Category Archives: Books

Confession: I STILL haven’t read Moby Dick

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Stan Dubinsky sends out an interesting-looking article about whaling (someday I’ve got to get ME a gig that allows me time to read all the cool stuff that Stan sends links to… I couldn’t even do it while unemployed… but then I’m a freakishly slow, deliberate reader), and it reminds me:

Remember back when I was talking about how cool Moby Dick was, because I had finally started reading it (40 years after I had gotten an A+ on the final essay test in my advanced English class despite not having read ANY of it, based purely on my talent for BS and listening in class)?

Well… I didn’t finish it. Again.

The thing is, while the opening chapters are pretty engrossing, after Ishmael and Queequeg actually ship out, once the Pequod is underway… it begins to drag.

I just totally lost interest, long before the Great White Whale shows up. Maybe it’s because I was getting to the draggy bits at about the time I got laid off, or something. I don’t know.

Mind you, I could have gone the rest of my life still giving the impression I had read it, and discussing the characters and themes with great insight and fluency upon demand, the way I always have…

But I just had to level with y’all.

Maybe I’ll take it up again; just not right now. Right now I’m making my way through Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley. On a related note, I almost bought myself a copy of Robert Leckie‘s Helmet for My Pillow over the weekend — but it turned out that I only had less than a dollar left on the Barnes & Noble giftcard that I thought I hadn’t used. So no dice.

Speaking of which, Burl: I’m still going to write more about “The Pacific,” once I’ve finished watching it for the second time, as you recommended.

Thoughtcrime is doubleplusungood

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Sorry to get all heavy on y’all on the day before Thanksgiving, but some of you got to talking about “hate crimes” back on this post, and I just can’t let it pass without reciting my usual homily on the subject…

Karen said:

And Kathryn, did you notice that in this country that after race, the highest number of hate crimes concern religion? Why do I not think that Christians are the ones being picked on?

To which Kathryn replied:

I thought sexual orientation was the biggest source of hate crimes (which makes your point, I suspect).

To which I just had to say:

It depends on how you define “hate crime” … which is sort of what the whole phenomenon of “hate crimes” is about, isn’t it?

A “hate crime” is a political act, one to which Orwell assigned the term “thoughtcrime,” a.k.a. “crimethink.” And writing and defining the hate crime law is also a political act.

The very decision to have such a thing as a “hate crime” is a political act as well — or, at least, a political choice.

And it’s one to which I object. Such things should not exist in America. That’s one of the few points on which I agree with libertarians. Punish the act, not the thought or attitude behind it. The idea that an attitude would be deemed a crime in this country is in its way as ugly as the attitudes such crimes seek to punish. It appalls me that the concept of “hate crime” ever developed in this country…

I mean, I love Big Brother and all, but this is supposed to be a free country, which means people are free to think and feel all sorts of mean, nasty, ugly things. It’s when they do something to other people that we should be concerned, and what we should be concerned about is what they DO.

… but I promise to read Faulkner before I do Palin

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Yeah, I said some fairly dismissive things about William Faulkner, but you Faulknerheads out there can take comfort from the fact that I did so from pure ignorance.

And here’s something else to make you feel better: Even though everybody and his brother is going on and on and on about the new book by Sarah Palin (there’s something oxymoronic in that combination of words, “book by Sarah Palin,” don’t you think?), I can assure you, with no doubt of ever breaking my promise, that I will read Faulkner before I read Palin. Trust me on this.

There are a lot of things I’m going to read before I get to Faulkner — that new Trotsky book I got for my birthday, that biography of Alexander Hamilton that’s been on my shelf for several years now (I asked for it for my birthday or Christmas after Fritz Hollings recommended it), the Bible from cover to cover, those last few books of the Aubrey-Maturin series that I’ve been saving, and definitely The Grapes of Wrath, which my wife can’t believe I haven’t read yet, to name but a few.

But there is no way that a book by Sarah Palin will ever make that list. For one thing, I never read those books that “everybody’s talking about,” especially books by or about current political figures. The only reason I read those autobiographies by Obama and McCain last year was as pegs for those two really long columns (“Barack Like Me” and “Faith of Our Fathers“) I was going to write anyway. In other words, purely for work and not for fun.

But even if I read books like that, I can’t imagine why I’d be interested in one by Sarah Palin. Not so much that I have an aversion as the fact that I completely lack any positive motivation to do so.

Top Five Southern Novels of All Time

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Did you see that list of Top Ten Southern novels of all time that Joey Holleman wrote about in the paper Sunday? Were you as outraged as I was to see Huck Finn down at fourth place? Seriously, folks — the only question to be asked about Twain’s masterpiece is whether it’s the greatest novel of any kind ever, much less best “Southern” novel.

Mind you, this is not Joey’s fault, he’s just reporting on the list compiled by the magazine Oxford American.

Now, right off the bat, you have to figure that any mag that calls itself “Oxford” anything is going to be prejudiced in favor of a certain person, even if it is based in Conway, Arkansas. And sure enough, the list kicks off with a Faulkner work, Absalom, Absalom!

And here’s where we get into my own blind spot: I’ve never read Faulkner. Oh, I’ve tried, back when I was young and felt like I had to in order to be an educated person. But a page or two of Faulkner, and I felt like I needed oxygen. I decided that I must hold my breath until I reach the end of a sentence or something, which can be deadly with Faulkner. Anyway, I never got very far. I’ve got several of his books sitting on a shelf to this day, awaiting me. Personally, I intend to read Finnegan’s Wake first, which means Faulkner will have to wait awhile. Sorry, Bill.

So basically, we have a problem in judging this list — no publication called Oxford American could possibly be unbiased with regard to Faulkner, and I’m not in a position to judge when they’re giving him too much credit and when they’re not. So we’re just going to have to throw all the Faulkner books off the list. Sorry again, Bill, but them’s the rules I just made up.

Since three of the 10 were thus tainted, that leaves us with a Top Five list plus two, and now that we have the Faulkner distraction out of the way, we can see more clearly that the list does, indeed, fall short:

1. “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren, 1946, 80 votes

2. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain, 1885, 58 votes

3. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee, 1960, 57 votes

4. “The Moviegoer,” Walker Percy, 1961, 55 votes

5. “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison, 1952, 47 votes

6. “Wise Blood,” Flannery O’Connor, 1952, 44 votes

7. “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston, 1937, 41 votes.

