13 posts tagged “books”

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Yesterday I bought a collection of Bernard Shaw one-act plays (fuck Dan Brown, plays are the best things to read on airplanes) and something called 'The Jewish Century'. Together they cost 8 Aus-bucks.

The Jewish Century starts out like this:

Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefits of individuals, nuclear families and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.

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The Jewish part I'm not so sure about, or at least I haven't read up to the author's justification of it, but the rest of that is a great description of the social history of this century. Eight Aussie bucks, man.

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I'm reading Edmund White's 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America', which I found in a bookstore outside of Sydney for $2. It was written in 1980, the final year of un-ballasted gay hedonism. It opens with a passage about L.A.:

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast. On e may grumble at a television performer out West but never at someone appearing 'live'. So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.
[...]
The polite friendliness of Californians is an ambiguous quality. Within the first ten minutes a visitor is showered with affection and familiarity, but that may be as close as one is ever likely to get to someone out West. This openhanded but superficial civility, linked to an obdurate and profound reticence, is precisely the granite wedge that all those hostile forms of California therapy are trying to dynamite. There is, however, a great public if not personal benefit to be derived from uniform good manners. People are able to cooperate. They can accomplish things.

This reminds me of Seattle, how everyone you meet is instantly welcoming and impressed with you, but that's as far as you ever get. Denmark has poured some bitter black coffee into the sweet cream of my West Coast superficio-ductions, but I still catch myself doing this.

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I also liked this part about a New York acquaintance moving out to LA.

His tenement pallor is giving way to a tan. His monologue pauses occasionally now for reflection or even for listening, and he has discovered in California that politeness I have mentioned, which he mistakes for acceptance.

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'The real problem here,' [He's now quoting a gay psychotherapist in LA] 'is that smart people don't know each other. In a large nomadic population such as the gay group in this city, the rules must be kept very simple. In Los Angeles the one rule is sexual display and curiosity. Even the most brilliant man, once he is at a party, will succumb to the general vapidness. From nine to five these people are bright, clever, grownup, but after five they become emotional morons. At parties there are no serious conversations and little real warmth. People arrive an hour late (a sign of hostility) and leave saying it was a terrible bore. Of course they were disappointed; what they needed was companionship but what they thought they wanted was sexual adventure.'

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You have to resist the impluse to nostalgize this period in contemporary gay life. It's tempting to reclaim the pre-AIDS period in 'those were the days' terms. But they weren't, objectively. A lot of these men were profoundly damaged. No one was out of the closet. The cops openly harassed gay bars and assaulted patrons. Legal and civil rights were nonexistent, as everyone in this book would discover in the next decade. Still, it's hard to not to find a wistful sigh on every page. 

Voice all chalky and shit.

[skip to about 1.20]

The whole speech is fantastic. Here's the video, and here's the transcript.

I read this dude's opus, 'The Bend in the River' last year and was amazed at how well it was put together. It felt crafted more than written, mostly because he painstakingly resists showing off.

The book starts out, 'The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it,' and only gets more masculine from there. The emotional climax involves the main character punching his lover in the vagina. It's a Jupiter-sized Freudscape in less than 400 pages, and is highly recommended.

My favorite line from the book, which I can't find now, went something like: 'You know what your problem is? You think that there's no right or wrong in this place. But in fact, there's simply no right'.

Look at dude's other quotations, he's the thickest badass behind a typewriter,

• 'Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes'
• 'One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria'
• 'Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.'

I'm only half joking about wanting to become like this dude when I grow up. There's a quality to him, and other writers that I admire, that I have trouble describing beyond the term old-school. The density of information in a passage like this,

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut. 

is something that my generation just doesn't seem as good at. Or maybe it only comes with age. But I worry sometimes, in the scrum of a generation of talkers, whether we'll forget the achievements of the doers.

which was rather tremendous

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It's a memoir about growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family in Wisconsin, and falling intensely in love with a girl from church camp. As it's based on real life, the thematic content is all over the place (it bounces from celibate teenage love to babysitter molestation in the course of like 6 panels), but the juxtapositions work, and the growing disillusionment of the main character provides a scaffolding for all the different threads.

