What I'm Reading

OK, year-end stats: missed the goal by 220 minutes. Was doing well until too much work in December.
Books: 170. Disappointing in view of previous. Best-ofs, in the order read:

fiction
Bacigalupi, The Wind-Up Girl
Newman, Anno Dracula
Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Grossman, The Magicians
Gustainis, Hard Spell
Duncan, The Last Werewolf
Gruber, The Good Son
Cline, Ready Player One

non-fiction
Wilson, Let's Talk About Love
Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn
Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed
Rodgers, Age of Fracture
Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places
Castle, The Professor
Mackintosh-Smith, Landfalls
Smith, Just Kids
Goodheart, 1861
Hoffman & Cole, Sacred Trash
Zinoman, Shock Value
Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line
Reynolds, Retromania
Sullivan, Pulphead
Feldman, Scorpions
Greenblatt, The Swerve

More soon, he said hopefully.

back in the saddle?

who knows? Anyway, for apparently new faithful reader Kirkeleh, some stats from last year:

workout goal fell 330 min. short of hour/day, which was disappointing; a mere 52 seconds more per day, on average, would have done it. Books read: 204, which I think was down some, but I do have the job and the family and the kid. Favorite books I read:

fiction

Vila-Matos, Bartleby & Co

Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens

Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

Sánchez  Piñol, Pandora in the Congo

Porkpie, The Corpse Wore Pasties

Castellanos Moya, Senselessness

non-fiction

Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded

Harris, Pictures at a Revolution

Waxman, Loot

Weber, As They See 'Em (great book about the world of baseball umpires)

Weschler, True to Life (the most mind-expanding book I read all year)

Palmer, The Bloody White Baron (further proving my suspicion that Eastern Europe and Central Asia after WWI were about the weirdest spots on earth)

Wrong, It's Our Turn to Eat

Fleming, Anti-Communist Manifestoes

Finkel, The Good Soldiers

More later.

Burroughs, Public Enemies

I love, love, love all those 30s gangsters. Did a research paper for History 467, US Since 1933 with the redoubtable Sidney Fine, sophomore year of college on them and probably something similar in my excellent seminar on radical lit of the 30s with Brian Lloyd, and then found a used copy of this when it came out, then let it sit on the shelf for 2+ years. Buzzed through--big-book week: Perlstein's is a 748-pager and this one's 550.

Mostly a narrative history of 1933-34, in which we learn:
1. Burroughs' disillusionment with Bonnie and Clyde (I get the sense that he originally might have thought they were interesting, then did more research and found they were pointless thugs deserving of no cultural resonance whatsoever)
2. the venality but nothing more of Ma Barker (apparently a nice, scattered old lady who did a lot of jigsaw puzzles but whom J. Edgar Hoover made into a mastermind)
3. the ineptitude of the early FBI, which boasted a bunch of college boys with law degrees who couldn't shoot and apparently couldn't follow or capture anyone either.
4. what I presume is the regrettable inaccuracy of the Thompson machine gun (there are numerous scenes of gangsters and G-men firing wildly at each other, then everybody gets away, unless someone hit a car's radiator by blind luck); from Philip B. Sharpe, "The Thompson Sub-Machine Gun," American Inst. of Crim. Law 23 (1932-33): 1098:

            The accuracy of the sub-machine gun is decidedly interesting. File records of the Auto-Ordnance firm indicate that in a Mann rest test fired at Hartford, Conn., May 2, 1921, the mean radius using a Remington Standard 230 grain bullet at 100 yards ran 1.89 inches. At 200 yards mean radius was 4.92 inches; at 300 yards 7.63 inches at 400 yards it increased to 18.31; while at 500 yards it jumped to 20.45 inches. Accordingly, one can assume that the accuracy of the more or less spent bullets is quite uncontrolled at the longer ranges. This writer suggests that the effective range of the weapon is under 300 yards....While the Thompson gun is a simple one to handle, it should not be used indiscriminately by any member of a police department. Machine gunning is a job requiring experience.

