Baby Got Books

Mourning My New Orleans. Sadly, I didn’t write this.

Before Katrina hit and made me want to throw up 24/7, I had a few posts stock-piled to keep the blog moving if I was occupied with other things. Um, so here’s one now:

The NYT runs the second article in a week about pirate books. This one is a little longer than Hitchens’ article, and it tries to explain the whole pirate thing. In an unrelated note (?) – National Talk Like A Pirate Day is on September 19. And they have a book apparently.

What can I say? I fell for the hype.

I salute this fellow on his book tour, but he suckered me into buying a book I didn’t need. That’s appropriate, perhaps, as the book is about a gang of con men who turn on and eventually kill one another off. It flows from a throwaway line in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi about a (supposedly) real-life 19th century American flim-flammer. Okay. Fair enough. Good concept. Fairly good writing. Just not a great book. When I want salty dialogue and a pitch-black view of human nature, I turn to My Man, and John Wray just doesn’t quite measure up. I’ll turn to Cormac’s latest for my next read.

After a brief hiatus, during which I stayed home with my kids and had them drain the life and brains out of me, I am resurfacing to post on our infamous blog. The majority of my reading this summer kept with my theme of getting some R&R and was mindless; the one exception to this was The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

If you are going to read one educational book this year, this is the one to read. Now let me preface this by saying that I am a huge Thomas Friedman fan. His first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, was amazing, and he is my favorite NYTimes OpEditor. So clearly I am biased and already predisposed to all of Friedman’s opinions.

The whole premise of this book is that with global technology, the internet, outsourcing, etc., the world has become “flat” and in the process India and China are kicking our butts. Friedman covers a very complex and technical topic but he does so in a way that is understandable to the layperson. I am not a technogeek at all (unlike our blog owner) but Friedman first describes the ten forces that flattened the world (from when Netscape went public, to outsourcing Y2K to in-forming [google, yahoo!, etc] to “the steroids” Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual. He then discusses in detail how developing countries have responded to this change versus how America has and then concludes with what this means for America (in a nutshell – we’re ***ed.)

My first reaction while reading the book was “ohmigod I am being totally left behind in the 21st century and know nothing about this new world.” For example, does anyone else know what Apache is? It is an underlying web server that was built by a bunch of nerds working online in an open-source chat room which all the big technology companies built their e-commerce engines on. What floored me was that this was all developed by techno-geeks from around the world for free and they built something better than Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun could. Apache today powers about 2/3 of the websites in the world and since it’s free – it has allowed people in Russia or Vietnam to develop their own websites and be part of the worldwide ecommerce system – pretty cool right? This is just one example of the many factoids that I learned from this book.

On the depressing side – the book also made me realize just how far behind the US is falling. Bangalore, India is apparently taking over the world and most probably when you call customer service for Amazon, Dell or even New Jersey unemployment – it is being answered by an Indian sitting in a Bangalore customer service center. The book discusses at length how there is a huge Indian population of young ,educated, aggressive people ages 15 to 25 years old (they’re known as zippies) who want the good life. They are like the equivalent of the 19th century American immigrants but because of the flattening of the world – they no longer have to come to America for oppportunity, they can stay in India. So, America is no longer going to attract the best and the brightest because they can all stay in their home countries.

Furthermore, India and China are continuing to put a lot of government funding into the science, engineering and technology programs while our brilliant President just cut funding for the National Science Foundation by $100 million. Factiod #2 – 40% of NASA employees are 50 or older. Only 4% of NASA workers are under thirty. And we wonder why our space program sucks???

The book at times did get a little repetitive but it opened up my mind so much to this new world and I definitely feel more knowledgable and certainly will be more focused on keeping up with the times. Most importantly – once I finished reading the book – I told my boys that they WILL be engineers when they grow up because according to Friedman, they will definitely be able to get a good job.

Phew……got in the blog before the summer ended.

Fuckity Fucking Fuck.

One thing that made me smile this morning – the Mayor of New Orleans announced that the Federal Government is ready to step in and help out with the rescue and rebuilding of the city, from the President on up.

You know it’s gonna be bad when The Weather Channel has Jim Cantore 90 Miles Away. This morning I’m waiting to watch the biblical-style destruction of my hometown on national television, and an old Randy Newman song keeps running through my head, Louisiana 1927. If you’ve never heard it, it’s a very simple song that tears your heart out if you’re from that part of the world.

The lyrics.

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

CHORUS
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tyrin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, “Little fat man isn’t it a shame what the river has
done
To this poor crackers land.”

CHORUS

I’ve finished a very enjoyable book, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka.

I feel extra cool — it was announced that this book had been selected to the long list for the Man Booker Prize while I was reading it. Sweet.

The book tells the story of two Ukranian sisters who emigrated to England with their family. They’ve become estranged after the death of their mother and arguments over their inheritance. Their father, an engineer who is a genius, crazy, or both was left out of the mother’s will entirely because he’d squander it all on some hare-brained scheme. The hair-brained scheme that he becomes involved in is attempting to “save” a voloptuous blond Ukranian from being forced to leave England by marrying her. This story line is hilarious. The sisters, who now have a common enemy, join forces to derail the plan. As the story unfolds, we learn that one sister is the “war baby” and the other sister is the “peace baby”, based upon the events of their childhoods. The differences in their upbringing have everything to do with how they see the world and their roles in it. As we learn about the things that have happened in the father’s past, too, one can appreciate some of his quirks. Pretty good book, and I recommend it all around.

