I love to read. So here's a list of books to share that I've read in the past few years along with some notes and quotes from some of them. This list does not include the numerous newspapers, blogs, web sites, textbooks and magazines that I somehow carve out time to read - Gary 2010 "The Cement Garden" Ian McEwan Most will find this story disturbing. Three children, two teenagers and a younger child, are left to fend for themselves after both parents die rather suddenly. They have no friends and perhaps the parents did not as well as no one comes calling or to check in on the family. When left to their own devices, such as in this Lord of the Flies type of predicament, a certain primitive behavior creeps up and takes over. "The Master Butchers Singing Club" Louise Erdich This is a tale of struggle in post WW1 America that spans nearly forty years. Fidelis Waldvogel, a German sniper and butcher by trade, emigrates to Argus, North Dakota with his pregnant wife. Enter into the picture Delphine Watzka, a traveling vaudeville performer who's father resides in the same small town where Fidelis sets up shop. Delphine and her performance partner, Cyprian Lazarre, are drawn back to Argus as Delphine's father, Roy, needs attention, being the town drunk and all. Cyprian is Delphine's lover but he's also struggling with his attraction to men. Any more information would be a spoiler. A great read as Erdich writes with eloquence and humor. "Manhood for Amateurs" Michael Chabon Here's yet another writer that I've read in multiples; The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, Gentlemen of the Road, A Model World and Other Stories. He's a self admitted geek (he espouses on that very word in this book under the chapter The Amateur Family) which he has passed on to his children, and it is in that spirit that has resulted in this very entertaining and smart collection of stories about his life as a husband, father and son. Here are a few gems... "There is no more useless activity than that of periodization, the packaging of history, in particular cultural history, into discreet eras – the Jazz Age, the Greatest Generation, the Eisenhower Years, the Sixties. Such periods can never be honestly articulated without resource to so many demurrals and arbitrary demarcations, and the granting of so many exceptions, as to render them practically useless for any kind of serious historical purpose. In times of supposed license, repression reigns freely all around; in eras renowned for their conventionality, oddballs and freaks hoist their banners high. And yet when I heard the gifted and intelligent Ann Druyan wondering, fervently but not without a sense of her own goofiness, if perhaps ages hence some technomagical future alien race might be able to reconstitute, from the record of her brain waves, her feeling of incipient passion for her man and for the work they undertook together, as equals, as partners, and lovers – to re-create the sense of how it felt to be Ann Druyan on an afternoon in New York City during those infatuated, boundary-breaking, termination-shock-crossing years – I knew that iwas listening, carried as by a lonely probe across the distances, to the voice of the 1970s." "You're going to put that up?" my wife had asked me when I brought the rack home form the store. She didn't sound dubious so much as surprised, as if I were also proposing to weave a new set of bath towels from cotton I had grown and harvested myself. "It's in this last element, so crucial to the work of Henry Miller, that gives away the game. When I was twenty years old, the following statement would have at once outraged me and made sense to me: You know nothing about women. It's just a sappy and worthless generalization to me now, empty of meaning. But at the time I thought women was a category, a field, like post-Parker jazz or the varieties of marijuana, that you could study and master and "know something about." If you are a callow young man at twenty – and I think the man of twenty pretty much defines the term – then your callowness consists almost entirely in this type of belief, that life is made up of mastering the particulars, memorizing the lineups, accumulating the trivia and lore, in knowing how to trace the career of drummer Aynsley Dunbar or to get a girl to go to bed with you and your best friend, as an expression of your existential freedom and complete disregard for the fact that she is a person, and she likes you or him, and you're actually kind of breaking her heart. "The House on Fortune Street" Margot Livesey "Moo" Jane Smiley "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" Sherman Alexie This is the story of Iris Lockhart, a stylish, young dress shop owner, who is informed that she has power-of-attorney for an aunt that has ben locked away in a mental institution for over sixty years. Esme Lennox was put away years earlier due to her inability and perhaps unwillingness to abide by polite society. In those days, a family could just institutionalize a young woman with independent spirit. 2009 "Indecision" Benjamin Kunkel "Black Dogs" Ian McEwan "I can see you think I'm a crank. It doesn't matter. This is what I know. Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, consciousness itself – call it what you like – in the end, it's all we've got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish. My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other. I'm not saying it'll happen. There's a good chance it won't. I'm saying it's our only chance. If it does, and it could take generations, the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas..." "The Darkest Evening of the Year" Dean Koontz "The Widow of the South" Robert Hicks This tale begins with the telling of the most horrific battle of the Civil War: the battle of Franklin, Tennessee on November 30, 1864. This is based on the true story of Carrie McGavock, who's colonial southern mansion was taken over as a hospital to tend the wounded. Little did they know that 9,000 men would lose their lives that day. Her empathy for the dead and wounded became so strong through this ordeal that she and her husband John eventually buried and marked graves on their own property for well over 1,000 confederate soldiers that were dug up and transfered from the original shallow graves they were dumped into shortly after the battle. "I pitied Becky for reasons other than her station in life. What was station anymore? I could feel my own station slipping away, and good riddance. I wore plain clothes and quit bothering to powder my neck. I swore occasionally in front of the men and committed to memory the new curses I heard the men sputtering. I thought of the curses as passwords, the lingua franca of my new life, one I could not yet envision but which I knew would be coarser and not possessed of the layers of fine scrim that had kept me in gauzy ignorance of the clang and stink and sharpness of things outside of Carnton." "The Double Bind" Chris Bohjalian "A term came to her that they used on occasion at BEDS: the double bind. The expression had a clinical origin, referring to Gregory Bateson's theory that a particular brand of bad parenting could inadvertently spawn schizophrenia. Essentially, it meant consistently offering a child a series of contradictory messages: telling him you loved him while turning away in disgust. Telling him he needed to go asleep when it was clear you merely wanted him out of your hair. Asking him to kiss you good night and then telling him he has offensively bad breath. Over a long period of time, Bateson hypothesized, a child would realize he couldn't possibly win in the real world, and as a coping mechanism would develop an unreal world of his own. The double-bind theory had not been completely discredited, but Laurel knew these days that most clinicians viewed nature - brain chemicals - as a much more significant determinant than nurture in whether a person became schizophrenic. Nevertheless, at the shelter they used the expression in much the same way that they would a term like catch-22". "Run" Ann Patchett Not her best effort (read Bel Canto) but Patchett weaves a tale of family that reminds us that the life we lead is sometimes not what we think it is. "Up In Honey's Room" Elmore Leonard I like a good murder mystery and Elmore Leonard ranks with the best. "Baudolino" Umberto Eco This is from the author of "Focault's Pendulum" and "Name of the Rose". I wanted to stop reading this tale several times but stubbornly kept at it. At times witty and throughout fantastical, Eco has woven a tale as told by the self-admitting liar Baudolino about his life-long adventure, along with his longtime companions, to find the legendary priest Prester John, a character he himself conjured up. This one requires patience as it's not to be skimmed through. Due to the weaving of historical references, theology, philosophy, languages and medieval allusions, having your laptop with google handy is not a bad idea. "The Witch of Portobello: A Novel" Paulo Coelho The story of Athena, an orphaned Romanian gypsy, is told post-mortum and chronologically by people who knew her throughout her life. Just on the heels of reading the book below, the idea of embracing 'chaos' into a way of life reared its head. "Seven Life Lessons of Chaos" John Briggs and F. David Peat This is one that I'll be picking back up again soon. It's not a 'how-to' book, but a meditation on embracing life's unpredictable nature. Here's a short paragraph that gets to the heart of what chaos is and is not: "Just what is chaos? The answer has many facets and will take a little explanation. To begin with, chaos turns out to be far subtler than the commonsense idea that it is the messiness of mere chance - the shuffling of a deck of cards, the ball bouncing around in a roulette wheel, or the loose stone clattering down a rocky mountainside. The scientific term 'chaos' refers to an underlying interconnectedness that exists in apparently random events. Chaos science focuses on hidden patterns, nuance, the 'sensitivity' of things, and the 'rules' for how the unpredictable leads to the new. It is an attempt to understand the movements that create thunderstorms, raging rivers, hurricanes, jagged peaks, gnarled coastlines, and complex patterns of all sorts, from river deltas to the nerves and blood vessels in our bodies". They discuss the way we view living as a timeline "much like a journey between two railway stations. Instead of it being our companion and friend, it is what is being eaten up fast, just as the train eats up the track ahead of it. This attitude is also reflected in our conventional view of history. History is a procession along a road whose milestones are battles, the death of kings, and the elections of presidents. Virginia Woolf suggested another sort of history, one in which women are engaged in continuous small acts of nurturing and holding our society together. Woolf challenges our preoccupation with a historical time demarcated by dramatic 'events' strung out along a line of time. She suggests that the real significance of time lies within the realm of subtle, human interactions and enfolded, multi-layered moments of human contact.". It's difficult to change the basic paradigms that have been drilled into our beings as we've been socialized from day one to ride the track. This book may help to upset the cart a bit...gently unscrew the top of your head, pour in new ideas, shake gingerly, drink lots of water, share with others. "Music For Torching" A. M. Homes We've all read or heard of novels filled with dire suburban angst and the middle class dilemma of achingly unfulfilled lives. Well, here's another...kinda. We really do not want to care for Paul and Elaine, the lead characters, but Homes has a way with her black humor to keep us in the game long enough to empathize and have quite a few laughs along the way. Somehow she's able to reveal just enough of the creative vacuum of the any-town suburban void yet manages to make it a fun read. Nothing profound here, but worth putting on your list. "Another Thing to Fall" Laura Lippman Another Tess Monaghan crime thriller...I actually had to turn the pages myself on this one, unlike "What the Dead Know". "Voodoo Dreams" Jewell Parker Rhodes The imaginary story of the notorious voodooienne Marie Laveau, the third Marie in a line of voodoo practitioners, in 19th century New Orleans. "My Son's Story" Nadine Gortimer The story of one complex family relationship set in South Africa focuses on a father Sonny, a black schoolteacher turned revolutionary, and his affair with a white activist. The young son Will unwittingly discovers his father's deception and the story evolves around his struggle to deal with that along with his loyalty to his mother Aila. "There came a point, not possible to determine exactly when, at which equality became a cry that couldn't be made out, had been misheard or misinterpreted, turned out to be be something else – finer. Freedom. That was it. Equality was not freedom, it had been only the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom." "For them, their kind, black like the others, there was only one meaning: the political struggle. (As he loved the magnificent chices of Shakespearean language, the crudely reductive terms of political concepts were an embarrassment to him, but he had to use them, like everybody else." "Joy. That was what went with it. The light of joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on family matters." "Samaritan" Richard Price "Oh My Stars" Lorna Landvik A novel of hope, a good read and timely. "Drowning Ruth" Christina Schwarz Another fast, suspenseful read...well done. "Impossible Vacation" Spalding Gray I really loved this book. Spalding writes as if he's reciting one of his monologues; engaging and surreal. 2008 "The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton" Jane Smiley "I stood up and moved away from the vent, suddenly weary of the certain outcome of their speculations. Back to Alice, back to the strange languor of life. It vexed me, too, that though their afternoons of complaint and self-justification would result in nothing new, they would make their way through it, anyway, like cows following the same old meandering track through their all too familiar pasture and coming upon the same old over-grazed corner as if it were fresh and unexpected." "I thought of something brother Roland Brereton had sometimes said about why he wasn't particularly neighborly: 'Why should I look after those who can't look after themselves? When the time comes, they'll be too behindhand to look after me.'" "In fact, in many ways it seemed as though fate or luck was separating all of our acquaintances into layers...but I thought, Well, Americans always sort themselves out one way or another into rich and poor, and then everybody gets blamed for however he ends up. Lawrence was the biggest town for gossip I ever saw, and it was only during a war that what folks said about each other was either respectful or kind." "Three Cups of Tea" Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin This book is about Greg Mortenson's incredible works in Pakistan and, for the last several years, Afghanistan. This story outlines in detail his quest, starting with one humble school for both boys and girls, to his successful completion of more than a hundred schools in the Northern Provinces and valleys. The non-profit group that he founded to make this all happen is the Central Asia Institute. What struck me first is that education, more than anything else, will be the killer of extremism of all types. The Taliban and Al-Queda have both recruited uneducated