Back to School (without Rodney Dangerfield)

A LONG day after a short Spring Break . . . the first day back to school is always shocking and exhausting-- but I still managed to teach three senior English classes, walk a few laps around the track with Brady, attend the faculty meeting, and run to the library during my off period (I took out an absurd book-- the 1300 page comprehensive account Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert-- perhaps because I finally finished Stalingrad . . . I did read a regular book between epic historical tomes, Liz Moore's Long Bright River-- which I read in two days, a gripping page-turner-- highly recommended).

A Short Sentence about a Long Book

I am on a train so I will keep this brief, to avoid getting trainsick: I just finished Vadily Grossman's epic and enormous novel Stalingrad . . . and I will be taking a break before I tackle Life and Fate.

Too Much Music For One Sentence: Prog Rock vs. The Cars

I just finished the highly entertaining The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel-- or I found it highly entertaining; it might not be a book for general audiences-- and while the start of the book covers bands that you might know, from Procol Harum to King Crimson to Yes, Genesis, Soft Machine, and-- of course: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer-- you might be surprised by the extent of the cross-pollination within the scene and the extent to which record companies funded and allowed for absolutely wild, bombastic, innovative music to be made and published-- including lots of solo efforts (Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman made a 40-minute progressive synth rock opera based on Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Center of the Earth? and it was a commercial success?) and then the book moves along to Rush and Marillion and Dream Theater, and finally to the remnants of prog rock-- how the old bands fell apart (or learned how to craft singles like Genesis) and how there are some remnants of prog rock in bands like Porcupine Tree and The Mars Volta-- and the book certainly got me to listen to some "new" music from long ago (or rather recent music, such as Porcupine Tree) but Weigel also details how punk rock and new wave put an end to prog rock as the darling of the critics and ended any radio play that these epic songs were getting . . . and I am also reading The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told by Bill Janovitz and you can see why people were so excited for this new music-- it's tight and catchy and skillful but also forward-facing and progressive, and The Cars first album is a perfect example of this-- 1978 was when prog rock was starting to decline and artists like Blondie and Elvis Costello and The Talking Heads and Devo and The Police released great albums (and there was also a slew of great rock albums: Van Halen, Some Girls, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Dire Straits, Shakedown Street) and while Rush did release "Hemispheres" in 1978, a prog rock classic-- pop music was trending toward shorter songs-- and this was partly fueled by punk rock, which gained popularity in this same time frame . . . "Never Mind the Bollocks" came out in 1977 . . . anyway, I prefer the new wave stuff and what it spawned to most prog rock (although "Close to the Edge" by Yes is a masterpiece) but Weigel's book got me to listen to some pretentious but exciting musical experiments, and it's usually good to open your mind to new music (except when Hitler got really into Wagner).

A Physicist Would Think Those Wings Need to Be Bigger, But It Was the 1970s and Everyone Was on Drugs

 

You may be familiar with Roger Dean's artwork from the various Yes album covers, but I also learned (from the fabulous book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel) that Dean designed album covers for the Caribbean-African funk band Osibisa, and Dean's flying elephants are much groovier than Dumbo.

Dave Gets It Done in the (Relatively) Balmy Weather

I didn't have to proctor any midterms today-- which is a wonderful day to take off from school because you don't have to leave any plans-- and I am proud to say that I've had a fairly productive day, here are the things I've ALREADY accomplished . . . and it's only 3:30 PM:

1) I went to TWO, count them, TWO grocery stores— SuperFresh for cheap produce and ShopRite for everything else, including some weird shit that my wife requested: protein pancake mix? coconut water coffee creamer?

