What I'm Reading

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.

Herf, The Jewish Enemy

Oy, is all I can say. Simply by reading Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda before and during WWII, Herf shows just how consistently and dully nutty the whole enterprise was. Which we knew. But the sheer irrationality of the thing is just mind-boggling: year after year, week after week, day after day of "the Jews control everything," "the Jews have declared war on us and will stop laughing," "they started the war," even in the face of what the leadership knew was really going on, which was ordered kept out of the papers. The Jews, the Jews, the Jews: they controlled FDR and Churchill and Stalin, and even Stalin's having them shot and purged was actually evidence of their perfidious hold on the world. Plus, endless discussions of how to resolve the supposed paradox of Communists and capitalists working together to oppose the blameless Germans, each time announced with this thrill of discovery: guess who's behind it! It actually grows a little boring in the middle, which may be by design. After all, getting the world this backward requires a fairly endless system of reinforcement to prevent you from thinking, so we have six years of more or less the same three or four revelations. But only rarely does Herf let the mask slip, pointing out how odd it was to hear Goering explain that in some 1943 conversation Hitler had suddenly made something clear to him, when of course it was the same crap he'd heard for 20 years. Does this mean that everyday people read this and believed it, or that they numbly passed it by and had simply abandoned the habit?

Proof of what you can find on the web every day, I suppose: the inability of too many people to change or learn a thing.

Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas

If he writes it, I'll read it. Still, the ways he gets published here are a little confusing. As one other review points out, the publication order in this country is a little off, so this one comes out AFTER a lot of his later stuff, including a later novel, Distant Star, that expands this book's last chapter into a short novel.

It's no stretch to say that he turns all of his fascists, Nazis, and traditionalists into Bolano characters--they're uncomprising avant-garde poets, stubborn pulp fictioneers, scrubs from the provinces trying to eke out a win in yet another of those minor literary contests Bolnao so loves...indistinguishable from his heroes in The Savage Detectives or similar figures in the stories in Last Evenings on Earth, which raises the question of what we do (and what he's doing) with such misdirected artistic urges. (Because he's really not mocking them, any more than he mocks any of his other marginal artistic types: maybe a little chiding, but mostly love and shared values.) Surely, as such an engagé writer, Bolano doesn't believe that politics are immaterial; precisely the opposite. So then the imagination of an entire cosmos of such writers has about it something of the odor of...charity, in that he grants the sincerity, though monstrous wrongness, of their beliefs? ...of belated struggles with history, in an attempt to understand what happened in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, how such appalling ideas got smuggled South and then reanimated?...a political sense that BECAUSE extreme right-wing ideas partake so much of fantasy both personal and collective, we need to understand and counteract, or counterprogram, those same urges?

I'm not sure he's worked this out yet. His main character in Distant Star, a sort of concrete poet of torture, more powerfully poses the whole question of art in a dictatorship. These seem more like gestures, attempts in the direction of understanding the whole corpus of ideas rather than the kind of finished, if ambivalent, artistic manifesto we see presented in, say, The Savage Detectives.

Still, it's not a bad introduction to his aesthetic, which strikes me as absolutely unique--can't think of a single writer with his stupefying imagination and capacity for narrative play (almost every one of his novels seems to be arguing, why can't every book contain as many styles and models as you want? note that, for instance, Distant Star throws in TWO utterly superfluous locked-room mysteries in its final pages, for no other reason than that he felt like it), flair for, and love of, so many genres in enormous detail (one of his pulpsters sounds like H.P. Lovecraft, another writes these bizarre post-apocalyptic macho gunplay fantasies that recall the grocery-store Mack Bolan thrillers, particularly well analyzed in James W. Gibson's Warrior Dreams), all combined with a relentlessly avant-garde sense of literature and an earthy grounding in bodies and sweat. Definitely worth a read, if not reaching the greatness of his best stuff so far.

2666, when are you coming out? I need you.

