures and alphabetical musings (styled after an earlier book about Vancouver, City of Glass) is a black-and-white shot of the empty, open trunk of a 1968 Chevrolet Biscayne with the lock busted open. A grim police officer can be made out against the black background. Looking at it, you just know that something bad happened here, and your eyes convince your hands to wait a bit before turning the page." [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 1:25 PM
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NOTE: I will be in D.C. from Thursday of this next week to Sunday night. The IHS made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:17 PM
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THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU: Dave Stevens, Kevin Steel and Kirk Marlowe; you guys are awesome. Thanks for helping me through this first long-distance production cycle. I don't know what they're paying you but it definitely is not enough to put up with me.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:15 PM
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MEN FROM THE BOYS, MY ARSE: Colby Cosh thinks I "can claim partial mitigation on grounds of American Thanksgiving" for letting such a long time go between posts. He doesn't know the half of it. While he was dribbling out his column and editing that report on dead people, I was learning new software, fielding countless phone calls, nailing down story lengths, writing a 1,500 word box cover story, being ever-so-patient with tardy writers and producing a magazine from roughly one million miles away. Oh yeah, and for the first time in my lifetime, my extended family decided to deluge our house for American Thanksgiving.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:12 PM
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wSaturday, November 23, 2002 |
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SLOUCHING TOWARD A COVER STORY: It's been a while since I counted but my writing has appeared in somewhere between 40 and 50 publications. And yet, I've yet to land a cover story. That may be changing, however. My articles are making peak a boo appearances on the cover of the current issue of Books & Culture and the next issue of The Report.
Speaking of the Books & Culture story, my hat's off to editor John Wilson on this one. He took two disparate, unsatisfactory essays and managed to stitch them together in such a way that I don't end up sounding like a moron. The article is on Harold Bloom's unfairly forgotten book The American Religion. An excerpt:
"Bloom did himself no favors by often substituting invective for argument. The conservative majority in the Southern Baptist Convention he called 'Texas Know Nothings' only because people would misunderstand his designation of them as Fascists. Jehovah's Witnesses reminded him 'of why very small children cannot be left alone with wounded and suffering household pets.'" [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 3:01 PM
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SINGLE PAYER TIME: The American Prowler has posted some responses (scroll down to CANADIAN CARE) to my column on Al Gore's lurch left on health care.
posted by
Jeremy at 2:48 PM
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wThursday, November 21, 2002 |
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READ THIS OR THE CAT DIES: I've mentioned them all separately but here is a round-up of Reportsters who blog:
Colby Cosh:
Author of the Up Front column and editor of that report on dead people
Used to be an Objectivist; now a Catholic atheist
Blogs about sports politics, literature and the doomed future of Western civilization; complains that his colleagues aren't trying hard enough to convert him
Kevin Steel
Web editor and photo editor; used to be a reporter
Lapsed evangelical
Blogs about his friends, his ideas and whatever’s in the news
Kevin Michael Grace
Political writer and book review editor
Paleoconservative Canadian Catholic
Blogs about everything, at length; thinks he’s Pascal
Dave Stevens
Design supremo and editor of The Compendium
Open minded
Blogs about movies, video games, technology and Report production
Rick Hiebert
Researcher, reporter and co-author of that report on dead people
Blogs about interesting news items, quotes, sports
Jeremy Lott
Production director and writer
Anglo-Baptist with a mean libertarian streak
Blogs about as often as he can manage
posted by
Jeremy at 10:49 PM
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THANKS: To WorldNetDaily for making my Al Gore healthcare column the column du jour.
posted by
Jeremy at 8:35 PM
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UGGH, WE GET LETTERS: As production director for the Report, I have to put the letters page together. To do this, I "get" to sort through the crank mail, the illegible handwriting, the letters that run on for eight pages and then demand a) that this letter be published - IN ITS ENTIRETY!!! - and b) that the letter writer be notified in advance of publication. I also get an early window into my own writing is being received.
My favourite letter thus far was several pages, handwritten, with the phrase "I am not a male homosexual" double-underlined near the top.
posted by
Jeremy at 8:29 PM
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wWednesday, November 20, 2002 |
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LURCH LURCHES LEFT: The American Prowler has published my latest North-South column. This one is on Al Gore's idiotic embrace of single payer healthcare. An excerpt:
"Some have expressed shock over Gore's change of mind but they must not have been paying close attention. ... [D]uring the 2000 election, the former vice president made no bones about wanting to expand the role of government in funding and regulating prescription drugs. He even went so far as to expound on the virtues of, yes, Canada's jury-rigged, highly regulated prescription drugs industry.
