Two Books with White Covers (Both Containing Allusions)

I recently finished two new books with white covers: But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman and White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer and while both of these authors are generally regarded as critics . . . of popular culture, the arts, and-- in the case of Klosterman-- sports (and both write novels as well) and they both share a precise, crisp writing style that is almost mock-epic in laying bare the logic of thought (Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz, in this review, described Dyer as "one of our greatest living critics, not of art, but of life itself, and one of our most original writers") but the big difference-- for me at least-- is that reading Klosterman is a smooth transference of thought, because Klosterman is around my age and he refers to things that I know a lot about (The Sex Pistols, Nick Bostrom, The Cosby Show, American football, Roseanne, Dan Carlin, the intelligence of octopi, the Higgs Boson, and Star Wars are a few that come to mind from his new book) while Geoff Dyer, a fifty year old Brit, will often refer to things just outside my purview . . . I think this is purposeful: Klosterman wants to appeal to a certain category of forty-something semi-literate, semi-intelligent, semi-athletic nerdy hipster (Dave is pegged) while Dyer, though easy enough to read, designs his references and allusions to take you beyond your normal thoughts and logic . . . in this new book, you will "experience the outside world" a world of art and culture and music that you know exists, but probably never investigated; anyway, here are some references and allusions from Geoff Dyer's new book, divided into two categories, the ones I knew and the ones I had to Google:

some of the references I got . . .

1) Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty;

2) Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come;

3) the life and works of Matisse, Pissarro, and Gauguin;

4) Dick Diver in Tender is the Night;

5) Art Pepper . . . I learned about him in the Bosch mysteries;

6) full moon parties at Ko Pha Ngan

7) Don Delillo's novel Underworld;

8) David Mamet and Thomas Pynchon;

and here are some of the people, places, and things I was unfamiliar with . . .

1) the critical works of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer;

2) Walter de Maria's landwork The Lightning Field . . . this giant rectangular collection of tall metal poles is in New Mexico, if I had know about it we could have taken a detour on our cross-country trip and tried to see it . . . although it's difficult to access;

3) Chaiwat Subprasom's photo Koh Tao;

4) Taryn Simon's photo series The Innocents;

5) Simon Rodia and The Watts Towers;

6) jazz bassist Charlie Haden, who played with Ornette Coleman;

7) seminal jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders;

8) Don Cherry's funky fusion album Brown Rice, with Charlie Haden on bass . . . I really like this album and I would have never listened to it if I hadn't read the book . . .

and so thanks to Geoff Dyer for introducing me to some new things, and making me feel a bit dumb, and thanks to Chuck Klosterman for explicating things I already know about, and making me feel smart.

Geoff Dyer Gives Up on Giving Up

Geoff Dyer-- famous for Out of Sheer Rage, his anti-biography of D.H Lawrence, which becomes a mediation on procrastination-- has written another weird and wonderful and obscure and profound book, The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings . . . I often struggle with some of his references, and he alludes and refers widely, from literature and jazz and French film to soccer and tennis and Beethoven and Nietzsche; but mainly this book deals with something from a Joy Williams story, when an adult tells a young girl:

"I hope you're enjoying your childhood. When you grow up, a shadow falls. Everything's sunny and then this big goddamn wing or something passes overhead."

and this book is Dyer contemplating life under this shadowy giant wing, as the end approaches-- the end of his tennis playing, the end of Roger Federer's career, the end of movies and films and books and musical pieces, the never-ending non-ending of Bob Dylan, the odd endings that happen when some people are still young-- such as Bjorn Borg and fighter pilots in WWII-- the end of stealing shampoo, the end of artistic purpose, and the end of The Tempest . . . the book ultimately asks the question "when should a creator stop creating?" and the answer is never, never stop until you stop.