Christians

I read a lot of books about Christianity and contemporary culture this fall, 'cause they're informative. I made it to about, I dunno, 6th grade before realizing that Christians and Catholics weren't the same thing, and I occasionally run into 9th graders at school who are at the same point. So reading about contemporary evangelical stuff is always educational, frequently scary, and informative. I suppose the proportion depends on the book and subject; but what all of these books point out is that Christians really do live in a parallel universe these days, with their own books, historical truths, music, culture, schools...everything. The frightening part is when the dictating to others starts up.

Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life, about the history and culture of Christian rock, was really interesting and mostly coherent; he has some stuff in there about abortion protests that pads out the length but doesn't really fit. The most interesting stuff covers the hiding of sexuality in Christian music (talk about love tends to get vaporized in worship music, which is about hanging with or loving Jesus in a totally disembodied manner), the variety of dissenters and fighters within the ranks of the music (both theological, as in David Bazan, of Pedro the Lion, who argues with kids onstage in favor of more tolerance, and cultural, as in various styles that may or may not fit the industry's model), and the speed with which anyone who makes it disassociates him-  or herself from the ranks of "Christian music." Plus he turned me on to DC Talk's "Jesus Freak," which is a Linkin Park/"Smells Like Teen Spirit"/"Lithium" ripoff, but a surprisingly catchy one.

Hanna Rosin's God's Harvard tells a different story, though presumably some of these kids listen to some of this music. Patrick Henry College is basically a one-man show dedicated to manufacturing little Christian political operatives (enormous numbers of them got White-House internships, the most famous of them Monica Goodling, a graduate of Rollins College implicated as the hatchet-person in the Gonzalez scandal), and Rosin spends several years with these kids. They keep trying to convert her, and she notes toward the end that some of them seem pretty pissed off that after four years of hearing "the truth," she's still Jewish. But they're also really smart (particularly their debate team), kind, intensely hardworking, and scarily diligent, from my perspective, since they tend to graduate and either go to Harvard Law or move to some edge city and start fighting against abortion and gay rights. Maybe the biggest lesson is how much they live in essentially a different world: no TV, no movies except those that are vetted for pretty much everything, a lot of home-schooling, covered-up bodies...and a set of cultural and global assumptions that begin and end with the greatness and rightness of GW Bush. The book ends with a culture-clash between the school's head and the best teachers, who are Christians but also scholars, and the power structure wins; so it's not clear where the school is going now, or to what extent its political mission is subsuming its educational one.

A.J. Jacobs's Year of Living Biblically has some hilarious passages, and some really thought-provoking bits about how following the Bible literally actually does have a beneficial spiritual effect on his life. (Also some shockingly dumb parts: he provides a pretty straightforward quotation, then explains it incorrectly.) But for the most part, he follows the rules obediently, no matter the consequence (not lying is a really hard one), with aplomb and a witty self-deprecation, as when he outtalks a Jehovah's Witness. The best parts are about the beard, which he lets grow and which acquires a personality of its own, and his outfit, which is sort of shepherd-ish from 2000 years back; you sort of expect to read the beard's version of this experience this summer. Not anything I'm going to try, but an object lesson in how much appearances  do matter, in kind of a good way.

I also read Ze'ev Chafets' oddly smug A Match Made in Heaven, about evangelicals' support for Israel, which needs to rebuild the Second Temple so Jesus can come back and defeat Satan. It's a typically pugnacious Israeli book (I keep getting the sense of him sitting back and feeling self-satisfied with how many stereotypes he's punctured), but also a desperate one: when the best you can do for allies is a group whose members keep spitting out messages about how Jews really need to accept Jesus and don't do so only out of stubbornness, that's a pretty sad sign.

Shapiro, The Cross and Other Jewish Stories

So I was teaching this history-through film class two years ago, and we got onto torture-porn, or whatever the hip name (Splat pack? gorno?) for the genre of Hostel 1 and 2, Saw 1-4, Turistas, etc., etc. etc. is these days. I kept saying, these films have something to do with Iraq--not that they're commentaries, though apparently Eli Roth keeps insisting his films really are complaints about American cultural imperialism and selfishness, but that they register some sort of psychic overload from or resonance of everything we're NOT seeing. (Crypto-Jungian, I know.)