children (and adults) who are much more susceptible to propaganda than even the mildly educated. Secondly, Mortenson approaches the projects with the philosophy to empower the various communities to do the work themselves, and not impose his own cultural background upon them. This has been an exhaustive and truly remarkable achievement. A small donation to this amazing group can garner many miles of American Karma. That $6 oversized Carl's Jr. behemoth you're chokin' down while leaning against your manly $35,000 pickup truck could buy a couple weeks worth of provisions for an entire family. Please take a minute to check out the web site. "The Professor and the Madman" (A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary) Simon Winchester This is a drier read than the subtitle indicates but well worth the effort. "The Children's Hospital" Chris Adrian This all takes place within a floating hospital after the world is flooded by God. Or flooded, by God. It sort of reminded me of the trend of current TV series such as 'Heroes' that go on and on and never quite resolve, with subplot after subplot. This was another one of those, however, that I had to finish...semi-satisfying, lovely bouquet. "Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons" Lorna Landvik This tale spans forty years of a group of women friends (also neighbors in a Minneapolis suburb) who form a book club that becomes an important social bond for all of them. Landvik knows how to maintain your interest in her characters making for a quick and entertaining read. "Independent People" Halldør Laxness If you are a fan of the music of the Icelandic band Sigur Røs, here is the literary equivalent. Both capture the eery and remote lay of an untamed landscape still minutely populated. Independent People was written in the 1930's but like all great literature, the theme of mans struggles are timeless. This is the story of Gudbjarter Jonsson, a stubborn self made man, as he endures the hardships of tending his own hard earned land...but it's not all dour. Laxness weaves in humor and satire effortlessly as the tragedies of everyday life unfolds. Not an easy read but I encourage those who stick with it a great reward. "Forenoon, noon, and afternoon are as far off as the countries we hope to see when we grow up; evening as remote and unreal as death..." "Few things are so inconstant, so unstable, as a loving heart, and yet it is the only place in the world where one can find sympathy." "...there is much comfort in the thought that time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less than love." "...two human beings have such trouble in understanding each other, there is nothing so tragical as two human beings." "In its own way misery no less than revelry is varied in form and worthy of note wherever there lurks a spark of life in the world..." Below is his rant of the wealthy politician, that begins with a miserable description of the worst behavior but moves to a more hopeful prognosis... "Wherein lay the secret of Ingolfur Arnarson's success? To what gifts, what accomplishments, did he lose the speed of the ascent that had carried him so rapidly from obscurity to fame, from nonentity to national eminence? Already, in spite of his youth, he was one of the most important and most influential men in the country, a national figure whose photograph was the daily delight of the newspapers, whose name the euphonic pride of the fattest headlines. Did he perhaps owe his rise, like great men before him, to a constant rooting and grubbing for personal profit? Was he always on the hunt for anything that people in need might have for sale, so as to be able to sell it again to others who could not do without it and were driven, possibly, by an even greater need? Had he, for example, appropriated a croft here, a croft there in years of depression and sold them again when prosperity returned and prices rose? Had he perhaps lent people hay in a hard spring and demanded the same weight in sheep as security? Or food and money to the starving, at a usurious rate of interest? Or had he achieved greatness by stinting himself of food and drink, like an ill-provisioned criminal in flight through the wilds, or a peasant who, in spite of slaving eighteen hours a day, has been told by his dealer that his debts are still increasing and that he has now reached the limit of his credit? Or by having one solitary chair in his room, and a broken one at that, and shambling about in a filthy assortment of mouldy old rags all day, like a wretched tramp or a farm labourer? Or was the method he employed that of accumulating thousand upon thousand at the bottom of his chest until he was rich enough to found a savings bank and start lending folk money at a legal rate of interest, and then standing in front of destitute men and informing them that the depth of his poverty was such that soon he would have to sell the very soul from his body if he wished to escape imprisonment for debt?...No Ingolfur Arnarson's road to honour and repute had been neither the miser's nor the merchant's bloody career, hitherto the sole paths to wealth and true dignity recognized as legal by the Icelandic community and it's justice. But a more bitter reality seems to creep to the surface... "Then did all the grants and the subsidies, the benefits and the bargain offers pass over these poverty-stricken peasants when Ingolfur Arnarson's ideals were at last brought to fruition? What is one to say? It so happens that it signifies little though a penniless crofter be offered a grant from the Treasury towards the cost of tractors and modern ploughs. Or a forty years' loan to build a concrete house with double walls, water on tap, linoleum, and electric light. Or a bonus on his deposits. Or a prize for cultivating a large expanse of land. Or a princely manure-cistern for the droppings for one or one and a half cows. The fact is that it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man; rich men are the only people who can accept a generous offer. To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant is the inability to avail oneself of the gifts that politicians offer or promise and to be left at the mercy of ideals that only make the rich richer and poor poorer. "Well, personally," he said (Gudbjarter), "I've come to the conclusion that a fellow has no more chance of becoming an independent man these days than he had in the old days, if he foes and builds himself a house. Never in the whole history of the country, from the time of the settlement onward, has an ordinary working man managed to build himself a house worthy of the name, so I don't see what good will come of it by starting now. We'll just have to let the old turf walls suffice. And anyway, what does it matter if a man has to live in a little mud hut all his life when his life, when you can really call it a life, is so short? It would be another matter altogether if folk had souls and were immortal. Only in that case would there be any point in trying to get oneself a house built." "Once again they had laid waste the lone worker's farm; they are always the same from century to century, for the simple reason that the lone worker remains the same from century to century. A war on the continent may bring some relief, for a year or so, but it is only a seeming help, an illusion. The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man's protector, but his worst enemy. The life of the lone worker, the life of the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other man, who seek to kill him." "Miss Garnet's Angel" Sally Vickers "Blue Angel" Francine Prose This is a witty satire on higher education, focusing on the creative writing departments. Well worth a read. "Swenson argued for Claris. He'd dragged in Chekhov to tell the class that the writer need not paint a picture