Wan Red Eye

Talkin' Tea Bagger Paranoid Blues

2009-09-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following to a group of friends who asked if my school was allowed to show the Obama speech:

Yeah, our superintendent got calls all day yesterday and the day before. So we can only show it to the kids who want to watch it.

I'm just going to lock the doors and pull down the shades and have the students hide under their desks until the whole thing is over. Our kids are so vulnerable to socialist notions! (especially because they are all Mexican) Socialism is such a powerful doctrine, however subtle (I mean I bet the guy doesn't even say words like "proletariat" and "class struggle.") I just don't want our parents to have to now spend all their free time un-brainwashing their own kids. Parents should not have to contend with a charismatic president and his espousal of ideas like "stay in school" and "don't drop out." These are socialist ideals. We are all familiar with the literacy rates of places like Cuba. We don't want a country full of do-gooding doctors, especially not in this political crisis.

The other suspicious thing about this speech is the length. It's going to be about 15-20 minutes of pure brainwashing. This is what I'm afraid of: smart people. Obama obviously knows that teenagers' attention spans are short and he's keeping the speech within the average. If this kind of cunning does not scare you then you are a socialist.

What I'm really afraid about is that Obama is going to say some things that on the surface are going to sound like he's encouraging kids to become educated, but really he's going to have a subliminal policy speech on socializing health care. I mean if kids come away from this speech saying things like, "I'm really interested in the idea of a public option, but I'm not sure it goes far enough to reform the health care system," or "I think that the profit motive in insurance companies might not be the most effective way to ensure the health of people in this country," or "the fee-for-service model is an unsustainable model," I'm just going to pick up and move to the nearest libertarian country. I mean I can really imagine my kids saying those things, and it's frightening!

If George W. was giving the speech, I would let the kids watch it. I mean this is a guy who has a great life story about his education. The guy went to the most elite private schools; he made C's. That's speaking to kids on their level. Obama was just primed from an early age to be an elite socialist. I mean this guy was raised by a single, socialist mom who made him get up at 4am and actually study! That is not the American Dream, and I'll be damned if those are values I want my kids to have, much less hear from a president who has benefited from them!

All in all, I think that understanding socialist ideas is dangerous. Keep the government out of my kids' schools!

"Now Eisenhower, he's a Russian spy,
Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy.
To my knowledge there's just one man
That's really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell.
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus."
- Bob Dylan

Clinton reads...

2009-08-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

During the 2008 election, I don't think I ever really thought that I wouldn't go back to loving Bill Clinton. I wish he hadn't made the "Jesse Jackson" comment after South Carolina, but it's all in the past, and there is almost no one I can think of whose reading list I am more interested in.

The LA Times blog "Jacket Copy" is apparently on that list. Carolyn Kellogg apparently received a letter from Bill Clinton (pictures of the letter on official Bill Clinton stationary are - I don't want to say it but I will - somewhat exhilirating) who read a post of hers that credits Clinton as literary and muses about what he may be reading now. His letter unveils his current reading list and all the books are ones I wish I was reading now. I put "Uranium" on my wishlist and might even up the priority level to a 4 (out of 5).

Anyway, read it here:

The Novel as Epic

2009-07-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

The word “epic” makes for a terrible slang word. It seems to have gone the way of words like “gnarly” and “bitchin,’” relegated to strict usage in a small section of surf culture or coteries of uber-cool high schoolers whose slick-smooth use of irony works well alongside multi-layered inside jokes. Maybe the reason it has such an ephemeral existence in the slang world lies in its inability to be properly used in the language of literature.

Leaving aside all the seemingly ubiquitous hyper praise, claiming So-and-so is this generation’s James Joyce, it is really difficult to apply the word “epic” to a piece of modern literature and be taken seriously. American writers may make an obvious an nearly successful attempt at writing the “Great American Novel,” however elusive even that is, but even the term seems to steer clear from the status associated with “epic.”

Reading Georg Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel is no picnic despite its mere 150 pages, but its appeal lies in its premise which is, the epics, for which Homer, et al. are revered, can no longer be written. It is a form that has died along with something else inside us, and only the novel form can hold a candle to the epic, and then, only if it’s done right.

It must be said here that Lukacs dispensed with the ideas in his book as he went on to ditch Hegel for Marx. His book The Historical Novel is his final word on the novel and is more Marxist in content. Yet, the concept in The Theory of the Novel is still… novel and appealing if for nothing else than its musing on the relationship of man with nature and nature with the novel. And reading this shows the thinker on his way to Marxism by contemplating man’s historicity and its connection to relevant art.

The man in the age of the epic was fundamentally different from modern man. His connection to nature allowed him a type of freedom that connected his interior world (life of the mind, etc.) to his exterior world (life in relation to nature and environment) to an extent that the mixture of the interior and exterior lives were homogenous. Man’s consciousness and conscience were one with nature; meaning and essence were pervasive and obvious. In this way the epic reinforces this idea by having heroes whose lives are untroubled by questions of society and alienation. The heroes are sure of the rightness of their actions and sure of the fact that their fates lie in the hands of the gods. Man was at home in his existence.

At some point along the way a split between man and nature occurred. Man began questioning his relationship with nature and found out that he and nature were no longer one. This questioning led to a focus on the interior mind. Morality and conscience were no longer plain as day, obvious, a priori. Man woke up and found himself homeless and lost, and the epic no longer has its place in society.

Lukacs argues for the novel as the only form that can take the place of the epic, but only if it’s done right. Here’s where it gets a little messy. The novel must find the right balance of interior perspective (author’s subjectivity) and exterior world. In other words, a novel that’s centered too much on the author’s subjectivity or too objective in portraying reality, cannot accurately portray the reality of the split and thus cannot portray a rounded portrait of reality as humans experience it. On the other hand, a novel that can maintain the balance can achieve a “transcendental homelessness” that can match the epic.

