Dizzies News Service

1. Dzyd Ben reports (in Los Angeles magazine) on a fatality at immigrant detention:

Until 1996, immigration law used a telling term to refer to noncitizens who can be legally denied residency in the United States. They were not only excluded, although they were that, too; they were “excludable.” The idea still prevails. They provide an opportunity for exclusion, for the nation to define itself by what it is not. Victoria Arellano was almost perfectly unwanted: not just a Latina, but an immigrant; not just an immigrant, but illegal; not just gay, but transgender; not just transgender, but infected with HIV—and an addict to boot. She did not merely slip through the cracks of the system. The system, cracks and all, was built with her in mind.

2. Michael Chabon at the DNC? Listen at the NYRB site...

3. Real buffalo in New York State. (Via Dzyd Susan)

4. Ten minutes of dissolute stumbling, fake Chinese accents, and tap dancing? Sure! James Cagney, "Shanghai Lil," Footlight Parade (Via Dzyd Brent)



5. And the PD reviews keep coming...This perceptive one is from (irony!) the L.A. Weekly. Here's some of it:

[A] battle cry rings between the lines of Personal Days: an angry defense of language against its murder at corporate hands. Park performs riotous burlesques with e-mail misspellings and corporate clichés; his characters hear double-entendres in computer error messages ("You are almost out of memory") and invent new words like "deprotion," for "a promotion that shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion." The novel may even remind you of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

Heyyy—I'll take it!