Hooray for summer

Heed the words of Grandaddy.

Packer on Iraq

George Packer, author of Assassin's Gate, has an World Affairs article that is well worth your time. He argues that for those Americans who are not serving or do not have family in Iraq, it is entirely an abstraction and means to attack the other side. The most disturbing element is how people don't seem to want to understand.

The Iraq War had its share of bad or indifferent journalism. But there was a huge distinction between the failure to expose the administration’s falsehoods prior to the war and the effort to report the truth in Iraq once it began. The press redeemed in Baghdad what it had botched in Washington. If the names of the war’s best reporters aren’t widely known today and will never be recalled alongside their legendary predecessors in Vietnam, it’s partly because the public—especially the portion of it that generates and consumes opinion on a regular basis—is less susceptible to the power of complex facts than it was in 1963.


I am as guilty as everyone else on the last point. Too quick to jump to conclusions and unwilling to spend the time to digest all the information. It's unfortunate.

Mixed

Anne Applebaum delivers a brutal dis to Nicholson Baker and his Human Smoke. She likens him to Dan Brown:

And the reader, both of The Da Vinci Code and Human Smoke, is duly flattered. Read Brown's book and you, all by yourself, can decide whether Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene! Read Baker's book and you, all by yourself, can decide whether World War II was worth fighting! You too can get the facts and make up your mind! And never mind that the facts have been chosen selectively, even randomly, by writers who do not understand the context in which they originally appeared, and indeed have deliberately tried not to understand it. Brown and Baker are not "experts," after all. They are, to put it politely, artistes.

What may be my least favorite fantasy novel, Wizards First Rule, will now be a full season series on ABC. I'm curious as to how they will handle all the S&M torture scenes. Not curious enough to watch, but still, that will be a challenge.

If you like thoughtful film criticism, what are you doing here? Read these takes on the three Indiana Jones films.

Chuck Palahniuk is upping his gross out ante with his new book, which features suicide via gang bang.

Speaking of fantasy novels, Steven Erikson's Reaper's Gale is a return to form after a disjointed volume. Which is to say, if you have gotten to the middle, keep going. If you haven't engaged by volume 2, pull out.

Barack Obama reads Fareed Zakaria...shouldn't you?

There are those who claim they love all chocolate, but can they handle the Belgian dark chocolate....anus? For a limited time only, also available in solid silver. For some thoughts on things you might actually want to put in your mouth, have a look at Joanna's take on our recent cherry candy tasting.

Remember Faces of Death? It was faked.

New iteration of a great book blog

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous is dead, long live the Citizen Reader. Nonanon was a great blog that covered only nonfiction, from a reader/librarian's perspective. The new site already brings the same goodness, but now with fiction! Add it to your RSS today.

Reading older science fiction

I started reading The Mote in God's Eye, one of the best regarded space operas I have yet read. I have yet to get to the meat of the story (first contact) but there are a few distracting elements. For one, the book was written in 1974 and postulates a US-USSR union that eventually falls apart. Not a big deal, we can just pretend it is a US-Chinese union like in Serenity.

I find it a little more distracting that the space navy is clearly modeled on Horatio Hornblower stories. Crews are swapped higgeldy piggeldy, the most valuable crewmember is known as the "sailing master," midshipman start aboard ship in their early teens, captains can be 25, and the Captain goes around saying things like "Damn your eyes!." David Weber's Honor Harrington books must owe some debt here, although Webers books are even more Hornblower/ Aubrey-Matruin in space than Mote in God's Eye, which uses the material more as background.

Like some other authors from the period (e.g. Chester Himes) Niven and Pournelle want to use some swears, but apparently the eff bomb wasn't kosher. The frak solution was yet to be developed, so instead of saying "Fuck em," characters say "Rape em." This isn't a case of future speak since aside from technology, everyone talks like 19th century people, which makes me think they should have said "bugger them!" Fuck em, while clearly hostile is non-specific in its outcome. Rape em has a much more menacing connotation even than, say, go to hell, which is also fairly hostile.

Fortunately, all of this is background. The story itself remains excellent and worth reading, so far at least. Unlike mysteries, which are (usually) set in a current or historical setting, science fiction creates futures, and those futures can seem silly to later generations. I recall a Norman Spinrad novel, written in the hippie days, where one future rebel type goes around saying "Come the revolution!" I prefer the current manner of making future humans in many ways alien, as our society would appear to our ancestors.

Some book discussion

Good Bloggingheads.tv in the last few days. Peter Wehner talks to Steven Waldman, author of the very good Founding Faith about religion and politics. On a similar note, Cato Institute Libertarian talks with Jeff Sharlett whose new book the Family comes out tomorrow. The book, about a fundamentalist elite secretly guiding US policy looks like conspiracy theorist fodder, but the blurbs come from a number of reliable individuals and Sharlett presents his ideas well in the video as well.

You can come back baby, indie rock never forgets

Hmmm, not only is Liz Phair working on a new novel, but Exile In Guyville is getting the re-release treatment and she is making a new album in the "DIY spirit" of her much loved debut. I am perfectly happy to pretend the last few albums were made by Bizarro Liz Phair and that we can get more songs like the one below.

Hey, is Dee Dee home?

Among my books on deck (that is to say, not my next read, but the books vying for that coveted book after next spot) is Martin Torgoff's Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age 1945-2000. It will be a change of pace at the very least. In thinking about the book, I tried to think of some of the best songs about drugs and came up with the Lemonheads Drug Buddy and the Heartbreaker's Chinese Rocks. Neither paints a terribly attractive picture. Videos below.

Pennsylvania Avenue

John Harwood and Gerald Seib, who write for the NY Times and the WSJ respectively, have written a book called Pennsylvania Avenue, which provides a series of profiles about power brokers in todays Washington DC. The book's meta-story is that DC is intensely gridlocked and that certain actors like lobbyists, fundraisers and finally cooperative Congressfolk are finding ways to bridge gaps and get work done in the city.

The book consists of a series of profiles of actors who find ways to make things work. Some like Ken Duberstein are directly involved in policies and making them happen. Others like David Rubenstein, founder of the Carlyle Group and Lea Berman, the social secretary, show more of how things happen, as opposed to how compromise is found, in the City. The Rubenstein story is illustrative about how money has gained greater power in DC and the Berman story is centered on a state visit from China and the wide range of protocol and signaling that takes place in a state dinner.

The authors have a lot of experience in DC and clearly have a lot of access. They interview all of the people in the book and get their viewpoint on a wide range of issues. Reading Karl Rove's take on politics is interesting, and good to read in his own words. I also liked the optimistic stories of ideological enemies finding ways to work together in Congress. This book will have the greatest appeal to political junkies who want an insider's look at how things are actually accomplished in the city. Those with only a cursory interest will find less in this book.

You can listen to both of them talking to Diane Rehm here.