So let it be written, so let it be done

While I ponder Sacred Causes, have a look at these.

Wow, I somehow missed the fact that the Silver Jews have a new album on the way. This blog has the first new song called Strange Victory, Strange Defeat. Perhaps an allusion to the dueling histories of the Fall of France? Perhaps not. This blogger has the fine sense to post both New Orleans and the Wild Kindness, songs you really need.

The LA Times interviews Alan Furst. He admits plot is not his genius:

Because I'm incapable of creating a plot. So what I learned to do early was to find some particular operation done by one of the secret services in one of the countries and make it my plot, and that's basically what you have in "The Spies of Warsaw."

Huzzah for Bob Barr! Unlike Libertarian Ron Paul, Barr has returned funds from the notorious Nazi site Stormfront. In honor of his telling the Nazis what for, here is Jello Biafra doing the same.

Grow large with food

The Onion has done the nation a valuable service by pitching a satirical product the fast food industry is probably contemplating. It's may be too late for the adults but we need to get Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman in front of more impressionable youth.

Jordan

Ross Douthat wrote this nice piece on Robert Jordan, his former favorite author. Jordan is also a former favorite of mine, although my fandom persisted through my twenties. Despite greatly preferring the George R R Martin and Steven Erikson fantasy series, I have not been able to generate the same level of excitement that I felt over the Jordan books.

It may be the Harry Potter effect. Back in the 90s, nearly every one I knew was reading the Jordan books at the same time and it was a constant source of conversation. With the Martin book and Erikson books, I haven't enjoyed the same shared experience. As Sam Anderson noted about the move to DVD on TV, we have left the era of simultaneity, where we all watch shows on our time. This was almost always the case with books, which makes the rare cases of simultaneity all the more exciting.

One I wish I had missed

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a number of science fiction novels which I fondly remember. The Legacy of Heorot tells the story of colonization and the perils of misunderstanding xenobiology. Footfall is an exciting update on the War of the Worlds. Lucifer's Hammer concerns the collapse of society in the face of a comet impact on Earth. My major issue with Lucifer's Hammer, bloat, is a much bigger issue in highly regarded Mote in God's Eye.

The bloat issue is gigantic here. The first 150 pages are boring exposition filled where we meet the stock characters (engineer with Scots accent, plucky female aristo along for the ride, young dashing military commander) and learn about the painfully uninteresting world of the future. Once we meet the aliens, known as Moties, it takes many more pages before we learn anything about the society. There are many portentous allusions to things the Moties don't want the humans to learn. It takes so long to get to the revelations, that I really didn't care once I read about them.

All this padding would be fine if Niven and Pournelle had provided a rich world to explore. No such luck. While the initial concept is interesting ( US and USSR unite, colonize space, have a civil war, new empire tries to pick up the pieces) it quickly devolves into cutting and pasting from 19th century Britain. The navy is straight from Horatio Hornblower, with officers named sailing master and teenage midshipman running crew sections.

The Church (which is Catholic, a bit odd given the leading space powers were largely Protestant and Orthodox) is clearly more powerful, without serving any narrative purpose. Has the Church followed its social justice wing or become a rival power center to create challenges for the elite? Has the theology created cultural restraints on the development of technology or society? No and No. All the more galling the Church apparently hasn't changed much at all in a millennium.

There is a decent story about alien contact amongst all its problems, but it is such a short part of the book, it is probably not worth working your way through to find it. As the humans encounter the Moties, they learn that the society could threaten human society. The debate concerns the means by which they must deal with it. The viewpoints expressed nicely describe the classical realist view of politics. Alien first contact follows similar rules and problems as seen in foreign relations. What makes a country a threat? How do you manage threats? What is the purpose of interacting with other societies at all? The book has some interesting, if one-sided, things to say about this, but you have to wade through hundreds of pages of crap to get there. If you are looking for a classic to discover, beware this one.

A few items

Steve Clemons posts a small excerpt from General Ricardo Sanchez's new book. It's so sad, but Bush sounds like General Buck Turgidson.

Ian McEwan has a two part piece in the Guardian on apocalyptic thinking.

I am in the midst of Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes, which is an excellent choice for those interested in religion's role in 20th century politics. His blog will give you a taste of his deep erudition, beautifully acid style and his Tory politics.

On the geek front, if you are looking for a way to survive those tedious conference calls, may I suggest Mabiweb?

Chandler

I consider myself a fan of crime fiction. This year is the first time I have read Raymond Chandler, which makes me a stupid fan of crime fiction. Having just finished the Long Goodbye, I think I will have to lay off crime books as all will pale in comparison. This book has provided the blueprint for countless following volumes, but it is well written enough to appeal to those who normally look askance at the genre sections of the store.

I view the downfall of Chandler's followers as drawing the wrong lessons from his books. Everyone has hard drinking loner PIs who turn a critical eye at society and particularly the powerful, but Chandler's Marlowe, particularly in the Long Goodbye, has a strong moral code that isn't just character detail but is critical to the story and it's development. The inherent critique of society is all the stronger for the near complete failure of others to live to any code at all.

Chandler's vision of the world isn't as starkly dark as that of James Ellroy or Jim Thompson, but his characters tend to be as venal as any found in those more explicit authors. His world is more depressing as it seems more realistic.

For an interesting study of the creation of Long Goodbye, read this.