Lukacs uses the example of Don Quixote as a novel that transcends. This novel portrays the discrepancy between interior and exterior worlds by pitting one man’s fantastically romantic ideals with the brutal reality of the real world. Without trying to overly romanticize the story (like the authors of the Don’s favorite books), Cervantes engages in a type of irony that is essential for a novel to depict if it is to account for the split.

Balzac, Goethe, and Tolstoy also find themselves in the good graces of Lukacs idealistic (i.e. Platonic or Hegelian) formula in their balancing inner life with society, all in an effort to achieve recognition of man’s current state.

On some level the ideas in this book mesh very well with any idea of man’s fall from grace, whether it be Plato, the Garden of Eden, or Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. The idea that somewhere along the way man was alienated from his original and best state and there may not be a way back. While Lukacs may have dispensed with this notion later in his career, the basic premise of man’s alienation from nature is one that still seems relevant and resonates with people, especially in an age where our way of life has been defined more by our relationship with machines than with nature, but also where man may have the ability to turn the tide and embrace his environment in a new way. Until that time, the novel still holds its place as the preeminent form… of literature anyway.

Rushdie's Beautiful Fire

2009-03-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

Though they are mostly British, some critics consider "Midnight’s Children" the "Ulysses" of the second half of the twentieth century. Personally, having never so much as opened "Ulysses" to just read the first sentence but having just heaved my way through "Midnight’s Children" I think it’s fair to say, “okay, fair enough.”

Narrated by Saleem Sinai who was born on the very instant India gained its independence, "Midnight’s Children" is a chronicle of modern India as it parallels Saleem’s own disappointing and tumultuous life. Rushdie appropriately chooses the magical realist style in an attempt to reconcile the deep seated mythology of pre-colonial India with the post-colonial modern reality as it comes into its own after so many years of British rule.

Rushdie, a remorseless, sharply critical political writer, carries Jonathan Swift’s torch, not so much to light the room to see the contradictions and hypocrisies of the political and religious leader catching them in perverted sexual positions, urinating on the carpet, and rummaging through purses, but to burn down their curtains. Scathing in his fictional characterizations, he persistently describes Indira Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, a man with labia lips. One doesn’t have to use too much imagination to get at what Rushdie would be calling him had he been grown up in New Jersey. And that's just one example. Indira Gandhi is a witchy widow who tortures childre, and the whole Nehru clan is rife with nepotism and designs on an inherited autocratic rule.

Yet, one can’t help but think that if Rushdie wasn’t such a master of everything literate, it might not hurt so bad. And his writing is phenomenal in the truest sense of the word. His pace is quick, descriptions rich, allusions many-layered, allegories vivid, execution bull’s eye precise, and comic vision hilarious. In one section of the book, he and three soldiers, masterfully described as a caricature of a single character and three separate characters all at once, are wandering in the jungle where they shoot Father Time, stuff their ears with mud to avoid the voices of the dead they’ve killed and wander into a Siren lair where they being to turn transparent. When they come to their senses they are washed away in a tidal wave.

It’s a rarely noted rule that you shouldn’t get your history from fiction. Rushdie does not let you assume you can read this novel and come away with some knowledge of India, Pakistan, or Kashmir, but for someone who does not know much about the subcontinent’s modern history, I can’t help feel like I got to know it a little bit, in the way you can get to know a town you didn’t grow up in. Though I think Rushdie may have trouble getting readers to sympathize with his characters, I did sympathize with India. Not the history but the cycle of intermittent optimism and imminent disappointment and the inevitable return of hope.

The Trance of Narrative

2009-02-07T20:55:00.000-08:00

In John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden he creates a character meant to fully embody evil. He defended his choice of making this woman, Cathy Ames, by saying it was surely conceivable that a person could strip away all sense of right and wrong and live to enjoy the suffering of others. While this is no doubt the characteristics of a sociopath, the inconceivable thing is that a sociopath could be quite as successful at being so evil without getting caught, all the while maintaining a very visible presence in the public eye.

The Scarlatti Inheritance by Robert Ludlum was given to me by a friend a few years ago when he was cleaning out his room before moving. Its 300+ pages and tattered cover gave off a faint you're-wasting-your-time air, you-should-be-reading-Pynchon. But after trying to read big hard books for a year, I thought it might be okay to read just one piece of trash. What I found after having spent a year trying to read the good books is that I can read 300+ pages of trash in no time. And as a tribute to Nabokov, I feel it's my duty to tear up this little flower and examine its parts and whiff its aroma for all it's worth.

If Ulster Scarlatti has an aroma, it's sulfur. He is Ludlum's evil incarnate, his Cathy Ames. He is the spoiled, ungrateful, sadistic child of a power couple who consolidated power in an ultra-competitive early 20th century corporate market place, and if there's any naturalism in Ludlum then Ulster got all the traits of competition and thirst for power from his parents and not really a trace of anything else. He is a World War II veteran who shoots at his own men in a ruse to get himself a medal of honor, steals securities, leaves his wife to hide in Europe, consorts with the most corrupt of corporate Nazi sympathizers all over Europe and plans to be an integral part of helping Hitler (who makes a subdued cameo) take over the world. He's not only evil in the head, but he's huge and seems to scare people by making them think he's going to punch them in the nose.

On the other side we have our two heroes. One is Mrs. Scarlatti, Ulster's mother, and the other is our government employee, bureaucratic everyman hero. She is the ubermensch capitalist femme who gathers all of Ulster's European corporate fascist cronies together and scares them, not with force but with business skill. She is the reason that Hitler did not gain as much financial backing that would surely have led to his eventual status as a world potentate.