Here's a 'preview' thingy from the publisher. Time Magazine called it 'part teen romance novel, part coming-of-age novel, part faith-in-crisis novel', and that's all true. But with pictures! 

-- by far -- has been 'Epileptic', by David B.

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It's a graphic novel about how the author's childhood was hijacked from him by his brother's epilepsy and his parent's attempts to cure it. The family goes from hospitals to gurus to cults to fads looking for a cure, and the author, 'the normal son', becomes increasingly neglected and isolated.

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It's a great dissection of our culture's relationship with illness and family, and it's illustrated with a mellifluousness that contrasts with the few-words-per-panel voiceover and dialogue. Here's a panel depicting how people on the street react to the seizures, which happen with increasing frequency throughout the author's brother's life.

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This is fabulous shit, and you come to realize that comic books can do metaphor better than books or movies, where this kind of exaggeration comes off as pretentious or Oprah's Book Clubby.

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Anyway, I'm trying to get everyone I know to read it. It's a blast to devour a whole book in an afternoon or two, and a moving, accessible introduction to a medium that still feels like it needs defending.

PS - Maus is scorchingly good too

because he reminded me of that friend everyone wishes they had, the one whose sniper-aim perspective on any conceivable topic reduces you to 'mmm hmm ... you're totally right, dude.' You might roll your eyes every now and then, at the almost unrealistic articulateness of it all, but you're glad you know someone whose hamster-wheel has a family of chipmunks in it.

I never get emotional over the deaths of famous people, and I can't say I felt my-cat-just-got-hit-by-a-car sad when I read that Wallace hung himself on Saturday, but it's just a fucking shame that we won't get any more books or essays from this dude. No, I couldn't finish 'Infinite Jest', just like everyone else, and yes, I thought the footnotes thing became a bit of a gimmick. But DFW was one of the best-ever observers of a crowded room, and one of the only New Yorker-style journalists still trying to write stories that weren't about what they said they were about. Like this 2005 Rolling Stone story on McCain, which started with

Since You're Reading "Rolling Stone," the chances are you're an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours.

and managed to squeeze this passage in between tour bus observarrhea

It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say, rather, that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process.

Think back to the sort of kids in high school or college who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn't seem so pointless and dull.

And now consider some of 2000's adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to dislike — what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is so often a defense against pain. Against sadness.

In fact the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us in ways that are hard even to name, much less to talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit.

So I, in my sick haze, have been reading DFW articles all day. Here's four of the best ones. And between cups of tea and coughs and red-eyed blinks, I'll tip out some Pepto-Bismol to all the digressions I'll never get to devour.

• You gotta love the Corruption, Ineptitude & Alcoholism bureau. It’s seriously amazing how careless and shitty the CIA was during the Cold War. I’m pretty close to concluding that U.S. covert ops had about as much to do with the fall of the Soviet Union as improper dental hygiene.

• If you ignore all the torture stuff, all the failure adds up to something pretty funny. I’ve shamelessly giggled through the first three chapters, which reconstruct the hubristical plans to ‘roll back’ the Soviet Union to its pre-WWII borders. Officially, this was done by empowering Eastern European resistance leaders, but according to the book, it was really more of a ‘Let’s pay this weird Ukranian dude and see what happens’ approach. Hundreds of people died after being literally dropped into enemy territory and instructed to ‘find a nearby village and plant seeds of revolution.’ My favorite fubar so far was the two Polish expats who convinced the CIA to fund an underground movement within Poland. After five years and 10 million 1952-dollars, the leadership finally figured out that the movement didn’t actually exist. It was just a Polish address and a handful of Russian double-agents. Oh, the Trumanity.

• But you know what? Of course all the covert ops were failures. Think about how shitty you would be at your job if you performed it entirely in secret. Your boss would ask ‘So, what projects have you been working on this quarter?’ and you’d go ‘Shhhhh.’