2) I got some audio recorded for my top secret audio project;

3) I took Lola, who was going stir crazy, for a hike in the Ecological Preserve-- I now realize the key is to drive her to wherever we want to walk; she can't walk on the salt-covered roads-- the salt, or whatever chemical is used to melt the ice-- lowers the temperature of water below freezing and then it gets into her paws, even if they are waxed, and makes them hurt (plus I heard from a couple people that when your dog licks this stuff off their paws, it can give them the liquid squirting shits)

4) I shoveled off our back porch and liberated our grill from a snowbank;

5) I went to FedEx and shipped my son's broken laptop somewhere for reapirs;

6) I took a nap;

7) I made lunch instead of going out for food because . . .

8) I've started Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece, Stalingrad, and I was trying to read the paperback, but the font is too small, so instead of getting a massage today or going out to lunch, I treated myself and bought the Kindle version of the book so I can enlarge the font . . . this is a good book to read in the cold weather, but not the paperback version (which is all the library had).

 

Thanks! For Blowing People Up and Perpetuating the Human Race, So We Have More People to Blow Up!

I'm nearly finished with Patrick Ryan's small-town Ohio saga, Buckeye-- and the book features both harrowing tales from WWII and harrowing tales of pregnancy and child-rearing . . . so perhaps we should say "thank you for your service" to both soldiers and moms.

Elite Summer Camp, Elite Apartment Building . . . Same Difference

Liz Moore's fantastic novel The God of the Woods is both an excellent thriller and a multi-generational family saga; it feels a bit like a Donna Tartt novel-- although not quite as expansive-- and has something in common with another book I read recently and loved: The Doorman by Chris Pavone-- in both there is the conflict and collaboration between social classes, especially the relationship between the uber-rich and the service industry class that often caters to these privileged rich folk . . . here's what Judy, a female state police investigator-- a real rarity in the 1970s—thinks about the dynamic between these two classes of people: 

What will she do now, wonders Judy, if the Hewitts lose the camp? If the Van Laars cut them out entirely, as they’ll no doubt do, snapping the thin thread that has stretched for decades between the Hewitts and Peter the First? And she answers her question herself: They’ll be fine. The Hewitts—like Judy, like Louise Donnadieu, like Denny Hayes, even—don’t need to rely on anyone but themselves. It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.

anyway, The Doorman and The God of the Woods are the two best novels I've read in quite a while, chekc them out . . . I've got to head to the sports medicine doctor to get my knee checked out.

Capitalism Undone . . . by Mutants

To kick off 2026, I finished yet another Clifford D. Simak classic sci-fi novel, Ring Around the Sun, and this one is full of big ideas: pristine parallel earths; mutant humans--who may or may not know they are mutants; telepathy with alien races; corporeal temporal stasis; consciousness transfers-- it's too much for one book (from 1952!) but it is mainly a story of scarcity and abundance and how to break our capitalist, materialist consumer society with "forever" products engineered by mutant humans and imported from various parallel earths, to break the supply-and-demand system and allow humans to progress to something transcendent-- but at what cost, at what cost?

2025 Book List

1) The Birdwatcher by William Shaw

2) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

3) IQ by Joe Ide

4) Save Our Souls: The True Story of A Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder by Matthew Pearl

5) The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

6) Never Tell by Lisa Gardner

7) The Loom of Time: Between Anarchy and Empire, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert Kaplan

8) The Secret Hours by Mick Herron

9) The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

10) Dry Bones (Longmire #11) by Craig Johnson

11) The Getaway by Jim Thompson

12) Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson

13) Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

14) A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson

15) Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak

16) Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon

17) Lexicon by Max Barry

18) Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III

19) Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman

20) The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

21) Hang On, St. Christopher by Adrian McKinty

22) Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough 

23) The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

24) The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

25) Gringos by Charles Portis

26) Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

27) Red Chameleon by Stuart M. Kaminsky

28)  A Taste for Death by PD James

29)  The Trespasser by Tana French

30) Broken Harbor by Tana French

31) King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

32) Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

33) The Secret Place by Tana French

34) The Likeness by Tana French

35) Hot Money by Dick Francis

36) The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp

37) A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen

38) Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson

39) Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

40) Harold by Stephen Wright

41) The Hunter by Tana French

42) Facing East From Indian Country

43) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

44) Time and Again by Clifford Simak

45) The Time Traders by Andre Norton

46) Starter Villain by John Scalzi

47) The Doorman by Chris Pavone

And a few mammoth non-fiction books that I've been reading all year on my Kindle, which I hope to finish in 2026. . .