of an ideal world, but only describe the actual world, without sermons, without judgement. As if his students give a shit about some dead Russian that Swenson ritually exhumes to support his loser opinions. And yet just mentioning Chekhov made Swenson fell less alone, as if he were being watched over by a saint who wouldn't judge him for the criminal fraud of pretending that these kids could be taught what Swenson's pretending to teach them. Chekhov would see into his heart and know that he sincerely wished he could give his students what they want: talent, fame , money, a job." "Skeletons on the Zahara" Dean King This story is based on the true-life account of twelve American sailors who shipwrecked in 1815 off the coast of Africa and were taken slaves for the better part of a year. It really made me thirsty. "S is for Silence" Sue Grafton Another quick read and thrill ride by Grafton, featuring the protagonist detective Kinsey Millhone. Wheeee. "What the Dead Know" Laura Lippman This is a cold case tour-de-force by Lippman. A page turner. Yes, the pages actually turn on their own. Amazing. Maybe it's just my copy... "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" Marisha Pessl I kept saying to myself "I'M NOT GONNA FINISH THIS IT'S GOING ON FOREVER AND CHOCK FULL OF ACADEMIC AND LITERARY REFERENCES THAT NEVER END AND I CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE!!!" Like that. The two quotes below are actually references from other authors: ' "As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion - usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina, " writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you." ' 'I present Paragraph 14, the section entitled "Zeus Complex": "The egocentric Man seeks to taste immortality by engaging in demanding physical challenges, wholeheartedly bringing himself to the brink of death in order to taste an egotistical sense of accomplishment, of victory. Such a feeling is false and short-lived, for Nature's power over Man is absolute. Man's honest place is not in extreme conditions, where, let's face it, he's frail as a flea, but in work. It is in building things and governing, the creation of rules and ordinances. It is in work Man will find life's meaning, not in the selfish, heroin-styled rush of hiking Everset without oxygen and nearly killing himself and the poor Sherpa carrying him." ' "Blackwood Farm" Anne Rice I admit it...I love reading Anne Rice. "Hello the house!" "But you love books, then," Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen. Yep, imagine a world where everyone read literature...there'd be no more religion as there would be no more sheep, and people might actually start exchanging ideas on a mass scale. "The Pact: A Love Story" Jodi Picoult An American Dream gone awry. A suicide/homicide? I'm not telling but, to Picoult's credit, there's no happy ending here. An imperfect but engaging read. Here's an interesting exchange that very tidily describes an aptitude that most artists strive for and few achieve: "Thank you," Jordan said. "So Emily's paintings developed fairly logically as she went through high school?" "The Feast of Love" Charles Baxter Another one I wasn't sure I'd finish. Did. Here's a few passages... "...What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight. He was uninteresting and genuine, sweet-tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race. "You know what I hate? I hate it when someone turns to me and says, 'What're you thinking Bradley? Tell me. What're you thinking?' Well, no. If it's a-penny-for-your-thought time, here's your penny back. Because, first of all, it's private, whatever my thoughts are – and don't think I'll tell you all my thoughts, either – but secondly, most of the time I don't, in the way of things, have any thoughts. There aren't any thoughts, per se, is what I'm saying. Day after day it's a long hallway up there, just a yard sale, interrupted with random images of my paintings, or my dog, or the coffee store, or memories, or a woman, her face or her body or something she said, all of it in free fall through the synapses." "We do what we do in tandem when you belong together. We got to movies, we go dancing (she's a better dancer than I am), we go to the grocery store and hold hands in the aisles (scandalizing the racists), we decide about furniture, we cook, we make love, we talk about the future, we play with the dog and take him for walks, we talk about our plans to get married, wher and how and when. We fit together. (I avoid saying these things in public; people hate to hear it, as if I'd forced them to eat raw sugar.) There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her. Life has turned into what I once imagined it was supposed to be, as complacent and awful as that sounds. In fact, I don't really want to talk about this anymore. As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life." "The Stones of Summer" Dow Mossman This has an interesting back story as the author wrote this in the mid 70's and disappeared from public life. I picked up a copy after hearing about it on NPR a while back. Another of those thick tomes that I almost threw out the window a couple of times but glad I stuck to it. Being a midwesterner myself may have helped, and I knew a few peers growing up who may have possessed the anger and resignation that drowns the Iowa native Dawes Oldham Williams (D.O.W.). Autobiographical? Maybe it's why Dow disappeared. In some ways it's as if Mossman was a seer as he jokingly refers to the outrageous notion of the actor Ronald Reagan becoming President. This was in 1972. "And he laughed, remembering it, sitting on the hill and saying the name, but he could see that words were only vessels for defining place, not time, because time had no vessels for defining itself, even in shadows, the way water forms itself in a jar. Words." "Ya," he said, "but the ones he found by the frozen sled when no one else would go out and look? The half-dead ones and the baby he found lying under the only half-warm, pure-dee dead horses!?! How about the orphanage and school he built? Wasn't that part of it?" "It is an old dream. In the end a clown comes on stage. He is dressed like Charles J. Chaplin, and in black distances at the end of a candle he mimes his own face; he takes it off and examines it at length; he is distended, ballooning, and his motions fill in the light. He talks of social democracy. His eyes fold themselves, roll, are vaguely lost in the yellow sockets, and he is crying now. Slowly he begins miming himself mime himself. He becomes lost in fits of forgetfulness." "Well," Travelin' Tommy said, "he thought about the fact that if you're a natural genius, with no place to go, and if you're floatin' down the river at night, just hearin' the dogs on the western shore howlin' at the fire in your pit, you either learn humor and humanity or you go mad in the end." "...The Catholics were holding another moonlight wake, behind him, across a yard of black and blowing trees. The air was dense, dreaming, heavy like ancestors..." "...He moved on toward the bridge, rustling the sand and the long night-blooming edges of grass, learning only the small lesson that you carry yourself along, wherever you go; trying to unlearn the Americas myth that by changing place, you are also changing identity..." "Listen," Dawes Williams said, "screw on your ole bonnet of an attention span, Dorothy, and try concentrating on this very hard for awhile. Ready? Any," he began, "social science, a contradiction in sanity to begin with, constructed like soft religion upon absolute relative knowledge drawn from structured learning, reason, and assimilated research is mostly dangerous bunk that operates on the level of self-confirming prattle. It is not only an illusion in progress, a highly pseudo exercise, it is actually recessive in nature. An outgrowth of pragmatism really, it remains true to itself – the merest rote function – the great and inferior butterfly ghost of this century–and it, therefore, ranks unintuitive, unimaginative, unstoned and non-a priori disciplined social scientists – the great and misled butterfly nets of this century – a great deal lower on the chain of being than Celtic Druids drunk on the witch's eye of the moon. In fact," Dawes Williams said, "when one is drunk enough, one is more than tempted to say that all backward-moving evil in this century which cannot be directly traced to that false, unquestioned god mask Technology can be indirectly, irrevocably and finally traced to the nub-headed priests of that electric god mask, to social scientists – i.e., the New 'Methodists' – the leading ninnies...and ninn-y-poops." 