I am going to make a blanket statement that any book by Russians, Soviets, or former Soviets is going to be good. I can’t think of any book off the top of my head that I’ve read involving Russo-protagonists that I have been disappointed with. Stick with the Soviet-block lit, apparently you can’t go wrong.

Writing for The Guardian, Zoe Williams is horrified – HORRIFIED! – to learn that British Members of Parliament plan to read The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter 6 on summer vacation. But remember, it’s not snobbery if your book choices make her think that you are a retard:

Back to the fiction: on face value these choices suggest an extremely low IQ. This isn’t a question of literary snobbery, of failing to understand the joy of an undemanding read. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve been working; if you can find pleasure and, more importantly, diversion in a book that has been written with deliberate preteen simplicity, a very low level of ambiguity and an emphasis on dog-level clarity (Yes! No! Good! Bad!) then you are not very bright.

What an asshole.

Shakespeare: The Ultimate Rapper.

New novel Hunger’s Bride by Paul Anderson is so huge (1,360 pages, 4 1/2 pounds), its web site includes a slideshow of safe reading positions (fifth bullet). The NYT says it may even be good.

A few interesting tidbits for a Monday morning:

Librarian.net gives us a heads up that you can literally check out lesbians at the library in Sweden. You know, for dispelling prejudice and whatnot.

The Onion notes that fundamentalists are rejecting the reality of gravity and are pushing for an alternative to be taught in schools: Intelligent Falling.

Lastly, the NYT has a round-up penned by Christopher Hitchens of new pirate histories. Aaaarrrgggh. I picked up The Pirates Lafitte immediately upon reading the article. More to come on that one.

That’s right. I read Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling. Book six in the series if you’re keeping score at home.

There’s little point in reading this book if you haven’t read the five that preceded it. It’s really very good, and there is a reason that kids read it in one sitting. It holds up for adult reading as well, if you haven’t lost your childlike wonder and you’re belief in……. ***MAGIC****. Sorry. I was channeling Doug Henning there for a minute.

Anyway. That’s all I really have to say about this book. It has been written about and analyzed at length elsewhere. What I did come across, that I thought was really very cool, was The Guardian’s alternative Harry Potter Contest. The idea was to write about the death of Headmaster Albus Dumbledore in the manner of a famous writer (not a spoiler, because the contest was held well before the book came out). My favorites are in the style of Irvine Welsh, JD Salinger, and the Wooster & Jeeves stories.

I am posting this for Shaft as part of my new posting service for those of us who are too busy to post on their own. A friend of Shaft sez:

Hey, I have an interesting book for you and your book club. Especially interesting for you given your heritage. It’s “Guerrilla Radio: Rock ‘N’ Roll and Serbia’s Underground Resistance“, by Matthew Collin.

The heritage comment refers to Shaft’s guerrilla past. It’s out of print, but available used at Amazon. Here’s an article in The Nation with an excerpt from the book.

Sadly, Persepolis 2 is subtitled The Story of A Return, rather than Electric Bugaloo.

Persepolis and Persepolis 2 are graphic novels about the fascinating life of the author, Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis 2 begins where the first book left off.

Persepolis ended with the young Marjane fleeing Iran for boarding school in Austria. from the beginning, the boarding school in Austria idea seems like a poor one – from a parenting standpoint. When things finally hot bottom, Marjane returns to an Iran that had been fighting Iraq for years. This book ends like her last book, with Marjane leaving Iran, this time for good.

Powell’s Bookstore has an interview with Ms. Satrapi that contains this nugget:

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

Amen, sister. This book is a worthy follow-up to Persepolis. So read them already.

Whew. Finally finished another book, and this one took longer than most. The book is called You Remind Me of Me, and it’s written by a fella named Dan Chaon.

I don’t know why it took me so long; it’s only 356 pages, which is nothing compared to any of the Harry Potter books that thirteen year-olds finish in one ten-hour all-night stretch.

I’m not even sure where to start on the book without giving away too much of the plot. On second thought, I guess most of the plot is pretty self-explanatory from reading any of the blurbs about it. A teenager gets pregnant, gives up the baby for adoption, gets pregnant again, doesn’t give that baby up for adoption, and we follow the lives of the two kids as they grow up and their paths cross. There’s not a whole lot of love in this book, although the main characters are sympathetic people. And none of the characters reminds me of me. They’re all from Nebraska and South Dakota, with little stints in Chicago, and I don’t have much in common with any of them.