• We kind of assume that competition is the only motivator of hard work and competence. In the private sector, the theory is that people at Nike work harder so they don’t lose market share to those cocksuckers at Reebok. In the public sector, though, the only proxy for competition is transparency. The only way that our government is going to work for us is if every single bureaucrat knows we’re watching them. You were on Facebook at work, Chertoff? I want my money back. Yet the only calls for government oversight consist of ‘starve the beast’, an ethos that just encourages the kind of secrecy and self-perpetuative scheming that the CIA pretty much invented.

• This quote, from former agent Bill Coffin, is great, and possibly even better devoid of context: ‘The ends don’t always justify the means, but they are the only thing that can.’

• This book might be the best possible argument against 9-11 conspiracy theories. Government twatocrats have shown themselves to be sloppy, impulsive and incompetent pretty much from Coolidge up to the current bunch of DCtards. Yet they managed to blow up the World Trade Center, shoot missiles at the Pentagon and down a passenger jet without fucking up or leaving a paper trail? I dunno, Rosie O’Donnell, that’s a little out there.

• I did like this passage, on a longstanding CIA chief.

Angleton was promoted to chief of counterintelligence when it was over. He held the job for twenty years. Drunk after lunch, his mind an impenetrable maze, his inbox a black hole, he passed judgment on every operation and every officer that the CIA aimed against the Soviets. He came to believe that a Soviet master plot controlled American perceptions of the world, and that he and he alone understood the depths of the deception. He took the CIA’s missions against Moscow down into a dark labyrinth.

• Is Torpid DrunkBoss one of those workplace archetypes that doesn’t exist in the real world anymore? These guys seem so grandpa to me now. I feel like there’s an unmarked grave somewhere, where TDB is lying peacefully next to Slutty Secretary, Teacher Who Cares and Nurturing Priest.

The arrival of warmth and sun in Copenhagen always completely re-introduces the city. I was biking the other day around sunset (8 pm now, and only latening until July), and I realized how pretty this place is. I haven’t been struck by the loveliness of my foster-city in eons, and I think it’s simply because I haven't seen it in six months. It’s been dark, or raining, or cloudy most days, and I’ve been walking around in my Gore-Tex burrito, trying to keep the climate out. The definitive image of winter for me is always the top of my front bike tire, because it’s often too cold or too windy to look straight ahead when I’m on my way somewhere.

It turns out, though, that Copenhagen exists above the first story. And I own clothes that perform more than heat-trapping mummification. And there are colors in this city beyond the gray and sepia. These things only strike me when we finally get all full-spectrumy in the spring.

I’ve been reading ‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson the last few weeks. It’s a slow, dusty kind of book, one that should be read to you by your grandpa in a rocking chair. It starts out

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.

I know, right!?

The book continues in this vein, a dying father writing to his adolescent son, through a few decades of the postwar Christian midwest. I’m not quite finished with it, but I feel a ‘Dancer in the Dark’ caliber moan-and-cry is waiting for me on the last page.

So this has been my spring so far. Long bike rides in the low-watt sun and droning geriat-lit. By the time summer rolls around, the only thing heavier than my mood will be my quadriceps.

Can there be just one fucking thing from my childhood that didn't lead me down the path of iniquity? Check this shit out:

"In his diaries, my father talks about having to write another of those cursed books," the author's son told one interviewer, "in order to earn another $100 to buy coal for the furnace." He'd "inject his wonderful sense of humor," McFarlane's daughter once remembered, to make the writing project "palatable."

McFarlane's magnum opus was a 1929 masterpiece of dirty double meanings called — what else — The Secret of the Caves. Within a few chapters, an elderly male shopkeeper is warning the Hardy Boys and their two male friends to stay away from the mysterious beach because "There's some queer things been goin' on down there lately." And what exactly does that mean, asks the Hardy Boys' friend — Biff.

"Nobody knows. But there's been queer lights seen down around them caves. And shootin'. Guns goin' off. Mighty queer doin's, they say..."