Matthew Canfield is flawed but honorable where it counts. He redeems Ulster's neurotic wife by marrying her and taking care of her kid. He saves Mrs. Scarlatti's life a few times and forms the weaker half of an odd couple that may be somewhat distanced because of class barriers but definitely grows into respectful and appreciative relationship.

And there you have your archetypes. And there you have your story which is confined to the possibilities of the archetypes. In cases like these the author knows the reader has simple expectations. The good guy has to win. The bad guy has to be really bad - beyond any sort of humanity or even humor. He, in fact, has to make the Nazis, who were the most evil people history has ever seen, look like a redeemable people with at least a perceivable code of honor. The heroine has to be tough as nails to stay on top in a dog eat dog corporate world, and though she does some mean things along the way, they can be undone by our government employee hero, so that we can maintain our notions of competitive but benign corporate system and the humble heroism of our government subordinates.

There is no other way to think. This is the trance of narratives. The author respectfully upholds the readers expectations, carrying them the entire way through the comfort of a thrilling plot. The author controls the imagination by fully illustrating their character so that their is no question to or complexity in who they are. The reader is willingly hypnotized because they trust the author to get them through this tunnel of suspense safely so that our own lives are exactly where we left them safe and sound. And we are still made to celebrate the patriotism inherent in our corporate system.

Often the purpose of the evil incarnate character in literature is to provide a foil and reveal the humanity of the main character. Ultimately the devil character loses out not to goodness but to humanity because the reader gains insight into how good can navigate its way out of the complexities of human nature and manifest itself in the world despite its antagonists. Ulster Scarlatti, on the other hand, ultimately emerges victorious. He does not challenge the humanity of his characters; his murder is accepted without thought. Instead he confirms the simplicity of their character and the complicity of the readers in accepting an easy answer and a false representation of humanity.

Lonesome Books

2009-01-14T17:38:00.000-08:00

If you're ever driving on your way to Albuquerque from Dallas, take a little detour south of Wichita Falls down to Archer City where the Texas author Larry McMurtry resides and take a stroll through the four old and rare book stores he owns in town.

When Sheila and I waltzed into this town of, oh I'd say about 1500 people, we drove around a little. Saw some ol' boys workin' on a truck; saw a feed mill; and we saw a bed and breakfast called the "Lonesome Dove Inn."

We swaggered into the local library, I put my elbow on the counter and asked the lady if she knew where to find these book stores of Larry McMurtry's. She was much obliged to tell us all about 'em. I asked if ol' Larry hangs around town much, and she said "Oh, sure. You'll see him walking around with a cup a' coffee in his hand. You c'n say hello, but I don't think he's much of a talker." Her teenage daughter snickered a little and rolled her eyes. We got the impression that ol' Larry isn't much of an Archer City socialite.

Anyway, you can walk into the bookstores and look around and no one even tends to 'em, 'cept in the main store, Booked Up No. 1. We thought the place was dead because we started at No. 2 and there weren't nobody in there. We were surprised to find that we weren't the only tourists in this one horse town and some people even had armfuls a' books.

I sighed and told Sheila I didn't want any books from here. She asked if I were sure. I told her that I like my books like I like my women: fresh and with a nice little forward from some other famous author who's got a more contemporary perspective on the work I'm about to read.

Ol' Larry may never be able to write another "Lonesome Dove" but he turned a little horse and tractor town into a classy minor tourist destination.

Economist's top books

2008-12-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

The Economist also put out a best of the year book list that's worth a look. There are a number of categories, not just fiction/nonfiction, which allows for more books. And, as should be expected, the list is made up of primarily non-fiction books. They did include the novel "Lush Life," however.

Five out of Ten Ain't Bad

2008-12-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

Here's the NYTimes top ten list:

Non-fiction
1.) The Dark Side
2.) The Forever War
3.) Nothing To Be Frightened Of
4.) This Republic of Suffering
5.) The World Is What It Is

Fiction
1.) Dangerous Laughter
2.) A Mercy
3.) Netherland
4.) 2666
5.) Unaccustomed Earth

New York Times Top Ten Books Prediction

2008-12-01T22:23:00.000-08:00

The NYTimes puts out a top ten books every year, and every year I look at it and wish I had the time to read them all. Books I've read from the top ten lists: "Absurdistan," "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," "The Looming Tower," "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (which I haven't really finished), and "Then We Came To The End" (just finished).

Anyway, though I haven't read hardly any books published in 2008, I do have predictions. They're based on the hype some books get divided by the good reviews and how often you write for the New Yorker (Jane Mayer - "The Dark Side") or how glowing the review was from James Wood of the New Yorker ("Lush Life"). The actual list comes out Wednesday.

Non-fiction
1.) The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
2.) The Ten-Cent Plague
3.) The Dark Side
4.) The Forever War
5.) The Post American World

Fiction
1.) Lush Life
2.) A Mercy
3.) Unaccustomed Earth
4.) Indignation
5.) Diary of a Bad Year

The News

2008-11-18T13:33:00.001-08:00

New links on the side: see.

23/6 is kind of like The Onion, but it's lighter on the satire and heavy on the sarcasm. For the inchoate political dilletante who discovers Huffington Post, this page is a more direct look into what these people wish they could say if they didn't feel an obligation to be "journalistic" and give their blog credibility.

So when you read the headline "Joe Liberman To Keep Committee Chairmanships," go to 23/6 and it'll say, "'Teflon Joe' Now Just Seeing What He Can Get Away With."

So apparently Sarah Palin is getting a book deal for $7 million. Prologue: All My Experiences, The Executive Ones and the Other Ones Too, Like Being a Mom or Such, Is What the Things Are That Have Made Me.