A Circuitous Journey

A few weeks ago, I picked up the new Geoff Dyer book at my local library-- and because I really like Dyer's writing, I wasn't disconcerted by the fact that the book claimed to be about unlocking the mysteries of a Russian science-fiction film called Stalker, which I had never seen-- nor even heard of-- because I assumed that Dyer would simply be using the film as a springboard for his trademark digressions (as he did in his "biography" of D.H. Lawrence-- Out of Sheer Rage-- which you can find in the BIO section of the library, but the book never actually becomes a biography of Lawrence, and instead is a treatise on procrastination) but this recent book, which is called Zona: A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room, is actually about what it is billed as being about, the film Stalker, directed by the renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky . . . so I took the book back to the library and spoke to a friend of mine, a film buff, and he told me I had to watch Stalker before I read the book, but that it wasn't going to be easy . . . and he was right, it wasn't an easy viewing, and this may be because I am certainly no film buff . . . I came to movies rather late in life and I have a limited attention span . . . and so it took me days to watch Stalker, which is nearly three hours and famous for its interminably long shots where relatively little happens-- and while I am glad I watched it, as it is compelling, ambiguous, profound, and beautifully filmed story-- and the journey of Stalker, Writer, and Professor is both archetypal and unforgettable-- especially the last scene-- while I admit all this is true, I think I came to this film too late in my life to really appreciate it, and Dyer explains this phenomena in the book: he explains that he saw Stalker when he was twenty-four and in a phase when he was doing a lot of LSD, and he became obsessed with the film, in a way that doesn't happen once you hit thirty or forty . . . he explains the sad fact that you probably won't see the film you consider to be the "greatest" after the age of thirty, and definitely not after the age of forty-- your ability to have your perceptions altered, your ability to respond to art with maximum focus and obsession, this declines with age . . . and so I am stuck with the films of the '90's as my benchmark movies: Goodfellas and The Big Lebowski and Fargo and Reservoir Dogs and the documentaries of Erroll Morris . . . not that a few films from my early thirties haven't snuck into my pantheon . . . Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation . . . but most of my films are light-weights compared to the greats-- fast-paced post-modern fun, as opposed to profound aesthetic journeys, and there is probably not much I can do about it . . . and funny thing, I actually reading about Stalker more than I enjoyed watching it . . . so I am guessing I will never become a cinephile. 

Unresolutions for 2011

I am proud to say that I successfully complied with my 2010 Resolution--  not once did I create an ersatz Yogi Berra quotation in 2010 . . . so I have kicked that habit; for 2011, I am going to pay homage to the great Geoff Dyer (who wrote the ultimate un-book, Out of Sheer Rage, which is ostensibly a biography of D.H. Lawrence, but actually a treatise on procrastination and motivation; he never actually writes the biography-- although it is found in the BIO section of the library) and instead of resolving to do things this year, I am resolving to not do things, and Geoff Dyer put this better than me in this passage-- you should read the whole thing-- but if you're lazy, he essentially boils it down to this aphorism: Not being interested in the theatre provides me with more happiness than all the things I am interested in put together . . . and so here is my list of things that I resolve to remain "not interested in" for the year of 2011:

1) The theater (expensive, time-consuming, and it's for old people);

2) Golf (ditto);

3) The NHL;

4) Reality TV (even Jersey Shore);

5) The phrases "It is what it is," and "You know what I mean";

6) Tron nostalgia;

7) Going to PTO meetings (thanks Catherine!);

8) Baking;

9) Organizing the crawl space (thanks Catherine!);

10) Oprah's Book Club.

Parallel Preparation (Not Really)

If you're a diligent reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I haven't been reviewing many books lately, and that's because I have been reading travel guides and hiking guides and (my favorite) eating guides, in preparation for our cross-country trip, but one writer was able to pull me away from this preparatory research -- the humorous British curmudgeon Geoff Dyer; his new book is called Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush and it is a study in the act of perpetual preparation, because-- as the men on board repeatedly tell him-- the lessons they learn about how to effectively and safely run an aircraft carrier are "written in blood"-- the bad things that can happen on the ship and in the air above the ship are multifaceted and multifarious, and Dyer describes them all (though he doesn't witness anything horrific, but he hears about soldiers being sucked into jet engines and blown overboard and killed by catapulting cables and the variety of ways to crash land, etc. etc.) and the book is both absurdist in its detailed observation and inspirational in how these men lead their lives, and it's great preparation for our cross-country trip, because no matter how claustrophobic it gets in the mini-van and no matter how annoying the kids get, this is NOTHING compared to what men and women have to endure when they are contained for months on an aircraft carrier (which, to Dyer's chagrin, has neither a bar nor a ping-pong table).