As for the story structure, each chapter is given a date, and they don’t go in chronological order. Uh-oh — sounds a little like The Egyptologist. Although Chaon does a pretty good job of not completely confusing the reader about who’s involved, what’s going on, and when it’s happening in relation to other chapters. What Chaon has going for him is a very readable writing style, and a gift for prose. Like The Confessions of Max Tivoli, this book makes very good use of metaphor, without losing the reader (unlike The Final Solution). Is there such a thing as “book-dropping”? Because I seem to be doing it. Anyway, where I think Chaon stumbles a little is in his ability to convey a long-form tale. Apparently, this guy has won (or almost won) lots of awards for his short stories, and this appears to be his first foray into the novel (correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. DJ), and I think he overcompensated. This story doesn’t need to be this long, and includes lots of details which, while not red herrings intended to add suspense, also don’t do anything to move the story along (in the manner of John Grisham’s style, like in A Time to Kill).

All in all a pretty nice read, but not nearly as moving as the blurbs would lead you to believe. But Chaon lives in Cleveland Hts. (sort of my adopted hometown from my college years), so I’ll cut him some slack.

As proof that you can bet on anything, a few days after the long list is announced for this year’s Man Booker Prize, The Times prints the London betting odds for each book. Somehow, I think that the Vegas sports books are going to take a pass on this one.

Ahoy, readers. Here’s a post that’s actually about a book. I’ve wrapped up Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, which is way cooler than my professorship at the University of Pimento Loaf. I crack myself up. (If, like me, you need to look up semiotics, here’s a definition – if you figure out what it means, call me). Anyway, I mention that semiotics thing, first because it is in the first paragraph in any article about Umberto Eco, and secondly, because I think it is actually central to the book.

Mysterious Flame is the story of an antiquarian book dealer in Milan, Yambo, who finds himself in the hospital and a little confused. He’s in his sixties, and he’s had a stroke. He learns that his personal memories are gone, but his memory of facts (encyclopedia memory) is intact. His wife and family and friends are all strangers to him, but he can remember lines of poems, songs, and historical events.

He’s sent home to try to adjust with the hope that familiar surroundings will jog his memory. He relearns his way around town and gets reaquainted with his business. He learns through a chance encounter that he is a philanderer, and he’s wonders what’s the point of an affair if it blotted from your memory. Early attempts to revive his memory are not successful. His wife eventually decides that the best thing to do is send him to his family’s country home for a few weeks, where he spent his childhood, in the hopes that the surroundings will revive his memories.

In the attic and closed rooms of the country house, Yambo finds a treasure of old books and records that he uses as the foundation for reconstructing his life. The covers of these books, the cover of albums, illustrations, and the lyrics of the songs are reproduced throughout the book. Up to a point, you rediscover the books of Yambo’s youth along with him. Every once in a while a feeling more powerful than the “flicker” of recognition, the “mysterious flame” lets Yambo know that he is on to something.

In this way workman-like way, Yambo rediscovers a role he played in Fascist Italy during World War II and “remembers” the great love of his life. I don’t want to go any further into those plots, because they are very interesting and who knows, you may want to read the book.

So the “semiotic aspect” of the book was the idea of images, words, and music as signposts for the memory. It got me wondering, if I were Yambo telling the story, what images, books, and songs would have been used as the sign posts of my youth. What media would I use to tell my life story? I thought briefly about pulling some things together for this post, but I ramble on long enough as it is. Maybe another day.

I dug this book.

But here’s an aside: while re-learning about Italy’s involvement in WWII, I kept asking myself, has anyone gotten off easier for that war than Italy? Could you imagine a grandchild of Hitler running on a far right national socialist platform in Germany? Yet, Mussolini’s granddaughter is a member of the European Parliament as we speak. Did no one catch the last name? She began her political career as a topless model. She’s also a surgeon. She’s also the niece of Sophia Loren. Who married one of Mussolini’s sons. I’m not making this up. Politics may be fairly boring in this country.

I am on a science-dork e-mail list newsletter that I should have unsubscribed to long ago. This week, some guy posted this rant about….something. Here it is, the most baffling rant you may see all week in its entirety:

Braking News — Sky scheduled to fall next year. Grasp firmly
ZCY News 3 Aug 05. The White House announced Monday that Intelligent Design would hereafter be incorporated into all Physics and Biodynamics classes. In this far reaching variation in Boyle’s 13th Law of Thermomaniacs, the ingestion of Home Economics was considered to be a logical digestion of the obvious intelligence of wives and mothers in the design of all circular celler stairs. Thus, will the final design of evolutional intelligence become forever wedded to all metaphysical archo-psychic theories of BubaBowWow megagenetics. Microgenetics remains another story whose dimensions remain totally misunderstood. The final portion of this story will be revealed last Monday as Time Stops by the new topnotch design. Copernicus was last heard rolling over in his grave. as Darwin released his grasp on the ghost

For Falling Sky insurance, call Maury&Dog Inc. at 915-555-HELP For Intelligent Design insurance call maurysis@ev1.net Ext. TILT

Ever wonder what really gets Godzilla’s goat?

Politcs blogger Wonkette reports on a comic book for conservatives that has the most chilling vision of the future yet:

It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden’s plans to nuke New York City.

Seriously. WTF? Is there no end to this horseshit? Haven’t at least two of those guys been jailed for taking a steaming dump on the Constitution?