Chet whistled softly. "This sounds good! We may stay longer than we had intended..."

Wikipedia says the word "queer" already had sexual overtones by the late 1800s. 

The four teenagers are on summer vacation, so there's time for some sleuthing. When they buy camping supplies, the old shopkeeper re-iterated again that it's a dangerous cave full of queer doins, and Frank "smiled at this thrust."

But his younger brother Joe was even more enthusiastic.

"The one thing we're afraid of is a quiet outing. Excitement," he added slangily, "is our meat."

"Ye'll get lots of it if ye go pokin' around them caves," the old gentleman predicted.

Chapter 17 veers suddenly into startlingly unwholesome territory.

Frank halted and peered through the fog at the base of the rocks some distance ahead.

"Do you see somebody lying there, Joe...? Seems like a man sprawled on the sand...."

The boys hastened across the rocks in the direction of the figure on the shore...

They came up to the man sprawled on the sand. He was not dead. An empty bottle lying by his side told the reason for his slumber.

"He's drunk!"

"What shall we do with him?" asked Joe.

Frank groped in his pocket and produced a length of stout cord.

"We'll tie him up first!"

"What if he puts up a fight?"

"He's too drunk."

They throw hat-fuls of water into in his face to revive him — but when he wakes up, they keep throwing more water at him.

"Hey! What's this?" roared the car thief indignantly. He had just discovered that his wrists were bound.

"Just a little joke," said Frank.

Water was streaming down the man's face. He was thoroughly aroused by now.

Shit, and here I thought I enjoyed those books for so many years because they were complex and engaging. Turns out they were just clicking my fag-button.

What am I gonna lose next, 'The Goonies'? Madeleine L'Engle? I hereby refuse to read any re-examinations of 'The Neverending Story', 'The Princess Bride', Jonathan Brandis, Dino-Riders, Mega-Man, Right Said Fred, or that sitcom with the girl-robot. I don't need any more essays gaying up an otherwise wholesome childhood. 

If I ever become a porn star, though, my name is definitely going to be Queer Doin's.

[don't worry, this is spoiler-free]

I love how the Internet has drastically increased the opportunity to read smart people writing about really trivial shit. Today's completely meaningless topic: How similar is Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings? Take it away, Smart Dude:

Though when LOTR came out people wanted to link it with the Second World War, and the Ring with the atom bomb, Tolkien was always insistent that if the book came out of any twentieth-century experience it was that of the First World War, the Great War, in which he fought and in which several of his friends died. And that’s clearly right. The slow coming on of war after a long period of peace, the reluctance of leaders to admit that war is on its way, the dawning sense not only that war is inevitable but also that its scope will be uniquely vast and terrible – all this clearly recalls Europe as its post-Napoleon century of general peacefulness came to a sudden and horrific end.

Rowling’s stories, by contrast, are obviously, even ostentatiously, modeled on the arrival of World War II. (The real WWII is referred to in the books, but the war with Voldemort is also a fictional copy of some of its themes.) Here too there is reluctance to admit what’s coming, not because peace has reigned for so long but because the wounds and traumas of the previous war are so fresh. Surely the Dark Lord could not have returned? Surely we could not be facing such conflict again, and from the same source? Surely the very families who lost members so recently could not be in danger again? Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, practices denial and appeasement in ways that clearly recall Neville Chamberlain, while Albus Dumbledore (in the political wilderness at Hogwarts) is equally clearly the Churchill of his world, insisting that everyone face hard facts. Once Voldemort and his minions take over, the historical parallels shift from wartime England to Germany under the Nazis and (to a lesser extent) Vichy France. There are bureaucratized purges of the racially or ideologically impure, forced governmental registrations of citizens according to bloodlines, an underground Resistance movement, etc. (You can even see Harry as a kind of Charles de Gaulle, oddly enough, as he becomes the charismatic point of focus for the Resistance.) The whole political/military structure of the books is everywhere modeled on the experiences of the Second World War.

 Cool, huh? Tomorrow: How "Where the Wild Things Are" is really about Darfur.