2016 Book List

Here's what I read in 2016 (and despite reading nearly a book a week, I feel dumber than ever) and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can see my eleven favorites . . . and if you're really feeling crazy and literary, you can check out my previous lists, but if you're going to read one book on this list, I would suggest Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather . . . I've read it twice, and I'll bet I'll read it again someday . . . anyway, here they are-- it's a little scary for me when I peruse this list, because I can't remember all that much about some of the titles, but I guess that's what happens when you read too much;

1) Trunk Music (Michael Connelly)

2) Hide & Seek (Ian Rankin)

3) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert D. Putnam

4) One Plus One Jojo Moyes

5) Andrea Wulf The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World

6) Death Comes to the Archbishop (Willa Cather)

7) The Milagro Beanfield War (John Nichols)

8) Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)

9) The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy (Tim Harford)

10) Tim Harford The Undercover Economist

11) The Expatriates (Janice Y. K. Lee)

12) Tim Harford The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

13) Dale Russakoff  The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools?

14) Charlie Jane Anders All the Birds in the Sky

15) Mohamed A. El-Erian  The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

16) Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh)

17) The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

18) Angels Flight (Michael Connelly)

19) Robert J. Gordon  The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

20) Tony Hillerman A Thief of Time

21) Peter Frankopan Silk Roads: A New History of the World

22) Tony Hillerman Hunting Badger

23) Tony Hillerman Listening Woman

24) Tony Hillerman The Wailing Wind

25) The Lost World of the Old Ones:Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest David Roberts

26) Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers)

27) Chuck Klosterman But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

28) White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer

29) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will Shape our future by Kevin Kelly

30) Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

31) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) Jerome K. Jerome

32) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

33) Truly Madly Guilty Liane Moriarty

34) Seinfeldia by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

35) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

36) Ghosts by Reina Telgemeier

37) The Walking Dead 23-26

38) The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For the Ivy Leagues by Jeff Hobbs

39) The Nix by Nathan Hill

40) Bill Bryson The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

41) Tim Wu The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

42) Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad

43) Nicholson Baker Substitute

44) The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts

45) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance.

Boats: Could They Cure PTSD?

In Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, Geoff Dyer summarizes writer Karl Marlantes theory: "in the Second World War people came home slowly, gradually, by boat, as part of a unit" but "in Vietnam, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, the swift return and dispersal of the group was accelerated and increased, something that may well have played a part in the drastic increase of PTSD" . . . and while this reverse acclimatization into the civilian life may be necessary to healthily adjust from wartime to peacetime, it's also possible that WWII guys were just tougher (this was the time of leather football helmets, a time when you could still die of septicemia from a rotten tooth). 

The Last Days of Tennis (Like This)

