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!)

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?

Pelevin, Homo Zapiens

Oy, maybe the most cynical Soviet (or post-) novel I've ever read. Which is saying something. (Speaking of which: an interview with Pelevin.)  Our hero is an unemployed poet who ends up writing ad copy in post-Communist Moscow. It is suggested here that all world politics is literally the creation of admen, for reasons and purposes you don't want to know. Capitalism is analyzed sociologically and phenomenologically by a Buddhist Che Guevara through a ouija board. Horrendously cynical ad copy is imagined; is the worst the copywriter who deeply wishes to be a real Russian and thus engages in the worst kind of anti-Semitic primitivist nationalism, because all the papers tell him that's mandatory? the hero, whose greatest inspiration may be the heartwarming vignette of father and son shooting Batman with Kalashnikovs (the only actual domestic product Russia makes, it's noted)? Plus Babylonian mythology, drug abuse, advice on dealing with drunkenness by tricking your mouth, and of course all the homologies between party propaganda and consumer capitalism. (Does it all hold together? Not according to the Times.) Bleak, funny, and kind of visionary--cyberpunk crackle juicing social(ist) satire, to coin a slogan.

Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher

OK, so long backstory here: first read Tom Perrotta in the extremely excellent pb original Bad Haircut, which I was hip enough to teach in a class in the 2000-01 academic year (NY in lit, trying to make a point about the suburbs and Jersey and their relation to NYC, particularly through the mega-boss story "The Wiener Man," whose hero is a guy dressed up as a hot dog, which probably made no sense to 16 California teenagers) and have read him eagerly ever since. (That was apparently his first published story, according to his website.)

So anyhow (part II of long backstory), I once subscribed to New York magazine, in high school. Why, I have no idea. I mean, I had no intention of being some midtown yuppie, which was what the mag was selling back then. I don't even think I got the whole Jay McInerney shtick. Fast-forward more than, yeesh, 25 years, and I'm home for the summer break for a little bit, and my parents have New York around the house. Which is odd, since they're blessedly indifferent to the kind of insistently hip craziness the mag still sells--it seems to have picked up some of the worst snarko habits of the old Spin and Spy (maybe we should call it Spew York, just to keep with the theme), like charticles with hiply knowing little ideas whose main point is how much you don't know, or need to pretend you do know, so your cool friends won't think you're uncool. And one of their bits about forthcoming fall culture was about how great the new Tom Perrotta novel was, in exactly the same ways Spin used to rhapsodize about, say, the upcoming Outkast record, which they had an advance of and you didn't.

So I had this sort of idea about the new Perrotta being life-changing, or something. And then saw some reviews that said, ehhh, and forgot about it, before deciding, about two months ago, to reserve it from our lovely public library. Got it yesterday and read it last night and today: ehhh. A well-meaning take on suburban religion and megachurches, plus youth soccer and sex ed, but with no real point of view besides that people are complicated and don't really fit comfortably under the kinds of labels they like to manufacture for themselves. Likable humans, as usual, with real-world problems and a refreshingly undogmatic take on human weakness and fraility, but not much dramatic momentum. An honorable not-quite failure, I suppose, but not quite a success, either.

And New York totally oversold it. But maybe the cool people read it, and I'm always in favor of anyone reading anything. Or, irritatingly, maybe I misremembered: according to this, their preview wasn't crazy about it either. But somebody, somewhere was raving hiply about it. I'm sure of it.

bleah

Well, we've all been flattened by some hellacious virus Isaac picked up at school. He got over it in about a week; us, not so much. (Personal record, I think: taught one class last Thursday, then went home, at kids' not entirely selfless insistence, unable to speak intelligibly or walk very fast, and spent next 20 hours in bed.) But the worst thing about being sick, apart from being sick, is that I just have no garbage lying around to read; I have more or less broken myself of the habit, which is sort of sad. So do I want to dip into an 850-page survey of 1830s America? perhaps the journals of an Israeli peace activist working amidst settlers and Hamas activists? Hmm. Or maybe that quick survey of American racial progress that ties its success to political progress rather than to the courts?

Nope, I wanted some mysteries. But even there, once I'd inhaled my latest Hard Case deliveries (love their shtick, but they're letting Max Allan Collins do too much, since he's a mediocrity in the most elemental sense of the world--not a memorable sentence, image, or character; just this endless bland competence--this one rips off, or, OK, alludes to, I, the Jury and The Maltese Falcon and was out of mind before I finished), I had to read a literate mystery, too. So I started Michael Gruber's Tropic of Night, about which, damn. Siberian sorcerors, anthropological theory about how limited our understanding of reality might be, African religions and their diasporic expression in Haiti and Cuba, spirit possession, the American racial paradox, Ralph Ellison...it's all in here, so much so I'm shocked John Leonard didn't do one of his free-associative Pollock splatters all over it. Of course, it's 457 pages, and I'm so sleepy (teach a class or two, collapse at desk, trundle home and so to bed, at least until one of us needs to get up and tend to the boy, who's wonderfully chipper) that I'm moving waaay slow. But, damn.