2007 "Disobedience" Jane Hamilton What my mother and Richard were able to do, once they were at last inside, in the alcove, once they'd pulled back the counterpane, once they were safely in bed–what they were able to do, beyond exhaust themselves in the usual way, was make a story out of nothing. That is easier said than done. There was, without the ballast of daily life, very little to hold them in their private world. And so they set about conjuring, doing the impossible work of building what they thought might be a solid structure, out of what proved to be flimsy materials in the end, out of words and touch and some musical notes. It's a dismaying thing, to be known long enough so that you cannot even try out a new expression. To avoid that particular type of humiliation, my mother traveled to Wisconsin, where she could experiment with alternate gestures and phrases, becoming someone other than the usual and approved Beth Shaw. For a brief honeymoon period nothing she would say to her stranger man could smack of phoniness. "The Patron Saint of Liars" Ann Patchett "Gun, With Occasional Music" Jonathan Lethem "Clown Girl" Monica Drake This book came to me as a premium for my pledge to local community radio KXCI in Tucson. Monica Drake is a former Tucson-ite that now makes her home in Oregon. It's a dark, quirky tale of a girl trying to hone her ideals for art in the clown world and keeping her head just above the rising tide of desperation and illusion. I loved the title but I also picked it up because Katherine Dunn (Geek Love) gave it a positive review on the back cover. "Underworld" Don DeLillo This book has over 800 pages and jumps randomly from character set to other character sets. Not only that, you are left guessing what year you're in and who the new characters are. It was an exercise in frustration every time I picked it back up and yet I couldn't stop...madness. "Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes." "I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-concscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing." "He didn't want to be a father. Being a husband was bad enough, what a burden, you know, full of obligations and occasions he couldn't handle. He was a loner, to use the romantic word, only worse than that, clinically self-involved, not out of vanity or stupidity, but out of some fear, some inbred perspective, some closeness of perspective that amounted to fear. It made him unable to see other people except as encumbrances, little hazy shapes that interfered with his solitude, his hardness of being." "That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned a steel wool pad with disinfectant. Then she used the pad to scour a scrub brush, cleaning every bristle. But she hadn't cleaned the original disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant. She hadn't done this because the regression was infinite. And the regression was infinite because it was called infinite regression. You see how fear spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves." A plain black everyday clerical shoe. "The Telephone Booth Indian" A. J. Liebling (Library of Larceny) The Library of Larceny, published by Broadway Books, is a delicious array of tales by such authors as J.R. 'Yellow Kid' Weil, Donald Dunn, Robert Byrne, Willie Sutton and, of course, A. J. Liebling who wrote the book above. Liebling knew how to spin the tales of New York hucksters (Telephone Booth Indians were "entrepreneurs" that conducted their business in telephone booths in the lobbies of New York office buildings), scammers and other petty nomads of the time. Liebling wrote for the New Yorker from 1935 until his death in 1963. "Like Normal People" Karen E. Bender "The Verificationist" Donald Antrim One of the more quirky and joyfully odd books I've read in a while. Using a Pancake House as the setting, it mixes the surreal tone of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel with Woody Allen-esque humor. "What is a pancake? Cooked batter, covered in sugar and butter. Condiments are applied to it. It is food. But it is not as a food, not as sustenance, that we crave the pancake. No, the pancake, or flapjack if you will, is a childish pleasure; smothered in syrup, buried beneath ice cream, the pancake symbolizes our escape from respectability, eating as a form of infantile play. The environments where pancakes are served and consumed are, in this context, special playrooms for a public ravenous for sweetness, that delirious sweetness of long-ago breakfasts made by mother, sweetness of our infancy and our great, lost, toddler's omnipotence. Look around. Notice, if you will, these lighting fixtures suspended from the ceiling like pretty mobiles over a crib. Notice the indestructible plastic orange seating materials designed to repel spills and stains. Notice these menus that unfold like colorful, laminated boards in those games we once played on rainy days at home, those unforgettable indoor days when we felt safe and warm, when we knew ourselves, absolutely, to be loved. We come to the Pancake House because we are hungry. We call out in our hearts to our mothers, and it is the Pancake House that answers. The Pancake House holds us! The Pancake House restores us to beloved infancy! The Pancake House is our mother in this motherless world!" "We pulled each other down onto the floor. The cat got between us and curled up for warmth. I had the beginnings of a cold. Jane, making love, has such poise. We weren't kissing. In the middle of everything, Jane began talking. She talked and talked, for the longest time, and it was fantastic to hear her. I kept my mouth shut. I breathed and listened. She said, 'I used to love you so much, Tom. It was a simple thing, loving you. I didn't worry about us loving other people. I thought about that, the possibility, but I never worried. I thought I could care for somebody else and still love you. It didn't seem like a problem. You know? Why wouldn't we love other people? Loving other people isn't bad. But it's wrong to think everything won't change. You feel like a different person when you make love with someone new. Falling in love with a new person is a way of becoming a new person. Well, not a new person. A different version of yourself. It's true. That's the wonderful part, and it's the difficulty too, I suppose. I don't want you to be a new person. I always want you to be the man I fell in love with. We're different people and we haven't kept track of who we are. That's why we're in this room, isn't it? This is where we can come to find out who we want to be when things change and we feel strange to each other. I think we each have versions of ourselves that we don't know are in us. Are you scared? Don't be. You're a man and I'm not a girl. Do you remember how young we used to be? We were so young in our twenties. We were children. I was riding the enormous man's bike I used to have, remember? It was about a million billion sizes too big for me, and