All things must come to an end . . . and endings are worth meditation-- as evidenced by Geoff Dyer's fantastic book The Last Days of Roger Federer; and so I must note that the end of this wonderful high school tennis season is coming to a close-- we lost last night 3-2 in the continuation of our Group I State Semifinal match to Shore Regional and this was a match that had more controversy than usual because of a rain delay, a religious delay (we have two observant Jewish players) and a Memorial Day Weekend delay-- I even got some weird flak from a Shore parent, who insisted on showing me his phone to prove that it didn't rain on Saturday (which it most certainly did) but I explained to him that the reason we were playing last night was because we had two Jewish players who couldn't travel or play on the Sabbath and that the tournament director decided the match couldn't be played on Sunday or Memorial Day and thus pushed it all the way back until Tuesday . . . and then we couldn't play at the normal time on Tuesday because of the heat restriction so we had to play at 7 PM . . . he asked me if the match would have been postponed if players were sick and I countered with the fact that the match would have been canceled if it were Easter and then I told him he was acting weird and insinuating something and a detached myself from the situation-- one of the HP parents said the guy also said something about how his kid tried baseball but that tennis was one of the last "white sports" so there was a strange vibe out there; anyway, Ian came back and beat his kid at first singles and our second doubles team won handily but the center of the line-up was trouble-- there was no way Alex could beat their second singles-- he actually seemed better than the first singles player, and Boyang was facing a classic pusher (who actually had a higher UTR than first and second singles, slightly fishy) and he struggled to stay patient enough to find the perfect net shots to beat him . . . first doubles became our last hope, the two Jewish kids, but they were facing two tall dudes who could hit overheads-- they lost the first set but went up 5-0 in the second, only to lose in a tiebreaker 7-5 . . . which might have been for the better because they would have had trouble winning a third set . . . anyway, we've got two more matches to make-up, which will be nice so we don't end on this oddly elongated loss and it was truly a pleasure to coach this group of players (and two of my children) and it will be the last time, after many many years of doing so, that I will coach BOTH my children on the same team-- this happened for many years in soccer and just once in tennis and I've got to say, it's a wild experience-- you're invested as a coach and a parent so it's pretty emotional, but I think I navigated it as well as I could and I was proud of what good sports my team was during the match and once it was all over.

A Little Shadenfreude Saves the Day

Our anniversary day in New York City started well, but then the Mexican restaurateurs got their revenge on me: we ate at a great Thai place for lunch (Pam Real Thai on 9th Ave) and saw Avenue Q (which was pretty funny, but, like British writer Geoff Dyer, nothing makes me happier than having no interest in the theater-- I don't have to read reviews, sit in cramped seats, buy tickets, ask people what shows are good, etc.-- so though I laughed, this will be my last play for a long long long time, and even though the songs were funny and satirical, they sounded too much like what they were satirizing, that slick forgettable Broadway sound . . . but the Bad Idea Bears made me laugh) and then the rest of our day was full of lessons; we walked fifty blocks up to the Guggenheim to see the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, but we wanted to wait until 5:45 because then it's "pay what you want" so we had a few minutes to kill, but up by the Guggenheim there are no bars just very fancy restaurants, very fancy children's clothing stores, and apartments . . . then we learned that a LOT of people want to cheap out and pay four dollars to get in the Guggenheim, so we abandoned the gigantic line and caught a train to Newark to eat at what was supposed to be a great authentic Mexican place and so we got off the express train headed to New Brunswick (home!) and walked into Newark and though I had read recent reviews and the place has a web page, it was boarded up and CLOSED--el restaurante está cerrado-- and I am sure that this is now a Mexican curse and conspiracy (avid readers will remember a similar dilemma several weeks ago) and so for our anniversary dinner we got take-out from "Hansel and Griddle" in New Brunswick, took it home, and watched The Shield . . . but we didn't feel so bad about our foiled plans because we got to listen to a great cell phone conversation between a bitter middle aged balding dude and his mother: one son just got arrested on five counts of burgarly and he was mad because his ex-wife was "protecting the kid with a lawyer when he needed to be punished, to be sent to boot camp" and his other son just got his second violation for underage drinking and now his ex-wife wanted him back in the picture to control his sons, who he feared might hurt the wife and had "lunged at her" but he had to move to Houston to a radio station there, because his time at CBS was coming to a close and he couldn't handle the four hour commute-- so like we learned from Avenue Q, sometimes a little shadenfreude is a good thing.