See? Huck Finn still isn’t first. In fact, it comes in second to All the King’s Men. Now I’m perfectly willing to assert that All the King’s Men is a wonderful work, one of the best ever — for about three pages.

Seriously, you can read the good parts of All the King’s Men in the “LOOK INSIDE!” feature at Amazon.com, and be done well before they cut you off. I’m talking about the stretch that goes from that wonderful ode to Highway 58, and ends with the paragraph that tells you everything you need to know about Sugar-Boy, ending with:

He wouldn’t win any debating contests in high school, but then nobody would ever want to debate with Sugar-Boy. Not anybody who knew him and had seen him do tricks with the .38 Special which rode under his left armpit like a tumor.

Great stuff. (Never mind that it should be “that rode under his left armpit like a tumor,” or that there’s no reason a grown man would participate in a high school debate anyway. It’s still great writing.) After that, it’s kinda downhill with all that decadent Southern nobility and corruption-of-idealism-by-power stuff. Go ahead and stack the first few pages of Huck Finn up against it, why don’t you — and then tell me it doesn’t hold its own. Never mind that the whole tone changes to deep and dark in the middle part, or then shifts back to that broad farce tone when Tom Sawyer gets back into it at the end. The greatest Southern novel — indeed, the greatest American novel — should have unevenness and inconsistencies. I wouldn’t give shucks for any other way, as Tom Sawyer would say.

Beyond that — well, I’d put Mockingbird ahead of Warren, too. As for Walker Percy — while I’ve read The Moviegoer, and enjoyed it near as I can recall, I was never tempted to re-read it, which means it wouldn’t make it onto a top anything list of mine. (I actually have a clearer memory of Lancelot, which I did not like. That whole “Southern Man as severely dysfunctional loser” theme leaves me cold; a few pages of it is a gracious plenty, as my Aunt Jenny would have said. It’s why I didn’t read past the first chapter of Prince of Tides, and regretted having read that much.)

The absence of Gone With The Wind is of course a deliberate snub, based on its not being highbrow enough or cliched or politically incorrect or whatever. Perhaps it was too popular. And no such list would seem complete to me without either God’s Little Acre or Tobacco Road, if not both. What, the Oxford American folks don’t like books with hot parts? Or are we only concerned with the troubles of the upper classes, and don’t have time for working-class dysfunction? Caldwell’s novels were certainly way Southern; you’ve got to admit that.

We can’t blame the editors of the magazine entirely, since the list resulted from a poll of “134 scholars, scribes, and a few mystery guests.” There is something vaguely un-Southern about this. Subjecting things to a vote seems kinda Yankee to me, like a New England town hall meeting or something. A true Southern list should be drafted by one quirky individual who doesn’t give a damn what anybody else thinks. At least it wasn’t true Democracy, since the electors were hand-picked — in a process that helps us understand why the list has more than a whiff of snootiness.

So now that I’m done tearing down this list, I should post one for y’all to tear down. So have at it:

  1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  3. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
  4. God’s Little Acre, Erskine Caldwell
  5. Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell

OK, one last admission — I haven’t actually read Gone With The Wind, either. But I heard about it so much from my eldest daughter when she was growing up that I feel like I have. And I wanted to put it on the list just to cock a snook at those pointy-headed types who ignored it in the OA poll. I thought about putting Pudd’nhead Wilson at No. 5, just to load my list up with Twain the way they did theirs with Faulkner, or even saying “a Faulkner novel of your choice” in that spot, just as a grudging acknowledgment. But I didn’t.

A Top Five list that leaves much to be desired

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So I was reading a review in the WSJ this morning about an incomplete Vladimir Nabokov novel that has been released posthumously, and probably should not have been.

And that got me to thinking about great writers who write in English even though it’s not their first language, and I thought it would be cool to draft a Top Five List of such writers. This would be challenging, and more highbrow than a “Top Five Side One Track Ones” list.

Trouble is, I can only think of two:

  1. Joseph Conrad, who as far as I’m concerned could occupy the whole list alone, even if you don’t go beyond Heart of Darkness. He packed meaning in and around English words in ways that native speakers never thought of. (Or perhaps I should say, “of which native speakers never thought.”)
  2. Vladimir Nabokov.

And I must admit I’m not too sure about Nabokov. People tell me he’s brilliant, but his “masterpiece” has always sounded kinda perv-y to me, kind of Roman Polanski, you might say (which suggests a Top Five Perv-y Directors Whose First Language is Not English, which would also come up short, I’m afraid). So I’ve never read it. A case of judging a book by its synopsis. I mean, I loved A Clockwork Orange despite its disgusting themes — partly because of its creative use of another language (Russian) melded with English slang to create a new language altogether, come to think of it — but I haven’t been interested enough to give Lolita a try.

Anyway, as I wondered who might be third, fourth and fifth on such a list (and maybe second, too, since I’m not sure about Nabokov), I learned that there is a whole publication devoted to such writers — a publication that even sponsors something called the Conrad-Nabokov Award (which provides a broad hint that maybe those two are in a class by themselves). Here is how it explains itself:

This is the third issue of Shipwrights, and perhaps it’s a good time to pause and reflect. This journal is an experiment, really. It may be the only international magazine specifically dedicated to publishing the work of “de-centered” (second-language English) authors. It is, thus, one representation of the linguistic effects of globalization. As the number of second-language speakers of English in the world continues to balloon, it’s interesting to consider a possible future day when we won’t even notice whether a writer in the English literature market is a native anglophone or not. After judging the Conrad-Nobakov Award, Ms. Burroway remarked, “It’s hard to believe that these authors are writing in English as a second language, for all of them have superior command of it.”

Bet you didn’t know that. Not that you needed to.

Man named Monday finds he’d rather spend weekdays reading books than burning them

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Yesterday, I had Health & Happiness at Rotary again, and my performance was… forgettable.

Rather than publish my routine here the way I usually do, I thought I’d tell you about a much better presentation recently by Ann Marie Stieritz.

It was an audience-participation thing, and I must admit that many of those sorts of attempts leave me kind of cold. I am, at best, a grumpy participant… What? You want me to get up and what? I’m not a pep rally guy, for instance. Unlike Andre Bauer (and, I recently learned, Mark Sanford) I could never have been a cheerleader.