"This frame of mind was not lost on the cast of Saturday Night Live. Near the end of their mock up of the first Bush-Gore match-up -- the infamous 'lock box' debate -- Darrell Hammond (as Gore) held up a picture of 94-year-old widow Etta Munsen. This woman, Hammond explained, was a one-kidneyed Tennessean who suffered from 'polio, spinal meningitis, lung, liver, and pancreatic cancer, an enlarged heart, diabetes, and a rare form of strychnic acne' and who was paralyzed by several strokes and 'an unfortunate shark attack.'
"With prescription drugs bills of roughly '$113 million a day' ('staggering!'), Etta had to choose some weeks between food and 'treating her Lyme Disease.' The punch line was pretty good, even by SNL standards: 'Now, under my plan, Etta's prescription drugs would be covered. Under my opponent's plan, her house would be burned to the ground. And that is wrong. That is just wrong!'" [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 1:57 AM
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BUSY, BUSY, BUSY: I've been setting up the home office on the fly and researching a few stories. Thus, blogging has been light and will probably remain so for the next few days.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:45 AM
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wSunday, November 17, 2002 |
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COSH SHOULD TAKE THIS QUIZ:
"We reject the false doctrine that the church could have permission to hand over the form
of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the
prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day."
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You are Karl Barth!
You like your freedom, and are pretty stubborn against authority! You don't
care much for other people's opinions either. You can come up with your own fun, and
often enough you have too much fun. You are pretty popular because you let people have their
way, even when you have things figured out better than them.
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What theologian are you?
A creation of Henderson
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Jeremy at 9:59 PM
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WHERE ARE MY MANNERS?: I meant to write a thank you note before I blew out of Edmonton yesterday but I was too busy and too tired to get around to it. Thanks to friends Dave Stevens and Kevin Steel for showing me the ropes. Thanks also to Paul, Kathleen and Mary for putting me up and acting as a surrogate family to this still wet-under-the-ears Washington boy.
Mary invented a pretty good joke that I'd like to take this opportunity to pass along:
Q: What's a monster's favourite food?
A: Human beings.
posted by
Jeremy at 5:10 PM
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A FINE KETTLE OF FISH: I'm in for the next week. Four articles simply must get written while I work to retool the production director job so that it can be done from home, in another country, over a thousand miles away from the epicenter of production. High speed access should be in place Tuesday but that still leaves a new phone line to be installed and a new fax machine (and perhaps a printer) to price out, get permission and buy.
posted by
Jeremy at 4:55 PM
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LANDED: Touched down in Abbotsford last night and was home a few hours after that.
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Jeremy at 4:49 PM
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wThursday, November 14, 2002 |
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ABOUT THE DRUNKEN BRAWL IN THAT PLACE WITH THE GUY: Well I didn't start it but I was the one foolish enough to put it on the web, so I suppose I should explain what happened at the party. The issue wasn't that the gent who I previously called a blowhard had different opinions than mine and had the audacity to express them so much as that he did so at a party.
Now parties are frivolous occasions. Politics, science, even religion can play a part but they shouldn't dominate. The whole point of a party is to jostle up against other people and have fun with them. If serious conversation does erupt, those individuals have something approaching a moral obligation to get off of our clouds and take it elsewhere. The agonizing thing is that it is nearly impossible to enforce this understood etiquette without ruining the mood of the party.
Add to this that a) it was late; b) I had a few drinks in me; c) he went traipsing over my one genuine field of expertise - biblical studies - and consistently got everything wrong (translation, religious history, etc.); and then d) had the audacity to claim that his religious knowledge was far beyond what us traditionalist peasants could understant; and, yeah, I got a little bit steamed. In fact, one guest told me that he thought I would have taken a swing at him if I had a few more drinks in me. I don't know about that but... it's possible.
That said, I did not realize, as Dave Stevens pointed out, that the "blowhard" tried to make ammends at the end. I guess I was too tired and distracted pulling everything together to get out of there to notice.