Palin's penchant for the cavalier is nowhere more bold than with her astonishing creativity with the passive voice. Dick Cavett's got a great, little polite, just an A-1, you know, immensely good writing of an article there that I think is something else.

Bob speaks

2008-11-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

As the transition continues with almost as much anticipation as the actual election, it's easy to forget the emotion of the night of the election. It seemed to bring out what each generation is made of and how far some have come. The symbol that sticks out most to me is Jesse Jackson, for all his foibles, standing in the middle of Grant Park crying. The man who stood next to MLK when he was assassinated has entered the promised land. And I can imagine (only imagine) that the emotion at entering this promised land cannot be far removed from the emotions of all mountaintops-to-promised land achievements throughout history.

Keith has got something that shows just how much our generation can get emotionally involved in something important too, putting to rest all the lame accusations from the baby boomers that our generation doesn't get involved or care enough.

But the man who said it best said it between two classics of his own. Bob Dylan, giving a concert on the night of Novemeber 4th after playing his first encore, "Like a Rolling Stone," said, "I was born in 1941. That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I've been living in darkness ever since. It looks like things are going to change now." Then he played "Blowin' in the Wind"

How many years must some people exist, before they're allowed to be free, you ask? You get a better sense of it and a tangible hope when you're allowed to live through something like this.

I wonder: if Kurt Vonnegut hadn't put so much hope in the cigarettes he smoked and the companies that sold them to kill him, do you think he would have given up all hope on humanity had he seen this day? He died right at the end of an era borne out of the sixties, an era that brought out the best and worst in the silent and the loud ones. A generation that produced Bush and paved the way for Obama. Democracy works slowly, and we may never see the canon balls forever banned, but we're getting somewhere when the hardened start to see some light.

New Link

2008-11-14T08:26:00.000-08:00

You got your Rotten Tomatoes and you have your Metacritic. Like Rotten Tomatoes, which rates movies based on an mathematical average of reviews from critics, Metacritic averages reviews from critics for recent novels. It also does so for dvds, video games, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a comprehensive list of books. I couldn't even find "Absurdistan," which was one of the New York Times best 10 books for the year in 2006. But you'll find your Delillos, your Pynchons, your Dave Eggers, and it has links to an array of full reviews.

Running Brave

2008-10-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

This was a quick read, and as good as it was to read, the time might have been better spent reading another one of his novels.

As far as memoirs goes, there is nothing illuminating here. It is cool to get a peek at Murakami training for marathons after selling off his jazz bar and starting his career as a novelist. But it's more like reading a well-proofread diary with very obligatory truths.

However, I have to say, if you want to admire Murakami more than you already do then read it. He does a marathon a year; he did an ultra-marathon (62 miles); and now, in his 60s he does triathlons. He's as tough as his novels are.

At any other point in my life this book may been more of a waste of time. But reading this book made me want to run marathons. My ankle's really killing me lately; I think I need some shoes but I'm up to four miles now.

Anyway, if you're looking for a gift for a friend who runs or wants to, you have one less person to get a gift for. It's easy and encouraging.

The Spirit World

2008-10-17T19:47:00.000-07:00

In the 18th century historians had begun taking narrative out of historical writing and presenting history in a more factual way. At the same time, the novel was born and many were published under the guise of being based on fact or history. (e.g. - "The History of Tom Jones, "Robinson Crusoe," et al.) Pilate's "what is truth?" comment might have figured into this conundrum quite well.

Before there was Cursive, "Adaptation," and "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," Tim O'Brien wrote a book of self-referencing short stories called "The Things They Carried," and it's good. Each story takes up the first person and maintains the same characters throughout the book. O'Brien uses these settings and characters to reflect on the experience of the war and relate it to us.

He will tell a really good story and then in the first paragraph of the next story tell you that the previous story is not a true story, but it's a true war story. Raising the question "what truth is there in story telling?" No author can get away with a gimmick like this if he/she can not portray their characters in such a vivid and loving light. I finished this book and thought "some of these characters have got to actually be guys he fought with in Vietnam. He's got to use their real names. But maybe he doesn't." What makes it even more confusing is that he dedicates the book to the characters in his book as if they were his real war buddies.

There are stories like "On the Rainy River," "Friends," and "Speaking of Courage," that seem incredibly real. He follows up the latter with an explanation of how he wrote it for his buddy (he uses the same name from the story) and how he changed his name the first time he wrote it but used his real name this time, and then goes on to leave doubt that the guy existed or the story was true at all. One attempt at an explanation is this:

"When you go to tell about [a war story], there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."

Thus there is a spirit and ghost motif throughout, which add to the strangeness and give a bit of an impressionistic air to the stories. Characters even seem to turn into spirits like in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," where a soldier's girl friend is shipped to his war zone and takes up with the green berets, goes on missions with them, and ends up vanishing into the wilderness, not as if she was captured but as if her being blended in and got absorbed by Vietnam. This story belongs in the canon of Vietnam literature if not the entire canon of war literature as a whole. (Read this story even if you don't read any other.)

O'Brien doesn't give you any room to speculate as to the truth of any of the stories. No one looking for facts on the ground will find any solid footing here. But the point is, if you're looking for truth in war, facts are the last thing that will guide you.

The Sane Socialism (a simplification)

2008-10-17T18:55:00.000-07:00

You can't help but second guess how wisely you use your time when someone says, "We have a literacy of above 90% of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. But instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of men with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic fantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in a while" ...I think I might have to stop watching Keith Olberman. (I really am pondering this, and Sheila approves of this idea.)

Erich Fromm diagnoses the ills of society. Why, in an age (this book is written in the mid 20th century) where the work hour is half of what it used to be, we have access to a relative abundance of luxury and leisure time, is the rate of alcoholism, gun deaths, and suicide climbing exponentially in Western countries.