I was riding on the sidewalk, which you're not supposed to do, and then there you were in front of me and I ran into you. Well, I guess I didn't run into you, did I? You jumped out of the way. What happened? You tripped over the hedge, and that dog came tearing out of the yard on the hill. God. The dog's owner ran after the dog and yelled at us to leave his dog alone and get the hell off his property. All of a sudden, because of that man and his dog, we were united. We were a couple. Think of the ways people meet! I get off my bike and it felt like, "Oh, hello." We walked together, and you were sweet and took my bike and walked it for me, and we weren't paying any attention to where we were going, and the next thing we new it was nighttime and we were in that scary part of town where the book factory is, so we went into that bar, remember, but we didn't drink anything, did we? We ordered club soda, and the bartender turned out to be the father of a kid who beat you up in high school, then later got killed in that terrible loading-dock accident. The father wouldn't stop talking about how death was everywhere, and he got impatient with us for drinking club soda, and we gave him a huge tip, because of his dead son, and just to get out of there. We went right to bed, that night, didn't we? I was afraid to take off my clothes. You kissed my back and told me it was beautiful, my back. I believed you. Do you ever want to be a different kind of man? Could you be a different man with a different woman if I were the woman? Don't be hurt, don;t take it personally. Who else did you fuck, anyway? Tom? Actually, do you want me to tell you something? I'm not sure I want you to say. How would you feel about that? Would you think I don't care? Can you fuck me like I'm all the people you might ever love? Why am I telling you not to be hurt? It's because I want to fuck like I'm everybody and not just me. Is that a crazy thing to want?' " "I was not, at this point, making a very good showing as a flying man. I might have done better if I had not eaten the pancakes. We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake – Pancakes! Pancakes! – that we never learn to respect. We promise ourselves that we will know better, next time, than to order pancakes in any size or in any amount. Never again will we be tempted by buckwheat or buttermilk or blueberry flapjacks. However, we fail to learn; and the days go by, two or three weeks pass, then a month, and we forget about pancakes and their dominion over us. Eventually we need them. We crawl back to pancakes again and again." "Blue Ridge" T. R. Pearson Author of The Sweet Hereafter "Once Two Heroes" Calvin Baker "He is not certain, until it happens, what kissing her will be like. She had been his childhood heroine, but he knows fame in and of itself is a condition more grotesque than anything else P. T. Barnum ever found to display. He has driven by and been beside it a thousand times in Los Angeles, or seen it in magazines, and always sensed some organ of wanting, as an extra hand devoted only to manipulation. Fame, he has always thought, is frightening. He glimpses in it an endless hole of emptiness. But she is more than fame and celebrity. She is pure starlight and, like any furnace in heaven, generates her own energy, heat. She radiates it out to him, and sends it through the room like a present bestowed, not a giftless pulling in. It is the heat of a fire already received. She pulls him into the warmth and energy stars exude, as he realizes, with an increase of gravity the nearer he gets to her face, that the humming molecules belong not to the celebrity but to the woman. She is a magnet of human depth and charisma. An omnisexual love. As their lips touch, he realizes she would be a star even if her picture were not plastered all around Europe. Even if no one except those who knew her had any idea what her name was. She would be the beloved of some small town, because her existence was a reminder that the universe's true gifts are equally distributed, and be proud that this one had been born to them. She would be the waitress who, night after night, picks up the most gold from her table, or the washerwoman who sings to herself on the street as she walks home from work, making every passerby's day the better for it. She would be the legend of only her husband's eye, or the eccentric, favorite aunt of all her nieces and nephews, because she lived in the rare world of the possible instead of the arbitrariness of ifs and must. The Queen of the City knows what she has, as any magician knows magic to be real, and possesses her gifts fully enough that they no longer belong to her, but to all the room, and to Mather's own cells. The closer he gets, the more he hears them buzzing inside of himself, as some small portion of misery flees. The war is really over." "A Mist of Prophesy" Steven Saylor "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome" Stanley Crouch I used to read Stanley Crouch's writings on jazz music in the Village Voice throughout the 80's. I stumbled across this book at the Pima County Library book sale. Highly recommended. The main two protagonists are Carla, the white jazz singer from South Dakota, and Maxwell, her black lover, a renowned tenor saxophonist. Carla musing about Maxwell's wood-shedding cycle: "Yes, that tone was big, full, not loud and offensive.It was a statement in and of itself, which is what he had aimed for, explaining to Carla that the musicians who could play the very fastest weren't those who shot out scads of notes, lickety-split. Not them. The champs when it came to speed were actually people like Louis Armstrong and Ben Webster because the very sound each of those special people made was an immediate musical experience; no phrase was needed. They didn't have to build up. You were taken away instantly. One note against the ear. Boom: There, instantly. You can't play faster than somebody who always has the sound of the music in his horn". "The Muse Asylum" David Czuchlewski "I've always found the term 'postmodern writer' distasteful and vague. Dickens used multiple and sometimes conflicting narrative voices in Bleak House. Conrad was writing about alienation and absurdity at the turn of the century. Wells was writing about the collision of society and during the same period. These are supposedly postmodern concerns, but they belong to a much wider range of authors. Forster said that all the great authors should be thought of as sitting together in the Reading Room of the British Museum, rather than separated into different centuries and movements. That's a much better way to think about literature than this absurd pigeonholing so common among small minds". "Mr. Dynamite" Meredith Brosnan This book is not normal. "Under the Banner of Heaven" Jon Kraukauer EeeeeEEEwwwwwwww...there are some really scary folks out there. The prologue to Part III begins with a excerpt from Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects": "One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it... You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world... My Own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as disease born of fear and a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others". Kraukauer states that "the genesis for this book was a desire to grasp the nature of religious belief". The last chapter is really the Author's Remarks which leads off with this excerpt from Annie Dillard's "For the Time Being": "There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time – or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less". "Doghouse Roses" Steve Earle Singer, songwriter and storyteller Steve Earle has come out with this gritty little collection of short stories. If you're a fan of his music, you'll love this read. "Getting Things Done" David Allen