5. more excellent 30s slang, like "yeggs," "git" (the detailed getaway map for a bank robber), and more; shades of Miller's Crossing, with the timeless line, "We only take yeggs what's been to college"
6. Machine Gun Kelly was sort of a loser as a criminal, and Pretty Boy Floyd actually WAS good to the regular folks he encountered
7. and what should be a more shocking revelation that Burroughs underplays drastically, that the FBI beat criminals (sometimes with telephone books) and occasionally even held them out windows to induce confessions, Suge Knight style

In the single best sentence in the book, Burroughs mentions that the FBI got some Lithuanian-speakers to eavesdrop on the parents of Alvin Karpis, whom he lionizes as the smartest criminal of the period, in the hope that they might lead somewhere. (Excellent find: parts of his Alcatraz disciplinary record.) Instead, all they did was sit around arguing about who was more to blame for their son's life of crime. That's a great short story right there.

Frankel, Punching In

OK, trying to get back on the horse here. 80 pages in, this one of the most irritating books I can think of, or recall reading in months. It's as if the NAM or Chamber of Commerce or, I don't know, the Corporation for Corporate Imagemaking sneakily decided to subsidize an answer book to Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, and so off this guy goes to work at UPS (loves it--the only bad thing is that sometimes the workers are mean to the managers), tries to get a job at the Container Store (apparently heaven on earth, and he's just not heroically moved enough by containers to get the job there), Whole Foods (not enough of a team player, but the store is ideally laid out and makes shopping wonderfully fun, like in a small-town market), and now Home Depot Pro (where they sport awesome black aprons and are really, really expert). No criticism, no irony, no worry about all these psych profiles; just good, clean capitalism. Yecch.

I suspect something evil here, and I intend to get to the bottom of it. Must finish first, to see if there's any corporate mass employer that is not a wonderful collection of humanitarians eagerly seeking our highest potential. I suspect none of them will turn out to be.

on measurement

The redoubtable Andy, whose statistically-inspired musings you can enjoy here, asks:

I've been sitting here dumbfounded for the past day trying to figure out when if ever I will have the wherewithal to read 210 books in a single calendar year. I am wondering however, for my own records, what it takes for you to consider a book "read." For example, I got about 275 pages into The Brothers Karamazov earlier this year before putting it down. Given that it is 600 pages, would you count that as a book, or a half a book, or nothing?

I am pretty much a fundamentalist on this, except when I'm not. Dostoyevsky gets you half credit for reading half the book, but not much beyond that. Done is done, so nothing for reading 60 pages, 150, or whatever else. My wife once threw down Thomas Pynchon's Vineland literally 20 pages from the end because she found it so irritating. I could never do that. So there you have it. I could try to reconstruct total pages read, but that's too nuts even for me. I think. I bet you'd enjoy these new bikes at the JCC, though.

year in review, part II

Additions, remarks, and odd things I learned this year:

Harvey Milk was essentially an old-style ethnic politician, just with sexual orientation as his organizing principle. Loved the film, but what Milk skimps on is how much hardball Harvey could and did play--there were a lot of gay dollars around SF in the 70s, and he knew what to do with them to win political representation, union jobs, and a seat or two at the table. He also was a Goldwater Republican who in some ways never really changed his political colors. (Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street)

Max Allan Collins gets to write too many novels for Hard Case Crime. I like pulp as much as the next person, I really believe that, but he writes the same damn thing every time. Almost exactly. I think this is taking the whole verisimilitude bit too far.