Too bad you never see any pull-quote reviews like that on books' front covers.

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.

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.

Bolano, The Savage Detectives

So I finally made my way through it. Took about 4 days. Time well spent. I recommend some of the good reviews out there to help make sense of the book: Alex Abramovich in Bookforum; Daniel Zalewski in The New Yorker; Scott Esposito's in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The book's love of dust and gritty reality, combined with the games, reminds me of the non-magic realist parts of Garcia Marquez (the density of Autumn of the Patriarch, for instance), of Munoz Molina (most of whose stuff doesn't seem to have been translated yet); of Javier Marias. All of which is odd, since only GGM is a "Latin American writer," yet I haven't seen a review make that point yet. Which may be testimony to just how much there is in this book: not just a main story that gets fractured into several other genres (road novel, mystery, science fiction, African adventure) and main characters who never actually narrate but get narrated, but a whole raft of other stories and lives that spin off from the main line. The reviews point out that other of Bolano's novels actually DO spin off other stories from this one, which makes me want to read them as well. This feels like a kind of masterspring of literature (is that a word?) as a whole, a raft of stories about art, politics, commitment, and the pain of trying to figure out where you're going once you hit 21. Probably the most challenging and rewarding book I read this summer.

70s basketball

So in my quixotic quest to read all of one best-of list (thereby accomplishing what?), I read 3 more books about basketball in the 70s, all of which populate the SI top 100 list. Axthelm's The City Game is I guess pioneering, or something--it links the Knicks to street ball in a way that must have been new in the early 70s--but nothing about it feels particularly fresh now. He shows how the Knicks finally got put together to make a real team after years of money-wasting, and he visits some of the playground legends whose names are still bandied about, even these days (Earl "Goat" Manigault, who's maybe the archetypal playground legend--Don Cheadle played him in a movie; Fly Williams, who actually made it to the ABA for a bit), which is kind of impressive for people who never played anywhere for much money or where records are kept. Score one, or two, for oral tradition. But despite Willie Morris' lionizing of Axthelm as this very real guy who was on the scene everywhere before burning out, the book just doesn't vibrate in the way that good 60s/70s new journalism still does.

Rick Telander's Heaven is a Playground really does, though--and it gives a much better sense of NYC as it slogged toward the abyss in the mid-70s. This is classic urban pastoral, a term I wish I'd invented that comes instead from Michael Denning's wonderful Cultural Front, complete with moments of joy, terror, connection, and missed connections. (In a lot of ways, it very much recalls We Own This Game, down to the adult hangers-on who maybe are helping the young players and maybe are sucking their lives out.) Albert King, later to be a good-but-not-great NBA player, is already a star here at 14, and Fly Williams is, again, the #1 'hood celeb. More than 30 years later, it still repays reading as a snapshot of the time before crack; crime and addiction impend at the margins but aren't central to the story. (I mean, they pop in about 15 years earlier, as seen in Manchild in the Promised Land, but somehow they still feel a little outside the frame here, maybe by willed choice rather than anything else.)

And then there's Loose Balls, Terry Pluto's engaging oral history of the ABA. From this account, it escaped marginality only sporadically; some of the teams crashed immediately (the, uh, Baltimore Claws), though some hung around and even made it to the NBA (Nuggets, Pacers, Nets, Spurs). But there seemed to be no end of fights on the floor (real fights, as in people dropping each other), fly-by-night announcers and owners, and contracts were as a rule hugely inflated to make the league sound bigger and more menacing to the NBA financially, and many of them contained this provision called a Dolgoff Plan whose precise ethical status remains unclear to me--the idea was that you'd pay x dollars into an investment fund that would pay off 5-10x dollars for the player in 15-20 years. Was this a scam, or did it work even after the league folded? But there are a bunch of wild stories here (if, frankly, a little less randy than in Ball Four and A LOT less than in Semi-Tough), and some great tidbits about people who went on to fame elsewhere, including Larry Brown, Bob Costas, Dr. J., and Moses Malone, who, it is strongly suggested, was close to illiterate. (Also, those who didn't, like cut-rate Burt Reynolds Wendell Ladner.) The ABA's patriotic ball looked cool, people say, when you hit a 3-pointer with it, and the league also invented the slam-dunk contest as well. Fly Williams played sporadically for the crazed St. Louis Spirits, summing up his career trajectory when he's alone for an easy layup and decides, what the hell, let's throw in a 360, then misses the backboard altogether. But the single best vision of the league's power is a photo of Dr. J shooting a free throw in front of what looks like 35 people in a high-school gym, and they're visibly bored on camera.

The one thing lacking, especially in a book about the 70s, is a better description of hair. Darnell Hillman was named winner of the biggest afro at an ABA reunion in 1997, though the book, which came out in 1990, already credits him with that achievement, but there's shockingly little discussion of fashion throughout, which is really disappointing. Still, a really vivid and enjoyable look at a colorful league.