A Couple of Books That the Unabomber Would Enjoy

Jonathan Moore's The Night Market is a sci-fi crime thriller that blends the byzantine plotting and tone of Raymond Chandler with some William Gibson/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type near future technology, and there's also plenty of Philip K. Dick-style paranoia (which is fully deserved) but the real impact of this post-noir San Francisco crime drama is that it is all too real-- the city is a burned out husk, as are most of the people who walk through it, because rampant consumption and a sinister form of advertisement has invaded the consciousness of the city and its inhabitants . . . the conspiracy is far-reaching and just and shallow and greedy as it should be . . . this is a book about giving up and giving in: the apocalypse is here and we are living in it-- and the fact that there is not much difference between the San Francisco in the novel and the world right now is beyond frightening . . . I was already primed for this novel because I've been reading Paul Kingsnorth's new collection of essays, Collections of a Recovering Environmentalist, in which he announces the death of the conservation movement and the promulgation of a new form of neo-liberal economic environmentalism, concerned with carbon sinks, global warming, eco-tourism, and market-based technological solutions for ecological problems, which is in contrast to the old school Green movement, which found intrinsic and sacred value in the beauty of biodiversity and wild landscapes, and celebrated the primal human attachment for natural spaces and places free of human subjugation . . . Moore's The Night Market is the end result of this shift towards data-driven market-based solutions, there is complete consumerism, complete consumption, and a world completely dictated by brands, corporations, markets, and the desire to replace the things that are important with things.

Dave Drops a Grotowski

Years ago-- for about thirty seconds-- I contemplated writing a book about the rise of the amateur . . . I was stupefied with the sheer mass of amateurism online: Soundcloud and Youtube and Ebay and all the online photography and blogging and art and animation and how to videos and Pinterest-type sites . . . and then the idea passed, but I was pleasantly surprised when I was browsing through the new non-fiction section at the library to see a book entitled The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield; I always try to bring a couple of books home from the library that I did not intend to take out, as a way to fight the algorithmically-curated society in which we live, and while I rarely finished these, I read this one cover-to-cover; Merrifield is a socialist and the book is something of a manifesto . . . he sees modern life as a battle between a professional data-driven technocracy designed to make you a passive consumer-- if you've got the cash and/or credit-- and the possibility of amateurism . . . literally doing what you love; in his mind the bean-counters are winning, government has been captured by big business; public spaces have been sanitized; and the bottom-up, emergent nature of cities and towns has been eradicated (although he sees hope in countries like Greece, where things have fallen over the edge and anarchists and radicals occupy public/private spaces, similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement) and the main value and purpose of many people is their job, their career, even if it is meaningless, because we are identified by what we do professionally-- that is how we achieve our status (and our health insurance, in America) and Merrifield, slightly impractically, speaks of the happily unemployed and a new way to live; he seems to think there is no refuge for the amateur in any profession-- even in academia you must publish and publish, and the more you are cited, the more you succeed . . . I would beg to differ, being the ultimate amatuer, a high school teacher: I happily teach a course in Philosophy, of which I know nothing about, and a course in Shakespeare, though I'm an awful actor, and now I'm an amateur Rutgers Professor as well-- but I digress (so does Merrifield, personal anecdotes are scattered through the book) and so I'll get back to the review; Merrifield calls on his favorite books to help his case, as many of them are my favorites: Dostoevsky and his Underground Man, Laurence Sterne and Uncle Toby's Hobby Horse, Kafka's Trial and Castle . . . and this reminded me that I used to read much more radically, and lately I've been consuming a lot of economic stuff, trying to understand what the hell is going on when there is perhaps no way in to the bureaucratic technocracy and it's better to work at the micro-level, as Merrifield proposes, and that we all become political animals in whatever way we can, and influence whatever micro-milieu we can influence; I hope Merrifield reads this, as I think he'd be proud of my amateur spirit; I've stopped watching sports and now only play and coach them, and I've resisted the club/professional training route in youth sports, the "next level" so many parents are eager to achieve-- instead I'm coaching the kids in town, and I'm coaching them really well because I'm an amateur, not a professional, because I love it . . . nothing has made me prouder than the fact that my kids are competing with year-round tennis kids on Saturdays at the local racquet club, not because they're decent players-- which they are-- but because my brother and I taught them everything they know about tennis . . . they'd certainly be better if they took year-round lessons from professionals, but that would be costly and also ridiculous; I'm also making my own music and my own podcast, writing this blog, trying to stay abreast of town politics (at least at a sporting level) and generally trying to avoid consumer culture unless it has to do with one of my hobbies-- I feel the press of what Merrifield is talking about and it's easy to succumb, there's a lot of shows on Netflix and a lot of credit out there, and your job can consume you and then you feel good, in a sort of anesthetized way, but we all know that productivity is on the rise and college costs more and more-- which is why I've been hinting to my kids that if they really like something, they don't need to go to college to pursue it . . . college seems to be for smartish people who don't know exactly what they want to do, it's a great (but expensive) failsafe that leads you right into the technocracy, burdened with debt, ready to become a productive worker; this has been heavy, so I'll get out of here with one last idea from the book, which would be amazing and fun to drop on an aspiring actor; Merrifield mentions radical Polish director Grotowski, who calls theater with lights and a stage and props and costumes "rich theater" and this Polish auteur denigrates "rich theater" for aspiring to be film or television,  then he makes a case for "poor theater," where actors become themselves in the scenes, no lights or settings, just an improvisation where you push the actor/spectator gap and the existential limits of the stage in a search for conflict with others . . . while I don't fully understand the theory, I would still love to "drop a Grotowski" on an actor (and if I remember, I'll do it to my friend Jack) when they are telling me about some performance they are in . . . I imagine I would say, "Oh so you're still doing rich theater? How antiquated and pathetic . . . Grotowski would so so disappointed in you."