I have to admit that I am a fledgling organizational freak. I just have too much stuff to manage most of the time. This book has helped me to change some bad habits, which can suck the life force out of a Tasmanian Devil, with some fairly simple yet effective ideas. "Motherless Brooklyn" Jonathan Letham "Hard Freeze" Dan Simmons "Chasing the Dime" Michael Connelly Connelly consistently spins a good detective yarn...great for a fast, easy and brainless read. "A Model World and Other Stories" Michael Chabon "The Devil's Highway" Luis Alberto Urrea The Mexican government's border sign near Sasabe doesn't actually say "Coyotes." It uses the hipper slang of the border. It says "Los Polleros." A pollero would be a chicken-wrangler. The level of esteem the smugglers hold for their charges is stated plainly. They're simply chickens. Of course, if you know Spanish, you know that the word for "chicken" is gallina. "Pollo" is usually reserved for something else. A pollo, as on arroz con pollo, has been cooked. They gawked at the worms of snow on the highest peaks. The stared at the pine trees, the roadside deer. The big cities were no more amazing than the dry lands they entered, the maguey and burros of the heartland, the cacti and plains of the north. The ones who knew geography told the others where they were–the states with the strange names: Zacatecas, Chihuahua. They passed through a hundred towns, a scattering of cities. They crossed little rivers, watched a thousand beaten cafés and gas stations whip by, burned out hulks of ancient car wrecks, white crosses erected along the highway where their ancestral travelers had perished. The whole way was a ghost road, haunted by tattered spirits left on the thirsty ground: drivers thrown out windows, revolutionaries hung from cottonwoods or shot before walls, murdered women tossed in the scrub. Into the Sierra Madre Occidental, the opposite side of their continent. Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers. The same facts and figures add up to different sums. The Center for Immigration Studies did a number crunch in 2001, and they came up with the alarming data that each illegal costs the United States money. "The estimated lifetime net fiscal drain (taxes paid minus services used) for the average adult Mexican immigrant is negative $55,200." That is, welfare, medical services, school services, various outreaches, cost us $55K+ over a lifetime of menial labor. The Mexican Migration Project (MMP) points out that harsher border policies, including the famous Operation Gatekeeper and its ilk, ensure that illegal immigrants stay for long periods - thus ensuring some percentage of that $55K+ prophecy comes to fruition. Several studies have also pointed out that illegal immigrants actually depress wages. They help keep the minimum wage down. This means savings for the managers: Captains of Industry and loyal Dittoheads in the grand cirque du capitalisme are saving money on low wages and cheaper product. That can of peas we eat doesn't cost $9.98, not until the Wobblies get in there and organize a real union. Vicks VapoRub is bottled in Mexico; Big Macs are cooked by Mexicans. Shaving points off both ends. Although the federal tax figure is decried in some of the reports as minimal - after all, these are poor folks who make $4.50 an hour - it is still worth considering. If there are eight million tonks slaving away in the United States right now (and one of the Mexican pols interviewed for this book crowed, "We have inserted twelve million workers into the United States - it is already Mexico! We have won the war!), most of those workers pay federal income tax: shaved right off the top. No choice, just like you. They pay state taxes: shaved right off the top. They get tapped for social security and FICA. There's a whole lot of shaving going on. If you multiply $4.50 an hour by eight million workers, that would mean there are 36 million taxable dollars being accrued every hour by illegals getting tapped for some percentage by Uncle Sam. Those workers will not receive a refund . State tax? Has the governor of California gotten a new swimming pool lately? How's the governor's mansion in Baton Rouge looking? Lower wages, cheaper product, unclaimed federal taxes, unclaimed state taxes, unused social security. Over a lifetime, does it start to ameliorate the $55K+? What about sales tax, gas tax, rent? What about pampers at the local Vons supermarket? Cigarette tax. Beer. Tortillas and BVDs and cable and used cars and speeding tickets and water bills and electric bills and tampons and Trojans and Mars bars. Movie tickets. Running shoes. CDs. Over a lifetime, how much does it add to the American commonwealth? But they take away our jobs! Interestingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that by 2008, there will be five million more jobs in the United States than people to do them. This is after the tide of illegals. After the post-Iraq economic doldrums. Even if we vacuum up the homeless and set them to sweeping and frying, we'll have a few million vacancies. Who you gonna call? UCLA's North American Integration and Development Center (you can hear the talk radio hosts protesting already - UCLA! Commie Bastards!) releases a twenty-first-century study that found that "undocumented immigrants" contributed "at least $300 billion per year to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP)." If you put their numbers at a mere 4.5 million, they still add between $154 million and $220 billion, the report says. Researcher Marisol Sanchez told the EFE News Service, apropos of this study, that "although conservative groups claim that undocumented immigrants are a social burden," illegals tend to shy away from seeking social services because they don't want to be deported. Wherefore $55K+? How many toys. How many phone bills. How much in the poor box at church. Hoe much for pencils, steaks, charcoal, glasses, panties, bras, bikes, skateboards, concerts, Blockbuster, Monistat, Head & Shoulders, Listerine. AOL. Computers. Backpacks. Uniforms. Night School. What of the Devil's Highway itself, the tormented border in Arizona? In June 2003, right in the heart and heat of the killing season, Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management, released a study. Sooner or later, everyone will release a study. But this one made the Mexican consuls of Arizona happy. No doubt Vicente Fox faxed it to the White House. Thunderbird learned that Arizona "gets $8 billion in economic impact annually from the relationship" with Mexico. That's profit, not costs. Mexico makes $5.5 billion. Reymundo and his son would have been stunned to know they were dying under a high tide of money. Critics will be stunned to learn that the United States makes more money in the deal than those wily Mexicans. Thunderbird relates: That leaves a profit of $319 million. The Arizona Republic further quotes the report: • The average annual wage for Arizonans is $28,355; for the state's Mexican immigrants it's $12,963. We not only gonna get it back, but we gonna pay for it, too... "The Center of Everything" Laura Moriarty "Taft" Ann Patchett "Reservation Blues" Sherman Alexie "Murther & Walking Spirits" Robertson Davies "Zydeco" Rick Oliver and Ben Sandmel "Django" Michael Dregni "Blowback" Bill Pronzini "The Salterton Trilogy" Robertson Davies "Cavedweller" Dorothy Allison "In the weeks after Billy Tucker tried to kill Dede, she and Nolan reminded Tacey of those puppies. sleepy-eyed but always watching. and jumping up happily when the other approached. There was no doubt they were in season, tuned to each other and vibrating to the same measure. They were like dogs and children in summer, their tongues always hanging loose and their hair smelling sweet and slightly acrid at the same time, like sugar and piss and love. Sometimes