I won't retract the blowhard comment but I will apply it to myself as well for making a big stink about such a small thing.
posted by
Jeremy at 2:31 AM
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GUESS THE LITTLE BIRD WAS LATE: Design supremo Dave Stevens has launched a blog entitled (what else?) NOT THE JANITOR.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:30 AM
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REPORT FORTUNE COOKIE: Little bird drop message on my head which say "Tomorrow good day for new Reportster to start a blog."
posted by
Jeremy at 1:09 AM
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NEW PIC: The Report has posted a column by moi with a great portrait by a talented seven-year-old. Go there for the pic; the column is just gravy.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:06 AM
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wTuesday, November 12, 2002 |
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MAIL: The American Prowler today ran some responses (scroll down) to my latest column. One letter, however, got lost in the shuffle. Jim Antle wrote:
Mr. Lott,
Enjoyed your piece in The American Prowler about the elections. However, I do have one small, perhaps anal retentive, correction. This election is not actually the first time a sitting president's party has picked up seats in a midterm election since FDR. Bill Clinton's Democrats actually accomplished this feat 1998. However, this is the first time since FDR that a sitting president's party gained seats during that president's first midterm election. 1934 was FDR's first midterm election, 1998 was Clinton's second and we all know what happened in his first, that "revolution" year of 1994.
It is conceivable that Clinton and Bush have shown us that the expectation that a president's party should lose seats in a midterm election no longer applies, but only time will tell.
Cordially,
W. James Antle III
posted by
Jeremy at 11:30 PM
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MY FRIEND EVEN MCELRAVY: Writes about the utter anguish produced by seeing his grandmother, who is dying of Alzheimer's, again for the last time. I've lost three grandparents over the last several years, but I'm not sure that's comparable to watching one's grandmother burst into tears because she can't remember your name. The title is "NOT OF THE EARTH IS THE PEACE I GIVE YOU."
posted by
Jeremy at 11:22 PM
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wMonday, November 11, 2002 |
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ANOTHER REPORT BLOGGER: Rick Hiebert has decided to join the cacophony. At this rate, the janitor will be blogging by New Year's. For the record, my blog is the oldest.
posted by
Jeremy at 7:56 PM
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BROTHER OF JESUS?: My article for The Report on the James ossuary.
posted by
Jeremy at 6:22 PM
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MESSIAH COMPLEX: Colby Cosh responds to a post about the party the other night. Specifically, he calls it "weblogging-as-revenge." Though I would rather group it under weblogging-as-a-handy-way-to-vent, I see his point.
posted by
Jeremy at 6:16 PM
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RELEASE!: Just finished my second (and, let's hope, final) draft of a feature piece for Reason.
posted by
Jeremy at 6:11 PM
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wSunday, November 10, 2002 |
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GO CHRIS: It's not like he needs the publicity but my former editor at the American Prospect, Chris Mooney, has struck out on his own and started a blog. Mooney is quite the writer even if he is a lefty.
posted by
Jeremy at 11:42 AM
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wSaturday, November 09, 2002 |
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HOWEVER: The evening closed with what became a speech by a blowhard from the Christian History Project. He began (or at least I started paying attention) by saying that Christianity is too hostile to modernity and should seek to incorporate and tame the spirit of the age rather than simply denounce it. We should realize that Christianity can be found in the Enlightenment and all kinds of other movements, even socialism.
Of course, by "Christianity," he spelled out some of what he meant: An explicitly Hegelian mutation which discounts the miraculous, the Church and even the idea that Jesus was God. We were told that "Jesus abolished God"; "Moses was the first atheist"; and that the Shema from Deuteronomy ("Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one") should actually read "Hear O Israel, there is no God." When pressed by the small, tired crowd, he acknowledged that his approach is a "radical" one but that it was the only one likely to work as inclusivity will trump exclusivity in the end.
When I attempted to say that "Christian" is a term with an historic meaning and that by taking this approach, he was setting himself outside of the fold, he replied that he knew more of and about Jesus-the-great-teacher than your average believer could ever hope to know. Referring to the story of Plato's cave, he divided humanity into an elite, who can grasp certain spiritual truths, and the great unwashed, who are confused and prefer fairy tales. (To which I replied "That story is awfully flattering to Plato." He missed it.)
Look, I'm as hip to contrarian readings of the Bible as the next guy but remove the supernatural and it becomes a different book than the authors intended. The bedrock assumption of the writers and editors of the the collection of texts was belief in a creator God who still gave a damn about what he had produced. This God muddles with people's lives, creates a people and promises deliverance from anger, sin and decay; and then delivers on that promise through the messiah. Jesus' teachings as handed down to us are in our posession because the authors and copyists believed that he was not a sage or magician or philosopher but God.
That is what the Church has always believed. Those who call themselves Christians while claiming otherwise are fooling themselves.
posted by
Jeremy at 2:35 PM
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THE "MEET JEREMY LOTT" PARTY: Most of last night was a blast. Steel did his damndest to welcome me to the neighbourhood, in a manner of speaking. The spread was tasty; the drinks were freely flowing; the company was fun and the video games made me feel like a kid again. My particular favourite was a fighting game (I think it was Soul Edge) at which I mopped the floor with most everyone, until Dave Stevens staged a last minute comeback.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:30 PM
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wFriday, November 08, 2002 |
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MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE YOUR PHONE CALLS ANYMORE: Colby Cosh is tired - and how - of taking reader phone calls demanding that we cover any damn pet story that readers want to throw at it. Best line: "[I]ncidentally, it's a super bad idea to call me up and say "My wife says I abused the kid--boy, I'd like to beat her senseless and burn her face with cigarettes for saying shit like that..."
He closes with the caveat, "These sentiments are not the official policy of the Report magazine, nor should they be construed as the opinion of any other employee but myself." Make that two.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:23 PM
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CROCODILE TEARS: My take on the elections has been published today on The American Prowler. I tried very hard not to gloat... and failed:
"Though the shock of losing such a big one short-circuited the wind-up string attached to the backs of Dem spokesmen ([pull] "Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment" [thwack]) a defensive piecemeal consensus is evolving which holds tactics, poor organization and a lack of overall message accountable for the staggering losses. As the boys at Tapped put it, 'the Democrats had no leadership, no message, no plan. There was just no there there.'
"Maybe the Tapped crew could be forgiven this inanity (after all, they did admit to writing while hung over) but it's hard to know what New Republic editor Peter Beinart's excuse was." [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 1:09 PM
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wThursday, November 07, 2002 |
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FREUD SLIPS: That's the title of a review by yours truly which was made available today on the Report website. An excerpt:
"From grades 4 to 10 my education was lousy with sex-ed classes. Speakers alternatively demonstrated the utility of various foams, told us to wait until marriage, told us how to procure 'reproductive services' and once engaged the class in a rousing game of--and I am not making this up--'Wheel of Contraceptives.'
"I was therefore amused to learn that Sigmund Freud, the man most responsible for this mandatory part of my education, was in reality quite the uptight, sexually frustrated prude. He probably did not have sex until his 30s, and then only with his wife. He then abruptly broke off marital relations before he was 40, and lived the next 40 years of his life as abstinent as a priest--or, given recent revelations, perhaps more so. In relating the father of his field's sexual history, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Armand Nicholi at one point throws up his hands and admits that it is difficult 'to fathom how Freud became an international symbol of sexual freedom.'" [more]
posted by
Jeremy at 3:34 PM
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GRANDMOTHER, WHAT LOVELY TEETH YOU HAVE: The other day, I went to dinner and a bookstore with a few friends at the Report. Here are the observations of one of them of me in the bookstore:
"I don't know how many of you out there in Blogsterville have ever visited a bookstore with a nasty book reviewer, but it's bit like following a shark into a pool (if such a thing were possible). He would circle around a table, seize a book, hold it a loft in a tight grip and, with his head still down and his eyes scanning the rest of the table, he would pronounce, 'Oooh, I gotta do this' or 'I gotta tear this apart.' I should like to name some of the titles he's set to sink his teeth into, but why spoil the fun."
posted by
Jeremy at 12:46 PM
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wWednesday, November 06, 2002 |
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RETURNS: It looks as though President Bush opened a can of whupass on the Dems last night. As Josh Marshall said, "On the Senate side, the Democrats lost basically every race that was even remotely losable." It's possible that, sensing the shift in political winds - especially in his home state - Zell Miller will jump ship. It's also not only possible but likely that the Grand Old Party will pick up Louisiana in the runoff next month. Assuming those ducks line up, the spread will be 53 Republicans 46 Democrats and one idiot from Vermont.