Robinsons Crusoe: The Ocean is Half Full

I was inspired to read Daniel Defoe's early novel Robinson Crusoe by the stubbornly lovable steward from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins . . . and while I recognize that it is odd to get literary recommendations from a fictitious narrator, I'm glad I read the book; Crusoe is the eternal optimist, he's happy with his original station in life-- the middle state, or what "might be called the upper station of low life"-- but he's not so content that he stays at home, instead he disobeys his father and goes adventuring at sea; he makes the best of things when he is captured into slavery; he does even better for himself on his deserted island, which he tames with his patient capability in all the skills of survival, agriculture, husbandry, and good living and where he realizes that "the fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself" and ends up befriending the ex-cannibal Friday and that's where I thought the story would end, but then there are a surprising number of action-packed adventures after Crusoe is rescued from the island, in Brazil and Northern Spain, involving guns, powder, explosions, cannibals, bears and wolves and when Crusoe finally returns to England most everyone he knew is dead, he is rewarded financially by various investments and could possibly live out the rest of his days in peace and tranquility, but instead-- in a move reminiscent of when Huck Finn decides he's going to light out for the territories-- Crusoe blithely mentions the death of his wife as the reason he goes back to sea with his nephew and revisits his island in order to see the progress the natives have made since he was gone.