Tacey would take a breath of them and laugh despite herself, but once in a while coming in on them when they were pressed to each other, she would feel as if something would hit her in the heart, stopping her utterly and making her whole life feel useless and uncertain. No one affected her like that, no one speeded her heart or altered her breathing. No one in her life had ever even made her think of changing anything. Watching two who in one moment had been remade rendered everything she had ever known questionable. Tacey pulled out some of her stories and read them through. With the smell of all that lust in the house, the stories seemed thin and bloodless. Tacey rocked on her mattress and tried to imagine what it felt like, the reeling passion that had overtaken Nolan. She felt cramped, uncertain and fearful that there were things she had not yet prepared herself to face." 2006 "Cavalier & Clay" Michael Chabon "Cloudsplitter" Russell Banks And yet are there not adult men and women, with all the powers, privileges, and prerogatives of adults, who secretly thin of themselves as children? Is it not as if our large, hairy bodies are merely fortunate disguises, and some of us are children going about in the adult world like spies, our hearts breaking daily at the sight of what our fellow children must suffer solely as a consequence of their not being as cleverly disguised as we? In cautious silence, we observe the cruelties and indignities, the inequities and powerlessness they must endure, until at last their bodies, too, grow large and hairy like ours and they are able to pass into the general population of adults, where, like most people, they either forget that they were ever children themselves or else they, too, become spies. We dare not identify ourselves one to the other, for fear that we would lose the powers and privileges of adulthood, and so we remain silent, whilst other people's children are beaten instead of nurtured, whilst other people's children are humiliated and bullied instead of taught, whilst other people's children are treated as property, as objects of little value, instead of as human beings no less valuable in the eyes of the Lord than we ourselves. Whilst I was in the midst of this task, I heard a group of horsemen approach from the direction of Harpers Ferry and stop before the house. "Hello, the house!" one of them shouted. "Anyone there?" "A Man" Orianni Fallaci http://www.artsandopinion.com/2006_v5_n5/lewis-24.htm "Immortality" Milan Kundera Road: a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and to enjoy it. What's more, he no longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed. Biography: sequence of events that we consider important to our life. However, what is important and what isn't? Because we ourselves don't know (and never think of putting such a silly question to ourselves), we accept as important whatever is accepted by others, for example by our employer, whose questionnaire we fill out: date of birth, parents' occupation, schooling, changes of occupation, domicile, marriages, divorces, births of children, serious diseases. It is deplorable, but it is fact: we have learned to see our own lives through the eyes of business or government questionnaires. A bust of a laughing Julius Caesar is unthinkable. But American presidents depart for eternity concealed behind the democratic convulsion of laughter. "Waiting" Ha Jin "Deadwood" Pete Dexter "A Widow For One Year" John Irving The novelist, Ruth Cole, putting up with a Q&A session following a reading: "Where do you get your ideas?" some innocent soul asked the author; it was someone unseen, a strangely sexless voice in the vast hall. Allan rolled his eyes. It was what Allen called "the shopping question": the homey speculation that one shopped for the ingredients in a novel. "My novels aren't ideas–I don't have any ideas," Ruth replied. "I begin with the characters, which leads me to the problems that the characters are prone to have, which yields a story–every time." (Backstage, Eddie felt as if he should be taking notes.) "It is true that you never had a job, a real job?" It was the impertinent young man again, the one who'd asked her why she repeated herself. She hadn't called on him; he was at her again, uninvited. It was true that Ruth had never had a "real" job, but before Ruth could respond to the insinuating question, Allan Albright stood up and turned around, doubtless in order to address the uncivil young man in the back of the concert hall. "Being a writer is a real job, you asshole!" Allan said. Ruth knew he'd been counting. By his count, he'd been nice twice. On the subject of childhood, Ruth preferred what Greene had written in The Power and the Glory: "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." Oh, yes–Ruth agreed. But sometimes, she would have argued, there is more than one moment, because there is more than one future. "The Most Beautiful House In the World" Witold Rybczynski "The Death of Sweet Mister" Daniel Woodrell "No Country For Old Men" Cormac McCarthy "The Fortress of Solitude" Jonathan Lethem "A Case of Curiosity" Allen Kurzweil "The Blind Assassin" Margaret Atwood "Interpreter of Maladies" Jhumpa Lahiri Here are a few books that I read for a bit then pick back up...both started in 2006... "The Discoverers" Daniel J. Boorstin "How the Mind Works" Steven Pinker "Crossing the Rubicon" Michael C. Ruppert "Genesis of Music" Harry Partch ...and there's Vonnegut: Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. ------------------------- When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted. Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government. I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it. I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one. But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this: Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all? How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes? "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …" And so on. Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff. For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break! ------------------------- There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are! I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person? No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said. During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again. Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken. One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us. ------------------------- And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times. The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade. But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball. Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then: Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut. If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you. If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler? ------------------------- My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41,he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint. Other drunks have seen pink elephants. And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today. So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief. That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay. Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People. About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem. I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other. But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut. And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels. When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey. Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on. © 2004 In These Times |
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