The suspects: industry, alienation, and conformity.

The solution: socialism. The real socialism, not its perverse doppelgangers Maoism and Stalinism. Not the totalitarian, authoritarian, dissension suppressing, genociding, redistributionist kind of Socialism. He's not talking about the kind of socialism that man serves, but the kind that serves man.

It's actually pretty brave and illuminating having been written during the peak of the Red Scare. Fromm doesn't necessarily blame industry on the alienation it causes, just the way it is set up and works.

Here's how it works: Man used to be the master of his work. He would see his work from inception to production (like planting crops, breaking horses, or making shoes) and this control over his work is what is humanly satisfying. It fulfills the nature of man. Industry on the other hand has man aiding machines in monotonous work that he has no control over or interest in. (This follows right along with Marx's "Fetishism of commodities.") And it's not just the assembly line workers but the manager class as well.

Thus he calls for a change. Not a drastic change but one that benefits workers. He cites examples of companies that give their workers more of a voice, not a union necessarily but a kind of partnership with the workers, managers, and owners. He doesn't call for wage equality but he does call for less wage disparity. He also thinks companies should provide incentives for hard work that include free adult education. (e.g. - if the workers collectively produce 40 hours of work in 30 hours, they are entitled to use ten work hours learning Latin, film, or theology - classes of their own choosing.)

While this book was illuminating for me on the issue of socialism and much more approachable than "Das Kapital," the part for me that was most inspiring was his world view (I sound like Sarah Palin). More specifically his explanation for human nature. He writes of man's evolution being one of consciousness and self-awareness. That is, once upon a time man evolved and stopped being one with nature like the lions, tigers, and bears, and started being conscious of himself. He aligns this with the Garden of Eden when man looked up himself and saw that he was naked. Once man knew of himself, he could never turn back to being one with nature. Instead he had to find solace and identity through reason and spirit - with being a creator.

Anyway, Fromm is more a humanist than he is a socialist, but inasmuch as he is a humanist, he has found a kindred morality in tenets of socialism.

The Invisible Man

2008-10-05T21:14:00.000-07:00

Any novel that wants to stake a claim in the Odyssey category must do a few things: the protagonist has to physically travel; he has to meet a cyclops; he has to go to the world of the dead (or underground will do); and he has to love disguises.

The nameless protagonist of Invisible Man does all these and more. This is an absurd adventure that starts out with the old battle royals where white men get a dozen or so blind folded young black men to fight each other in the ring - naked. He goes to college and gets kicked out for being forced to take a white man into a black bar with crazy people. He goes to New York and encounters unions, crazy mill workers, mad scientists, and communists.

This man gets a lobotomy, moves to Harlem, gets sucked into being a community organizer of sorts, sleeps with rich white women who fantasize about being raped, encounters a rival community organizer who starts a riot and shows up on a black horse draped in lion skin and throws spears, and finally falls through a man hole where he decides to stay.

Every event that happens in the book happens to him. His life is controlled by outside forces; i.e. the powers that be. They coax him and woo him and manipulate him until he finally realizes these people are feeding him illusions and robbing him of his individuality to the point where he never really knows who he is (a la Matrix.)

In discussions about the elusive "Great American Novel" some have said that no novel can be considered the "Great American Novel" unless it's written about the black experience. If that's true then I would say, "I nominate Invisible Man." There is nothing preachy in this novel. You can't talk about this novel without talking about race, but it would take away from the grandeur and expansiveness of it to call it a race novel. I think it may be about all of us: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you."

City of Thieves

2008-10-05T20:47:00.000-07:00

David Benioff lives the life. His dad was head of Goldman Sachs; he got a grad degree from UC Irvine in creative writing (same as Michael Chabon); and he married Amanda Peet. He didn't have to start out with a book of short stories right out of a reputable writer's workshop to get noticed. He was (God bless him) a high school English teacher who not only got his book 25th Hour published but got Spike Lee to direct and Ed Norton to star in it. Why stop there? He wrote the screen play for Stay and The Kite Runner and is working on the screen play for Wolverine.

Yet he still decides to write novels. And thank goodness. There's nothing mind blowing about "City of Thieves"; it's not an instant classic or something that will be studied in colleges twenty years from now. It's just a really good, fun story.

Lev and the incorrigible yet dynamic Kolya have to find a dozen eggs as punishment for deserting and looting in Leningrad during a time when the Nazis are besieging the city. There's a lot of action, suspense, and camaraderie. Kolya is an arrogant and lovable literature lover, whose big mouth can get him and his new friend in to trouble, but it also helps with the ladies.

I don't like it when characters die unnecessarily. Does a mentor need to die when his apprentice has learned all he can teach him? Does a main character have to die just so the tragic setting seems believable?

Nevertheless, it was worth the read. It was simple and fun; not genre fiction; not pretentious. I think that this is what Michael Chabon means when he says he just wants to entertain. Of the last three books Chabon has written, none have been as purely and solely entertaining as "City of Thieves."

Glass does Coetzee

2008-10-03T17:48:00.000-07:00

Phillip Glass has an opera based on the book "Waiting for the Barbarians"

Phillip Glass has done the soundtrack to "The Truman Show," "The Hours," and most recently "Cassandra's Dream."

It ended on an oily stage where/I wrote elegiac stanzas for you

2008-09-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

Though James Wood apparently tears him apart in How Fiction Works, everyone else has all but deified David Foster Wallace as our generation's Faulkner or Pynchon... or Cobain.

The warmest of these tributes comes from A.O. Scott who nestles Wallace's work in its proper and complicated place comapared with others of his generation.

N+1 drools over Wallace, but the article by Jared Roscoe is the most touching.