I mentioned this on the phone to Brian Doherty this morning and he replied "What do you care? You're Canadian."
posted by
Jeremy at 4:58 PM
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SERVED COLD: My review of Stephen Fry's Revenge for the 30th anniversary issue of Crisis.
posted by
Jeremy at 4:17 PM
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wTuesday, November 05, 2002 |
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FOUNDER TRIVIA: I know these polls are unscientific and signify the better part of nothing, but it's still nice to be compared with the Father of my country.
posted by
Jeremy at 5:26 PM
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PROMISES, PROMISES: I told Evan McElravy that I'd have something to say about this post on the prospects of an Islamic Reformation, and I will. Eventually. Maybe Mr. Cosh would like to have a run at it in the interim.
posted by
Jeremy at 5:17 PM
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BLOG-O-RAMA: Well today's the day that two of my colleagues chose to launch their own blogs. Canadian nationalist Kevin Michael Grace opens by giving in to the American cultural monolith and quoting Walt Whitman (though he promises it'll never happen again) and Kevin Steel shares a very odd photo (not the one of himself; the other one).
posted by
Jeremy at 5:13 PM
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VERY COOL II: The Report has reposted my article about California politics, including two new web pics of yours truly. This triples the number of Jeremy Lott photos available online.
posted by
Jeremy at 1:03 PM
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VERY COOL: I have been added to Amy Welborn's blogroll (under the banner "Catholic bloggers").
posted by
Jeremy at 12:50 PM
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wMonday, November 04, 2002 |
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BOOTY (I MEAN DUTY) CALLS: Reason has posted a small piece by yours truly on Spokane County's absurd attempt to enforce the four foot buffer zone at a strip club.
posted by
Jeremy at 5:22 PM
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wSunday, November 03, 2002 |
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RAMBLINGS: (Warning: The computer I'm using has no word processing program and, thus, no spell check. I also have a bit of the bubbly coursing through my veins so... you have been warned.)
At about 2 this afternoon, I put my part of the issue to bed - which is to say that all the editorial stuff is wrapped with the exception of a final read of the blue lines by my boss on Monday morning. The blue line read is similar to an emergency lever on a production line. It's costly and annoying to shut it down for inspection but on the other hand it does save the occasional limb (e.g. avert lawsuits). My hat's off to design supremo Dave Stevens, still toiling away with some of what we'll call "layout issues."
It was my first solo run and the time consumed by learning/doing the job, combined with some, ahem, creative deadline-keeping by writers, kept me at the office late several nights this week. I slept there Wednesday and Friday nights. The former was a big mistake because I was mistaken for Dave on Thursday morning, at 4 AM!!!!, and didn't get back to sleep. (Bitter? Moi?) The next issue could be easier because I'm switching from physical mark-up to direct-to-page computer editing. However, I'll be training in on the layout program, so I'm not holding my breath.
Some highlights:
* One story came in in such a discombobulated state that the proof reader and yours truly literally couldn't figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Dave started posting it to page anyway with the result that, I quipped, we have now invented a new art form: Haiku layout.
* I learned that the great Colby Cosh is frightened by little kids with hollow plastic pumpkins.
* Each article has a one or two word chunk of text over the body of the article on the right-hand side called a "bug." Usually, it's descriptive (e.g. an article on healthcare would get the bug HEALTHCARE or MEDICINE) and thus easy to write, but there are exceptions. For instance, in this issue, Kevin Michael Grace turned in a book review of the novels of contraversialist Michel Houellebecq, who was recently put in the spotlight for testing France's hate crimes laws by calling Islam "the stupidest religion." After pouring over the review a couple of times, which quoted Houellebecq on everything from the seeming meaninglessness of existence to the reason for the popularity of sex tourism (feminism has dehumanized traditional sex roles), I could not figure out how to bug the damn thing. Early this morning, I think I finally settled on THE FRENCH.
OK, that's enough from me for tonight. The photo director (whom I call the Man of Steel) has invited me and a bunch of other staffers to a Jeremy Lott coming out party at the end of next week. I hope they won't be dissapointed to learn that I'm not gay.
posted by
Jeremy at 2:11 AM
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