But Ann Marie pulled me in by appealing to one of my worst features — the desire to show off the few quirky talents I have. So it was that when she talked about the faux-lit phenomenon of Twitterature, and gave the following examples, I was the obnoxious first person (or shared that distinction with someone) to call out the titles of the books they summarized:

  • Hero constantly spied upon by someone claiming to be older sibling. When he complains, finds himself with head in cage of rats.
  • Rich kid thinks everyone is fake except for his little sister.  Has breakdown.
  • Bloke takes boat trip in search of long-missing colleague who may well be impossible to find. Ends up wishing he hadn’t.
  • Group of teenagers adopt incomprehensible jargon, drink milk and discuss Beethoven before terrorising the community. All society’s fault.

Not much of a talent, really. The thing is, after writing headlines for a living, it would be pretty lame if I couldn’t recognize the headlinized versions of 1984, The Catcher in the Rye, Heart of Darkness and A Clockwork Orange, I’d be in trouble. Especially the last, all about Alex and his droogs peeting moloko plus to sharpen them up for a bit of the old ultraviolence in their platties of the night. Yes, a book about horrible people doing horrible things, but a wonderfully inventive use of language.

Some other good ones:

  • If you thought California was land of milk and honey, think again. Hard-working family could suffer and starve out in its golden valleys.
  • Dozen kids abandoned on desert island. Scene soon resembles 10-year-old’s birthday party, but worse.
  • Couple of drinkers with literary pretensions decide to travel across country, without plan or route. Not much happens. Which is the point.

And no, I didn’t remember them all or take notes that fast; I just asked Ann Marie yesterday to send me her notes from her presentation. I enjoyed this bit at the end, which shows what Odysseus would have written had he been on Twitter (as are the authors of Twitterature):

Calypso is the suxor for real. Seven years ago

Nice island (B). Anyone know how to get off this? Seven years ago

THNX for the raft! Laters! Four years ago

Just found new island.   Naked chicks.  FTW! Four years ago

Caught Demodocus show at dome.  GREAT!  Any one have vid? Four years ago

Just saw a dude with one eye! Four years ago

Circe is hot.  All my bros turned into pigs.  LULZ! Three years ago

Hot singing chicks! KTHXBAI Two years ago

Wrecked the boat.  Totaled.  Everyone dead.  FAIL Two years ago

Back Home!  Who r all these random dudes? Five minutes ago

Best meeting scene ever televised

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Gene Garland, back during this discussion, mentioned the two wonderful BBC mini-series based on the first and third books in Le Carre’s Karla Trilogy.

Nothing better has ever been offered on the telly, in my view — with the possible exceptions of “Band of Brothers” and “The Sopranos.”

The amazing thing about them is that they are such good representations of books that are essentially about … meetings. Meetings and interviews. Sort of gives me hope that someone will see gripping drama in a story about an editorial page editor. (Guess I need to write the book first, though, huh?) All of the key action happens in meetings. By contrast, the middle book in the Trilogy — The Honourable Schoolboy — was all about action and exotic locales. Which is why the BBC didn’t do that one — too expensive. But it was also the most forgettable of the three. Smiley was in power in that one, whereas in the other two he was in exile, only the Circus couldn’t make do without him. (Perhaps you think, given my situation, I’m harboring fantasies of Oliver Lacon coming to my house one night and asking me to straighten out the newspaper, unofficially of course. Well, I’m not. But it’s an intriguing plot line…)

This could have fallen completely flat on the small screen, but it’s to the credit of all concerned that it positively glittered in the BBC version. And not just because of Alec Guinness as Smiley. The whole cast was fantastic.

For the best use of meeting dynamics ever on television, I invite you to watch the first two minutes and 8 seconds of the clip above, which in a beautifully understated manner, and only one very short line of dialogue, sketches the personae of the four major characters (other than Smiley). Entering the room on the clip are, respectively, the actors playing Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland, Percy Alleline and Bill Haydon. (As Control said, “There are three of them and Alleline,” the characters whose code names give the book its title.)

This is just so real. If you have, as I have, spent ridiculous amounts of time in meetings with a small group of people you knew almost as intimately as member of your own family, the little touches of how people establish their roles and characters in small ways will ring as true as anything you’ve ever seen. It feels, for me, exactly like the daily editorial board meeting, with each person wandering in in his own unique way and initiating wordless rituals that say so much.

Anyway, enjoy.

Top Five books that should have been made into movies by now

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My birthday was three weeks ago (and thanks again to the many of you who wished me a happy on Facebook), and I had a good day. My wife and one of my daughters and I participated in the Walk for Life (where we ran into Mayor Bob), and the weather was perfect for it, then my wife — who had several gift certificates she had never used — took me to Barnes & Noble for coffee (as you know, my favorite leisuretime activity) and to let me pick out a couple of books. Then that night we had dinner over at my parents’ house.

The actual party was the next day, and as usual it was a joint one with my son, whose birthday is three days later. The twins (who are 21 months now) kept wishing us “Happy Day.” Then after awhile the one sitting next to me started pushing her dinner away from her and saying “Happy DAY!” with an increasingly testy tone. I finally realized that “Happy Day” is their term for cake, and they felt like they’d been waiting for it long enough. It was sitting right there in front of them, after all.

Anyway… I got several books that had been on my wish list, such as the second Flashman book, and a new biography of Trotsky, and a really good one I’m currently reading about Nelson’s navy called The War for All the Oceans. But one that I picked out myself at B&N was one I had read several times before; I just wanted my own copy so I could read it again any time I wanted: High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby. It is wonderful. It is the best, funniest, truest book about differences between men and women (and guys don’t come out looking too good) that I’ve ever read. That just sounded like a chick book, but it’s not. It’s written from the guy perspective, but from a guy who knows how lame we can be.

If you haven’t read the book but saw the movie, you sort of have the idea. But the book was much better. Nick Hornby is a genius.

One of the ways in which the protagonists and his fellow guys express their creativity, their superficiality and their encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture is by challenging each other to construct esoteric Top Five lists — Top Five side one track ones, or Top Five pop songs about death — and then critiquing each others’ choices. (Derisively, in the case of Barry.)

Anyway, inspired by having just reread the book, and having run across something on the internet where someone was complaining about a certain book having never been made into a movie, I’ve decided to draft a Nick Hornby tribute, a list of the Top Five Books that Should Have Been Made Into Movies by Now:

  1. Stranger In A Strange Land — This is the one I found the complaint about online (can’t find it now, though). Definitely number one. An entire generation would buy tickets to see this, if it were any good at all. The sex stuff toward the end might have been a barrier in the 60s, but not now. I remember once in the early 70s hearing that it was being made into a movie starring David Bowie, but that turned out to be something else. Since nobody else seems interested, I’ve thought about trying to write the screenplay myself, but only if Hollywood would let me be in it. I would have been a natural for Ben Caxton when I was younger, but now I’d probably have to audition to be Jubal Harshaw. Of course, the soundtrack would have to include the Leon Russell song of the same name.
  2. SS-GB — Not Len Deighton’s best book (that distinction belongs to The Ipcress File, which was made into a creditable, although not very faithful, movie), but easily the most cinematic alternative-history books ever. The images it invokes — of the Scotland Yard homicide detective working for the SS after the Germans invaded England and won World War II — are just made for the big screen. Another book that I didn’t like as much but which seemed to me a cross between this and Gorky Park (the plot involved a German investigator living in 1964 in a Third Reich that had survived the war and was now engaged in a Cold War with the U.S., rather than the Soviet Union) was made into a movie. It was Fatherland, and the made-for-TV film starred Rutger Hauer. SS-GB would be much better.
  3. Guns of the South — OK, Barry in High Fidelity would probably take away points for my listing two alternative history novels, but this one would ALSO work great on the screen. I mean, come on, ragtag Confederate soldiers wielding AK-47s — could action get any better than that? But you know, I suspect there’s a reason Hollywood doesn’t often tackle this sort of plotline — people know so little about history, they’re afraid their audiences wouldn’t get the point.
  4. Rose — I mentioned Gorky Park, which was made into a really disappointing film (worst part, William Hurt as Arkady Renko; best part, Brian Dennehy as his counterpart American detective). The author of that book is a master of recreating a world and putting the reader in it. And possibly his most readable novel ever is a mystery about an American mining engineer and African explorer in the 1870s who is sent to a dismal English coal-mining town to figure out what happened to a curate who disappeared. The imagery in it is compelling; it begs for cinematic treatment. I’d go see it — although only if the casting of the main character was right. No more William Hurts, please.
  5. The entire Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin series. Yes, “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” was a very enjoyable film. I own it on DVD, and have watched it a number of times. But the Aubrey-Maturin series deserves a more extended treatment. The perfect format would be a high-quality series (with better casting this time, please) on HBO or the BBC — one two-hour episode for each of the 20 books. Maybe you wouldn’t watch them all, but I certainly would.

Take a Look at the Lawman, or, The Trouble with Time Travel

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Seems to me we need a break from our exhausting (to me, anyway) discussion of civility, one in which I find myself engaged deeply in discussion with some of the blog’s worst offenders (Lee, “Mike Toreno”) because I feel like I have to consider them thoroughly, give them every chance, before tossing them out, if that’s what I’m to do to keep order. Oh, the fundamental fecklessness of liberal democracy! Perhaps I should just conjure a virtual Gitmo for them, and to hell with due process! One of my friends, a liberal Democrat (in the big D sense) through and through, says I’m guilty of WASPish diffidence, and perhaps I am…

We need some escapism. Let’s talk time travel.

Yes, I know Stephen Hawking says there’s no such thing (his proof: that there are no time tourists from the future — that we know of, I would add), and I figure he’s probably right. That doesn’t keep me from being a sucker for it as a plot device — “Back to the Future,” the H.G. Wells original, variations on the H.G. Wells original (such as the enjoyable thriller/romance “Time After Time,” which starred Malcolm McDowell as H.G. himself), and on and on. Not that it’s always satisfying: “The Final Countdown,” aside from having one of the least relevant titles ever, is probably the most disappointing movie I’ve ever seen. For two hours you build up to the 80s-era USS Nimitz getting ready to go up against the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then the battle is prevented by a plot evasion as cheesy as, “… and then he woke up.” All because the producers lacked the budget to stage the battle, I suppose. The earlier scenes, such as when the F-14s splash the two Zeroes and the confrontation between the Japanese pilot and the historian, are pretty decent though…

I’m always a little embarrassed to admit this, but one of my favorite novels to reread when I want to relax my mind is Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. Why embarrassing? Well, when you explain the plot — “It imagines what would have happened if the Confederacy had had AK-47s” — you sound like an idiot. But it really is GOOD.

Let me hasten to add that I like the more reputable A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court much better, and have ever since my first reading as a kid. But the Turtledove book is still enjoyable.

In real life, we all engage in a bit of time travel to the best of our means. We all think back to moments in our past when we might have done something differently. This ranges from bitter recrimination (“What I should have told him was…”) to tantalizing wistfulness. I suspect most guys have experienced in their heads some version of Steppenwolf’s “All Girls Are Yours” fantasy.

You run into trouble with such imaginings when you try to make them believable. First, there’s the device — time machine? bump on the head? For that matter, if it’s a machine, how does it work? It’s generally best not to explain it in too much detail. Michael Crichton made that mistake in Timeline. His characters explain that what they have discovered is actually travel between universes in the multiverse, which somehow magically ACTS like time travel in that if you leave a note for yourself in one universe, you can read it 600 years later (or what SEEMS later) in the other. I could explain further, but it gets more ridiculous the more it tries to be serious. Doc Brown’s “flux capacitor” is much more believable, and more fun.

Then, what are the rules — is history mutable, or not? And if not, why not? And let’s not even get into the grandfather paradox. And if you go back to a point within your own life, can you see your younger self as a separate individual (in which case you might have a lot of explaining to do to yourself) or are you back inside that earlier version of yourself, only with what you now know in your mind, like the Steppenwolf back with all his past loves?:

At the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in early Spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly…

Anyway, I’m thinking of all this this week because I rented the first two episodes of “Life on Mars” from Netflix. Premise: Cop in Manchester, England, in 2006 gets hit by a car, wakes up as a cop in 1973.

Promising. You’ll recognize it as the “Connecticut Yankee” device — physical trauma, followed by the time dislocation, which the protagonist can’t explain and at least at first doesn’t believe in, but has to come to terms with. In this case, the hero keeps hearing voices and other sounds that persuade him that he’s in a coma in 2006, but then he is beguiled by the richness of irrelevant detail in his 1973 existence. He keeps thinking, Why would I have imagined that?

I’ve enjoyed it so far, but ultimately it falls down on an important measure for time-travel fiction — the evocation of the visited era. The writers of the show seem unable to go beyond bell-bottoms and vintage cars. Their notion of the difference between being a cop in 2006 and 1973 is that back then the office was a lot grungier, and the cops liked to slap subjects around and disregard proper procedure. Oh, and it took longer to get stuff back from the lab.

Which, I’m sorry, is pretty inadequate… I was in college in 1973, and people were just as insistent upon rules and standards then as now (despite their really, REALLY bad taste). And ultimately, watching this show, I don’t really FEEL like I’m back in that era. And I realized why when I watched a bit of the “making of” video — the writers and others who made this flick were too young to remember that date, which still seems pretty recent to me. The protagonist would have been 4 years old in 73, and the writers and producers seem to be his contemporaries.

Not only that, but they get their idea of what the 70s were like from watching cop shows of the period. In other words, since Starsky and Hutch bent the rules, that’s what real-life policing was like. Sheesh.

The soundtrack’s pretty good, though. The sequence in which the cop is hit by the car and goes back happens to the strains of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” (hence the title):

Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

… first on an iPod, then on an 8-track.

I’m going to watch the next disc; I’ve got it ordered. To see if he wakes up or whatever. But I’ve seen time travel done better…

Like Jane Austen writing about television

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Today, I’m listening to Jethro Tull on Pandora, the virtual radio station site. I’m often disappointed by Pandora because it seems their collections don’t go very deep. And sometimes they don’t even touch the surface in the spot where I want them to. For instance, I created a 10cc channel that keeps throwing Queen songs at me on the grounds that they are “like” 10cc. On my Donovan and Elvis Costello stations, they keep playing Beatles. Hey, I love the Beatles, but when I want to listen to them I’ll tell you.

Then there was the time that I had a hankering to hear Roger Miller’s “Dang Me,” so I created a station by that name. And it played me a couple of Roger Miller songs that I didn’t want to hear, and then other songs “like” Roger Miller. But so far, no “Dang Me.”

I strongly suspect Pandora to be a subsidiary of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, famous for its drinks machine that produces a substance that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

But I’m enjoying the Tull station a bit more. Not that I’m getting pure Tull, of course, but the stuff that Pandora judges to be “like” Tull is mostly enjoyable. Led Zeppelin’s “Rain Song.” Some live Who. And, I’m happy to say, quite a bit of Tull.

Including recent Tull, which is a bit of a shock, because I didn’t know such an animal existed.

For instance, did you know there was a Jethro Tull song titled “Dot Com?” Seriously; I’m not making it up. This is a surprise coming from a band that I associate with “Aqualung.” And no, not the one that the kids listen to. To me, Tull is quintessential 70s. I hadn’t even thought about them in years. It was only when a real radio station (94.3) played “Thick as a Brick” this past week that I was reminded of their existence, and created the station just to, shall we say, do a little living in the past.

The Jethro Tull of my memory lived in a universe that had not thought of, and could not even have imagined, anything called a “dot-com.” It was, I don’t know, like finding a previously unknown Jane Austen novel that’s about television. You know, like:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sitcom in possession of a laugh track must be in want of a joke.

I’m picturing Mr. Darcy earning his “ten thousand a year” hosting “So You Think You Can Dance,” on which he repeatedly refuses to dance with attractive young women on the grounds that they are “tolerable,” but not “handsome enough to tempt me.”

Anyway, what I’m saying is, it was weird.

The Anglosphere considered, minus imperialism

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Stanley Dubinsky can always be relied upon to point out things that provoke thought. I was particularly struck by this review from The Times of a book called REPLENISHING THE EARTH: The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world. An excerpt:

Writing history is largely a matter of what filters you use. Different-coloured filters bring out different patterns. For most recent chroniclers and analysts of the Anglo-Americanization of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the filters used have been those that show up the “imperialism” of the process. The most startling novelty of James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth: The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world is that it scarcely mentions imperialism at all, except to marginalize it (“with all due respect to the rich scholarship on European imperialism, in the very long view most European empires in Asia and Africa were a flash in the pan”); yet it still makes a pretty convincing job of explaining the huge and important process that is its subject. Even where it does not totally convince, it is immensely illuminating, as new filters invariably are. This is one of the most important works on the broad processes of modern world history to have appeared for years… – arguably since Sir Charles Dilke’s pioneering Greater Britain introduced a concept very like Belich’s “Anglo-world” to his Victorian contemporaries in 1868.

Dilke’s book was written before the word “imperialism” came into vogue, at least in connection with British overseas expansion. Empire carries essential connotations of power, or domination, whose major manifestation in Britain’s case was India – which again finds no place in Belich’s book, and hardly featured in Dilke’s either. Dilke was interested in something else: the migration of the British people over the globe, including North America; with the aid of some state power, certainly – the general protection afforded by the Royal Navy, occasional military expeditions to pull the migrants out of trouble, charters and treaties – but not in order to dominate anyone. Rather, the aim was to reproduce British-type “free” societies, usually freer than Britain’s own, in what were conveniently regarded as the “waste” places of the earth. Belich calls this “cloning”. It was an entirely different process from the more dominating sort of “imperialism”, representing a different philosophy, involving different social classes, and mainly affecting different regions of the world. Belich believes that it was a far more important influence than what is generally understood as imperialism on the whole course of modern history.

Consider this post a transparent effort to lure the “Anglospheric” Mike Cakora back to the blog. Haven’t heard from Mike in awhile…

Why would anyone have lied about that?

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As y’all know, I pretty well dismissed John Edwards early on, to avoid the rush. Therefore I had nothing to say when he crashed and burned later.

But I do find myself wondering something when I read this:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — A man who once claimed to have fathered the child of John Edwards’ mistress says in a book proposal the former presidential candidate is the real father and that he and Edwards worked with his campaign finance chairman to hide that secret, according to a newspaper report published online Saturday….

What I wonder is, Why would anybody have bothered to lie about that? I mean, if you admit (finally) that the affair happened, why on Earth bother to deny being the father if you were the father? What would be the point? Are we to believe that Edwards was calculating that if we just thought he was fooling around with a woman sufficiently loose as to be carrying on a separate affair with one of his aides while his wife was campaigning her heart out for him during a recurrence of cancer, then just maybe he could salvage his political prospects — but if he was technically (as opposed to morally) responsible for impregnating her, we just couldn’t forgive him?

I don’t know. And I don’t care. But I can assure you that, with or without the sensational teasers, I will not read this book. So don’t bother.

A little something for Mike and Burl to enjoy

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Mike Fitts has always been a valued friend and colleague, but the nicest thing he ever did for me was turn me on to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels — which, if you haven’t read them, are best described as being about a couple of fascinating characters living and fighting their way through the Napoleonic Wars, mostly at sea. But that’s pretty inadequate. You’d have to read them.

I’ve often mentioned the books here on the blog, but the only person I can remember responding that he’d even read them was Burl Burlingame, so Burl, this is for you, too. My eldest daughter subscribes to The New Yorker, and she is aware of my obsession (I’m now reading the early books in the series for the fourth time), so she made a point of showing this to me. And I very much enjoyed it. I suspect that the artist is an O’Brian fan, as well. Who else would have looked at New York tour buses and thought of this?

So what we have here is a couple of first-rates (four-deckers!) at the start of an engagement loosing their full broadsides. They each throw about the same weight of metal, but the one on the right would appear to have had the weather gage, given the direction in which the American colors of the bus to larboard are blowing. Their captains each seem to know what they’re about, except I’d have to fault both of them for firing full broadsides too soon. Rippling broadsides, with each gun firing as the target bears, would have been wiser, and less of a waste of powder and shot. Of course, in the case of the vessel to starboard, the full broadside may have been fired for strategic reasons. You’ll note that he has suddenly spun his helm sharply to larboard, possibly with the intention of boarding the American in his smoke. Either that, or he means to cut even more sharply so as to rake his stern. Either way, the captain to the right appears to be more of the Nelson school, as in Never mind maneuvers, always go straight at ’em, a true fighting captain who is taking full advantage of the weather gage…

Now for the rest of you, I’m sure that didn’t make much sense. But I thought Mike and Burl would enjoy it.

“All the News that Gives You Fits”

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Most of the reactions to my blog’s new look have been positive — so thanks to all for that (and I’m still working on it, so I hope you’ll like it even more as we go forward).

But the new look has caused a number of you to question the tagline that I’ve used for the last few years (you can still see it here on my old blog): “You’re either on the blog or you’re off the blog.” It was, of course, a paraphrase of what Ken Kesey told the Merry Pranksters: “You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.” More specifically, here’s the full quote from when he spelled out the policy — which was a reference to state of mind as well as physical location:

There are going to be times when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place — then it won’t make a damn.

Anyway, for years, I’ve thought about whether to stick with that, or go with the one you see up there now: “All the News that Gives You Fits.” This is a play on the Rolling Stone slogan (“All the News That Fits“), which is in turn a play on The New York Times‘ “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

It’s also the official motto of The Status Quo, the fictional newspaper featured in a comic strip that Robert Ariail and I planned, but never fully executed, back in the 90s. The strip was set in the capital of a small Southern state, and it also featured:

  • A protagonist named Hampton “Sugarboy” Shealy Ravenel (or something like that), who was a lobbyist and general all-around fix-it man who may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but knew everybody and meant well. I got the nickname from Robert Penn Warren, and the idea for the character from Randy Newman (“…college men from LSU/Went in dumb, come out dumb, too./Hustlin’ ’round Atlanta in they alligatuh shoes/Gettin’ drunk every weekend at the barbecue…”).
  • Auntie Bellum, the owner of the boarding house where our anti-hero lived. She is already a regular character in Robert’s cartoons. You’ve seen her before — such as in this cartoon and in this one and in this one — you just didn’t know she had a name.
  • The state’s junior senator, Grits Holler, and the senior senator, Storm Thunder. We thought we’d introduce the characters by initially introducing Grits merely as The Junior Senator, and he would be drawn looking like a centenarian.
  • Two mice, named Sol and Edgar, who lived in the Statehouse and who, unbeknownst to everyone except our hero, actually wrote all of the legislation that ever passed. They did so at night, when no one was looking. The protagonist’s value as a lobbyist arose from his close relationship with the mice.

Anyway, you get the idea. A mix of political satire and Mayberry-style downhome gags. Sometimes the strip would consist merely of dialogue among boarding house residents settin’ on the porch shelling peas for Auntie Bellum, a la Andy and Barney. Other story lines were less down-to-earth — such as a recurring thing where Sugarboy gets taken up into the spaceship by aliens who take the form of two-headed Elvis impersonators. Anyway, the whole thing was too Southern for the folks in New York who Robert tried to sell it to. So we set the project aside.

I’m sufficiently fond of some of the characters and situations that, since the strip didn’t fly, I now and then think of writing a novel based on the characters — less cartoony, of course, more serious, but some of the same characters and situations. Now that I’m unemployed, I’m thinking more and more about that novel…

All of which makes me happy to turn to The Status Quo for my new catchphrase, which — knowing the backstory as I do — at least makes me smile…

Comfort reading

People speak of “comfort food.” Not being all that much into food myself, that’s not what I turn to to settle me when I need settling. In times of stress, I tend to turn to certain books that are familiar and comforting to read.

Not because of…

SORRY! I THOUGHT I HAD SAVED THIS AS A DRAFT LAST NIGHT! I WOULD PULL IT IF Y’ALL HADN’T ALREADY LEFT MYSTIFIED COMMENTS.

ONLY THING TO DO IS TO GO AHEAD AND FINISH…

Not because of … the subject matter, necessarily, but because it is familiar. Sometimes “comfort books” for me are ones I enjoyed from the very first read — such as Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, which I’ve got to get somebody other than Mike Fitts (who turned me onto them, several years back) to read, so we can exchange esoteric references, because it’s fun. Other times it’s books I didn’t even like the first time I read them, but got hooked on subsequently.

The Aubrey-Maturin books (which you may associate with the film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” which is based upon them, but which is an inadequate summation) are so engaging because they so completely put you in another world. But it’s not a fantasy universe like in Tolkien, but a magnificently detailed recreation of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Jack Aubrey, one of the two main characters (the other is his particular friend Stephen Maturin), is based loosely upon Lord Cochrane, and most of the naval engagements described come straight from contemporary logs and gazette accounts.

The detail, from speech patterns (both formal and casual) to politics to popular culture to social arrangements to politics to the complexities of sailing a square-rigged vessel in all conditions all around the world. is so engagingly rendered that it removes you from whatever is going on in your dull contemporary existence. And when you’ve been away from these books, you’re as anxious to get back to them as Jack is always anxious to get back to sea after another of his disastrous (and often comically so) spells on dry land.

There are 20 books in the series, which are wonderful read individually or as one long, magnificent work. Or at least, that’s true through the 16th book, which is as far as I’ve read because I dread getting to the end of them and having no more new ones to read. Having finished the 16th a few weeks ago, I’ve started reading the previous books for the fourth time, and they are as fresh as ever. They are just so rich that there’s always something new. But the remembered, familiar passages are so enjoyable that you’re glad you remembered them, and happy to be experiencing them again.

And, did I mention, comforting?

Some other comfort books, that I’ve read to tatters:

  • Stranger in a Strange Land — This is the one I was thinking of when I said a comfort book doesn’t HAVE to be something I enjoyed the first time. I wrote a rather savage essay about this one in high school, despising it at the start. But it really grew on me, and I’ve worn out a couple of copies. (Why, oh why has this never been made into a movie? I’ll write the screenplay if no one else will…)
  • Dune — ONLY the first book. I hated the sequels. I’m on my second copy. Yes, the book that inspired the worst big-budget movie ever made…
  • Battle Cry — Here’s a weird personal fact about Leon Uris’ opus about the Marines in WWII: I first read it at the same time I bought “Abbey Road,” in October 1969, and to this day listening to the album (especially the second side) reminds me of the novel, and vice versa. I told you it was weird.
  • The Dirty Dozen — You probably didn’t even know there WAS a novel. Well, there was, and it was way better than the movie (as close to a violation of the Guy Code as it may be to say that). I read it when I was 14, and it was the first “adult” novel I remember reading. Long and involved, I practically memorized it. For years, I could remember the names of every one of the dozen cons without looking at the book, and probably still could, if you gave me a few minutes. Talk about your useless information.
  • The Once and Future King — I’m really into Arthurian legend (hey, kids, guess why the Harry Potter story is so appealing! It only rips off the best legends of the English-speaking peoples!), and this is the best version I’ve run across. Although I also have read and reread and enjoyed an obscure attempt to place Arthur in a realistic 6th-century setting, The Pendragon.
  • High Fidelity — Again, a good movie, but a WAY better book. Nick Hornby is great. Probably the best-ever evocation of the differences between the way male and female minds work. We don’t come out looking too good, guys, but it’s a fun read, anyway. One great passage: The protagonist’s girlfriend is explaining that he’s just too miserable to be around, and that if he isn’t happy he should Get Happy, and she stops him before he interrupts and says, Yes, I know that’s the name of an Elvis Costello album; that’s why I said it — to get your attention… Boy, did that feel familiar.

Well, I could go on and on, but you get the idea…

Why not a Mentat for the court?

Folks, I’ve got nothing against Sonia Sotomayor so far. Still gathering info, in an offhand, passive sort of way. She seems to have really nice teeth. The NYT reports that her rulings “Are Exhaustive but Often Narrow.” Narrow sounds good. They say she saved Major-League Baseball. That’s good, right?

But I’ve got to tell you, I’m not liking all this human-interest, fuzzy-wuzzy stuff I keep hearing. Nor do I like the rather blatant Identity Politics language, of which even the judge herself has been guilty:

Judge Sotomayor has said that “our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.” In a lecture in 2001 on the role her background played in her jurisprudence, she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

You see, I’ve got this thing about the Rule of Law. The law should be no respecter of persons. We should be a nation of laws, not of men. Or women. In other words, who you are and what the law is are two entirely different things, and no one should be more cognizant of that than a Supreme Court Justice. Respect for that notion ought to be right up there at the top of the job description.

So yeah, I’ve got a problem with this. And it’s reinforced by the fact that President Obama himself indicated that HE would be looking for something other than someone who objectively ruled on the law. I wrote about how that was really starting to disturb me right before the election. (A lot of you thought that column was just about abortion — a problem which I attribute to the tragic way that abortion has distorted our political discourse. But it was about much broader concepts.) An excerpt from what I wrote at the time:

Sen. Obama seems to judge court rulings based more on their policy effects than on legal reasoning. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he wrote, “The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me — for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.” That hinted to me that he cares more about good outcomes than law. But I forgot about it until I heard him say in the debate that “I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.” That third qualification disturbed me because it seemed to demand a political sensibility on the part of judges, but I wasn’t sure.

And now here we are — with a nominee who is not embarrassed to say such things as what I quoted above. And I have a problem with this.

Which, I know, puts me on the “right” side of the left-right wars on this one. And you know how I hate being on either side, but it happens.

That said, I’ve seen nothing yet that would keep me from voting to confirm her were I a senator. Why, you ask? Because, unlike the president, I don’t consider this touchy-feely biography-as-qualification stuff to be important enough to make up my mind either way. It’s peripheral. The point is, is she a good judge, which is something that is entirely independent of how she feels about herself as a Latina, or how the president resonates to that.

And yes, I know that to many liberals, this makes me sound like, at best, a cold fish. But folks, the law is a cold-fish thing, if it’s going to be fair. It’s about the intellect, not the emotions. My liberal friends, do you want Roberts or Scalia or Thomas ruling on the basis of how they feel about things, or on the basis of the law? That’s what I thought.

Maybe the ideal judge would be a Mentat, as imagined by Frank Herbert (or, to a lesser extent, a Bene Gesserit, who are also trained to override their emotions). Or Robert Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses. Of course, maybe the fact that my examples come from science fiction is an indication that such intellectual rigor and cool objectivity is impossible in the real world. Maybe.

But at least it ought to be an ideal that we strive for, rather than celebrating the possibility that a judge would rule on the basis of how he or she feels, or what groups they might identify — which frankly, as a believer in the Rule of Law, I find disturbing.

Thanks, Senator Courson!

Back in my newsroom days, probably the most valuable and jealously guarded thing on my desk was my Legislative Manual. As the gummint editor, I had occasion to use it often, and if you weren’t careful it had a way of walking off. So I wrote WARTHEN in heavy block letters on the edges of the pages on three sides, so that I could easily spot it wherever it went.

Anyway, even though I can now get access to most of that info via my Blackberry from the Legislature’s Web site, it’s still a handy thing to have on your desk or in your pocket. And I’d been missing the fact that I didn’t have an up-to-date one. In fact, I was thinking about how I’d like to have one just yesterday.

Sen. John Courson must have been reading my mind, because I got a small-but-bulky package in the mail from him today at my home address, and lo and behold, he had sent me a new 2009 Legislative Manual! He’s never done that before, and what possessed him to do it now, I don’t know. But I was certainly glad to get it.

So now, I’m going to start concentrating real hard on how much I want a permanent, full-time job with benefits, and see if the good senator can send me one of those in the mail. It would probably take a pretty big envelope… But in case he can’t swing that, in the meantime I truly appreciate the Manual.

Do you know what your sin is?

Yes, that’s a quote from “Serenity” — the Operative, in point of fact. Do you know, I once took a quiz online to find out “which “Firefly” character are you?,” and it said I was the Operative. Some of my libertarian friends out there will get a chuckle out of that, but I didn’t like it a bit. Then I took it several more times — going the other way on questions that had been close calls — and each time I was somebody else. Never did get to be Jayne, though, which was disappointing. I didn’t even get to be Mal (I was stuck with the doctor — my least favorite character — and Shepherd Book).

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that I did the first reading in Mass today, which is a rare privilege. I much prefer doing the 1st reading (Old Testament, usually), but I almost always get scheduled to do the 2nd (usually Paul’s epistles). I really get into the Old Testament readings — they tell stories; they take you somewhere — while Paul is usually too dry and abstract to mean as much to me as it should.

So it fell to me today to do the 1st reading, and this was it, from Jeremiah 31:

The days are coming, says the LORD,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers
the day I took them by the hand
to lead them forth from the land of Egypt;
for they broke my covenant,
and I had to show myself their master, says the LORD.
But this is the covenant that I will make
with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD.
I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts;
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the LORD.
All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD,
for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.

One of the ways that my faith manifests itself is that I see meaning in my being chosen to read this to the people. And this reading seems particularly pregnant with meaning for me.

You see, I’m going through a rough patch in my professional life at the moment — what with being laid off and all. And it reminds me of when I went through a much worse one, almost exactly 22 years ago. And God delivered me and my house from that. I’ll tell you the story of it in greater detail another time, but suffice it to say that the four seemingly interminable days it took my wife and me to drive our two cars and (then) four young children out of the Western wilderness to the East Coast caused the 40 years of wandering in the desert to be much more immediate and real for me. And I have always thanked God for leading us out of there, to the land of my fathers, where we have been blessed.

So that part of the reading, about the earlier covenant when God took the people by the hand and led them out of Kansas — I mean, Egypt — is a reference I personally find applicable.

But God says through Jeremiah that that deal is now off, just as my time of being blessed in my job at The State is over.

So that leaves me with two questions:

  1. What was my sin, if indeed sin there was? Maybe there wasn’t one in particular, since I don’t feel all that much of a sense of loss. But if there was one, I should know what it was.
  2. What’s the new deal?

Mostly lately, my mind has been focused on the new deal, the new covenant that lies before me. As it has begun to take shape — just bits of it so far — I’ve gotten pretty excited about it. And the mind naturally turns to “What’s next?”

But this reading causes me to wonder: Is there a lesson yet to be learned from where I was? If so, I need to figure that out. I’m planning on going to the Lenten Reconciliation Service at St. Peter’s Monday night. So I’m reflecting upon this…

Too heavy for you? Well, then go to the mall, as Jack Black’s character said in “High Fidelity,” just to bring us back to the realm of pop culture, for those who are more comfortable there.

By the book: Apparently, I’m doing everything right

You will not be surprised to learn that I took a particular interest in a book review, in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal this morning, of Martha I. Finney’s Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss.

And I was reassured that I seem to be doing the right things, just by instinct:

  • I didn’t blow my stack over losing my job. In fact, beyond some peevish moments while dealing with paperwork — y’all know how I hate forms and such — I haven’t actually felt anything like anger, much less acted out. That’s good, because according to the review, the book says “Throwing a tantrum is out. Not only can it get you an unwelcome reputation as a hothead, it could lose you what little you can hope to take away in benefits.”
  • I still get up at the usual time, shave, get dressed and go to the usual place for breakfast, thereby staying in sync with this advice: “Ms. Finney presents some basic strategies for depression- avoidance, including such simple tactics as getting out of bed and getting dressed as if for work.”
  • The reviewer disagrees with the book one on point, and so do I: “And downright unhelpful is Ms. Finney’s suggestion that one abjure such ‘stress hormone-inducing substances’ as coffee. The last thing an unemployed java junkie needs is to go job-hunting sluggish and glassy-eyed from caffeine deprivation.” Amen to that. I’m trying not to overdo the coffee, because it can cause anxiety (even in the best of times) — but I’m not about to go cold-turkey.
  • The reviewer also objects to the author’s advice that the job-seeker call attention to himself by starting a blog. “Exactly how many employers will be eager to grant you an interview if they think that it might become material for your blog?” wonders the reviewer. That might be a good point for someone who wants a job in banking. But this is what I do, folks. This is my way of staying in shape for work.

The very best thing about this review is that I don’t feel compelled to read the book itself. That’s good, because being unemployed is hard, tiring work, and it takes all your energy and time. I say that based on one day. But at least I can say that every day I’ve been unemployed so far, I’ve received a standing ovation. Here’s hoping the second day is that good.

The tax on stupidity

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I liked this analogy offered in a book review in The Wall Street Journal Thursday about why we so often call lotteries a "tax on stupidity:"

    'Imagine a standard NFL football field. Somewhere in the field, a student has placed a single, small, common variety of ant that she has marked with a spot of yellow paint. You walk onto the field, blindfolded, and push a pin into the ground. If your pin pierces the marked ant, you win. Otherwise you lose. Want to give it a go?"
    Thus did one mathematician describe the odds of winning a Powerball lottery. Is it any wonder that economists deride state-run lotteries as a tax on stupidity? Bad enough that the government is encouraging gambling; all the worse that it is encouraging such a bad bet.

You betcha.