Dave Does NOT Bring the Hammer Down

This year, I'm teaching my students very differently than I have in years previous and this is mainly because our college writing class is now based on the notorious Rutgers Expos model; students read five long, dense and difficult non-fiction texts and write synthesis essays connecting these texts; the goal for the student is independent logical thought supported by textual evidence and the goal for the teacher is to provide activities and a framework for the students to investigate the texts; write, think, and peer-edit; and collaboratively comprehend a set of difficult ideas . . . and most importantly, the goal for the teacher is not to perform the traditional, top-down, goal oriented, template-style teaching that makes for good clean lessons, neat closure, and competent performance on tests and papers . . . instead, I've learned to pull back and let kids make a mess of things, as they actually learn to think on their own, without my meddling guidance, my schema activation, and a "big reveal" at the end of class . . . I just finished a book which exemplifies this educational spirit, and it's an easy read that might affect you profoundly; it's called The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik, and, as you might guess, the gardening and carpentry metaphor applies to different methods of teaching; the carpentry model is where you build the kid to an exacting specification-- and there is a great deal of pressure to parent in this manner in the United States . . . to make sure your kid "turns out right," but Gopnik deconstructs the actual task "to parent" and provides plenty of psychological support to her thesis: kids learn better when they are given freedom to flourish in an environment where they can explore, grow, and play . . . and while the results may be more the way a garden grows, slow, messy, and unpredictable . . . which is exactly the way human children grow up-- while we've all heard why babies are born so helpless (it's hard to get such a big head through such a small opening, so infants have mushy skulls) we also have an extended period of middle childhood and adolescence . . . time to explore and grow (unless you're under duress from standardized tests . . . one of the scariest tidbits in the book is the natural experiment with high stakes testing and ADHD . . . districts that put high stakes testing in effect earlier had more ADHD diagnoses and more students on attention-deficit disorder drugs than districts that did not put the policies into place) and teachers and parents are responsible for creating garden-like environments where kids can think on their own; there's an especially powerful experiment with a toy (described here and in this podcast) that drives the point home; the end of the book is solution-based, Gopnik first points out that we're doing all of our children a grave injustice: the children of the middle-class are over-organized, over-trained, over-tested, and feel the pull of top-down dictates . . . so their learning is often carpentry-style and static, and the poor-- because of lack of money, infrastructure, and public space-- deal more with chaos and a lack of a good place to flourish . . . and she points out that we're never going back to the anomaly of the classic 50's "nuclear family" where the father worked and the mother minded the kids; this "traditional" model of the family was actually a rare consequence of the beginning of industrialization; through most of history, both men and women worked, whether on farms or in workshops or hunting and gathering or in careers, as we do now and because you now have to make the choice of keeping a parent at home and taking major pay-cut or having both parents work and then paying people to take care of yoru kids, child-care is a very low-paid profession-- though it requires incredible skill, love, and decision-making . . . carpentry-style "preschool" and rigorous top-down training seems more productive and outcome based, but it's actually an awful way to take care of kids, and to teach kids; so I'm trying my best with my own kids and with my students to let them explore, play, and often fail . . . and I'm trying to set-up rewarding activities and experiences where they have the locus of control and I'm not suggesting how to solve the problem . . . because we're not going to be around forever and if I've learned one thing in my life it's this: when I was a kid, if an adult told me to do something, then I was going to do the opposite (or worse).

2017 Book List

I just finished my 46th book of 2017 this afternoon and it's a fitting one for the end of the year; Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials by Malcolm Harris is an intelligent, analytical and provocative book written by a millennial about the millennial generation that might just change your mind about millennials in general . . . from my perspective, this book is about the end of my era, Generation X, and any slackerly influence it might have had upon the world: kids these days are more prone to anxiety, work harder, do less drugs (drug overdoses seem to be following the Baby Boomer cohort), have less sex, do more homework, get surveilled more-- for a scary take on this, watch Episode 2 of season 4 of Black Mirror-- take out giant student loans which fund ever expanding building projects on college campuses, intern more, get paid less, compete more in an organized fashion, train for this organized competition in areas that are supposed to be fun and healthy-- sports, music, the science fair, dance; are trained by their cell phones to be more available and productive than any work force in history, and don't have much of a shot at the wealth in our nation, which has increasingly been hoarded by the old and the 1% . . . Harris backs this up with plenty of data-- beware: there are charts in this book-- but it is slender and if you have kids or teach or coach or work with kids in any capacity, then you should read this book; the conclusion is not very hopeful . . . I worry about my own children and this book is making me take a step back in my expectations for them and for myself as a parent; the book is also making me enjoy my stable and noncompetitive union job, as the millennial generation will experience job precarity as a matter of course; anyway, this ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution, which is to try to live more in the slow, meditative, and profound world of great books, and avoid the twitchiness of the internet as much as possible . . . I did a pretty good job of it in 2017, especially because we cut the cable and I stopped watching football (and playing fantasy football, which is another one of those productivity training devices that "prepares" people for 24/7 availability and efficiency) and while I didn't quite reach my goal of a book a week, I was close . . . anyway, here is the list--  I discussed my seven favorites on Gheorghe: The Blog-- and wrote reviews of all of them here on Sentence of Dave . . . my favorite book of the year is The Power by Naomi Alderman: if you're going to read one book in 2018, that should be the one . . . and you should try to read at least one book a year, just to avoid being part of the American 26% that reads zero books each year; these are just the books I finished, I started plenty of others and bailed, so anything on this list is pretty good:

1) Selection Day by Aravind Adiga

2) Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927

3) Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

4) Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe

5) The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly

6) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

7) Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

8) Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty

9) Normal by Warren Ellis

10) Jonah Berger: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior

11) Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman

12) The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack

13) Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

14) Ill Will by Dan Chaon

15) Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell

16) Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun

17) The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley

18) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

19) Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty

20) Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan

21) Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

22) Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

23) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

24) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

25) Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick

26) Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

27) 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden Hue

28) Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

29) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

30) The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

31) A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane

32) Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman

33) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

34) David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

35) Michael Connelly: Nine Dragons

36) Gar Anthony Haywood's Cemetery Road

37) Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

38) Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

39) Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

40) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

41) Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty

42) Roddy Doyle's Smile

43) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

44) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

45) The Power by Naomi Alderman

46) Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of the Millenials by Malcolm Harris.