Reaganland by Rick Perlstein

The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914 by Philip Blom

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Forgotten Continent: A History of New Latin America by Michael Reid

Best For Last . . .

I am assuming Chris Pavone's The Doorman will be the last book I finish in 2025, and it was my favorite-- a thriller with plenty of social, racial, and class commentary; the novel's center is a working-class doorman (Chicky) with working-class problems, and his interactions with the very, very rich residents of the fancy Upper East Side apartment where he works-- and they have very, very rich problems-- and all the problems collide into a wonderfully stressful mess: this book feels like a tightly plotted modern version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, with some Richard Price NYC tone thrown in for good measure-- definitely worth reading.

Follow the Link For the Recs . . .

I did my usual "Seven Books for Reading" post over at Gheorghe: The Blog today . . . if you're looking for a good book, check it out.

Enough With the Time Wars . . .

I'm not sure how-- serendipity, I guess-- but I just finished another sci-fi book written in the 1950s that details a war being waged throughout time . . . this one, The Time Traders, by Andre Norton, is much faster-paced than Simak's Time and Again-- although it features an American rehabilitation prison/time traveller program, a hostile advanced alien race and the Russians, and everyone is at odds with one another, this is really more of a Bell Beaker-era (2000 B.C.) survival tale, with some interesting anthropological details (and a bunch of sci-fi action) and the usual cautionary lesson, that when you fuck with the past, things are going to get ugly-- but with the additional idea that there may have been great technological wonders in the past, whether alien-made or human-made, that were lost in the haze of the millenia-- modern humans have only been around for 300,000 years . . . in the millions and millions of years of life on earth, advanced technologies could have risen and decayed and left no trace (although this is highly unlikely-- they probably woudl have left some chemical fingerprint or isotopic anomaly).

Even With Some Help, I Don't Think Our Brains Will Ever Work This Well

Time and Again is more profound and serious than most of the Clifford Simak books I've read (Mastodonia, They Walked Like Men, The Goblin Reservation, City) and while the book has some fun sci-fi tropes-- a war throughout time, androids that can chemically reproduce vying for human rights-- it also has that 1950s transcendent evolutionary vibe that seems naive today . . . the idea that humans will eventually, possibly with the help of alien intelligence, become something mentally more, something psionic and telepathic and revolutionary . . . and maybe I'm being pessimistic and thispsychological transcendence is possible, but I'm more of the feeling that the huan race is going to be perpetually stupid until we exterminate ourselves.

Ignoring the Unspeakable

Today was an apt day to finish  Omar El Akkad's book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (a title which reminds me of a book I read about the Rwanda genocide called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families) since the news is filled with unspeakable gun violence and mass shootings-- which Americans will be ignoring soon enough-- Akkad wants people to stop looking away from the horror, especially the horror in Gaza, perpetrated by what he views as the ugly business of imperialism, supported by the U.S. military industrial complex, political machinery, and media . . . here's a passage from the end that gives an idea of his tone:

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless. One day it will become impossible to accept the assurances of the same moderates who will say with great conviction: Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on the border of the unsated side of the planet and yes supply chains are beginning to come apart and yes soon enough it will come to our doorstep, even our doorstep n the last coded bastion of the very civilized world, when one day we turn on the tap and nothing comes out and we visit the grocery store and the shelves are empty and we must finally face the reality of it but until then, until that very last moment, it's important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things. One day it will be unacceptable in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.

it is rough stuff and an especially controversial topic around my area because we have both a sizeable Jewish and Muslim population, there are people on both sides of this issue, and I don't see any resolution other than more violence, suppression, terrorism, displacement, starvation, military incursions, explosions, and horror.