Gloria Steinem took CIA money as a student activist in the 50s, as did Richard Wright and Nina Simone. A bunch of former Communists put on the payroll, though, were pretty unsatisfactory employees, as they took the agency's money and continued on a campaign of factionalism and plunder of anyone who did not share their exact strain of beliefs. (Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer)

being a 19th-century criminal was really not fun: talk about nasty, brutish, and short. And once you talked to the cops, you were pretty much dead meat on the street. And the prisons were even worse. (Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket's Tale) Also, running a gang is hard, particularly as regards the question of punishment and deterrence--how hard do you discipline people? when do you need to lay down the law, and when can you outsource? when do you just let things go? (Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day)

Jacob Riis pretty much invented the multimedia presentation, touring with his photos of NYC slums in the 1890s, and made a pretty good career of it as well (Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis)

Thomas Jefferson was attacked as a dangerous atheist, and John Adams as a religious fundamentalist who would turn the US into a theocracy in the election of 1800 (Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe)

you can tell how hard farm people in the 30s worked by their recipes, which all seem to call for massive amounts of soaking and cooking in cream. Either that, or they were all really fat and this has been excised from photos (Kalish, Little Heathens)

intellectual stunt-journalism books are harder to pull off than it looks: Jacobs' The Know-It-All, where he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, is funny most of the way through, but can someone with a Brown BA really be as ignorant as Jacobs sometimes shows himself to be?or is that part of the shtick? Shea's Reading the OED, where he, well, reads the entire OED, is basically a bunch of odd words with a few pages of OK rumination dressing them up. He sounds like a nice guy, but it's a thin book. Honestly, Ken Jennings' autobiography/apologia/trivia-nerd defense, Brainiac, which is far better than it has any right to be, remains the cream of the crop for me.

you can draw some interesting homologies between dominant modes of social experience and sports--football, with all of its regimentation and military lingo, was of particular cultural centrality in the 60s and 70s, when those experiences had formed a central part of the lives of many Americans (Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports)

people were making waterboarding jokes, in a satirical context, 100 years ago, given that the tactic was being used in the Philippines--and thus it must have resided at least somewhere in the collective consciousness. What happened in the interim? (Crosby, Captain Jinks, Hero: from the NYT review, Aug. 30, 1902: "A good American sitting among his broken idols and ruefully rubbing the welts and bruises his patriotism receives from the bastinado which Mr. Ernest Crosby wields in Captain Jinks, Hero, may, nevertheless, find balm in the thought that he wrote it in six weeks -- as his publisher announces.")

the Inquisition pretty much invented every tactic of spy agencies and tribunals, including agents provocateurs, going after financial assets, forcing accused people to denounce others to survive, and using secret evidence (Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual)

someone could make a great movie about Venice Beach around 1980-81, when steroids were making their way into bodybuilding culture with what can only be called great bursts of energy. The whole revolution of everyone and everything around Arnold, and the shady dudes prescribing everywhere the informed eye knew to look, would be one of the cooler and mostly unexplored subcultures to put on the screen (Assael, Steroid Nation; see also the excellent documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster*)

Abraham Lincoln came into office with no knowledge of military affairs, so, in order to prevent his generals from steamrolling him, he gave himself a crash course in military history. George McClellan, who had graduated from West Point at 20 ranked #2 in the class (the famous class of '46 that also included Stonewall Jackson, Pickett, and 20 other Civil War generals), had had so many experiences of early success that all he would do was sit around and whine about how Lincoln never gave him enough troops. Reason #50 why Lincoln rocks. (McPherson, Tried by War) When McClellan ran as a Peace Democrat in 1864, he was actually more pro-war than some in his party, who were openly rooting for a Confederate victory; there were significant disturbances and attacks on military recruiters in places like Ohio (home of exiled congressman Clement Vallandingham), which does at least make me both defend and worry about the kinds of civil-liberties measures Lincoln chose to win the war (Weber, Copperheads)

it's far too easy to buy your way into college. When I read about, say, the Olsen twins or whoever going to NYU, I thought, well, maybe they're actually smart. Or maybe not, since there are all sorts of loopholes to let dumb children of the rich and powerful, or famous people with no particular academic distinction, into prestigious schools, no matter how horrid their academic records. This has been going on overtly for most of the century, and semi-covertly for the past 15 years. Duke has more or less leaped two levels in reputation over the past 30 years on the backs of such development admits (Golden, The Price of Admission; Karabel, The Chosen)

it is not so dangerous to attend soccer matches in England now, partly because you can't buy tickets to matches unless you have a previous history of ticket-buying. Also, there are lots of police stationed everywhere, and a lot of the louts have been priced out. (Culpepper, Bloody Confused!)

Year in review 2008

Faithful reader E.G., whom I ran into on the street pretty much in front of the house, asks if in fact I have read anything since October. Well, yes. So, to get back on the horse, here we go:

books read last year: 210
minutes of exercise: 21,260 (took the last week-and-a-half of the year mostly off, so I missed my compulsive goal of an hour a day by 640 minutes, or a mere 1 min. 45 seconds per day).
Evidence that I am not alone in this comes from my gym, which has installed these crazy bikes that have courses you can race on and even a lame game where you ride through dragons. You can create a login and then track all of your progress (average mph, calories, distance ridden) and graph it against everyone who's registered, break down the data by age and sex, club, bike type, and region. So there--I am clearly not the only one. If they had something like GTA on there, except you had to pedal your car, I would be Lance Armstrong.

Actually, not--they give you the mph rating at which you're pedaling, and I've been up to about 27, but not for long (did 1 mile in 2:26, which works out to 24.65 mph). I think the guys on the Tour de France regularly pedal at like 30+, for hours. According to this, in 2005 Lance Armstrong averaged 25.82 mph over 86 hours, with a top speed of 35.54 mph (that's an average, too, which means he did this for more than an hour) for a 41.85-mile time trial. Dang. Still, it would kick butt if you could ride around and shoot things.  Since you have to, you know, stay on the course, that has cut down on my reading a bit. But it's more fun than I would have expected.

Anyway. Best however many of the year, in fiction:
Gruber, Tropic of Night--African shamans and folklore, taken seriously and exported to Miami, where they enrich the tropical stew. Reminds me of those paranormal George C. Chesbro mysteries I ate up as a teenager. Pretty dang literate, and suspenseful. His last book made it into trade pb, which is a nice step up.
Faust, Money Shot--the best hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn. Also the only hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn.
Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas--funny and compassionate, in an odd way: even his Nazis are compulsive writers who submit their work to endless contests, found minor journals no one reads, create weird personal mythologies that only other obsessives follow, and carry on with little compunction about their horrendous beliefs. Bought 2666 the day it came out and am stuck on p. 60 or so, but will get back in there slugging soon.
Gaiman, American Gods--mythology, confidence games, gods fighting, a prison novel, end-times prophecy: pretty much every genre there is mashed together, and it all works astonishingly well as a story; you don't just sit there and admire how well he mixes it all. A heck of a trick.
Park, Personal Days--or Ferris, And Then We Came to the End, both of which concern politics, office politics, and relationships, and how weird work is in general. Hard to separate what exactly happens in each, though Ferris's collective narrator captures something scarily essential about office culture
Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude--WWII fought out within the confines of an English rooming-house. Dry, hilarious, mean. Particularly recommended to Eoin.
O'Neill, Netherland--Gatsby as a post-9/11 West Indian named Chuck Ramakissoon, and cricket as a grand metaphor for about 15 things. Which reminded me that I know two people who are actually really interested in cricket, and who showed me cricket videos on YouTube.
Hemon, The Lazarus Project--history and the usual hilarious black-comic Balkan self-loathing, mixed in with photos and a reimagined story about an immigrant killed by Chicago's police chief for what may have been anarchism or just simple confusion. What Everything Is Illuminated should have been. (Reminds me of the people I got stuck next to on the flight back from NY--out-of-the-catalogue twentysomethings: he had the hobbit beard, sagged pants, chain wallet, hoodie, and she was reading, yes, Everything Is Illuminated. Couldn't tell if they were friends with benefits, just friends, a couple, or what. Ah, these young people.)
Gran, Dope--mean, twisty, bleak little female-centered noir set in 50s NYC. Lives up to the Jim Thompson comparisons by reviewers.
Bloom, Away--who knew she had it in her? After writing some great New Yorker fiction (not exactly an insult, but definitely a genre), Bloom here presents a brutal, unsentimentally funny, vivid take on Jewish NY in the 1920s, along with a semi-tall tale about a real-life woman who tried to walk to Siberia to get her child back. A powerhouse of a story, told with color and a drive I had no clue she could muster.

In nonfiction:

Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York--and boy, did they. I think I'm supposed to call this "delicious," which may presume a higher interest in antique society gossip than you or I possess. (Also makes me ponder the continued career of Louis Auchincloss, who seems to turn out a small, elegant, [and totally uninteresting to me] novel every year or so about latter-day NYC WASPs. I guess someone reads them--maybe the adult version of whoever reads Gossip Girl novels? I begged one from a student--"I won't be your enabler," she protested, before giving in to my whining--and my soul felt maimed afterward. I tried Twilight, too, but the first page was so horrid that I couldn't do it. Susan kinda liked all four, though, so your mileage may vary.)
Dalrymple, The Last Mughal--vivid, thoughtful, wonderful look at the 1857 mutiny through the eyes of actual Indians as well as Brits, with a full ration of savagery and imperial brutalism. Later, it turns out that someone we knew is a descendant of the Mughals and had read the book, which was awesome. She also loves (and even slightly prefers) his White Mughals, which I got about a quarter of the way through but will pick up again in deference to Priya.
Faust, This Republic of Suffering--about how the Civil War instituted an entire new regime dedicated to managing suffering, which relates not just to the world of emotions but to refrigeration, cemeteries, and pensions. A powerful and resonant book. Also, Dray, Capitol Men, about the impossibly courageous African-American politicians who made Barack Obama possible.
Mendelsohn, The Lost--another of those people I would be if I were way smarter. Mendelsohn traces the members of his family lost in the Holocaust while also considering the story of Genesis as a way of understanding why the world is and people exist in the first place. Paul R. suggested that he was probably sleeping with all of his translators, too. If so, more power to him.
Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire--calls the entire course of the Vietnam War, in about 1963. Also some amazing stuff about how hard the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses strove to get him silenced or pulled from the country.
Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure--or Mayer, The Dark Side; or Lichtblau, Bush's Law; or Filkins, The Forever War--at some point, I got tired of all the malfeasance (couldn't read the Cheney biog, though Lisa R-S recommended it), but before that, got as much chapter-and-verse as I needed. Filkins' take on the war rewrites Herr's Dispatches in ways that are chilling, immediate, and horrific; he really shoves your face in what it's like to be older and under fire and protected only by massively-armed 20-year-olds. It's not a good feeling.
Perlstein, Before the Storm--the definitive Barry Goldwater book, I'm sure, and one not weighed down by the overly large historical claims made in Nixonland, which I think is a little too much a politics-junkie's book: every story gets told (admittedly, some of them great, as when Jack Germond jokes that George Romney, Mitt's dad, is such a maladroit communicator that "the Governor later clarified" is a key on his typewriter), whether or not it ultimately mattered, and I think the result mistakes overheated rhetoric for real political commitments. What's now particularly interesting to me about the Goldwater book is what it will show in 10 years. If the republic actually elects President Palin (the Repubs, Perlstein points out at length in both books, were essentially written off by political scientists as a permanent minority party after LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964), then it's going to be really, really scarily relevant. I'm rooting for historical curiosity instead.
Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic--it really sucks to play pro football in a lot of ways, and the players grasp most of them. In a surprising way, a great book about a modern American workplace. Also mentions born-again kicker Jason Elam's Christian thriller Monday Night Jihad, which I saw at JFK airport and briefly considered reading. But I read Left Behind, and that was crap (though I am still rather a large fan of LB II the film; III sucked, even with Lou Gossett), and I'd rather someone with those politics not get my money. (Sounds more decent than you'd expect, though. From the PW review: "Rich details about life as an NFL player invigorate the story; the details become problematic when the story gets wordy (as in one long and unnecessary chapter toward the end of the book). Although the final [...] plot twist is too easy, unexpected humor helps leaven the serious themes, and the sparks of romance that fly between Riley and an American Muslim woman will pique readers' interest.")
Page, The City's End--several hundred years of fantasies of the end of NYC. Amazing a) how many people have wanted it destroyed b) how hopeful these visions can be for a new future. Introduced me to a fascinating WEB DuBois story about the racial possibilities of the city's end that I'd never known of. (Here's an interesting review in an SF mag.)
Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague--poor old EC comics, beaten down by the forces of, well, the usual. A great bit of comics history, enlivened in particular by interviews with those who did the burning as well as those who got burned. Plus that great bit from Gaines' congressional testimony:
            Mr. BEASER. There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?