Get Your Head in the Bardo

You've probably heard that acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and you might have even looked up the definition of "bardo" and learned that it's a Tibetan Buddhist term referring to a purgatorial state between life and death; the amount of time you'll spend there reflects how you lived and how you died-- and I'll warn you now: if you tackle this book, you will enter the bardo . . . a meditative state between history and story, fact and fiction, tragedy and comedy, grandeur and disgust . . . and while I struggled at first, because the book is a fragmented post-modern montage of cited recollections, some apparently fictitious, some obviously historical, and many existing in an ambiguous in-between state, but the fact that three of my colleagues successfully passed through the bardo inspired me (thanks, Stacey, Kevin, and Cunningham!) and I kept at it, pondering and plugging along, quotation after quotation, until I reached some sort of enlightenment: there is no reason that death will be any less absurd than life . . . and though Abe Lincoln was mired in the worst kind of war (and he may have been more calculating than most of us learned in school) he was also a loving father and suffered deeply when his son Willie died, but after spending a period of time in awkward and inconsolable mourning, he returned to the land of the living to preside over the country . . . Saunders captures this brief moment and makes something new of it, part poem, part macabre ghost tale, part existentialist tome on the silly and transitory nature of our lives, and part untold history . . . so many people never got a chance to tell their story and become a part of history, and now Willie Lincoln and the rest of the cast have their due.

Nice Work Wilkie!

I just finished The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and though it was published in 1868 and the story is told by an extensive epistolary spiral of narrators, the prose is surprisingly straightforward and compelling and plot is surprising and byzantine-- this work is considered the archetypal English detective story and for good reason it's got all the classic tropes: the superb but oddly touched detective (Sergeant Cuff) and the ominous historical overtones (the British colonization of India) and a butler (spoiler: he didn't do it) and a spooky setting (moors and tidal quicksand) . . . but it's also got themes and elements that would fit right into a modern thriller: opioid addiction, Orientalism, secularism (for Gabriel Betteredge, Robinson Crusoe operates as both the I Ching and the Bible) and-- most significantly-- what might be the first instance of a state dependent and context dependent memory encoding and retrieval experiment in literature . . . I won't spoil the how and why of this, but read the novel-- it's excellent and it's free on the Kindle.

Adrian McKinty + Willie Nelson = Literature

Adrian McKinty has produced another solid mystery set amidst the Troubles in Northern Ireland-- Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly-- and this time Detective Sean Duffy is doggedly investigating a murder committed by crossbow, and along the way he has his requisite adventures of a Fenian in a strange land (the IRA and the RUC are more porous and intermingled than you might imagine) and the book is chock full of the usual McKinty-esque musical allusions (the title is a line from a Tom Waits song . . . who I coincidentally saw last night, playing a crippled Vietnam vet in The Fisher King) and the rest of the references run the gamut from The Butthole Surfers to Morrissey to Rachmaninoff (there's also a few literary allusions, including a nod to one of my favorite Orwell works: Homage to Catalonia) but the throwaway moment that elevates this book over the top, and makes it a work that should be passed down through the ages, a timeless piece that should represent our era, the Odyssey of our generation, is when Detective Duffy tries to break the ice and tells my favorite joke, the Willie Nelson joke . . . I just heard this joke for the first time a couple months ago and the earliest link to it on the internet is 2011 but I'm willing to excuse the anachronism (and the joke could easily be from the '80s . . . because Willie Nelson has been old since I was a kid, and-- remarkably-- he's still the same amount of old) and now, if you check the comments, Adrian McKinty himself provides the origin story of the joke, the first ever celebrity cameo on Sentence of Dave.

The Main Thing About the Future is You're Not In It

If you're a fan of Shane Carruth's time-travel film Primer-- which Chuck Klosterman called the finest and most realistic time-travel movie ever made-- then you'll love reading How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu . . . it's a novel wrapped in a paradox of a conundrum, with charts and footnotes to aid and abet your confusion; at first, I pored over the diagrams and tried to understand the timeline, but soon enough I gave up (the same thing happened with Primer . . .  I could look at this chart for the next twenty years, then time travel back to now and do it all over again, and I still wouldn't understand it) and I just forged ahead into the future of the story, turning pages whether I fully understood them or not, just as I'm doing with my life


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You Got Some Bubba Bona Fides?

Nancy Isenberg's treatise White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is a detailed slog through the swampy history of class in America-- in many ways this tale parallels the story of race in our country, with plenty of cultural division, desired separation, but also the paradox of romanticized identification and appropriation-- she starts with the british colonizers dumping the "waste people" in America, and makes her way to Jimmy Carter running a redneck campaign to defeat George Wallace, Burt Reynolds defeating the hillbillies in Deliverance-- the city boys contending with feral rednecks and learning to be "real men" in this country crucible, but then in his next film (Smokey and the Bandit) Reynolds becomes the rednecks he was fighting, and leaves the shackles of society with runaway bride Sally Field . . . scalawags and squatters, indentured servants and trailer trash, they've been with us since the formation of this great nation, and while they were often derided, romanticized, alienated, and disenfranchised, you can't ignore them . . . Honest Abe Lincoln was called a "mudsill" and "Kentucky trash" and Andrew Jackson a "rude ill-tempered cracker," and Bill Clinton confused things the most-- he was deemed "our first black president" by many notables, but also had the reputation as Slick Willie, a fast talking Southern snake oil salesman . . . from Dolly Parton to Daisy Duke to Tammy Faye Baker to Sarah Palin, there's been no easy way to draw the line between white trash tramp and American treasure . . . we all know the tropes, from The Andy Griffith Show and The Beverly Hillbillies, on up to Swamp People and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo-- and Isenberg ends with the typical lessons that we all know-- we referring to the educated middle class . . . if you help the poor, there will be a political backlash, and the poor will often vote against their best interests because the people trying to help are portrayed at Northeastern liberal elite bureaucratic monsters, who want to take money from the hard-working salt-of-the-earth and give it to the undeserving, and that real men and women don't need socialist government hand-outs and the men to be admired are those who did it themselves, outside the system, without the sympathy of the city folks . . . and Donald Trump figured out a way--despite his lack of Bubba bona fides-- to appeal to this crowd; it's a load of bulshit, of course, as it's very hard in America to make it out of the trailer or the swamp-- though we espouse the American Dream, we talk the talk but we don't walk the walk (we hand our money down through bloodlines much more than European countries, and we have low rates of social mobility) and there is an element of Social Darwinism and eugenic breeding to American class lines that runs deeper than it should, considering our ultimate aim as a nation-- Isenberg explores this topic in the middle of the book, and she ends by discussing the plight of Billy Redden, the iconic banjo-playing inbred from Deliverance . . . he was chosen because of his odd look, did not play the banjo in the film, and wasn't paid very much . . . in 2012 he was interviewed and talked about his job working at Wal-Mart and how he was struggling to make ends meet, a mythic figure turned mundane . . . this is a comprehensive history, a book that is fascinating and boring by turns, full of detail, but it comes to an end a little before you think, because there are 120 pages of endnotes-- whew-- and while it was a fascinating journey, I'm glad to be out of that world . . . if you want something shorter, try Hillbilly Elegy.

If It Wasn't For You Meddling Post-Traumatic Young Adults . . .

Edgar Cantero's meta-novel Meddling Kids is an interesting fictional experiment: a Scooby-Doo-like gang of kid detectives are reunited as adults to try to solve the one special case that traumatized them all, a case so nefarious that it sent them hurtling towards suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, and nihilistic depression . . . and while this conceit works for a while, it eventually it becomes a slog: too many hijinks and amphibian creatures; too much sorcery; too much plot and not enough jokes . . . but I still give it a B+ for the effort and hope Cantero's next effort is just as weird.

The Butterfly Effect Is Silly

James Gleick's new book Time Travel: A History is strange and uncategorizable: it begins as a history of the idea of time travel-- H.G. Wells was the first to marry those words together-- and then the chapters twist and turn through philosophy, physics, literature, memory psychology, technology and the meaning of the digital world . . . the book invites you to think about time as much as it details all the thoughts that have come before, I found myself deciding that the "butterfly effect" is rather silly-- ecosystems are more robust than that and one butterfly isn't going to throw all that much off . . . and our minds are probably similar, one change here or there in the fabric of our timelines wouldn't do all that much to our personality and fate (if it were a butterfly sized change) but we'll never know of course, because the most important thing about time to conscious individuals is that we live through it, our perceptions prisoners to the moments, and no matter what the physicists tell us about the reversibility of cause and effect, time is a one-way street for our bodies and a layered labyrinth for our brains . . . anyway, the book is full of quotable quotes, long summaries of time travel books and movies, philosophical implications of scientific breakthroughs, and plenty of food for thought . . . it makes me want to go back and reread some of Gleick's other great books, Chaos and Faster and The Information, and rereading is a method of time travel as well, one espoused by Nabokov, you return to a text knowing the framework and then start to observe it as a whole, outside of the timescape of flipping pages and forward progress, and know it differently . . . and if you like thinking about such things, then you'll love Time Travel: A History.

Game of Bosch

Michael Connelly's Nine Dragons is one of the darkest Bosch novels . . . this time Hieronymus takes on the Chinese Triad syndicate . . . in Hong Kong, and he leaves a wake of dead bodies in his path as he searches for his abducted daughter; if you've never read a Harry Bosch mystery, this is a good one to start with.

Oh, What a Noble Mind is Here O'erthrown

Whatever he's writing about-- whether it's the banality of sports memoirs; the politics of prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries; the lack of concupiscence at the AVN awards; the general self-centered douche-baggery of John Updike; strategy, sincerity and skepticism during John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign; the genius of Fyodor Dostoevsky and his biographer; 9/11 as seen from the mid-West; the morality of boiling a lobster alive-- and however good his writing, research, and ideas are, the main thing about reading a David Foster Wallace essay is that you are reading David Foster Wallace, he manages to use words like "pleonasm" and "dysphemism" and "gonfalon" and "benthic" and "prolegomenous" and they fit, they pique interest instead of coming off as faux-intellectual and bombastic; I think I read most of the essays in Consider the Lobster years ago, but this time I read all of them, in a row, even the endless account of McCain's campaign and I went through the footnotes as well . . . and no matter what the subject, these essays are compelling, accessible and entertaining-- they make me want to read more Dostoevsky and also study the context of his life and times, they make me want to read Bryan A. Garner's Dictionary of Modern Usage, and--most importantly-- they make me want to re-read more David Foster Wallace . . . he's so alive, his voice so vibrant, that it seems impossible that just after this collection was published (2005) he fell apart, went off his medication, and in 2008, in a state of hopeless depression, he hanged himself from his rafters . . ."the observed of all observers, quite, quite down!"

You Had to Be There (Not That You'd Want To)

Mark Bowden's new book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam recounts the Tet Offensive, the capture of the ancient provincial capital city of Hue by the North Vietnamese, and the ensuing epic 24 day battle waged by the Marines and the ARVN to recapture the city . . . the book is over 500 pages and a monumental day-by-day account of the heroism, atrocities, propaganda, misinformation, strategy, blunders, civilian casualties, destruction of ancient wonders, Communist purges, political failures, and-- amidst great effort and honor-- the futility of top-down command in warfare . . . Bowden interviewed scores of people from both sides, so while he focuses on American perspectives and tells the stories of many, many Marines and reporters who were at Hue and witnessed the bloodiest battle in the war, he also recounts civilian and North Vietnamese perspectives of the tragic month; the sum total of this grueling depiction is the ultimate expression of "I support the troops but not the war," although at times it's even hard to support the troops, who often busy themselves shooting dogs and civilians, prying gold fillings from the teeth of the dead, and committing other acts that could only occur in the moral vacuum of a chaotic, street-to-street, house-to-house plodding assault, where young men watched their friends get shot in the streets, tried to retrieve the wounded, were consequently shot and on and on-- the book graphically describes the many many deaths and injuries-- the Marines were used as fodder and many are still angry about this, none of the people higher up the chain understood the amount of NVA in the Citadel, nor how well entrenched they were, or that their supply chains were intact . . . they didn't understand how well-trained the NVA soldiers were, the generals thought they could be brushed aside with little collateral damage, they didn't understand that the spider-holes, trenches, towers, turrets, snipers, and occupation of the city created a maze of interlocking fire that just devastated our troops, nor did the people calling the shots understand the North Vietnamese strategy, which was simply to hold onto the city as long as possible, cause as many casualties as possible, and-- though the NVA knew they would eventually lose the battle-- they would win the war, because the American people and media (including Walter Cronkite) would finally realize that it wasn't worth the effort . . . so while the Marines heroically took back the Citadel, the generals (Gen. Westmoreland specifically) didn't realize that the death toll, the destruction of the city and its historical wonders, and the civilian casualties would drive Lyndon Johnson to bow out of the presidential race, and completely change the strategy in Vietnam . . . while the capture of Hue did not foment a fervent Communist uprising, and-- in fact-- many of the people in Hue (an educated, upper-middle class city) tried to stay out of the war and not choose sides at all, many of these people, the ones not killed by the initial battle, were killed by the Communists in purges . . . it was horrible and ugly on both sides, the genetically engineered IR8 rice didn't do the trick, nor did the Hanoi government, and while the war would slog on for several more years, as we tried to "seek honorable peace," the lessons were obvious and while we have gotten mired in places we don't belong, we at least know now that we have to "win hearts and minds" in order to achieve any kind of lasting success in a foreign proxy war (not that we're immune to this sort of thing, despite what we learned, we still managed to concoct Abu Ghraib . . . but that's still a far cry from the treatment of the civilian "gooks" in Vietnam, there was very little thought of collateral damage by the soldiers and the generals, despite the fact that we weren't fighting a war against Vietnam, we were supposedly fighting a war for the Vietnamese people . . . what a fucking mess, read the book).

This Post Is Not Beethoven's Ninth Symphny

A couple weeks ago, I brought a stack of books home from the library and told my kids to choose one and start reading . . . Ian chose I Am Legend and really enjoyed it (and then we watched the movie and he was disappointed with the ending, but didn't care for my version either) and Alex started on Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos but didn't love it and ended up reading A Prayer For Owen Meany-- which he has declared one of his favorite books ever-- and I ended up re-reading Vonnegut's Galapagos, which I will readily admit isn't one of his best, as it's a bit repetitive and probably has too many characters, not all of whom are discernible, but since I first read it-- as a high school kid back in 1986-- I've visited the Galapagos Islands and so the second time around, the book was much more vivid-- I had been to the places and seen the things he was describing and though it was published thirty years ago, the themes are oddly prescient-- there's convenient anthropomorphized AI, the fear of automation, a rapidly deteriorating environment, a fatalistic malaise about this rapidly deteriorating environment, and a general ambivalence for the big brains of humanity, which are capable of so much wonder and innovation, and also so much damage and devastation . . . but don't worry, because in the end, there is a tragically comforting thing that can be said about the demise of nearly each and every one of us, myself included: "Don't worry about it . . . he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

The Victorian Age: Unbuttoned and Muddy

On nearly every page of The Essex Serpent, a dense and lengthy novel by Sarah Perry, ideas clash-- but in the civilized manner of the late-Victorian age, in fact, much of the weightiest discourse takes place by letter; science and faith; myth and reality; love and friendship; the monstrous and the absurd; city life and country living; politics and society; feminism and the male hegemony; poverty and wealth; sickness and vitality; medicine and quackery; etcetera, etcetera . . . and all this juxtaposition is couched in the language of the time period, so it's not exactly a beach read, but the prose is beautiful and gothic, and picks up in pace later in the story . . . many of the events are based on real happenings of the the time, and Perry lays her sources bare at the end; this book will change your view of the 1880s (if you had one) as it paints a picture of a world just on the edge of modernity, one boot in the 20th century and the other pulling out of the sucking mud of antiquity.

Inside Out is a Great Movie But . . .

Lisa Feldman Barrett's new book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain is psychologically groundbreaking-- it upends intuition, debunks, assumptions, and overturns the classic way psychologists and laypeople alike view emotions-- you should read it, but if you don't feel like wading through (and I had trouble, I often had to read paragraphs over and over again) here are a few highlights:

1) your brain makes a model of the world through prediction and correction, and if things don't work then the brain tries to construct a new prediction to resolve errors;

2) therefore you don't have set emotional circuitry, that you share with all other people . . . so Inside Out isn't all that accurate;

3) your upbringing, your culture, your genetics, all your experiences and stimulus and all sorts of other things influence these models and predictions, so no emotion is the same;

4) some cultures and people lack emotions that other cultures and people possess . . . and knowledge of these emotions and granular analysis of common emotions can cause people to experience emotions differently . . . just knowing the word for a particular emotion, such as schadenfreude, can cause someone to have that emotion;

5) emotions aren't triggered, they are constructed;

6) there is no battle between the logical, conscious brain and the emotional "side" of the brain-- the brain isn't cerebral rationality wrapped around primitive emotional response circuitry;

7) we are neither blank slates nor hardwired circuitry, though this is the caricature of each position;

8) our "body budget" has a profound impact on how we view the world, so sometimes emotions are the result of lack of sleep, lack of food, or lack of exercise;

9) your memories are "highly vulnerable to reshaping by your current circumstances";

10) mental inferences about emotion are often wrong, and facial expressions are not hard-wired or indicative of much . . . behaviorism is not a great predictor of emotion;

11) at the core we feel valence and affect . . . we feel aroused or calm, and we feel pleasant or unpleasant . . . the rest can be determined by a number of factors;

12) we have more control over our emotions that previously thought-- which appeals to the conservatives: you are responsible for your actions, but-- and this appeals to the liberals-- culture and experience literally create our prediction models, so emotions are more relative than universal;

13) "the dividing line between culture and biology is porous";

14) this revision from essentialist emotions to a more interoceptive model will probably be considered equally primitive in 100 years;

anyway, if you read this book and The Nurture Assumption by Judith Harris, you'll have a whole new view of psychology, which might make you feel liberated or ignorant or empowered or pedantic or-- if you're reading this stuff on a couch in a supine position-- sleepy.

This Happened? In America? Less Than 100 Years Ago? Yikes

David Grann's book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a tough story in more ways than one; it's a detailed account of two dozen (or possibly more) murders of Osage Indians, who relocated from the Cherokee territory in south Kansas (the ending point for many tribes after enduring the Trail of Tears) to a hardscrabble land of rocks and hills in Oklahoma because they thought the white man would never bother them in such lonely wicked country . . . but once oil was discovered under the Osage land, the white man came in droves, the Osage got filthy rich with headrights to the Osage Mineral Estate, and the atrocities followed one after another-- many of the murders masterminded by William King Hale-- who took advantage of the fact that some of the Osage married outside the family . . . it's impossible to summarize the rest, as the book has a huge cast of characters and also delves into the birth of the FBI, the methods of J. Edgar Hoover, and the storied biography of Tom White, who eventually ran Leavenworth Prison, and while the plot might be a bit byzantine for beach reading, the images of the richest Indians in America-- riding in chauffeured limousines to pow-wows, flying private planes to campfires, and sending their children to the finest European boarding schools, while still being under the corrupt auspice of government guardians and managers-- and these same Indians falling prey to a compromised criminal justice system, while being fleeced and often killed by number of greedy and conniving white men, with the lure of black gold looming in the Oklahoma hills, this all makes for an epic and embarrassing story from recent American history, and there's some new findings at the end, that Grann uncovered in his copious research-- so while this book isn't as fun as The Lost City of Z, it's much more significant, and in the end you will agree that-- as God told Cain-- "the blood cries out from the ground."

Barrett vs Tolstoy

Lisa Feldman Barrett begs to differ with the opening premise of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," as she believes that happiness-- like every emotion-- defies categorization and is much more variegated and complex in form (and much simpler than was once thought in content, controlled by two factors: valence and affect) and she points out that "you can smile in happiness, sob in happiness, scream in happiness, raise your arms in happiness, clench your fists in happiness, jump up and down doling high fives in happiness, or even be stunned motionless in happiness . . . your eyes might be wide or narrowed, your breathing rapid or slow . . . you can have the heart-pounding exciting happiness of winning the lottery or the calm relaxed happiness of lying on a picnic blanket with your lover" and this idea connects to Barrett's central thesis, that emotions aren't set pieces waiting to be triggered, they are created on the fly, thus the title of her book: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain . . . and if don't feel like wading through the text, you can listen to Invisibilia "Emotions Part One."