Worth a look

I read through World War Z last night, and really liked it. It's written as a serires of interview transcripts with various characters - doctors, smugglers, soldiers, survivors, etc., and their disjointed union tells the tale of a massive outbreak of a deadly zombie virus. It's very War of the Worlds in its style. Easily found at my favorite book store, the library.

The elephant in the room

Intolerant Chic - Benjamin Schwarz discusses Stuff White People Like, which if you want, maps much of the cultural fault line running through this, and every, election season.

I did make it to Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like book signing. In fact, I showed up slightly early.

Online Library

Check it out (ha ha)

First Step - Set up free blog

Cool Tools is cool: The Personal MBA

I once dabbled with the idea of getting an MBA. After a life avoiding any work in a business, I wanted to start one of my own and knew zero about it. Like many folks, I thought a heavy-duty school program would cure my ignorance and inexperience. But an official MBA degree can easily cost $100,000. I figured out I would learn more spending $500 in self-education. So I devoted $200 for books and the other $300 actually starting a small mail-order business (the fee went for an ad). In two years I learned more about how business really worked than any MBA graduate I had met. No matter what they tell you, an MBA is not essential for landing or handling a good business job. The chief "skill" you'll come away by your degree is a diploma, and a network of indebted friends in business. The latter is actually useful.

Step two eludes me, but step three is Profit!

Read the book

I read "No Country for Old Men" on the plane to visit the folks, and I liked it better than the movie and I still like the movie. That said, although the Coen's followed it the story fairly closely, they left out some things and changed others that made a difference. For one, I think the Sheriff's war story makes a big difference in how you view him. Another is Chigur's speech with Moss's wife (and the ending there is explicit, which also makes a big difference in what his accident later means), etc.

It's a good book, even if the lack of quote makes and apostrophes gives it a James Ellroy affectation.

Newt Gingrich Amazon Reviews

Via Freakonomics, Newt Gingrich is a prolific Amazon reviewer and just gave Chuck Schumer's book a positive recommendation. Weird.

Chuck Klosterman Can't Lose

I read Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Coco-Puffs yesterday. He's sort of a P. J. O'Rourke crossed with Nick Hornby. Or maybe it's Gregg Easterbrook crossed with Camille Paglia. Bill Simmons vs Tom Wolf? Whatever conveys the appropriate sense of Gen-X gonzo journalism. Complete with the, pardon my French, "fuck-patois" that is the bane my generation. Just a side note, but vulgarity is our free-love and polyester leisure suits of Gen X - a manifestation of our self-absorption whose shame will bloom in the fullness of time. At least in those who remain capable of shame.

ANYWAY, as the title indicates*, Klosterman is obsessed with sex, drugs, and coco-puffs, or to state the subtext directly: Death, boredom, and authenticity. I know this is the subtext not because I am clever, but because he writes that it so several times. He also calls nearly everything post-modern and ironic, and at the same time, I get the feeling he thinks those labels are ridiculous intellectual posturing. He's hipsterdom eating itself. He's fallen and he can't get up. Perhaps the saving grace, here, is his sense of perspective, which leads to humor. The book is eminently quotable:

I know nobody uses the term Generation X anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It's simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It's not pejorative or complimentary; it's factual. I'm a "Gen Xer," okay? And I buy shit marketed to "Gen Xers." And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.

So, what's the final score? Should you invest time in this gen-x navel gazing by some wildcat music reviewer? Chuck Klosterman Is His Own Worst Metaphor is a review of a subsequent book, but the same message applies:

Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually (more than they already do). I’m not arguing that a North Dakotan with a stack of KISS albums and a bong is going to single-handedly change the country. But he might be an enzyme for some sort of progression. And I assert as much knowing that Klosterman analyzes the significance of Morrissey’s Hispanic fan base, Val Kilmer’s uncanny politeness, and the reasons Goths annually coagulate in Disneyland (bingo players “gather”; Goths “coagulate”).

One interesting twist to all this may be Klosterman’s own melee with celebrity. Chuck Klosterman IV will serve as a benchmark on Klosterman’s own celebrity arc – he’s that much closer to the falling action on this ride to success. What personal crisis must follow? What could becoming a celebrity mean to someone whose purpose is to decipher the spaces inhabited by celebrities and their metaphors? According to his own measures, he’ll soon become a signal describing some cultural message. He’ll eventually come to exist as a living opposition, some breathing contradiction between his outward, abstract meaning and the guy who ties his own shoes every morning – a man antagonized by his own shadow.

His fate necessarily leads in one of two directions. Either: He successfully breaks from the abstraction (i.e., dies a fiery death in a Chevy Vega that swan dives from a Cuban bridge at sunset; Klosterman IV is reissued by Penguin Classics). Or: He successfully reconciles with his contradictory condition (i.e., becomes a conservative radio host; procreates with the urgent fury of Britney Spears’ secret garden).