More War

 

Another dark episode of We Defy Augury . . . some thoughts (loosely) inspired by Daniel A. Sjursen's book "A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism" -- I got so bogged down in the shit in this one that I've decided to take a break and perhaps pursue a different idea for a podcast-- because I really don't want to make an episode based on the book I'm reading now, Omar El Akkad's indictment about the liberal media and governmental response to the Israel/Palestine conflict One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This  . . . his point, that the logical, moral position is not halfway between the right and the left-- as they are both ignoring reality-- and the center is as morally repugnant in it's policy and more milquetoast and unfocused, especially when atrocities are being committed and a people are being displaced and destroyed . . . I'm about two-thirds of the way through and I don't see a happy ending to this story, now or in the future.

Ardnakelty: Things Behind Things Behind Things

In Tana French's thriller, The Hunter, the rural Irish mountain town of Ardnakelty reminds me of the newish Bon Iver tune "Things Behind Things Behind Things"-- and retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper is pulled farther and farther into these rings within rings (this is the second book in the series, the first is The Searcher) and you know what happens once you get pulled in, it's tough to reach escape velocity; an evocative, slow-burn about how gossip and history and small-town mores can sometimes fuel animosity, violence, and worse (and I believe I have now read the complete of ouvre of French, who many conisder our greatest living mystery writer . . . I think I am one of them).

Very Short and Cheap Field Trip

Today in my English 12: Music and the Arts class, the kids were diligently reading and taking notes on a chapter from Susan Roger's excellent book on the formation of musical taste, This Is What It Sounds Like: What The Music You Love Says About You, when a student raised her hand and said, "Spotify Wrapped came out today . . . can we get our phones out and look at it? This is a music class!" and I thought for a moment and overcame my aversion to ever letting the children touch their cell-phones and said, "Sure" and we grabbed our phones and went outside into the freezing cold-- because Spotify is blocked on the wifi inside the building and we don't really get cell reception inside (unless you are close to a window) and we stood in the brisk winter air and shared our favorite genres (Jazz Funk for me) and our favorite artists and and our most listened to songs and all that and it was a lovely five-minute field trip (until we all got very cold and went back inside to watch the morning announcements).

Spin Cycle Sanctuary

After watching the Giants blow another lead, I took a number of large laundry items-- comforters, afghans, a small rug-- to the local laundromat to be washed in bulk, and I am finding it strangely relaxing here, listening to the hum of the dryers and the slosh of the washers and the chattering of children, while I drink a can of Coke and read my book . . . it's almost making me forget that the Giants should have kicked that field goal instead of gambling on fourth down.

The Battle is Over

Earlier today we finished touring the Gettyburg Military Park, and just moments ago I finished James McPherson masterful and massive Civil War history book "Battle Cry of Freedom" and now I am going to take a well-deserved nap, glad that I own many pairs of comfortable shoes and will not have to take part in Pickett's Charge.

Dave Begrudgingly (and Apathetically) Participates . . .

This year for Halloween, the English Department decided to dress as various book titles-- e.g. Rachel wore a catcher's mask and carried a loaf of rye bread for The Catcher in the Rye-- and while I do not like to dress up in any kind of costume . . . or generally be festive in any way other than drinking alcohol and eating good food, I didn't want to suffer the ire of the department and last year I managed to skate by with a minimalistic "costume" and avoid public shaming, so I tried the same tactic this year-- I dressed as I often dress: khaki pants, a light-weight short-sleeved button down shirt, and knock-off Birkenstocks BUT I also brought in a cowbell-- and I told people I was dressed as Ernest Hemingway (close enough) and I was portraying For Whom the (Cow) Bell Tolls and while I was mildly shamed for lack of effort, once I explained myself, the ladies pretty much left me alone-- which is all you can ask for in this kind of situation.