            Mr. GAINES. Only within the bounds of good taste.

            Mr. BEASER. Your own good taste and salability?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes.

            Senator KEFAUVER. Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

            Senator KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth.  

            Mr. GAINES. A little.

read my uncle's book!

And read this interview with him. Buy the book!

Hagedorn, Savage Peace

Amazing how little I knew about 1919, somehow--even after the Lehane book, and Dos Passos, and William Leuchtenberg, and everything. Big surprise here, I suppose, is the spying (followed at a close second by all the lynchings): Hagedorn reveals how closely and obsessively the federal government was allied with, and even led by, private spy types, and by military intelligence, which went right on spying in some areas even when told not to. (And on people like CJ Walker as well as WEB DuBois, who worked for them, too--Hagedorn makes the case, more or less convincingly, that he was trying to show the Americanness and patriotism of the civil-rights movement and thu pre-empt charges of unAmericanism [odd comparison to Orwell in the last few years of his life] and various lefties. The Major assigned to "colored" issues, black himself, ended up concluding that Bolshevism had little to do with unrest, and that white prejudice accounted for the vast majority of problems.)

Secret hero: William Monroe Trotter, who sneaked himself off to Paris as a shipboard cook (the government had denied him a visa) to agitate for equal rights, got ignored by Wilson (one of history's great what-ifs: no Vietnam War, maybe, better Civil-Rights progress, less lynching...Should be a lefty alt-history novel, instead of all these warmongering History-Book-Club tomes where the Confederacy gets guns or whatever), who was busy ignoring every non-white person's request for some of that democracy-safe world. Other one: Carl Sandburg, whose journalism from WWI Europe and in Chicago's black belt, right before the race riots touched off, I now want to read.

Oh, and Helen Keller was in the IWW. I, for one, did not know that.

The power of random discovery, or something

A fifteen-minute snippet of Life As We Know It: wandered over to the always-interesting SF K Files, where I read about how anxious everyone is about their kids starting kindergarten. Hey, me too. Message: don't make a big deal, and the kids will be OK. Among the 158 comments are a bunch from someone who teaches second grade in the East Bay. Some of the commenters are mad at him; others agree that hovering parents can be a pain, even well-intentioned ones. So I look over his blog for a few minutes. While there, I see a link to the excellent Edge of the American West, so I hop over there and note that the top story at the time is a link to another academics' blog with a Cookie Monster (well, really Kermit) video on YouTube. Hilarious. Make sure to watch to the very end. Then I watch more Cookie Monster vids. And then on to whatever we call all these recontextualized vids (mashups? we should have evolved a more interesting term than that) all over YouTube--The Skeletor Show, all the Soulja Boy synchs (best one here), and now muppet metal. Also with Ernie & Bert doing blast beats. Kinda hard to handle for the full 2 1/2 minutes, but you get the idea. Cookie v. Martha Stewart.

Which then leads me on to the best one, a closing of the circle if you will: Cookie Monster to death-metal guitar. Since the classic term for that kind of singing has always been Cookie Monster (or "Cookie Monster on PCP": when will some alt-OED trace that one back? well, here is a deeply outstanding article in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, pursuing that question), this makes perfect cultural sense. Cookie kinda headbangs already, too. Herein, the Napalm Death classic "You Suffer," all 2 seconds of it, which the article calls "a virtual tribute to Cookie Monster."

Does this count as scholarship?