They disagreed. Andy, who sees lots of movies, disagreed. They thought it was not the stupidest thing ever, but in the top 10.

I still think there's something there. In the interests of research, I watched Saw II and Hostel, which are on one of the cable channels. Saw is so fake-looking that it's not particularly scary; it's just sort of grinding (hacksaw to the neck, gunshot through the head, baseball bat with spikes to the back of the head, sharp knify thing to the wrists) and cheap and relentless, with this green tinge to everything that makes it look like, I don't know, an early-90s computer game, Doom or something. Hostel at least does a good job with atmosphere--kind of a menacing Don't Look Now vibe, undercut and jazzed up for the Girls Gone Wild age--until the ridiculous gore overload to close things off (dissection, beheading, eye removal and dangling, fingers chopped and later sawed off, man nearly drowned in toilet before having throat cut). So I survived them, anyway.

And then I was reading the reprint of Lamed Shapiro's short fiction, and it occurred to me that if Eli Roth had any real interest in telling stories with some meat and historical connection to his own life, he'd film these. Shapiro deals in the same bodily violation, but with a real and direct relationship to the history he'd lived: one whole section is tales about pogroms, though the entire collection is shadowed by violence, killing, and rape of Jews. But the title story in particular is the one that grabbed me: the narrator meets a man on a train in America with a cross carved into his forehead by Russian pogromists, a brutal parody of the Jewish injunction to wear the words of YHVH as frontlets between your eyes. Along with Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter," about the Kishinev pogrom, it's a pained, resigned, and unforgettable vision of terror so endemic that it literally marks you for life. I'm not exactly holding my breath here, but it would be really an event to see all of these experts in disgust turn their, um, talents to better cultural use.

year in review 2007

OK, been a while, but I've been working and stuff. Four classes=more than twice as much work as two.

My apologies. Will get back on the horse in the new year. Didn't make any resolutions on 12/31, but writing some more is a good one. Other than that: be a good dad and husband and son and brother, love people, take care of things, like that. My sister-in-law is vowing to run another marathon, which would make 2 for her, and one of my friends from college did so, too. She said it was mostly a matter of mental discipline. Those always sound exciting--well, not exciting, but improving, and nice to be done with--in the abstract, but you can't read while running a marathon, which sucks. Someone should change that. In the interim, will probably stick with the gym.

So:

minutes exercised: 22,845. I have reached and passed the compulsive goal of an hour a day. This works out to 62.6 minutes per day, which does show a nicely insane level of self-improvement, or compulsiveness, or both, which I suppose I already knew. Dunno if I can go for 24,000 this year, which would require an additional 1115 minutes over the course of the year, a piddling 3 min./day, give or take. Hmm.

books read: 222. Disappointing. Down 2.3% from last year, and down a distressing 14% from two years ago. On the other hand, Isaac is doing a lot more than he was 2 years ago and is more fun to hang around, so not a huge loss. Should probably read more short mysteries if I just want to get the numbers up for the sake of...nothing, really. Did re-subscribe to the extremely excellent Hard Case neo-pulp novels, which I reviewed (fairly decent in retrospect; not the best job ever, but a review that got at what was good and limited about the endeavor) a while ago and which are great fun.

So, favorite fiction:

Spiotta, Eat the Document
Mengestu, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears
Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Fforde, The Fourth Bear
Shapiro, The Cross and Other Jewish Stories
Horn, In the Image
Bolano, The Savage Detectives; Distant Star
Diaz, Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Non-fiction:

Millard, The River of Doubt
Stewart, The Places in Between
Trynin, Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be
Packer, The Assassins' Gate
Holland, Persian Fire
Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire
Roberts & Klibanoff, The Race Beat
Mackintosh-Smith, The Hall of a Thousand Columns
Bissell, The Father of All Things
Hafner, Defying Hitler
Cohn, Tricksta
Weiner, Legacy of Ashes
Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road
Roberts, A Sense of the World
Jenkins, The Real All-Americans
Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape
Saviano, Gomorrah

More comments and thoughts to come.

Some questions and remarks from the year:

1. We had a long, looong flight back here from NY. Plane delayed 3.5 hours at JFK. We were in the international terminal, but even there the cultural options are sadly limited. And their papaya, the existence of which at an airport terminal is awe-inspiring, is sadly just not as good as it is at the original on 86th. (The lower west side one--dunno what the 'hood is called at 14th/7th--is about the same.) Attempting, mostly unsuccessfully, to induce Isaac to sleep, watched a lot of TV. Reality shows all over the place, including one where they were competing to be made into models. Made me wonder if the pervasiveness of reality programs has made people somehow more interesting, in that many of us now conceive of ourselves as characters and need to have a storehouse of remarks for, not any situation, but the limited number in which reality TV deals. Or has it made people more narcissistic, since they now conceive of the self as a product competing for mental and visual shelf space in the marketplace of people? Discuss.

2. Was conversing with Dan about how ESPN didn't do a lot of journalism and how they were trying to make their interviews more interesting. Then watched some footage of this enlightening exchange with Clinton Portis:

interviewer: Clinton, four weeks ago, this team was down and out. Now you're in the playoffs. What happened in between?
Portis: The team came together, man. We came together as a team.

Dan agreed that this was excellent interviewing. While you're here, read his piece about why the Red Sox victory this year was sort of unsatisfying, or not unsatisfying, but not particularly satisfying. OK, stupid website doesn't seem to let you search by name. When it does, you get 28,400 results. D'oh. Will check with him and get some pieces linked.

3. I was thinking about Being John Malkovich. Literally, the idea came to me: I wouldn't want to be inside his head, or rather I have no particular interest in being there as opposed to in my own, which most days is a sufficiently weird place to be. I would rather operate someone's body for a while, or maybe just sort of take it out for a spin, since I assume I couldn't steer something that fast or powerful for that long. So let's assume that you can operate said body as well as its possessor. On that assumption, I would happily spend my 10 minutes being LeBron James. Maybe it's a common white-guy fantasy, to want to dunk and jump that high, but so be it. Will ask my students their thoughts. Yours?

4. Lawrence Weschler (read some of the entries from the convergences contest) came to talk at UHS. Pretty much satisfied my entire purpose in getting the public-programs job. Wrote a nice inscription in my old North Point edition of Boggs' Bills, Shapinsky's Karma. And he was friendly and hung around to talk with kids and autograph copies of his book, plus a napkin for the Canters' mom when I sold out of copies. Peter Cole also was in town and came by. Student turnout disappointing. But got him to autograph a copy of his book for my parents, and he read the poems (his translations of Jewish poetry from Muslim Spain) wonderfully. Jason Roberts came. Kid turnout horrendous. He was super-nice about it, which was exceedingly generous of him. Have worked on the promo angle since then, but bribes seem to work best, which is a little sad.

5.  I spent far too much time watching  YouTube, egged on by several current or former students. You know who you are. Some of my faves: the psychic caterpillar Thai tea ad; the Syndicate of Sound lip-syncing "Hey Little Girl"; a BBC hoax about the Swiss spaghetti harvest--really the only useful thing gleaned from a dumb book on This is Spinal Tap; an excellent Franco song--though you can see his stage show here; Beny More performing; far too many ultimate-frisbee videos, including the so-called "greatest," a play that is, admittedly, hella impressive (here and here), and this whole sequence of original, parody, and then reference to the original (there's probably a boring cult-studies journal article to be made from this, though not by me); Flight of the Conchords doing "Business Time" (or here, live in concert) and their, um, rap song. (Must be the only rap ever containing the word "perchance," which is the point and is alone a signal of genius.) What bugs me is reading the comments on so many posts: sent a student a link to Triumph of the Will so she could understand fascism, and fully half the comments are Holocaust deniers. Ecch. Search 9/11 and you get pages of nutty nuts explaining their nuttiness, nuttily. With indisputable video evidence, naturally. I wonder what the consequences of this will be for future students, though mine assure me that, due to the combination of mass audiences and anonymity, "everyone knows" YouTube comments are insane, or the work of sociopathic twelve-year-olds, or both.

6. I taught a class on Jewish history through literature. Major point of the class for the students, or at least a vocal segment of them, was that Jews should have guns. More Jews should have guns. And more of them. Not sure how I feel about that as the outcome, though I suppose I should have expected it, given the way I designed things. Also decided Isaac Babel and Primo Levi really are that good; thanks to Ben Z. for expanding my brain with his paper on Levi.

7. My cable provider lets you watch music on demand. Watched far too many metal videos while making the bed. Man, they really work those double-bass pedals. Not enough videos where people dress as monsters, since they have the same two GWAR vids and none by Lordi. Are there other monster bands out there? Also watched some Led Zeppelin shows. In the 1969 show, Jimmy Page is wearing Levis and an argyle sweater-vest. There are at least two guys in the front row wearing jackets and ties. In 1969. At a Led Zeppelin show. The mind reels. (Speaking of which, in this one from '69 there are two moms with babies visible in the audience!) By the 1973 show, the universe is righted again: there's a groin-cam focused on Robert Plant's lemon, which looks ready to let its juice run down his leg, and Page is wearing an open shirt and his Mystical Wizard pants. Had me worried for a second there.

Sholom Aleichem

Had never read him, less because of his reputation, or that of Fiddler on the Roof, than because I just hadn't gotten around to it. (Though also a bit of that sitcom-ish reputation, to be honest.) Finally read him, though, and found things a lot more complex. For one, he's sort of the hero of Ruth Wisse's teleologically Zionist, if I read it right, The Modern Jewish Canon, with a late Tevye story arguing for maintaining Jewish identity in the face of oppression and pogroms, even in the face of death.

The standardized mock-angry husband/wife interplay in these stories, whether between Tevye and Golde or Menachem-Mendl and his wife, Sheyne-Sheydl, is the most sitcommy aspect, and it does make me wonder where this shtick came from and whom it influenced. But the Tevye stories are actually quite sad, since he loses his daughters one by one: one marries happily (the tailor, not the butcher Lazar Wolf, the song about whom I remember), but then he dies in the last story and she and the kids come home; one marries a Communist and moves to Siberia; one marries a goy and is dead to him, only to come home as well at the end to be with other Jews; one marries up, and her arriviste husband tries to send Tevye somewhere that a milkman in the family tree won't embarrass him; one falls in love with a rich kid, whose family moves him away, and drowns herself. So, as Wisse points out, the movie makes these stories into usual emblems of timeless and raceless tolerance (typical of the early-60s we're-all-the-same humanism that we see in the Americanization of Anne Frank and in West Side Story and Flower Drum Song, about which I used to lecture in my US-Through-Film class) rather than the specifically contextualized and historicized Jewish identity Aleichem is describing and celebrating. They're a little formulaic, but Tevye's voice is really funny and vigorous, and the endnotes help clear up jokes in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew.

Then there's his Menachem-Mendl stories, about a classic luftmensch who gains and loses with stunning frequency, from Kiev and Odessa to the US, with some very funny bits about the early stock market in the east. You could, as Dan Miron's intro points out, read these as indictments of capitalism if you were, say, a Soviet critic. In my favorite bit, M-M sells some stocks to local hustlers, then proudly buys them back for only a little more money so he can keep getting rich. The edition I read has the charming Mottl stories as well, where we actually do see America through his eyes.

But the real surprise for me was the railroad stories, which came with the Tevye stories. These are little modernist gems, narrated by a commercial traveler who lets the people he meets hang or celebrate themselves in their own words. They remind me a lot of the stuff Ring Lardner was doing around the same time, like the story "Haircut" most famously, or You Know Me Al. There's the same love of talk as it actually sounds coming out of people's mouths, the same sly dagger-stabs of insight, the same openness to experience and love of what others might disdain. (The last story argues that you should always travel third-class so you can talk to Jews and listen to them, whereas in second-class they'll all pretend to be goyim, and first-class types are so stuck-up and unpleasant that it's not worth your time. Which reminds me of Scott Fitzgerald's famous remark that by sticking to baseball Lardner catastrophically narrowed his artistic vision and achievements.) Obviously neither imitated the other; I'm assuming the ties lie through naturalism, whether Zola and Balzac or Crane and Norris. But it's fascinating to see such different writers achieving much the same effects in such different circumstances. Some of the reviews also call Aleichem "the Jewish Mark Twain," which is true if you think of both as sly comedians who'll never be taken for fools.

Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire

See? I did finish it and was not distracted by reading 4 mysteries or mystery-related books in a row. For Gorenberg, the settlements are a kind of portrait of Dorian Gray for Israel, a secret and mostly unacknowledged accompaniment of the political unconscious of its policies of the 60s and 70s (the book covers 1967-77) that offered a truer and more real vision of what was going on below the surface--not to mention what would happen in global politics. In his telling, after 1967 Israel ended up with all of this land it had no real plan for, and worse, no way to come up with a plan--at least, with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who comes across here as a fascinatingly and maybe constitutionally Machiavellian figure who was congenitally unable to articulate what should be done. Partly, the reasons were political: the Labor coalition was hostage to smaller parties whose defection could cause the government to fall, and so both left and right, who pushed for different kinds of settlement for different reasons, got their wish. Partly, Eshkol seemed unable to simply say that he wanted anything at any time, so settlement poked along, sort of legally and sort of not, even as numerous observers predicted precisely the costs they would exact.

The spookiest part is that he mentions interviews done with veterans of the 6-day war, some of whom were already disillusioned and some of whom saw in the war validation of the end times. So it was therefore time to grab "Judea and Samaria," as promised in the Torah. Not knowing what to make of such thinking in 1967, the writers left it out. Then, in 1973, despite an arguable loss in the Yom Kippur War, religious types saw even more validation in their beliefs--even though, as Gorenberg notes, not a single one of the supposed values of the settlements proved true. This is a powerful, necessary, and troubling book; it's dense, but well worth the time.

Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

At first I thought of that Monty Python skit where everybody is Superman, except for Bicycle Repairman, who's thus a superhero. 'Cause here, they're all JEWISH! Cops, criminals, everybody. But of course there's more to it than that; Chabon does his alternate history proud (Jews get a sorta homeland in Alaska during WWII, Zionists are driven into the sea, the A-bomb gets dropped on Berlin in 1946, and there's some war in Cuba), and he finds a secret Jewish heart in the hard-boiled genre. Hasids are the hard-core gangstas here, and the one fixer who makes it way up in the FBI is as compromised a politico as you could want. But it's not just the robust reimagining that got me: Chabon got me thinking about the whole Jewish presence in the hb genre. Offhand, I recall almost nothing. There's Joel Cairo, greasy "Levantine" in The Maltese Falcon, but for the life of me I can't recall a single Jewish major character of any sort in Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald. Though Spenser's girlfriend Susan Silverman is of course Jewish, it's interesting to think about this absence registers the social/emotional political splits between the world of Jewish lit (mostly lefty and realist in the 30s and 40s, when the classics were being written) and that of detective fiction, which was in many ways equally lefty, pulpy, and realist--and somehow unremittingly goyish. You had the high-lit tradition of Kafka, most famously, whose detective-fiction implications have been pursued by Auster's New York Trilogy, but Chabon seems to me the first to really think well about how Yiddishkeit might be connected to and illuminated by all of these tropes. (As he points out in this interesting interview with the good people at Nextbook, stylistically and culturally, everyone here owes Isaac Babel a debt.) All sorts of in-jokes here, from people living on S. Ansky Street and Ringelblum to calling cell phones "shofars" and my favorite, a cheapo department-store chain called Big Macher. I enjoyed it thoroughly and was gratified to see that he didn't condescend to the genre and overwrite, which I suppose the Lovecraft homage in Werewolves in Their Youth should already have clued me in to. Philip Roth, where's your detective novel?

Speaking of which, read Brian Wiprud's other two novels in a day. OK, but not as fabulously zany as the taxidermy novels. I see that he has a new one with his taxidermist character coming out later this month, so I will surely ingest that.