Some movies are better than others

American Beauty (the film, not the Grateful Dead album) always rubbed me the wrong way, but I didn't understand why until I watched Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Both films critique elements of American society, suburbia in Beauty's case and the media in Ace, but American Beauty allows the viewer to assume superiority while Wilder holds up a mirror.

American Beauty allows that there are many unfortunate people out there who follow some suburban dream, but rebels like Lester Burnham ( and by extension the viewer) don't have to put up with it. Viewers can even feel sorry for themselves as Burnham is martyred by the forces of hatred.

Kirk Douglas's Chuck Tatum is a hustler from the get-go who takes advantage of a human tragedy in order to create enough buzz to get a job at a New York newspapers. With just a few (generally pathetic and tragic) exceptions, every character in the movie is out to take advantage of the situation, whether to make money, gain power or to get a few moments on the radio. It is a ugly portrait of a problematic part of the American character.

You can argue whether or not the portrait is fair, or even if the naked pursuit of self-interest is all bad, but Ace in the Hole doesn't allow the viewer the opt-out of the criticism or to have knowing conversations about the horrors of the suburbs. So it shouldn't surprise that American Beauty was a hit, while Ace in Hole did so poorly that Wilder was docked pay on his next movie.

Weezer

YouTube is today's MTV, a place that actually provides music videos. And the new Weezer video is YouTube's Money For Nothing, a video that pleases the addict with its numerous references. My personal favorites are the inclusion of Miss South Carolina and K-Fed and the peanut butter jelly time banana. But there is so much more to enjoy. And yes, South Park made a similar joke, but this is better, as the YoutTube stars get in a few digs of their own.

A bit of this and that

This video is crude, vulgar and will probably offend people, but man, is it funny. Especially if you have already seen Downfall.

KNRK is playing this bit of pop pleasure, by the band Carolina Liar. It has that infectioness that will lead me to listen to it fifty times in next five days, after which I will put it aside. It will be fun while it lasts though.

Here is an interesting blog post that debates the pros and cons of African American Book sections at the bookstore. Borders seems to shelve black authors in this section. I went there looking for Edward Jones's Lost in the City (probably my favorite short story collection) and probably wouldn't have found it without the computer guide.

Check out Citizen Reader hating on the Randy Pausch book. As her commenters note, the book does smell of Albom.

The new Scott McClellan (if you have forgotten, a Bush White House Press Secretary) has a dishy memoir coming out. The Politico has a preview of the nastiness.

Speak about destruction

Back in the high school days, a teacher probably showed you a movie with car crash victims or some horrifying images of lesion studded genitalia to warn you of the dangers of bad driving and over-frequent sexual behavior. Like those teachers, Mark Lynas with his book Six Degrees is trying to scare you and your government into shaping up.

The book describes what would happen to the Earth as the average surface temperature increases, degree by degree (Celsisus.) Each degree presents a new list of horrors including rapid desertification, super storms, the collapse of food production, the death of the oceans to the possibility of mass extinction.

While the first few degree changes are merely terrible, Lynas notes that the shift in temperature can create positive feedback loops where the build-up of carbon allows for even faster accumulation of carbon in the environment. For example, as the temperature rises, sea ice will increasingly disappear. That sea ice reflects quite a bit of energy back into space, so as it goes, more energy can build up on the earth raising the temperature further.

The book is aimed at someone reasonably current on science, but who is not an expert. His emphasis is on the processes and then the likely to possible results of the processes. He does mention specific problem areas (Pakistan running out of water, Florida disappearing, the Sahara creeping into Iberia) but he doesn't paint lurid disaster scenes. So don't go looking for them.

While the possible futures are terrifying enough, the real shock of the book is that Lynas says we have about seven years to start curtailing carbon use. While this is meant to inspire us into action, my reaction is like that of Hudson's in Aliens. It is hard to see the world getting in line behind an effective response in that time line. Still, if you are looking for a reason to see why we should be talking about carbon instead of Iran, this book will do it.

Testament

Testament is a lesser known film that should stand with the likes of Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe and the War Game as essential films about the dreadful, yet fascinating, subject of nuclear war. Testament nicely complements these classics, with its focus on a single family.

The movie is set in a fictional San Francisco exurb, far enough away to avoid any blast damage, but close enough to lose family members and to fall under radioactive fallout. With the exception of a flash of light, we never see any of the physical effects of the bomb. Instead, the focus is on the emotional, as the radiation slowly kills the town. The movie is as understated as is possible. There are no explosions, no riots, and no (physical) violence.

Coming within a year of each other, Testament is likely to be compared to the Day After. The image I recall is the jogger vaporized by the atomic blast wave. From Testament, I will always remember a mother telling her dying daughter what it is like to be in love. The focus is entirely on the emotional and daily lives of the survivors. We see them as they face the realization that they are unlikely to survive, and they press on with what is left.

Unlike most nuclear war films, there is little to no suspense. There is no attempts to stop or mitigate the bomb damage. The war just happens and it is never clear why. In truth it doesn't matter. There is no horror either, at least, not psychological or physical horror. There is a kind of spiritual horror as the characters try to deal with impending doom.

While from a movie perspective, it is closest to On the Beach, I think it is best compared to Connie Willis's the Doomsday Book, another book which focuses on grappling with an impossible situation. This movie is recommended to all.

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.