On the Rarity of Switch-Hitting Authors

Someone smart and well-read could develop this idea into a full-fledged essay, but I don't have the time or the mental stamina for that, so I'll just offer my thesis and maybe someone will run with it: I just finished the new David Sedaris book Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays Etc. and while I loved the essays -- typical Sedaris . . . forays to the dentist, the taxidermist, the British countryside the airport, and the bar car of a train -- I did not love (and mainly skipped) the "etc." which are short fictional pieces in which he wrote in the voices of a woman, a father, and a sixteen year old girl with a fake British accent; this brings me to my thesis: there are certain writers who I will only read their non-fiction, though they may have written novels and fiction; David Sedaris is one of these writers -- I only want him to be himself -- and it is the same with Chuck Klosterman -- I read his non-fiction fanatically but I haven't read any of his novels, not one word . . . I just want him to be Chuck Klosterman . . . it's the same with another favorite of mine, Geoff Dyer -- I'd love to read more by him, but I won't even open his four novels . . . and then there are authors who I will only read their fiction and could care less about their life and actual voice: Elmore Leonard, James Michener, Umberto Eco, etc. and then there are those rare authors who are masters of both forms: George Orwell, Mark Twain, and James Ellroy immediately come to mind . . . and though I often contemplate writing a great sci-fi novel, I think that I am a member of the first category, and probably can only muster the Voice of Dave with any consistency and energy.

Dave is NOT in the Zone

It looks like I'm going to have to do this whole thing all over again, in the correct order-- which is highly appropriate for the content, as . . . like most of us (except for the stalkers, of course) I made my trip into the Zone unprepared, with little or no information, and came about it the wrong way, from the wrong direction, as a blithe intellectual, moving too quickly, with too much alacrity-- and I thank myself lucky that I was not ground into pulp, or that my legs weren't turned to gelatinous rubber, but what I should have done, instead of trying to read a book about a movie I had never seen, what I should have done-- because I'm no cinephile-- what I should have done was read the original book first, I should have read Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel Roadside Picnic long before I watched Stalker and I should have read Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room  long after consuming both the original novel and the movie inspired by the novel, and while Tarkovsky's film is regarded as one of the best of the 20th century, it's also rather interminable, especially when you don't understand what's going on, and Roadside Picnic explains all that and more, in fact, if you're not a cinephile, then you can skip the movie and the Geoff Dyer book and just read the novel, and if you're not into Russian sci-fi, then you can skip the book entirely, and head to the Afterword, and simply read the notes the Strugatsky Brothers took on their very first discussion about the story, long before they sat down to write it . . . as these notes are so elegant and poetic, so ominous and enigmatic, and so pointed and precise, that they almost replace the novel itself: "a monkey and a tin can . . . thirty years after the alien visit, the remains of the junk they left behind are at the center of quests and adventures, investigations and misfortunes . . . the growth of superstition, a department attempting to assume power through owning the junk, an organization seeking to destroy it (knowledge fallen from the sky is useless and pernicious; any discovery could only lead to evil applications) . . . prospectors revered as wizards . . . a decline in the status of science . . . abandoned ecosystems (an almost dead battery), reanimated corpses from a variety of time periods."

Book List 2022

Here are the books I finished (possibly with some skimming) this year . . . I started plenty of others and quit them because . . . well because I wanted to . . . that's what's great about reading-- if you've got access to a library, you aren't beholden to any particular book:

1) Depth of Winter by Craig Johnson

2) Lazarus Volumes 1-6

3) Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

4) Kindness Goes Unpunished by Craig Johnson

5) The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul

6) The Given Day by Dennis LeHane

7) Live by Night by Dennis LeHane

8) A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich

9) Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

10) Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

11) Caliban's War by James A. Corey

12) Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

13) The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

14) Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath

15) We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

16) Abbadon's Gate by James S.A. Corey

17) The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart

18) The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

19) One-Shot Harry by Gary Philips

20) The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer

21) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

22) Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey

23) The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough

24) Harrow by Joy Williams

25) The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

26) Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

27) The Foundling  by Ann Leary

28) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

29) Fugitive Telemetry: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

30) Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

31) Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit by Mark Leyner

32) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

33) Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

34) Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

35) Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey

36) The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

37) The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

38) City on Fire by Don Winslow

39) Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

40) what if? SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC ANSWERS to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe

41) Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Stephen Johnson

42) The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl

43) The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race For a Gun, and The Community United to Save Them by Sudhir Venkatesh

44) Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

45) A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller

46) Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

47) Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

48) Liberation Day by George Saunders

49) Upgrade by Blake Crouch

50) Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

51) Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway

52) Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

53) Pines by Blake Crouch

54) The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte

55) Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

56) Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson

57) Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross