What I'm Reading

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.

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.

10 interesting things I learned this year

In no particular order, a random assortment of discoveries:

1. Only 6 NFL players served in Vietnam. Masses of them served in WWII. The teams used the old National-Guard out to get them plum local jobs where they wouldn't have to go anywhere. (from Michael Oriard's Brand NFL.)

2. William Rehnquist ran the Supreme Court's NCAA pool. No info about who won. And I am NOT picking Kansas this year, since they screwed me both of the last two years. Which probably means they'll win. (from Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine.)

3. Persian Kings actually did wear mascara and stacked heels, as is asserted in 300. (from Tom Holland's Persian Fire.)

4. Early 20th-century college football teams, mostly from the Ivy League, enrolled uneducated people in their mid-20s solely to play football. Since it took only 5 yards to get a first down, brute force was all you needed, which explains the high casualty counts. (from Sally Jenkins' The Real All-Americans.)

5. As early as the late 1950s, college football players were enrolled in dummy jobs for which they were paid, put in gimme classes, and offered sex as a recruiting tool. Amphetamine abuse and horrific training-table practices were the norm. (from Dave Meggyesy's Out of Their League.)

6. Theodore Roosevelt invented parkour. (See Isaac's favorite parkour video.) He mandated that, as a character-building exercise, his children undertake point-to-point hikes in which they could go over, under, or through anything in their paths, but not around it. In pursuit of the same aesthetic, he nearly died while exploring a tributary of the Amazon in his mid-50s. (from Candice Millard's The River of Doubt.)

7. Naples' crime rate is so out of control that residents of the US Army base in the vicinity are instructed not to leave the base if at all possible, as a "Wild West atmosphere" prevails outside it. (from Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah.)

8. Christian colleges turn out really good debate teams. Patrick Henry College's team has beaten Harvard and Oxford in the last few years. (from Hanna Rosin's God's Harvard.)

9. The FBI, in its earliest years, actually fought racial violence. Its earliest incarnation, 40 years before the FBI itself was incorporated, sent undercover agents into the South in the early 1870s to document the atrocities being perpetrated against African-Americans during Reconstruction. (from Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI.)

10. By the 1970s, CIA morale had sunk so low, and the culture had changed from "tennis players" to "bowlers," that most of the old-guard membership of the office was uselessly drunk in the afternoons. (from Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes.)

BONUS EXTRA DISCOVERY:

11. "White Christmas" is actually set in Southern California--the first verse of the song goes:

The sun is shining
The grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway.
I've never seen such a day
In Beverly Hills LA.
But it's December the 24th
And I am longing to be up North.

Which is why he's "dreaming" of a white Christmas. But then everyone told Irving Berlin that the song played and resounded much better without it. Also, when Berlin was still a singing waiter on the Lower East Side name Israel Baline, he wrote a Jewface song called "When Mose with his Nose Leads the Band." Nearly thirty years later, he used the same melodic figure in "God Bless America." (from Jody Rosen's White Christmas and his visit to campus.)

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.

speaking of lists...

So the mighty-legged Andy, whose name is 6th on the list when you Google him, asks how many of the IMDB top 100 films I've seen.

It's a weird list--lots of classics that everyone says you're supposed to see, mixed with anime, Tarantino and Tarantinoids (uh, Sin City one of the 100 best films ever??). I do like how they're listed by original names, like The Seven Samurai as Shichinin no samurai and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly as Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo. (I saw that at the Berkeley theater in a Leone double feature and forgot to eat beforehand, so I was starving after 5 1/2 hours of walkdowns and shootouts. That was painful.) Plus lots of films featuring gunplay.

Having seen lots of films featuring gunplay, I score a more than respectable 86 of the top 100. Booya. Must waste time tomorrow lookng up other lists and seeing how I do. And will be up to 53 of the top 100 sports books when I finish North Dallas Forty tomorrow...

The SI top 100 sports books, and other reading lists

Being the compulsive counting sort of person that I am, I decided to look at some of these canonical lists and see how I did. I recall having read 52 of the Modern Library's top 100. The SI list, which is, again, here...let's see: 8 of the top 10, including Ball Four approximately 100 times when I was a teenager, and Liebling's The Sweet Science, the #1 book, at least a few times. Also Lardner's You Know Me Al at least twice and maybe three times.

I'm not sure if I should want to read a lot of these, or just a few. Ah well. 16 of the first 25, with Peter Gent's North Dallas Forty in the mail. 28 of the first 50...and 50 of the top 100, which is sort of disappointing. I think. I dunno. Maybe I expected to have read them all, but it's all those books about horse-racing (I did read Seabiscuit), golf, and hockey that did me in.

Addendum: just read Pete Axthelm's The City Game (#23, and overrated there) and am reading Rick Telander's Heaven is a Playground (#15), which is great so far. So that's 52, which still puts me behind the Time list. Am not going to read hockey books, damnit.

OK, let's try other canonical lists. The Modern Library top 100 novels in English...here's John Baker's list of how he's done, along with some entirely relevant comments. I got, in an odd coincidence, 16 of the first 25 (but come on, Appointment in Samarra? I like John O'Hara and all and read this, but one of the top 25 novels in English since 1900?!)...25 of the first 50...and 48 of the top 100, helped along mightily by diligent reading of Evelyn Waugh and Edith Wharton. Also, Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson is just a bizarre addition. And I say this as someone who has actually read it.

Modern Library top 100 non-fiction...the readers'-choice list is hijacked by cranks (3 Ayn Rand books and Dianetics in the top 6), so I'm not going to bother. Uh-oh, 4 of the top 25...17 of the top 100. Eesh. Should really read Silent Spring, I suppose, but am not going to read some of those big-ass political biogs.

Let's try Counterpunch's top 100 lefty books...21 of those, some of them the same as the Modern Library list and some just odd (Edith Wharton's The Decoration of Houses?). For balance, let's look at the National Review's list. Orwell I have read, Friedrich Hayek...not happening. Here I get 9 of the top 50 (weirdest inclusion: The Joy of Cooking, I suppose because it keeps women where they're supposed to be or something) and 12 of the top 100. Did not read The Starr Report, which they named #100. Sure, guys, why not?

Time's top 100 novels, and in other languages, even...55 of those, which is my best yet. Wahoo! BBC's Big Read...I do like English fiction, but am not super-optimistic about this one. Yup, 30 of them. Bizarro list: Harry Potter next to Garcia Marquez next to the complete works of Terry Pratchett next to Cold Comfort Farm, which is a hilarious novel.

OK, and finally, the top 100 mysteries. After my disgraceful showing on the sports books, if I don't get at least 60, then damn. 12 of the first 25...36 of the top 100??!! Here's a different list: 24 of these, though tainted by one book/author, which discounts my having read all of Hammett, Chandler, Mosley, Pelecanos, Lehane, Spillane, Cain, et al. And poor Carroll John Daly never gets a mention. (Though you can enjoy this piece, which hilariously asserts that he's better than Hammett. Um, he's not.)

I am a disgrace.

Recuperating....here's a directory of top-100 lists. Will just try one more to resuscitate my ego: the Guardian's list. Well, 28 of these. The most interesting list, which is something, even if some of the selections seem sort of strenuously multiculti.

Still, dang. Maybe should read some more sports books this summer to get above a failing grade. I do think it's unfair to have Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which is 12 novels, count as "one." I read book one and then stopped, though I amassed all twelve. That Widmerpool is a bad 'un.

Gigantor

Just had a checkup: Isaac is 44 inches tall and weighs 49.5 pounds, which makes him the height of a 5 1/2-year-old and the weight of a 6 1/2-year-old. Jeez. He has gotten taller in the last year proportionally: he was 97th percentile last year and is "off the charts" this year. Maybe he really will be tall; projections we looked at, based on age and height, had him between 6'2" and 6'5", which would be really weird, given the relative lack of height on my side. We discounted them, since I was tall until about 6th grade, or rather I was tall in 4th grade and then not anymore. But maybe we shouldn't. Must be Susan's tall maiden aunts from the 40s...

More year in review

Had to take a break for a little while, as we got a new Mac, then promptly installed Windows XP on it and wiped the whole thing. That was frustrating. No computer at home for 2 weeks, and thus no ability to accomplish all the time-wasting tasks one usually performs.

Anyway, the Barnes book is a great mediation between literary and commercial fiction, the story of a real-life case Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took part in as well as a meditation on what we can and can't see in our daily lives--what do our assumptions, limitations, etc. let us know, and what do they blind us to? Plus you get this great vision of ACD, who was a roaring blunderbuss of a Victorian with an abolsutely indomitable will to achieve what he took to be right. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should have had him, Teddy Roosevelt, and Kipling roaring off together to fight, I dunno, killer zeppelins or something. In brief, David Mitchell's Black Swan Green is actually remarkably structurally clever, but you don't even need to notice that to enjoy the book, whereas the whole point of Cloud Atlas was the technique, since both the idea behind it and the flattish characters themselves didn't compel overmuch interest.  After you finish, you can go back and enjoy all the clever little structural play. Subcomandante Marcos can really write. I thought his co-production with the estimable Paco Ignacio Taibo was great fun; the point isn't, as the NYT review had it, that the solution is obvious; or rather, that IS the point--of course we knew what was happening and why, and we still couldn't stop it. Lefty sloganeering and anti-globalization activism become a willing self-parody here, with the jokes serving as their own kind of protest.

Year in review

OK, some numbers: I read 227 books, which was a decline of 12% from last year, and worked out 20,620 minutes, which was an irritatingly small 180 minutes--less than 30 seconds a day!--from the sheer anal-compulsive perfection of 20,800 minutes, and also a decline of 3.6% in working out. A mere 1280 more minutes over the year, or about one more workout every three weeks, and I could have achieved the even more crazily compulsive feat of 21,900 minutes, or an hour a day.

Well, that's what dreams are for, yes?

In any case, favorite books of the year:

Fiction:
Meek, The People's Act of Love
Barnes, Arthur & George
Mattison, Men Giving Money, Women Yelling
Grossman, Forever Flowing
Adams, Harbor
Salter, Last Night
Mitchell, Black Swan Green
Sijie, Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch
Stern, Angel of Forgetfulness
Wiprud, Stuffed
Marcos/Taibo, The Uncomfortable Dead
Horn, The World to Come
Schwarzschild, Responsible Men

Nonfiction:
Robb, A Death in Brazil
Lansky, Outwitting History
McCoy, A Question of Torture
Kinzer, Overthrow
Berman, On the Town
Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats
Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma
Maraniss, They Marched Into Sunlight
Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin
Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars
Buford, Heat
Bissinger, A Prayer for the City
Kamp, The United States of Arugula
Goldberg, Prisoners
Davis, Led Zeppelin IV
Leff, Buried by the Times

On the books I haven't previously discussed, some random thoughts: Harbor, which my brother gave me for the holidays last year, is a wonderfully humane and humanitarian novel about Algerian refugees and terrorism in Boston; judging from the notes, Adams got in among people and asked them what their lives were really like, then transmuted them quite adeptly into fiction. The novel rings with an unforced compassion for the struggles you face with so much stacked against you, and it's only going to get more true and accurate over the next few years. (Also a nice tie-in to my second-favorite series this year, Showtime's scary Sleeper Cell, which Susan and I discovered in December and watched both seasons of in their entirety. I was physically anxious about their intended terrorist strike on LA in season one. Season two was a little more relaxing somehow, though Oded Fehr's excellently cynical performance as the head jihadi remained disturbing and smirkily confident, even as he was getting extraordinarily rendited [?] to Saudi Arabia for torture. Best of the year would have to be The Wire, season four, about which I can recommend Tim Goodman's comments and the impressively obsessive comments on the comments.)

More soon.