A fine run of reading

Finished The Hawkline Monster, the last short novel in the Brautigan collection. Good fun. Have gotten more into Angela Carter's collected nonfiction writing called Shaking A Leg. This woman should be as missed as Molly Ivins. She had an intelligent, outspoken, irrepressible spirit and voice. An excerpt or so from a piece called "Anger in a Black Landscape", which touches upon her antiwar views. "We think people who sell heroin are very evil and, if we catch them at it, send them to prison for a very long time. The men who deal in instruments of infinitely larger destruction acquire great wealth and respect." She said she's no expert about nuclear weapons in order to argue against them technically, "although I possess a hereditary facility for vituperation. In the old days in my father's country, Scotland, the tribal chieftains deployed their poets in territorial disputes; they made them stand on ridges above the combatants, hurling abuse at the foe,until one or the other was humiliated enough to leave the scene. Those were the days. Perhaps the time has come again to utilise these ancient skills - this time against BOTH sides." She was prescient about the possibilities of blogging, back in 1983! What a mighty blogger she'd have been!
And this - "It's sad but true that the 'irrational, subjective' arguments against nuclear weaponry and, indeed, against militarism itself, are the moral and emotional ones - and morals and emotions might be more or less the same thing, at that. I've been engaged, here, in below-the-belt arguments, because these are, perhaps, the only ones left. We must plead, harangue, protest, demand - all kinds of things! A lot more democracy; a lot less secrecy; make (oh, horrors! oh, embarrassment!) a fuss, then a bigger fuss, then a bigger fuss again. The peace movement in the USA didn't rationally argue US troops out of Vietnam. It harangued. It shouted. It screamed. It took to the streets."