However, I don't think that "young Americanss urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually..." It's not like post-modern intellectual culture (the high-culture to the coco-puffs low) has anything better to offer other than nihilism and cynicism.

In another interview, Chuck Klosterman: Articulating the Unintelligible, the author begins by saying:

It is uniquely fitting that the man who is being called the voice of Generation X uses cultural debris the way a flasher uses a trench coat. Eloquence suddenly emerges from his deceptively chatty prose, imparting momentous meaning from sources that can usually be called humble. Chuck Klosterman's voice is compelling to the extent that he writes convincingly about the significance of cereal commercials. It isn't a case of making something out of nothing, the conclusions he arrives at are frighteningly substantial, somehow managing to be funny at the same time.

What fascinates me about Chuck is that every time he speaks it's like he's tossing out new material. The Klosterman process is operating constantly: A casual mixture of hedonic mirth and profundity that veers to the edge of neurosis and pulls back triumphantly. This is how he has managed , I assume, to write for Spin, Esquire, and ESPN while churning out a steady stream of book titles. I suspect that it would be hard for him to turn it off.

The tossing out new material description is apt. Klosterman is very much like a stand-up comedian trying out new material to see what sticks, which results in an uneven book. But still, even when he's off, there's still usually something there to chew on.

---
* "You can't judge a book by its cover" is misleading. Maybe you shouldn't reach a definitive conclusion, but it's a good place to start.

A Thousand Monkeys, Part A Billion

Many minds, one novel? Wiki tries to create art
2/5/2007 12:27:14 PM, by Nate Anderson

Students at the UK's De Montfort University in Leicester have joined forces with Penguin to launch a "novel wiki." The project, which will run throughout the month of February, is designed to see if thousands of users can do as good a job at creating a fictional narrative as they can at describing the Jetsons. Several days into the project, it sadly (and predictably) looks like they cannot.

Duh?

Speak of the Devil

This morning's quote of the day:

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
Mark Twain

I know, it's not easy to stand up and go, "Why don't we set all of Proust on fire?"

Well, it would burn for a long time, like a viola.

I Can't Stand This Book (and the comments) [via Dr. Frank] made me think (it happens) about what books I hate. Since I don't teach (ergo I do?), I'm not going to get stuck trying to foster learning from books I hate, or books that aren't even wrong - but still, what am I supposed to like, but read and hated... Honestly, I'm drawing a blank. And it feels awkward, because not hating anything suggests that I am a white-bread, uncultured philistine. There's a strong temptation to just say "I hate Moby Dick!" But, like Bartleby, I would prefer not to.

There are books I had read but didn't like (the Aeneid, Second Sex...) but I don't loath them. In fact, teaching them might be fun in an adversarial way. Should I dress up in a suit of armor and attack the ice-cream sundae that is Ulysses? I suspect that you have to live in constant, unrelenting contact with the text - have your nose shoved into it - to develop true-book hatred.

Hard-Boiled

I finished reading the ultra-pulpy crime novel Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Hammett blazed the path for Raymand Chandler and Richard Stark. Later, Red Harvest inspired Yojimbo, which of course inspired how many other films. Needless to say, it's not a real happy story.

It's not a masterpiece of characterization or plotting either, yet its weirdly hypnotic style and gallows humor carry you along:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.”

The slang can make it hard to relate to the people though - they seem cartoonish - in the same way that it's hard to find Cagney or Edward Robinson scary. That said, the story was originally serialized, and it doesn't follow the conventional arc - it just keeps escalating and pilling up bodies along the way (hence Red Harvest).

I'm not sure why I read it -- and that's not a criticism of it in general but of this type of amoral story in general. Vicarious thrills? Moral allegories?

Enjoyable Bit of Sci-Fi

Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder. Nice steampunk swash-buckling space millitary-political mini-Dyson sphere coming-of-age story. Yes, I did that on purpose. Does go around the "war is stupid - can't we all see we are people" bend, but makes up for it with imagination and characters. Reminded me a little of Serenity, except sans the Ye and whatnot anachronisms.

Some Danger Involved

I spent the last two evenings sitting around home, nursing a drink, and reading. Last night I read Some Danger Involved, which gets two-thumbs up.

From Publishers Weekly
Modeled after the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but with a verve all its own, this debut mystery introduces a likable pair of sleuths and explores the Jewish quarter of Victorian London. Fresh, self-effacing Thomas Llewelyn is a plucky lad down on his luck (he was booted out of Oxford and served eight months in prison for petty theft) when he becomes the unlikely assistant to idiosyncratic Cyrus Barker, a patently Holmesian private detective with an enigmatic background in China. Hardly has Llewelyn settled into his new quarters in his employer's residence when he is called upon to assist Barker in an investigation of the crucifixion death of a young Jewish scholar. The convoluted tale leads through the tightly circumscribed Jewish ghetto, as it appears that the murder may be the overture to a pogrom by vicious anti-Semitic factions. Barker's methods ("You see, I try to throw a web over London and sit like a spider in the midst of it all, my fingers on the strands") and Thomas's tone (" 'I must admit, sir,' I confessed, 'that I doubted you a little' ") may owe much to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but the author's lively, learned tour of the various foreign enclaves of 19th-century London is notably contemporary. Besides initiating Llewelyn into the rigors of detective work, Barker introduces his young associate to a number of exotic cuisines, Chinese and Italian among them. Such period curiosities and the growing friendship between Llewelyn and Barker are the chief delights of this engaging novel.

I thought Barker and Llewelyn were a little too modern in their sensibilities, but still, good fun all around.

His Majesty's Dragon

I read Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon today, and it's great.

First, there's the catchy title, which calls to mind some sort of scaly 007 - thought that's not quite it. The book is set in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, except with dragons in historical fantasy genre, e.g., Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy.

Anyway, it's a sort of Harry Potter with Dragons meets Master and Commander, and it flips by in a few hours. Add in a little Han Solo humour and it would be a wonderful film.

What's in a name?

Who worries about names more than expectant parents? How about authors?

Episode 2 of why I Chose the Names I Did:

Tally Youngblood

This was obviously an important one. Midnighters bounces between five POV characters, but we’re stuck inside Tally’s head for 240,000 words! So obviously, her name can’t be too annoying or unwieldy. “Plaztercrappitastica” is way out.

But Uglies takes place 300 years in the future. Names probably won’t be the same as now. So I needed something that’s not a current name, but that doesn’t make your brain fritz when you read it. So I chose a regular word in English.

That’s right: “tally” as in “count.” As in “Hey, Mr. Tally-man, tally me bananas.”

Thus, the little spell-checker in your brain doesn’t ping every time your eyes scan across those letters. (And the real-world MS Word spell-checker doesn’t draw a squiggly line under it.) “Tally” is capitalized, of course, so you know it’s a name, but otherwise “tally” reads as a perfectly normal word.

Maybe authors could take inspiration from spammers? I kinda like Eduardo Watches, but I didn't see Max Power anywhere.

Happiness

Dan Gilbert talks about happiness. Which I clumsily reviewed here.

Things to read

From Clive Davis: Christopher Hitchen's on the very polite Americans in Borat's movie (I totally think he deserved that recent punch in the nose). Also, somewhat proving that you can't review a bad book without showing off, here's an essay on Dawking's The God Delusion. And for fans of Malapropisms here's an introduction to The Inscrutable Americans, which I am now curious to see how it turns out (Amazon) [via Orrin Judd].

The Book of Ratings

From Yahoo's Pick of the Day: The Book of Ratings. Everything and Anything. Many things you wouldn't have thought of. Um, or rather, many things of which I had not thought. For instance, pasta shapes:

Capellini

This seems like one of the better reasons to keep your mind uninfected by the Italian language. If you speak Italian, suddenly waiters are encouraging you to try the little hairs. "The little hairs are very good tonight," they say. "You really can't go wrong with a plate full of little hairs." I know that there's always the English term "angel hair pasta," but that's different. I have no problem believing that angels are delicious. I'm sure you could run up and bite off an angel's thumb and it would taste like Krispy Kreme. B

Agnolotti

These are chubby little ravioli, and the name means "fat little lambs." Cute! That's a lovely little image, fat lambs frolicking in a field of cream sauce with a bunch of hideously overgrown scallops and occasionally being stabbed with the massive fork of a vengeful god. I also like to imagine ninjas fighting with throwing stars among the sheeps and scallops, but I don't think that has a culinary analog. Maybe capers. A

[...]

I wanted to give my blog a D, but it already switched to Pass/Fail.

Book

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert - What appears to be a self-help book is really a book on how our brain wiring affects our memories and how we remember (in reverse) what we want to happen to us down the road. Much like the way the wiring of our eyes and visual processing results in optical illusions, the way our memories work (for example, leaving a lot out and not noticing, or later on making things up to fill in the gaps) causes our expectations and plans to veer far off course when the same mechanisms are used to plan our futures. How we think we will feel in the future, depending on various butterflies flapping and so forth, is often wrong.

The upshot is that we fool ourselves consistently, even if we know about the lies. Because we are good liars. So - do you want to avoid the Charlie Brown reenactment? Read the book.

PS, I don't agree with a lot of Mr. Gilbert's world view, which I think tilts towards the materialistic (in the philosophical sense), but that's more of a question of destination and this is about locomotion.

Shakespeare - what a hack

Speaking of writers to emulate, how about Shakespeare? Consider this introduction to a list of quotes from The Shakespeare Book of Lists:

The old joke goes something like this: A guys walks out of the theater after seeing Hamlet for the first time. “I don’t know why everybody thinks Hamlet is such a well-written play,” he says. “It is full of clichés."

I don't have my OED on me to verify that old Bacon-bits originated each of these phrases, or popularized them, or whatever. For that matter, I don't even have an OED.