And the following comes from an anniversary issue of "The Atlantic":

Just Asking
by David Foster Wallace
Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?
In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?
FOOTNOTES:
1. Given the strict Gramm-Rudmanewque space limit here, let's just please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes—an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency ... the whole democratic roil.

2. (This phrase is Lincoln's, more or less)

Damon on Palin

2008-09-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

"It's like a bad Disney movie..."

Christian Today's Top 10 Most Dangerous Books

2008-09-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche. You knew these guys would make the list, but did you think John Stuart Mill would?

Lenin, Sanger, Freud, Mead, Hitler, Kinsey all joined them on the top 10 with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, and Freidan as a supplemental list of five books that according to Christian Today who added, "The world would be a much better place, argues Wiker, if these fifteen books had never been written."

Granted, the guy espousing doesn't want to censor these books and even encourages people to read and study them. He just thinks they have inflicted a lot of damage.

My philosophy is that humans inflict damage, not books. And if the author wants to make indirect relationships to books then why don't we go a little further and blame the Christian institutions and society that nurtured these thinkers and their ideas.

Check out the entire article here:

Resentment can change the world

2008-09-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

Apparently resentment can do a lot of damage, further than the family strife and middle school backbiting we've all experienced, or even resentment that causes a person to not vote for a certain candidate or a politician or political party who prevents a just law from passing because the other party made them look bad in public.

Everyone knows bin Laden and his crew want to destroy America. What "The Looming Tower" does is not just put a human face on everyone involved, it portrays the surging swell of animosity, starting with an introspective and conflicted young Egyptian intellectual and growing into a movement whose scope of destruction is not even limited to the West but to all non-fundamentalists.

The cast of characters in "The Looming Tower" is extensive, yet Wright puts a human face on all of them. Sayyid Qutb (pronounced kuh-tub) is the Karl Marx of Islamic fundamentalism. He wrote the ideas and let the next generation carry it out.

And what is it about the '60s. Every neophyte intellectual wanted a revolution and pronto. The '60s in the Middle East was no different, except their radicalism was toward a fundamentalist Islam. Ayman al-Zawahiri (Osama's second in command) started a terrorist cell when he was fifteen years old to overthrow the government of Egypt. He was tortured in prison after Sadat's assassination with a whole bunch of other people like him. So much so that some people believe that 9/11 can be traced back to those prisons.

Osama comes along and is a little bit of a pansy. He and his friends want to try to follow the Koran faithfully and marry four wives and have kids. He's super rich because of his father but he never lives lavishly. He doesn't get involved in much until the Afghan war with Russia.

One of the perversions of this story that sickens anyone with a hint of rationality is the idea of a "fatwa." You may remember this word from when Salman Rushdie wrote "The Satanic Verses" and the Ayatollah issued a fatwa, essentially giving a reward to anyone who murdered him. But a fatwa is not a bounty. Instead it's a way of lifting Islamic law for a certain purpose. Basically saying, "In the Koran it says you can't kill innocent people, but in this case it's okay." It has to be approved by an imam, but if you want to kill a bunch of people on a bus, you can find an imam to issue a fatwa. Suicide is a mortal sin in Islam. But if you issue a fatwa, it's okay because the imam can say that you are fighting evil.

There are other human faces put on the Americans who are tracking this. We all knew that the problem with 9/11 is that the FBI had a few of the pieces and the CIA had a few of the pieces, and together they could have stopped it. But the culture of ego and glory didn't allow for that and New Yorkers paid the price (including one of the agents who was working on Al-Qaeda, stationed in the towers). Wright makes it read almost like a detective novel the way he portrays the folks in the FBI and CIA.

As far as Al-Qaeda, it was a joining of al-Zawahiri's group and Osama's. They had numerous resources and began recruiting people from all over. The people who were most attracted weren't necessarily the poverty stricken, not-much-to-live-for-anyway arabs. It was the really smart internationally educated Muslims who felt like outsiders in the West and clung to Koran in a radical way. Mohammed Atta had a graduate degree in urban planning from Germany and went on to lead the 9/11 attacks.

This feeling of being an outsider in the West is the same feeling Qutb had when he came to visit America. He was offended by loose morals, female sexuality and the West's exploitation of it. He felt uncomfortable here and decided that there was a way to live and this wasn't it. They all seem to feel this way, but when they come back to the Middle East they find that their own societies are not as extreme as these men have become. They create an ideal and an identity that they think is rooted in the culture in which they were born, but it's mostly made up. If this wasn't a common experience Al-Qaeda wouldn't be as successful as it is. It's a cause that fits their world view and they are only a small group that share it even in their region.

If there's one thing I like, it's the New Yorker. I don't care how snooty the Talk of the Town or the movie reviews are, when I read an article I never want it to end; it's non-fiction but it's a story. Reading "The Looming Tower" is like reading a 400 page long New Yorker article and worth it. This is a book that makes you feel like an expert on current events, makes you be able to actually listen to Joe Biden and realize he might be one of the only ones who knows his shit.

Rating: 9.0
Danger Rating: 6.0 - Makes revolution look like a place that can go down dark paths.

2008-08-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd pick up a book by the Nobel Prize winning author Jim Coetzee, and, not knowing much about Coetzee except that I wanted to read "Disgrace" at one time and the New Yorker review of his newest book "Diary of a Bad Year" roundly praised the author, I decided it would be best to introduce Coetzee to myself with a Penguin Great Books edition, which happened to be "Waiting for the Barbarians."

Set in an unknown local in an unknown but premodern time (they ride horses), the story is written almost like a parable. The main character is an old magistrate widower who runs a settlement on the edge of a burgeoning empire that may have reached its limits. Our magistrate is a good and honest man who has experience keeping the peace with the natives, encouraging trade between the natives and settlers. However, the natives live off the land just outside the fringes of the empire and are allegedly planning an invasion.

But all hell breaks loose when the Empire sends its bureaucrats to the border settlement and try to force themselves on the citizens. Refusing to listen to the experienced and cultured magistrate, the bureaucrats torture and dehumanize the natives, the rumors of which will cut any ties the natives had with settlers.

"Waiting for the Barbarians" hits on clearly universal themes, some of which would work especially today with the war on terrorism: understanding the enemy vs. obliterating them; torture as a method to get information vs. torture as a method to lose all credibility with people, etc.

Coetzee accomplishes a classical purpose of literature which is to make a story of lasting significance and interest despite the time and setting.

Rating: 8.7

Danger Factor: 7.0 (Anytime to you speak out against an empire, you land on the danger side.)

History of History of Histories

2008-08-04T19:56:00.000-07:00

I finished this book last week and while I feel a little smarter for having read it, I feel a lot dumber for what it revealed to me that I did not know. As the title suggests, the book looks at the genre of history in the West from its inception and recounts its childhood, adolescence, and its current embodiment.

Starting out with Herodotus and the Greek histories (Thucydides, Xenophon, et al.) was engaging because I had an idea of what it was about and have actually read Thucydides. (That's right, I'm going to memorize the funeral speech later.) When it got to Roman history (Livy, Tacitus, et al.) I had a harder time following because as histories get newer they get denser. See where I'm going with this? Once you get to early British history, which, unless you grew up in Britain and memorized all the kings and houses and coats of arms, you're in for a whirlwind of a ride - it becomes too much. Then who knows anything about German history? And the tedium of academic history as it is now was too much by the end.

The premise of the book is extraordinarily interesting. How did humans handle history and facts and stories of old? But the book is more than a beginner, novice, or even a fledgling amateur of history can swallow in one gulp. There are too many references to historians and events that you have to already be familiar with; the sentences are riddled with explanatory and digressive clauses; and it's too easy to get excited about a chapter, like the one on Machiavelli, and then lose interest going into the third paragraph. It's a book to be studied, not just read.

I was looking for a more clear cut argument or observation on the evolution of historical writing. I wanted him to just tell me how the Renaissance historians differed from the Medieval counterparts and how they influenced but fell short of the ideals of the people who came next. I wanted him to talk more about the merits and shortcomings of the role of speeches in all the histories from Herodotus to the Renaissance.

There's a great article in the New Yorker that is much more satisfying as it reviews this book and a couple others: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/24/080324crat_atlarge_lepore

Though the book was more of a survey than I would have liked, one thing I respected about it was that the author gives each history and its author a fair picture, focusing on what their intention was instead of trashing them for not being what a modern historian thinks they should have been. And one of the things that kept me going was that, despite its dry spots, you can really get a sense of the author's enthusiasm for certain histories.

Though I don't recommend this book, I highly respect it. And it did make me think about dead-lifting "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" from my bookshelf and reading it - in spurts. For a more engaging history read, I would suggest "The Discoverers" by Daniel Boorstin, a book that I could not for the life of me put down and only felt smarter after reading it.

Rating: 5.6

Danger factor: 5.8 (it does survey Marxist historians, one of the best parts of the book.)

2008-07-29T15:19:00.001-07:00

So I've decided to go ahead and conform to my boy Keith's blog format. It was his idea to include a picture of the book he just read on his blog and include a mini-review. And while we're at it, it was Keith's idea to read 50 books in a year.

So, I'm counting this one even though I listened to it in the car on the way to and from Dallas. I feel justified in doing so because I haven't counted other audio books this year and because this is a super cool book.

So, even though the story claims to center around the life of a fat and nerdy, hopeless loser named Oscar, it's actually a sort of immigrant narrative about his family and gives a history of his family and how his mother came from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey.

Let me give a little back story of my own if I may. This book caught my attention because it was one of the New York Times Top 10 books of the year. But after reading what it was about I lost interest quickly. Immigrant narratives are good but I start to get the impression that they're a lot of the same thing. That's actually unfair and untrue, but it's hard to get excited about a book like this...

until you read the first page and the narrator talks about "Fuku" which is essentially the dark curse of Dominicans. And their former dictator Trujillo is essentially the embodiment of Fuku and brings it down on all of his citizens. This bad mother fucker (as he is often referred to in the novel) is never featured in the novel but his spirit is always hovering around the characters even after his presumed death.

This novel makes a white boy like me almost want to be a Dominican so I can have some kind of mystic history to explain things with (and also because, according to the narrator, it is physically impossible for a Dominican male to die a virgin) - (that sounds bad, but it would have sure given a lot of hope to me as a high schooler). The narrator talks almost in New Jersey vernacular and you want to hang out with him and at times want to be him (in college he could bench 340 pounds). He is successful in really creating a legendary history for Dominicans.

I'm going to go ahead and rate my books (also not an original idea - Keith said he didn't actually do it but gave a book a star rating).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: 9

That's out of 10

Gen X/McSweeney's Writing Workshop

2008-05-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

Hello one and all. This is the first installment of my very own writing workshop where I teach you inexplicably well how to write like a GenX-er and get published in McSweeney's. So before you donate all that cash to the 826 business, get on board here and learn to lay it down rock 'n roll style.

I haven't been writing for long; you can tell by the number of posts on my blog. But I do have a blog which says quite a lot about who I am and why you should listen to me and seriously think about considering to question the authority of non-blog sources of information. There's really only one way to understand what is actually, truthfully going on in the world and that is to read blogs by people who, like teachers, don't do it for the money - they do it for the truth. If they were doing it for the money you would know they are lying.

But, hey. Let's get to writing. Let me just show you a couple of examples of some really stylish, contemporary prose that will make you want to hope to lose your virginity:

Instead of saying, "I was sitting on a knoll of grass in the park," spice it up with some background information:

"So there I was pensively sitting in the same place that Daniel Boyd Bonner Stewart sat when he wrote his first comic book that hit the stores in 1982 and after that had a small running of about five issues that sold 12 copies before he moved to San Fransisco and became a bike messenger."

Heartbreaking!

Here's another:

Instead of saying, "I whipped it out," spice it up with some onomatopoeia and some $100 words:

"It didn't make the boooiiiing sound I thought it would make, but there it was my princely palladian penis progressively pointing perpendicular..."

Staggering!

Or how about this for emotion:

"Please tell Mom and Brother I asked them not to die."

Genius!

You see, you don't want to be a boring ol' writer like Hemingway or Faulkner - yuck! "Literature" tries too hard to be complex and not hard enough to entertain. Short stories today are too complex. What happened to short stories that were exciting to read. So you definitely want to go back to the idea of a plot-driven simplistic story, but use long sentences. That way no one can accuse you of being pulp, nor can they accuse you of being literary.

Also, when you write, be nice to every single person in the world. This is a happy world... but it's also not a hippie world. You don't want your stories to be sad, you want them to have a clear nostalgia for the '80s. Yeah, the '80s when you were riding big wheels and everyone listened to Journey and Van Halen, wore stone-washed jeans, and chewed bubble gum.

My last piece of advice is simply this: don't stop believing. You can do anything in the 21st century, so start your writing career on a free blog, and in no time you will be writing with inconspicuous authority.

mo' lyrics

2008-03-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

I didn't know why Common always the ghetto's target
People say he not real, not black, but I still liked his beats
But I seen that man buyin' carrots at Whole Foods Market
At least that's what my girl told me (I sent her to buy me some meat)

lyrics

2008-03-14T20:37:00.000-07:00

My girl asked me why I can't quit smokin'
"Why you can't quit yo' life of crime"
I said, "Let me answer your question with a question,
Why you gotta be such a bitch all the time?"

booklist

2008-02-18T21:13:00.000-08:00

My boy Keith told me that Bill Clinton read 90 books in 2007. Maybe that was more books than he's ever read in his life in one year but it apparently caused Keith (who is the only reader of this blog) to set a book-reading goal, which in turn has caused me to set a book-reading goal: 50 books this year. (I read 20 last year: dismal)

So, I'm up to six books so far and I'm about to finish the titanic Anna Karenina. Here they are:
1.) Freakonomics*
2.) Democracy Matters***
3.) Gentlemen of the Road**
4.) Metamorphoses*
5.) Persepolis
6.) House-Keeping vs. the Dirt*

If you see an asterisk or two that means the following:
* started reading it sometime in the last year
**it was a serial in the NYTimes magazine and while I started reading it last year, I got the book for Christmas and started over from the beginning (can't touch me there)
***Started it at the technical end of last year but finished it this year (technically the year ends on Dec. 31st, but for me it practically ends the day I get out for winter break. Plus, over winter break I was trying to finish books so I could beef up my list from last year)

The thing about it that I'm not going to keep a secret is that everyone of these books I started last year and did not finish except Persepolis. Anna Karenina, which I'm about to finish, is the same way.

It's really not that big of a deal okay. I am still finishing these books and when I'm on the radio next December and the radio show host asks me what my favorite book is that I've read this year, I'm going to say, "well, out of the fifty books I read this year, it's hard to decide, but I really think that it would be a toss up between either be Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Joyce's Ulysses, or the screen play to Got Busted which was a little known but well-done porno flick about a politician down on his luck as the most redemptive comeback of all time"

Look, I'm not in it for the glory; I know reading books is awesome and people are adored for it all over this country, but I do it so I don't start feeling insecure because every retard who was in an 80s hair band has a book that he has written. I want to at least be able to be like, "Oh, wow, I think that's cool that you've written and published a book. You must feel like Proust did before his seven volume magnum opus. Haven't heard of him? Oh, that's weird, didn't you say you wrote a book?"

Rap on the side

2007-09-24T19:50:00.001-07:00

I wanted to remind all the white folks out there that saying "hip-hop" is really only a white people thing. It's like calling someone who's black an "African-American." Black people call it "rap" and laugh at white people when they say "hip-hop." So, if some black guy is talking to you (assuming your white) and he says, "hip-hop" with a sudden non-black accent then he's is making fun of you for being white and not hip.

You're probably wondering how I know this - well, it's because I "rap" myself. I thought I would leak a little bit of the album I'm writing here on this tight-ass blog:

Bitch when come shots out my dick
It's like a professional safety blitz
You bet' be able to handle 'dat
Cuz no matter what you say
I never wear a jimmy-hat.

That rhyme scheme is actually a bit complicated for a rap song. See I should have made the rhyme scheme a little less diverse - something like an AAAAAAAAAAAAA rhyme scheme will probably attract the bigger record companies that I don't even give a shit about signing with because I ain't all about that. I just make my music you know.

Anyway, I tried to at least keep the content real, cuz that's how I roll. Imagine that verse with a bomb-ass bass drop like this: BBBBBOOOOOOOMMM BA BA BA BOOOOOOOOM and some horny ass girls in the back ground going like this: unnnnnngh, uh huh, unnnnnnnngh, uh, uh, uh, uh-unnnnnnngh.

Listen, the real trick with black people is just be real. Black people will make fun of you for being white no matter what. Just let 'em know you dig chicks, and don't be afraid to say something totally outlandish about some girl's privates. They'll bust out laughing. Just don't overdo it on the F-word. It'll seem like your trying way too hard.

Hi

2007-09-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone.