This is a writer's life

I suspect that many of us envy the idea of a writing life. Lots of contemplation, musings, and being one's own boss. The ultimate life of thinking leisure. Mine would involve sipping sloe gin fizzes and Pimm's Cup while resting at the Lodge at Torrey Pines.

The reality of course is often far different. For many it means taking a series of soulless jobs, facing years of rejection and living with an odd mix of relationships. In Beg, Borrow or Steal, novelist Michael Greenberg describes his writers life from his early, striving and starving days to his recent successful ones.

The book consists of a series of short essays, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, built around an anecdote from his life. They range from the tense, as when he and his wife have a run-in with the military government of Argentina, to the comic, as in his failed attempts to pay the bills working as a waiter and his visit to a polyamory group. While the subject matter varies, there is a calm sense of reflection about them that makes each of them a great pleasure to read.

Greenberg has spent most of his life in New York City and its environs so much of the stories focus on the City. You'll learn for example about the giant potter's field located not far from LaGuardia and as well as the "Negros Burial Ground," the earliest known African-American cemetery in the United States. Greenberg also writes about Jewish life, including the role of circumcision. His principal subject, though, is writing, including the perils of screen-writing and the role his writer friends and mentors have played in his life.

The essays here are remarkably concise, but are still meaningful. They are strong stories well worth reading.

A few links for your morning

Here is Alan Jacobs writing on Michael Chabon in an essay called Jews with Swords. It is about Chabon's journey as a writer: "Chabon insists that he doesn't repudiate any of that work. He just wants to contend that it is perfectly reasonable for him to do what he did in writing Gentlemen of the Road: take off "in search of a little adventure."

The Musical Pairings blog has a pile of Spoon live covers for your enjoyment. The cover of Panic is one of the finest Smiths covers I have yet heard. It captures the wild exuberance of a band that many tend to think of in morose terms. There is also a cover of one of my fave Springsteen songs, namely I'm Going Down.

Pitchfork has a list, with videos, of the top music videos of the decade.

Dead of Winter

Rennie Airth's latest, the Dead of Winter, would have been a perfectly good book, if it had not been written after his excellent River of Darkness (looks like there is a mass market available - you are crazy not to get this book at that price) and quite good Blood Dimmed Tide. Now it seems like a book that could have been much better.

The book differs in a number of ways from the previous stories. Two of the most significant though are the time frame and the characters. Unlike the previous books which were set in the post-World War One period, this book is set in the waning days of the Second World War. Britain's home front is grim, with the family tension rising as parents fear their children will die in the last days of war, food being close to inedible and the V-1s and V-2s making London a frightening place.

A young Polish girl is killed on the blacked out streets of London. Retired policeman John Madden, reluctant hero of the previous books, is brought back in as the girl had been working on his farm. He then drops out as other characters take the lead. The book is quite light on Madden, enough that I felt it was a stretch to call it a John Madden mystery.

The story, which involves ties to a 1940 murder in France and to the growing violence of the 20th century, is fairly straight forward. It is a police investigation where the cops are from the old world of simple criminals must contend with a hyper-violent criminal from the nasty second half of the century.

One of the things that Airth does best is show the terrible wear of war on society. Here he does it with the damaged home front. The police force consists mostly of older cops who should have retired, but all the replacements are at war. The populace gets by on little and the unfortunate East Enders live in bombed out ruins. It is incredibly bleak, but handled very well.

I think the World War 2 setting made me want some more dark political dealings, in the vein of John Lawton or Alan Furst, authors more known for their World War 2 settings. It is still a very good book that I read quickly. In the end, it left me thinking how much more I liked the earlier books.

Disney buys Marvel!

Marvel comics is going to be part of the world's best known entertainment empire. My hope is that the Death of Captain America sequence becomes a movie. Or the Ultimates.

Descent part 2

I loved, loved, loved the Descent. Scary, claustrophobic and ambiguous, it is hard to think of a better horror movie from the past decade. The trailer to the sequel is now available. You can watch it here. The movie is working from the US ending, not the UK version. This means that the heroine escaped and is now taking a group back down to investigate. It feels a bit like Aliens with the sole survivor returning with a bunch of people who don't believe her. To be honest, it doesn't look that exciting.

A visit to the comic shop

I've spent a long time working on converting my kids into nerds and the effort is finally bearing fruit. We started with Star Wars, the nerd gateway drug, and have moved along nicely. Now the kids love Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ray Harryhausen, and giant monsters (can Godzilla be far behind?)

The next great leap is to comic books. My oldest likes the Marvel Adventures Avengers books. The Marvel Adventures books are geared for the younger set. This is handy as comics are increasingly being made for more mature types. It is fun to take them down to Cosmic Monkey and look through the kids section. It also means I get to pick some up for myself. Here are some recent reads.

Locke and Key Head Games. This six issue series just wrapped up. Unlike the first six issue series (an absolute must read), this one is more transitional, setting up action for the next book. The weirdness quotient goes up quite a bit in this story as does the complexity of the narrative. Author Joe Hill writes horror novels as well, and it shows in the story.

Unwritten - I picked up the first one, and will certainly be reading more of this title. The book is about the son of a writer of Harry Potter like stories. The father has disappeared and the son plays on his fame at comic conventions. At one convention, an audience member calls his identity into question and then the story gets really strange. Pretty soon characters from the books start appearing in the real world. Here is a LA Times piece on the book.

Y the Last Man. How on earth have I not read this already? At the shop yesterday there was a display of "After Watchmen, what next" comics. For a buck you get to try classic darker comics. So I finally picked up Y the Last Man, a story about all the men on Earth dying, except for Yoric. Wow what a book.

The new Stephen King

Reading about the new Stephen King (due out around Thanksgiving, a nice gift to booksellers) I was struck by how retro it seemed. The book is long at over 1000 pages. It involves a strange threat (a dome suddenly appearing overhead) to a small Maine town. In the face of adversity, the citizens exhibit varying amounts of good and evil ( you can count on a fair helping of venality as well.) Sounds like his epic horror books like the Stand and It, that he wrote back then.

It turns out it sounds retro for a reason. King initially drafted the book back in the 80s. He took another stab at it later and is now finally satisfied with it. Boffo, I say. Under the Dome sounds great to me.

The Brits love the Wire

The Guardian loves it so much they have a whole page devoted to all things Wire. The show is big enough to cause a row in UK politics. Apparently a Tory shadow minister called Manchester the British Baltimore. Silly of course, but I am happy the show is watched enough to become a reference point in Parliament.

Here is the Guardian's nine reasons to watch, which should convince you if you haven't already started watching. They pick Bubbles over Omar as the character you can't help but love, which I think is right. Here is Irvine Welsh saying that the Wire makes writing on British TV look suck ass. Ok, he says "absolutely shit." It's nice to see that the British wail and bemoan the state of their culture as much as we do.

Sometimes, I wish I were Catholic, I don't know why

Conspiracies make for great fiction. Like ghosts, vampires and other hidden terrors, they are the sort thing we would like to believe exist, but our rational mind tells us they do not. Conspiracy fiction lets us enter a fantasy world, usually a political one, where the evils of politics are not forced by the realities of compromise, but by wicked forces.

Thanks to Watergate and the collapse of trust in institutions the 70s were a hey day with movies like Three Days of the Condor and the Parallax View. The X-Files ushered in a new era of paranoid drama in the 90s, reviving the notion that the government and the aliens were engaged in a long term struggle of which we caught occasional glimpses. The funny version was Men in Black, the creepier version was Taken.

In the book world, the most successful of conspiracy stories is of course Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. It will be interesting to see if his Lost Symbol creates the same excitement. If successful, we can be sure that tourism will spike in his chosen settings and interest in previously unpopular subjects like the Templars will sky rocket.

It was the Catholic Church as a whole that sat at the center of the Da Vinci Code and its predecessor. And why not? Is there an organization as large, ancient, culturally pervasive and powerful as the Catholic Church? (the Illuminati, maybe?) They have cool commandos in the Jesuits, and their own Majestic-12 in Opus Dei.

Portugese author Luis Rocha explored the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I in his first book, the Last Pope. He has just followed it up with the Holy Bullet, which continues the intrigue. In this book, it is the attempted assasination of Pope John Paul II that drives the plot. This time the CIA, Opus Dei, the British SIS, an Islamic visionary and the unfortunate heroine of the first novel chase after the truth behind the near death of the Polish Pope.

The book can be a challenging read. Rocha writes in a indirect European style that is far more elliptical than the writing you usually find in American novels. The chapter ordering is also out of the ordinary. The chapters set in the current day are in order, but the many chapters in the past are not, which requires close reading.

The book forces you to pay attention, and I appreciate that the book assumes you know something about the Church and European politics. At one point, we see mention of "the German, Ratzinger." Now, hopefully we all know that is the current Pope. Plenty of other thriller writers would contrive some means of relating who Ratzinger is to those who are unsure. I am happy Rocha assumes we read newspapers.

They were all in love with watching, they were doing it in Texas

David Morrell is a prolific writer of adventure and horror stories. He is probably best known for writing First Blood, the basis for the Rambo movies. I greatly enjoyed his Creepers and have a few others on my bookshelf as well.

His latest is called the Shimmer and it is based on the Marfa lights. The lights, the origin of which is still unexplained (but may well be headlights in the distance), appear to some people but not to others and draw a number of visitors to this quiet corner of west Texas. Morrell uses this occurence and as the base for an entertaining sci-fi adventure tale. The lights are hynoptic in the book and those who see them are drawn to them, while those who can't become...troubled.

The story itself has elements of the X-files, Ace in the Hole, and the paranoid 70s film era. The main character is a cop, Dan Page, whose wife disappears. Turns out, she is in Rostov Texas where Page quickly heads. While there he becomes embroiled in an escalating crisis involving the lights and a secret government base located nearby. Quicker than you can say Trust No One, the cop and his wife find themselves in dire straits. Others are in a much worse place.

The emphasis here is on action. Morrell switches things up nicely more than once and gets the plot moving along. The book is more about the crazy adventure, than the characters, although I quite liked the back story of the mysterious and violent Colonel in charge of the base. I totally want to go to Marfa now.

Niall Ferguson goodness

I am in the middle of a number of big fat nonfiction books (including the HUGE From Colony to Superpower) so I am taking them all slow. I was slow to start Niall Ferguson's The War of the World, for no real reason I can identify. Maybe the first few pages didn't grab me. Now I am greatly enjoying it.

It is the story of why the 20th century was so violent. He explores the role of ethnic conflict and the replacement of imperial cosmopolitanism with violent nationalism as sources of violence. More on that later.

I just wanted to mention how much I enjoy his prose. While talking about the murderous Stalin regime, he tells the sad tale of the Leningrad Society for the Deaf and Dumb. Having killed off everyone else, the forces of the state decided this fellows were bad news and executed 34 of them for plotting to kill Stalin. Then, in a footnote of all places, he nicely captures the insanity of the regime. If it wasn't so terrible, it would make for an ideal farce.

What had in face happened was that the chairman of the Society had informed on some members who had been selling things on local trains to make ends meet. This denunciation led to the NKVD's involvement. The chairman himself was subsequently implicated in the alleged conspiracy and shot. The following year, the NKVD decided the original investigation was suspect. The local police were then arrested.

Why apologists for Stalin still exist baffles me. If you want to explore this regime from a fictional perspective, I highly recommend Tom Rob Smith's Child 44.

Fun with lists

Oh how I loved the Book of Lists, when I was young. Filled with strange lists, like people who might have been Jack the Ripper or the ever popular preserved sexual organs of famous men, the book was made to titillate and entertain. There is much less titilation, but plenty of entertainment in 10 Bad Dates with De Niro, a book of movie related lists.

I of course went straight the sex and violence section, where movies like In the Realm of the Senses play a major role. Once you get past all the real live actors having sex lists, you can move on to less prurient fare. There is plenty of it. I thought I would give it a quick flip through and put it aside, but I thought that many of the lists were funny and informative. In a list of movies that were never made, but should have been, we learn that John Waters of all people was planning to make A Confederacy of Dunces. I hated that book, but I think a Waters version of it would be worth watching, especially if done in the bizarre fashion of his early movies. There's tons more of this sort of goodness, including a list of one by Stephen Soderberg. He talks about Chinatown really is as awesome as you remember, and in fact is probably better.

This is a book that movie geeks will devour. The book's editor, Richard Kelly, has a blog about the book and movies in general.

Dark and nasty, but oh so good

I imagine that, at one point or another, most people have experienced the terrible feelings of wrong and hopelessness that come late at night when you cannot you sleep. When dawn comes, a more measured view takes hold. The main character, and in fact most of the characters, in Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects lives permanently in that state. Rejected by her cold, cruel patrician mother in favor of her dead sister and her eventual much younger sibling, Camille is a bundle of neuroses. Her relationship to sex is particularly troubling and it complicates the task that brings her back to her small town Missouri home after years of self imposed exile.

Her editor sends her back to write a story about two girls, one dead and one missing. Camille reluctantly agrees and soon finds herself in combat with her mother, the local police and her former friends. Her hometown's wealthy cattily stalk one another and trample on the weak, all done with smiles. The younger generation is just as bad. Camille's younger sister leads the bullying popular pack of girls that torment the rest of the town's children.

It's the writing and the depiction of the evils of how people treat one another that make the book shine. There is a mystery at the heart of the story, but the end isn't much of a shocker. Like Camille we watch the everday and not-so everyday horrors inflicted by those that can do it, whether parents, friends or neighbors. This one isn't for the whodunit reader, who will be disappointed and potentially repelled, but for those who want a look into damaged lives and communities.

Wow, Avatar looks sweet

A lot of people think Titanic when they think James Cameron, but he also made the first two Terminators and Aliens, one of the best science fiction films ever. I had heard that Avatar, his latest, is going to be good and this new trailer certainly makes me think it will be.

Truck

Finding new non-fiction can be a challenge. There are certain subjects about which I happy to read regardless of author. When considering a book outside of my have to read subject zone, I generally rely on past experience. Certain authors, like Ted Conover and John McPhee, cover subjects in such an engaging way that I am to pick up any book with their name on it. Finding new highly reliable authors is always a treat. Thanks to Citizen Reader, I found Michael Perry. Perry lives in rural (very rural as the title of his book Population 485 attests) Wisconsin and writes thoughtful essays about work, community and life based on his own experiences as an volunteer fireman/EMT, a brother and a husband.

His book Truck: A Love Story does not fall into my obvious must read category. Cars are a complete mystery to me and I cross my fingers whenever I visit the shop as I am incapable of intelligently discussing service options. Perry makes the story of his year long effort, with the help of his brother-in-law, to rebuild his 1951 International Harvester pick up truck compelling by staying humble and by breaking down the story with lots of context. It helps to that this book is about a lot more than rebuilding a truck. It is about learning how to grow your own food, finding love in unexpected places, and building a relationship (with a person as well as a truck).

The slow breaking down, cleaning, repairing and rebuilding of the truck is a nice metaphor for the reflective style of essay writing that Perry adopts. If the unexamined life is not worth living, Perry has every reason to enjoy life. Perry's prose is a pleasure to read. On to Coop.

Stay out of the swamp

Our two spookiest states are Maine and Louisiana. Maine has the creepy fog covered craggy coasts where you just know a lizard creature is waiting to pull you into the depths. Then there are the forests, the people with the crazy accents and the Stephen King and Lovecraft stories. Louisiana has the dank bayous filled with gators, snakes and all manner of bugs and is a bad place to hold National Guard exercises. Let's not forget the voodoo, the crazy accents, the drive through bars and the fact that the sea is swallowing the Delta. Louisiana though doesn't quite have the horror story base that Maine does.

Deborah LeBlanc is doing her part to fill in the gap. She has written four novels set in the creepy backwoods and waters of the Sportsmen's Paradise and the latest is Water Witch. A water witch is someone gifted in the ways of dowsing, or finding water. Dunny Pollock, born with an extra finger, can find all manner of objects including missing people. Living in Texas, her sister summons her to the Lousiana bayous to find two missing children. She does go but then has to confront evil forces unleashed by a poorly performed native American ritual.

The book has lots of bloody violence, the supernatural and children in peril. It also is steeped in the local culture, which LeBlanc apparently knows well. Here's to LeBlanc for making Lousiana a place more likely to give me nightmares.

Between two ferns

I have yet to see the Hangover (a fool decision on my part, I know) but I have enjoyed Between two Ferns the faux interview show of Zack Galifianakis. I quite liked this one with Michael Cera. The tickling is quite uncomfortable. The Bradley Cooper one is also nice.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

And here is between two cocks, which is nice and tense.

Detroit crime city

Peter Leonard, son of Elmore, writes crime novels that will remind you of his father's. His Trust Me is a briskly paced crime novel populated with a wealth of Detroit low lifes and strivers. The central character is Karen Delaney. She is shacked up with a Greek restaurant owner but harbors plans for revenge against a ex-lover. She gave him her life savings to invest which he kept when he kicked her out of the house. When a pair of dim witted criminals try to rob her current beau she hatches a plan to get back her money, and then a bit more.

Things of course go awry and then many people find themselves after the money. There are many characters, sometimes confusingly so, and most of them are in some sort of desperate situation. The level of violence, often quite casual, is greater than in the Elmore Leonard books, at least as I recall. The elder has his hard core killers, but this book features intelligence-challenged fools making a series of bad mistakes that tend to get them dead or badly hurt.

The Detroit in the book is a bleak place. While a few people live well (and in fear of crime) the majority live on the edge of ruin and seem to spend their time in casinos. Like the city, the characters are a damaged bunch. Don't read this if you like to have characters with whom you can completely sympathize. Do pick it up if you want a fast bracing crime story.

Could have been better

So I finished the Strain last night. Overall I give it an OK grade, thanks to a strong start and a weak finish. The book starts with a 777 landing at JFK with nearly everyone on board dead once the wheels stop rolling. A CDC epidemiologist is called in to investigate and he soon learns that something dark and nasty is afoot. The authors build up the tension nicely, with the vampire strain creeping out into the city, and thanks to some powerful assistance to the vampire, the world won't listen.

The problem is the end which becomes quite formulaic. The redshirts are very clearly redshirts and the final battle of this first volume of the trilogy is like many other vampire, or monster, books you have already read. The epilogue gives hope for something more novel and exciting in the second volume.

I suppose I have come to dislike the small band of heroes holding back the tide of darkness model of fantasy/science fiction/horror. Perhaps it isn't even dislike, but a sense that if you are going to do it, do it some way new or terribly exciting, which the ending did not do.

Too much vampire bizness, reading late at night

So I am still on vacation, but we leave tomorrow for Portland. I finished Fangland this week and wish I could have brought the other vampire book I am reading, the Strain, along as well. That one was too heavy for the travels and I dislike travelling with library books anyway. These two very different books once again illustrate all that can be done with the vampire story.

The Strain, which I haven't finished, is a tale of Vampire Apocalypse. In the book, vampires are a disease and a weapon that threatens to overwhelm the world. The pacing is rapid and the feel is cinematic. Characters, such as they are, serve mostly to create tension and to allow the plot to move forward. One thing to note is, at 80% through, this book is part of one of those trilogies which is really one novel cut into three parts. Nothing wrong with this, but you can expect to be left hanging, or desperately wanting more.

Fangland is an updated version of Stoker's book complete with a victim/avenger character named Harker, Evangeline in this case. Evageline is a producer for a 60 Minutes like newsprogram. She heads off to Romania to interview a crime figure who turns out to be something far worse than a gangster. Later, said criminal begins to infiltrate the offices of the newsprogram.

This book takes the metaphorical/symbological approach with the battle of vampire vs. human serving as the philosophical battle between those fixated on the wrongs of the past and those who want to move ahead. Sex, frequently a subtext in vampire books, is front and center in this one, but in a morally ambiguous sense. Harker herself is burdened by sin, but is in the end redeemed. You can read this one as an allegory about life in the media or as the triumph of life over death. Either way, it's good.

I think the vampire story is so flexible because each author can pick their mix of sex and violence. The form allows for, and maybe even demands, both, but the authors can make one or the other dominate. In the case of the Strain, it is nearly all violence, with a sense of sexuality driving the villain. Other vampire novels have highlighted the murky line between sex and violence, but Fangland is interesting because it sets sex and violence in direct opposition.

Something for the top of your reading pile

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is one of my favorite of the many good literary thrillers. Set in post-war Barcelona, it is a tragic, sad mystery centered on a love story and the love of books. His most recent book, the Angels Game, is a much more conventional than the first book, with a simple structure, a familiar plot and familiar characters. It is a testament to Ruiz Zafon's great strengths as a writer that this book is just as an enthralling as the first book. I may even like it better and plan to re-read Shadow of the Wind to be sure.

The main character, David Martin, works at a newspaper thanks to the help of a wealthy benefactor. He begins to write lurid potboilers for the paper and finds a following. He gains a number of successes as a writer and attracts a mysterious patron who wants him to write a special book. The writing of the book and his purchase of a dark, forbidding house begin a spiral into a tale worthy of his own dark stories. There is much more of course, including the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a few love stories, and tragedies aplenty.

As I mentioned the plot veers closely to familiar territory. At more than one point, I thought I was re-reading another thriller. This isn't the case, although the similarities are often great. I was happy to look past this thanks to the wonderful writing. Ruiz Zafon's prose is densely atmospheric and he sets up a wonderfully gothic story that has its fair share of surprises. The characters themselves provide impressive surprises. While he follows thriller formula in terms of pacing, he uses pace to drive the story and to excite, not to distract from plot holes or the absence of characters.

I used to grouse that this guy was never going to write another book, it took so long between the two. I am happy for him to take this long if the book will be this good.

I should note that much of my enjoyment of the book, originally written in Spanish, is due to what seems to me to be a fantastic translation. The book reads as if it were written in English, a tribute to the skills of Lucia Graves, the book's English translator.

Away

Off to GA and NC for a week long family vacation. Should be very fun. A few book notes before going:

I am reading Truck - I loved Population 485 so I immediately picked this one up. I think I prefer this one to Population 485, which says a lot as I thought that book was great. They are similar in subject, with lots of personal stories built around a theme, in case, the rebuilding of his rusty truck and finding unexpected love. The writing feels more confident and relaxed this time around. Perry riffs on an amazing number of topics and delivers more off the cuff wisdom in a chapter than many books deliver.

Guillermo del Toro, he of the spooky movies, now has a spooky book in the Strain. It is a Vampire Apocalypse book, or so it seems, with what promises to be an insane body count. The book has its issues, but I finding that I quite like it, staying up far too late to read some more. It's the first of a trilogy, which means there will be cliffhangers aplenty, but based on what I have read so far, it is a winner.

The BN review has a long interview with Richard Russo. I am cautiously optimistic about his new book. I particularly like this response to a question about reviewing books:

Actually, I don't review that much, and for a reason. Even when a book truly sucks, I can't get out of my mind the fact that some poor dumb schmuck labored over it lovingly, just as I do over my own fiction. I realize that it's somebody's job to blow the whistle on bad books, but I resist the notion that it's mine. When I do review, I look for and attempt to articulate the work's strengths before pouncing on its weaknesses. When there's simply no good news, I try not to appear as if I'm enjoying myself in delivering the unpleasant verdict.

Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

Sean Dixon's Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal concerns the Lacuna Cabal, a book club consisting of a group of odd performance artists. There club had a series of peculiar experiences in recreating books, but things get really strange when they start to read the Epic of Gilgamesh, off clay tablets naturally. The book starts just as the war in Iraq is kicking off and with a book that comes from Mesopotamia, you can probably guess there will be a connection.

The book club consists of a set of quirky misfits, some of whom are alpha misfits that dominate the rest. At times they felt a bit overly quirky, to the point of distraction, but I thought they worked reasonably well.

The book is decidedly post-modern, with narrators speaking with the readers strange footnotes and a purposeful confusion of what is happening. It reminded me a bit of the House of Leaves in this way, although it did not make me want to throw it across the room as that one did.

More fun than a barrel of nukes

My favorite nonfiction book of all time is The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Telling a story that combines brilliant individuals, the biggest scientific endeavor of all time and intense political drama, it is hard to go wrong, but author Richard Rhodes knocked it out of the park with this phone book sized opus. It is, I believe, the only nonfiction book I have read three times.

Loving the subject matter and having had success with some of her other histories, I had to try Diana Preston's Before the Fallout, which covers much of the same ground. The Preston book is much shorter and has a tighter bibliographic focus that the Rhodes book. While the achievements of the scientists lies at the core of the Preston book, it doesn't go into the intense detail that the Rhodes book does. You won't see the extensive reporting on weapons design that you will find in the Rhodes book, but you will get a close look at the community of science that discovered the secrets and created the ideas that led to the bomb.

Preston writes clear, accessible engaging prose and her books cover a wide range of subjects including the Lusitania sinking, the Boxer Rebellion and polar exploration. This one on the Taj Mahal looks quite good as well.

Way out there alternate history

If you like completely gonzo over the top alternate history, then you probably have already read or heard about John Birmingham. In his Axis of Time trilogy a US-led naval task force from 2021 finds itself catapulted back to 1942 where it quickly disrupts the timeline by accidentally sinking a good piece of the US Navy. World war 2 changes quite a but as you might guess.

His latest is even crazier. Without Warning starts a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. For reasons unrevealed in this book (part one of a new trilogy), most of the population of North America disappear. The area around Seattle, Guantanamo and southern Mexico escape but that is about it. As you can imagine, the world is initially stunned, but then the chaos starts. The world economy is shattered and the conflicts really heat up the world over.

Perhaps this was the only way to go, but the way the conflicts fall out reads like the neocon scare list. Again, it is not to say that what he comes up with is unreasonable, but it may sound a bit like the Corner at National Review when you read it. I don't think, especially based on some other plot lines, that Birmingham is advocating a particular political line here, but you will certainly take note of the fate of certain nations and locales.

The characters are a mixed bag, serving to anchor stories in Seattle, Cuba, Mexico, France and the Middle East. The character in France has the most exciting story. She is ultra secret assassin type who finds herself on the run in an increasingly nasty Europe. I liked the Mexico story as well which involves some smugglers becoming Han Solo-esque good guys as they assist refugees escaping the collapsing Mexican state.

I like how Birmingham ratchets up the action and chaos as the book progresses. I suspect the action will get even crazier in subsequent volumes (the next of which is titled After America). The book suffers from a bit of bloat, but this one feels much sleeker than the recent efforts of Turtledove, the reigning king of the genre.

NPR listeners don't like the genre

NPR recently polled its listeners about the top 100 beach reads. The results are here. While I quite like the books chosen, the list smacks a bit of pretension. Aren't beach reads supposed to be the guilty pleasure, escapist books? This is the time for people to break out the crime, the science fiction the fantasy. Not our NPR readers apparently. There is a Chandler, an Orson Scott Card and Tolkein, of course, but there is only one Stephen King listed? Really?

I may be projecting, but the list looks like favorite books overall or the books people would like to be seen reading instead of the genre. On the genre side, I was a little surprised at the Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett. A fun read to be sure, but I am surprised if it still being read enough to make the list.

More fun with Harryhausen

A few months back I rented Jason and the Argonauts for the kids. They had been reading some Greek myths and I thought they might like the monsters. They liked even more than I expected/hoped, so I decided to follow up with a less seen film with Ray Harryhausen's effects. Yet again, the kids loved it.

The Valley of Gwangi is probably the world's only cowboys vs. dinosaurs movie. The plot is simple. A group of people try to revive a struggling rodeo show by bringing in creatures from the Valley of Gwangi. The Valley somehow has various beasties from pre-history including the eohippus and the allosaurus. It takes awhile to get to the creatures,but once it does, it is quite fun. The effects are impressive and there is more human interaction with the models than in some of the other Harryhausen films.

Form a line to the throne

The Dark Ages are typically skipped over in most histories. Despite books like the History of the Middle Ages, the period following the fall of Rome and before the Renaissance gets little coverage in the popular histories. Tom Holland, writer of vigorously entertaining and thoughtful histories of the West, has now turned to this era with Millennium: The End of the World and the Rise of Christendom. In the book, he explores how Christendom, and therefore the West as we know it, arose. The book begins and ends with the meeting of Pope and Emperor at Canossa where the first of many balances would be struck.

As in his prior books, Holland explores the mindset of his subjects as well as their actions. Great emphasis is placed on the concern that the world might really end and how the visitations of people like the Vikings might be a sign of the end times. Holland also highlights the role of those Vikings in creating modern nations like Britain and Russia.

I also appreciated his reminder that the people of this era were quite different from those of today. He shows the castle building knights to be predatory creators of protection rackets that devastated the autonomy and independence of the peasantry. The supposedly enlightened leaders of Islamic Andalus are shown as similarly cruel and exploitative.

Unfortunately, this one didn't hold together or delight as much as Rubicon. In part it is because he is telling a larger story, how the West started on its path of separate religious and state power. He had an easier task with Rubicon in describing how the Roman Republic collapsed. Fewer actors and a definite end. It's just not as tidy here and some of the stories feel like non sequiters.

Still, better than most history and much more likely to engage the average reader.

Mixed

Man, the heat has been killing my ability to do anything, including post. Here's hoping the heat wave really is gone. Here are a few things I noticed of late.

Are the Misfits the ultimate New Jersey band? Idolator says yes. I just know they rule.

Here is a nice bit on the parodies of that scene in Downfall. The Hillary one remains my fave.

I've long had a fascination with LA. In my imagination, it is a sunny sort of place with all manner of evil lurking just beneath. Yes, yes, the very images from LA Confidential. For the longest time, I thought it was Ellroy's LA Quartet that created my fascination. It should be Chandler, I know, but there you are. In reality, I think it was Axl Rose who did. I have been listening to Appetite for Destruction again and I am pretty sure it is songs like My Michelle that nestled in my brain and created the fascination.

This post makes me consider, at least, reading Vollman's massive book Imperial.

Have you tried the limited edition coconut M&Ms? Not bad.

The future's so grim, I gotta wear shades

If you are looking for a brief story about a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, Genesis is your book. The framing device is an entry exam to the Academy, an elite and apparently ruling organization in a future polity modeled on Plato's Republic. The candidate has four hours to present an argument in hopes of joining the mysterious institution. Candidate Anaximander chooses to discuss the life of Adam Fforde, a key historical figure in this world.

Author Bernard Beckett packs quite a bit into this slim volume. You get discussions of artifical intelligence, the role of memes in society, the role of the state and power and commentary on the current world. If that seems like a lot to pack into a short book, it is. Not only that, but we get a mix of Biblical and ancient Greek references. These make sense for the story that Beckett tells, but I think it muddles the book a bit.

The ideas flow by so fast that they can get lost. In the end, I think this is OK, as the book is more about a story of politics and the ideas give flavor to the ultimate resolution. This one got quite a bit of buzz, I think because of the post-apocalyptic element which continues to find favor in today's media. The Wall Street Journal has a nice piece on upcoming post-apocalyptic movies and TV. It's worth a read.

New Rennie Airth

I knew this Rennie Airth, who certainly takes his time between novels, had a new one coming out, but I am a little surprised it is set in World War 2. The NYT Crime column has a brief positive review. Like the prior books, it featured damaged hero John Madden. If you are lucky enough to have the chance to read River of Darkness, the first Madden book, for first time, please read it now.

M-O-O-N, that spells good science fiction

Moon is great fun and something of which I hope we see more, the small intelligent hard science fiction film. The set-up is simple. Sam (played by Sam Rockwell) is coming to the end of a three year tour as the only human employee of a mining operation on the far side of the moon. He is getting ready for the return trip when things start getting a little strange.

Fortunately the strange all makes scientific sense without getting into hand waving fantasy that plagues the science fiction movie world. The movie has a tiny cast, and Sam Rockwell has nearly all the screen time (the robot voiced by Kevin Spacey is the next most prominent.) Given that, he does a great job portrayed a confused person.

Thinky sci-fi movies can become glacial bores, but that isn't the case here. The movie has its fair share of tension and surprises, but it keeps the story on track as well. This one is worth watching before it goes to DVD.

On spoilers

Spoilers are a tricky thing. Most of us know not to reveal an ending, but reviews in particular are guilty of effectively revealing the ending. I am guilty of this myself I have at some point mentioned that a story reminded me of An Occurrence at Owl Creek. If you haven't read that Ambrose Bierce story then go read it and then come back. Now, if you know the story, it has a particular ending that has been re-used many times. By referencing that story you are planting the seed of that sort of ending, or at the very least the notion of the twist ending.

The thing is, I as a reader, or movie watcher, do not want to know that there is a twist ending. More than half the fun of the twist is the jolt of surprise. Most twists themselves are fairly boring (he/she is actually insane and criminal/his momma is his aunt/we are but a dream of sleeping cockroaches,) but well presented they are wonderful. Once we expect them, they look like a parlor trick.

This makes all manner of things difficult to cite. If I mention Angelheart, you probably won't think about creepy ladies scrubbing blood off the wall. I suppose this really only affects thrillers, but I must say it vexes me.

Packer

Just back from the coast where it was warm to the furnace of Portland. Oh for air conditioning.

Anyway, George Packer has some nice bits on the New Yorker blog. He has me excited for Fred Kaplan's book 1959. Even better, his review of the war movie Hurt Locker, which he quite liked. Here is the first para:

I didn’t particularly want to go see “The Hurt Locker,” because every other Iraq war movie I’ve seen managed to portray American soldiers as psychopaths in a crude, politically overdetermined video game, with the same hand-held camera tricks and heavy-metal score creating a nauseating sense of randomness and meaninglessness. But “The Hurt Locker” turned out to be the first good movie about the war I’ve seen.

The Night They Drove Old Glory Down

So I watched CSA, the faux documentary/expose about a modern Confederate States of America that occupies all of the continental territory of the United States today. I am of two minds on this movie. The commentary on race relations and the unfinished business of the Civil War and Reconstruction is great and quite well done. The alternate history, which drives the narrative and can't be avoided, is terribly flawed and drove me to frustration.

First the good parts. The framing device is that a British documentary is being shown on Confederate TV in San Francisco. When the show goes to commercial break, a number of cutting ads are shown. This one starts out normal, but wait for the finish. Far better are the ones that show the celebration of the CSA or the racism that lingers or was once more prominent. This ad for Sambo X-15 is a good example. There is also an excellent spoof on Cops, which often has cops beating on black men, called Runaways, where cops beat on runaway slaves. The movie definately puts stereotypes and our easy acceptance of them in culture right in our faces. So well done there.

The alternate history on the other hand is really quite bad. The film-maker wanted to have the whole country be the CSA, the better to compare our society with a more explicitly racist one. Fair enough, but it is simply not credible to have the CSA occupy the entire US, even with the help of the British and French. What's more, world history follows along more or less the same even though the CSA is building a giant empire, except in Canada. Canada, which cannot be defended against an aggressive continental power to the south, has to exist so they can make it the nicey-nice country to which to compare to the CSA. There is yet more that goes wrong (it is hard to see Hitler arising in the world he portrays, yet he does) but the point is, if you care about counterfactuals, this will drive you crazy.

I recommend you rent it, but fast forward to all the commercial segments.

Theres so much you have to know

As part of Citizen Reader's Book Menage, I read Tom Bissell's The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. Bissell addresses the first question I had about this book in the opening sentences of the book. Do we really need yet another book on Vietnam? Bissell says that he has grown up with the war because of how it changed and affected his father. Although the book centers on a trip to Vietnam that Bissell takes with his father, it is also a book with rich analysis of the war.

The analysis may be too much for some people. He spends pages and pages going over certain periods like the evacuation of Saigon, the Tet offensive and the My Lai massacre. I found that Bissell was remarkably even-handed. Although he leans left and his father constantly calls him my son, the communist, (depsite Bissell having written about the disastrous communist rule of Central Asia), he is just as prone to point out the wrongs of the Vietnamese as he is the wrongs of the United States in the war. He opposes the war, but he does not believe the North or the NLF were the good guys.

The sections of the book that deal with the father son relationship are touching and often sad. Bissell was hoping to find and understand the happy man who went to Vietnam, only to be replaced by a quiet withdrawn man. It seems that father and son become a little closer than they were before hand, but there is no great epiphany or reconciliation in the book. I was left hoping that when they got back to the United States, they managed to engage deeper, but it wasn't clear what would happen.

All in all, a very good book.

Population 485

I doubt I would have read Michael Perry's Population 485 if it wasn't for Citizen Reader's Book Menage. I am happy to read most non-fiction, but I wasn't naturally drawn to a book about working as a volunteer fireman in a small Wisconsin town. I have to give thanks to CR, because the book is a great read.

The book is divided into a number of essays on topics like the impact of dangerous road corners, the first time you puke as an EMT, dealing with the death of someone you know on the road and living in a small town. One of my favorite chapters is called Tricky. It tells the story of a local ne'er do well named Tricky who crashes his car into the laundromat. Perry relates how the fire department deals with the accident from traffic control to triage to clean up. The accident victims bizarre behavior spices up the story and so does Perry's description of the town. He is given to multiple threads in his essays and this one features a defense of country living and lifestyles, including yard art.

Although the tone of the stories vary and the book is often quite humorous, the overall, there is an overall tone of seriousness set by the opening and closing essays. These two stories center on tragic accidents and while they are quite different they are both deeply affecting, without being exploitative. The last accident involves a family member and his treatment is particularly good here.

Perry is a great writer and a stalwart defender of small town life and I want to read his other books, Truck: A Love Story and Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Farming.

This is true

Vulture has it right, the new Pearl Jam single is the best thing they have done in years. I heard it this morning and drove around the block a few times so I could hear it all. Called the Fixer, it reminds me quite a bit of Whip It in message, an apparently unironic message about getting things done in nice pop rock package.

Menage at Citizen Reader

Head over to Citizen Reader where you can participate in the latest Book Menage. This time it is a pair of memoirs. The first is Michael Perry's Population 485, a collection of essays about living and working in a small Wisconsin town. The second is Tom Bissell's The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son and the Legacy of Vietnam, which is part travelogue, part story of familial relationships and part history. I'll have reviews of each in the coming days.

Timecrimes

As one should with most movies, I went into Timecrimes with almost no knowledge. Thanks to the title, I assumed it would similar to the confusing, time travel crime story Primer. Those looking for a plotline that requires note taking as found in Primer will be disappointed, but if you want a simple, bleak, but still entertaining story will enjoy this one. I'm no expert, but I thought it obeyed the various "rules" of time travel well. In fact, at about the half way point, I worried the story was going to go down a boring path. It turned out not to be the case and I thought the ending payoff was strong, if dark.

Rather than say more, I entreat you to take a look the short film, 7:35 in the morning that got director Nacho Vigalondo the funding to make Timecrimes.

Superchunk

The best live show I have ever seen was a Superchunk show. They walked on announced that they were a band from North Carolina and tore up the Crystal Ballroom. Of course I love Slack Motherfucker, the Gen X anthem, and Seed Toss, but but my absolute favorite is Without Blinking. It is unapologetic alterna-guitar rock of the variety we now rarely see. If you can see them live, be sure to do so.

Crash course in dude surgery

So yesterday I went into the hospital for some (very minor) surgery. There I was, all naked in my hospital gown and stressed when my doctor came in with a science fiction paperback. My first thought was, dude, sweet, science fiction, nice choice. My second thought was DUDE WHAT THE FUCK, you are reading a novel before you use the tools on me? My third thought was, well I guess I am glad you are feeling pretty confident and not freaking out about it. Then I was going to sleep. It obviously turned out OK.

You could have it so much better

So I was pretty excited for Warren Fahy Fragment, a heavily promoted novel about a lost island with a divergent ecosystem, said to be in the spirit of Jurassic Park and the Ruins. Well I read it, and it isn't like those books. Let's start with the Ruins. That book is, I think falsely, viewed as a thriller. Like Smith's only other book, the amazing A Simple Plan, the book is a rich study of torment, both emotional and physical. Fragment is many things, but it is not strong on emotions or characters. The death toll has no apparent impact on the characters other than to make them grimly determined. The book's two rivals, meant to portray different versions of science, are laughably stereotypical, one angelic and one eeeeeeevviilllll.

The comparison to Jurassic Park is also inapt. Crichton always (after Andromeda Strain, at least) put story before science. He let it support and ground the story, but not derail it. Fahy just loves his material too much. He provides paragraph after paragraph of example, theory and idea. The examples are the worst, where one might suffice, he is happy to provide five. He also chops up the action with a bit too much description of the monsters.

When it comes time to tell the story, the book works pretty well. The set-up is great as a reality show science expedition stumbles onto the Lost World, a violent ecosystem similar to that in the Skinner. We get a pair of redshirt holocausts, political infighting and a number of imaginative horrors. The book shifts from adventure mode to political thriller as changed viewpoints lead the surviving characters in a race against time.

If this were a movie (and I am sure it will be), I would say you should Netflix it. As it is, head down to the library for this one. I tore through it, but my pleasure decayed as the book continued. I hope the next one is better.

A question to which I don't really need the answer

After a delightful lunch at Russell Street BBQ, my eldest and I walked past a thrift store. I saw a stack of the Left Behind series up for quick sale. I recall these being the top of the news for quite awhile, but talk is mostly done. I wonder what the Millenarians read now?

The Show that Smells

Derek McCormack's The Show That Smells isn't your average read. It reads like a screenplay and features Lon Chaney, Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and an unfortunate country singer suffering from consumption. It reminded me quite a bit of a John Waters film, something out of the Polyester era, not quite as crazy as his early work, but not for the masses either. The humor is strange, scatalogical and sexual. It's experimental, probably a bit too experimental for me, but should appeal to fans of outre post-modern fiction.

You can read an excerpt here. McCormack will be at Hawthorne Powells tomorrow, July 16 at 7:30. I suspect hearing him read from the book will be particularly interesting.

Getting into Phish

Not me silly, Carrie Brownstein. She of Monitor Mix asked what bands people liked that their friends could not understand. Phish came up huge. She realized that people had opinions about the band without ever listening to them. She has challenged herself to become a Phish fan and you can watch this video as she drives down to the record store to swap CDs for a bunch of new Phish ones. It's quite funny.

I actually attended a Phish show in 1993 (it may have been 1994, I don't remember). It was a Phish heading lining HORDE tour. I was a little, uh, under the influence, so I honestly don't recall much. Even whether they played Reba, a song I honestly like. Here they are playing it at fan favorite Hampton Coliseum.

Scandal in the Asquith Cabinet

Once I find a writer I like, I tend to binge on them. I stop when I have had enough or when I realize I am about to exhaust the oeuvre. In the mid-90s I read all of Robertson Davies and was sad when I all I had left was personal letters and the like. I similarly tore through Patrick Robinson's and Dennis Lehane's crime novels and the Barset Chronicles by Anthony Trollope. Robert Goddard's body of work turned out to be too large to consume all at once. Already in the teens when I started him, I read four or five in a row. loving them all, and then moved on. His books were great, but I guess I had enough of moody, English thrillers for the time.

I had forgotten about him until Stephen King came out calling him his top read for 2008. I picked up a copy of Past Caring late last year and just got to it this week. It was actually even better than I recalled.

Past Caring is lengthy, but that is because it has to fit in the diaries of a long dead British minister as well as the historical research of the less than ideal Martin Radford. Radford is a failed academic and teacher who seems to enjoy drink more than books. A chance visit to Madeira leads him to hunt down the story of Edwin Strafford, a rising political star in 1910 who disappeared from politics for mysterious reasons. As he digs deeper, Radford finds that there are those who wish to keep the story buried along with Strafford.

This book works better than most thrillers because he is interested in his characters as well as his plots. This makes the book twice as long as many similar books, but it is well worth the investment. At many points in the back half, I thought I could tell where the book was going only to have the plot shift in a surprising way. The ending was also true to the characters and did a great job tying it all together.

I think I am going to get on another Goddard jag now.

Unjustly forgotten

There are a lot of reasons that most people are unaware of how great a song Kim Gordon's Panties. The most important of course is the band name. When you call your band Rapeman, you are asking for people to hate you. It doesn't help that the output is, overall, the low point of Steve Albini's recording career. Sure you have an amazing song about the combination of low self esteem and sex addiction, and a nice song about how vegetarians should shut up about the meat eating, but overall, the output is not great.

Kim Gordon's Panties, though, is fantastic. Really. Not only is a bizarre paean to Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, but it is also a salute to the Sonic Youth song Schizophrenia. In the song, Albini sings that Thurston Moore, husband of Kim Gordon is not getting any play. Incredulous, Albini claims that if he "had that to go home to, I'd never leave my bed." He then goes on to claim that any red blooded male would act differently. Not surprisingly, the Sonic Youth folks didn't take kindly to this and dedicated Beat on The Brat covers to Albini in subsequent shows.

Even though much of my enjoyment of the song comes from the sophomoric humor, I love the musical build up and the drum crescendo mid-way through the song. Listen for yourself.

Of course work sucks

William Browning Spencer is an underappreciated novelist in the vein of Tim Powers, James Blaylock and Jonathan Carroll. He writes stories of men, often writers, beset by terrible supernatural forces. I loved his Zod Wallop and I recently got my hands on a copy of his Resume with Monsters. When I say underappreciated, you should read that also as out of print. The status of his book would certainly vex his main character, Phillip Kenan, who fights through dead end job after dead end job in hopes of getting his massive novel published.

Phillip's daily drudgery is made all the worse by this constant combat with Lovecraftian forces. I don't mean alluding to Lovecraft, but actual Cthulhu mythos creatures like Azathoth and the Old Ones. This shouldn't work well, but until the very end of the book, it is not clear whether Kenan is delusional or is really fighting eldrictch foes. Spencer writes the loner who no one believes quite well.

Spencer spends a lot of time satirizing the work place in this book. It gets better as it goes along. It isn't a pretty vision, as he has hate for companies large and small, but I still found it amusing.

This book is a bit like the Atrocity Archives, and a lot like the Kings of Infinite Space. I think the author of the latter was more than a little inspired by Spencer's book. The latter book is funnier, but the Spencer book has its charms. The most significant are the wild swings in plot. Much of what happens is completely unexpected. The book is a tad long for what it is, but it is worth reading. Note, I tried this book three years ago and gave up on it. Here is what I thought then. Starting over, I can see why I gave up on it, but I am glad I stuck with it. I was somehow more ready for it this time.

Blasphemy

Douglas Preston, of the Preston Child writing duo, writes some of the better techno/scifi thrillers out there. His most recent novel Blasphemy is another fun one, but it feels a bit calculated to create controversy. There is a disclaimer in the back about how the book is not anti-religious, since the hero is a practicing Catholic and former monk.

Still, the book involves crazed fundamentalists creating acts of intense mayhem and a crooked television preacher riling up the rubes. The end of the book also calls into question the notion that the book isn't anti-religious.

With this in mind, the book is a good thriller, with red herrings, mounting tension and lots of action. It isn't his best, but it works pretty well.

Nice sentence

I burned through a number of Robert Goddard's novels back in the late 90s. I burned out and moved on, but I just recently picked up his first one called Past Caring. I have to thank a recent Stephen King hat tip for rekindling my interest. Any doubts about the read were dispelled by the excellent first sentence* which is below:

The spring of 1977 found me, newly past thirty, a bad case of wasted talent in a largely waste city - an unemployed, divorced ex-schoolteacher of foundered promise and dismal prospect.

That's really packing in some info in a sentence.

*Technically not the first sentence as there was a brief prologue.

Mixed

The parody of the NYT bestseller list is quite funny. Sometimes it satirizes specific books, other times whole genres as in Cracked Like Teeth by Dexter Egan: A memoir of petty crime, drunken brawls and recovery by a writer who was addicted to paint thinner by age nine.

Do you miss the days of the Creature Feature with the local host with the spooky name and bad make up? I certainly have fond memories. In my case, we had Dr. Madblood, who is still doing his thing, and then some other guy who wore green make up and did a lot of extreme close ups. i09 has some clips from one of these old shows that makes me think I wouldn't like it as much these days.

Awhile back I saw a video that replaced the lyrics to an A-ha! video with a literal description of what was going on. That one was funny, but the one for Total Eclipse of the Heart is funnier.

McNamara RIP

Until the coming of Rumsfeld, we had yet to have as complex a Secretary of Defense as Robert Strange McNamara. There are a lot of takes on him out there like a nod to his World Bank work at Marginal Revolution, this negative one from Mickey Kaus via Matthew Yglesias, a short take from Robert Farley that leads to others, and a thoughtful note from Kevin Drum.

Update: As I suspected, Stephen Walt's take is direct and brutal.

I will sidestep giving an opinion and instead beg that you watch the Fog of War. Don't watch it to judge whether McNamara should be forgiven or not. Watch it to see one of the best ruminations on war on film. We can only hope that Rumsfeld does something like this eventually. The full movie is embedded below:

It's the same old thing

I love the Ramones. No matter what happens, the Ramones will always be greater gods of my rock pantheon. The first four records are astounding, the next four solid and the follow on albums are, to be kind, so so. I feel the same way about the films of George Romero. His early works are excellent and worthy of horror film canonization.) His recent effort, the Diary of the Dead, is crap.

Diary of the Dead combines two moribund approaches to film making, zombie social commentary and Point of View film making. Zombie movies are mostly played at this point(although I hold out hopes that World War Z will be good,) but this movie is killed by the use of the point of view style.

The movie's characters are a group of film students making a horror movie in the PA forests when they hear about the zombie attacks. While they pack up the film crew RV and head to their families, one of them decides to film for posterity. There is some pushback from his friends, but they mostly go along with it. The device becomes more and more unbeliveable as the film continues. They film while people are being killed or while they are in huge peril. This is a comment on media, I know, but I doubt college kids would act the way they do in this movie.

I suppose everyday conversation can be as stilted and ridiculous as the dialogue in this movie, but I doubt it. The acting doesn't help. Most annoying of all is the film school teacher who takes breaks from his booze drinking only to deliver horrendously cheesy pronouncements of world weariness.

There is a sequel to this film being made now. If I hadn't seen this film and wanted to take a guess at its likely quality, I could take note that one of the characters is named "Nicotine" Crockett. I hope Don Johnson gets the role.

Crack Up

Big Black is one of those bands which attracts eternal followers. One of the tasks of the followers is to gather all of the desiderata. If you want giant hooks, you have come to the right place. Rather than forcing you to buy the otherwise uninteresting God's Favorite Dog, here is Crack Up.

USA books

Happy Independence Day! Here are a few good books on the US that I have enjoyed.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S Wood. It dispels the notion that the American revolution was a conservative affair.

The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1789 by Robert Middlekauff. The title is not ironic.

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson. It's thick but it is good one stop shopping for the Civil War.

The USA trilogy by John Dos Passos. For the literary minded, this critical take of the early 20th century is outstanding.

Special Providence by Walter Mead Russell. The best treatment of American foreign policy that I have yet found.

Newsweek loves books

I like the new Newsweek. The longer articles are better and the new visual style is fresh and appealing. I am most happy though that the new issue is titled What To Read Now. The title refers to a book list that is more interesting than the typical top books list. Starting any list with an Anthony Trollope is going to make me happy, but I was particularly happy to see Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes. He remains an underappreciated crime novelist and I hope to see his books re-released.

There are also author interviews, the "best books ever" by a few experts, and other articles including this one on re-reading books. Jonathan Lethem's photo tour of literary New York is worth a peek too.

Kids today

It's easier to be a fan of genre writing than literary writing. If your favorite author comes out with something you don't like, you can take solace in that he or she will pump out another one in a year, or even less. Some literary writers take so many years between books that we have to make do with the occasional essay or short story.

So I am excited that Michael Chabon has a new essay in the NY Review of Books. It is titled the Wilderness of Childhood and it is about the cult of safety that parents, including Chabon himself, in which parents today find themselves mired.

He speaks to the possible impact on literature, as kids who do not explore have less chance of developing an adventurous imagination. He also talks about the conflict he feels as a parent:

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play?

There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn't encounter a single other child.

Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?

(via Bookstorm)

Last week we were at Eagle Crest, a vacation spot in Central Oregon. In the evening, the kids from connecting condos would rush out and play amongst the golf course trees. I remember doing this almost every night as a kid, but this was out of the ordinary for my kids.

Short takes

Here are a few notes on some recent reads.

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James McPherson. Written by the leading popular authority on the Civil War, this is a concise study of Lincoln as military commander. This is not a military history, but a easy to understand study in civil-military relations. It is easy enough for the uninitiated, but also helpful to fans who want to understand why Lincoln put up with the incompetents as long as he did.

Postcards from Tomorrow Square by James Fallows. This is a collections of Fallows China essays for the Atlantic. The quality is high, so you will probably want to read them all. Unlike other collections, I actually read this one cover to cover. It is typical Fallows, plenty of insight in reader friendly prose.

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson. This one didn't do it for me. The small time crooks trying to game one another felt like a Elmore Leonard novel with more hard boiled language. It wasn't bad, but I didn't care enough about the story to get fully invested.

The Issues of Red Seas Under Red Skies

I'm in the happy position of owning a large number of unread very large fantasy novels. I've been watching the pile grow, but getting The Blade Itself for Father's Day made me decide I really had to tame the beast. I chose Red Seas Under Red Skies for the next one. Short review: Good read, but no Lies of Locke Lamora.

More on that later, but I have to mention a fundamental problem with these books. The main characters are thieves who happen to be as good with a weapon as they are with a cheeky quip. They are just too nice to be thieves in the nasty world that author Scott Lynch portrays. Lynch has a town where bored aristocrats pay money to watch the poor publicly tortured. Assassins are everywhere and the powerful are venal to a person. Danger is everywhere.

The thieves just don't act like the worn down people they would have to be. They regularly spare people, even people who were just trying to kill them. At one vexing point, someone tries to cut a rope that if cut, would lead to a violent death. They escape and let the fellow go, with a mild beating. This was done no doubt for plot purposes I have yet to see, but it is simply unbelievable. In another scene, a young man loses a contest and dies for it. Locke Lamora goes over to say a little prayer for him. Really? I know he wants us to like the guy, but come on.

It is like he wants a brutal world like China Mieville's while populating it with happy go lucky Oceans 11 characters. I felt the same way about the first book, but I was willing to let it slide because the plotting was so good. The less well crafted sequel makes the fundamental problems more glaring.

Anyway, it is good enough to continue. I will see if he can rescue the book.

Albums as set lists

Carrie Brownstein delivers the news that the Pixies will be playing Doolittle in track order in an upcoming tour. This follows similar efforts by Sonic Youth with Daydream Nation and Liz Phair with Exile and Guyville. I think that someone like myself, who missed the band in the heyday and really wants to hear a certain set of songs, is the target for these shows. This raises the question of which shows, prompted perhaps, by a need to pay for the kids's steep college bills, we would like to see. I suspect my top votes would be for Slanted and Enchanted, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and Q:Are We Not Men A: We are Devo. I was going to say London Calling (impossible I know) but there is a bit too much fluff there.

A bad way to start your week

I've made no secret that good covers are among my favorite things on Earth. Some covers though are about as fun as someone vomiting directly into your mouth. The Spinnerette cover of Devo's The Day My Baby Me a Surprize makes the horrendous No Doubt cover of Stand and Deliver seem like Cash's cover of Hurt. In fact, pretend I didn't tell you about this Spinnerette garbage and just listen to the Man in Black instead.

Or check this TV special version of Cash's cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, with Jim Varney as an Army of Northern Virginia regular.

You can come back Lizzie, indie rock never forgets

Liz Phair is to indie rock fans as Anakin is to Obi Wan at the end of Revenge of the Sith. As she turns to the dark side, we weep and cry out "You were the Chosen One!" Then we see her dispatched in the fiery lava of critical lambast. It is my hope that we may now be approaching the scene where she turns back to the Light and tells us "You were right, tell the fans, you were right."

You may have caught last year's re-release of Exile In Guyville, her epochal debut release. Last year she played a few shows during which she played only songs from Exile (I should have caught one of these. Oh well, I get to see the Pogues with Shane this year). She is now apparently working on a new solo record, which is supposed to be a return to the early sounds. The video below gives me some hope as she mocks her lost decade and her sex kitten reputation.


It's hard to overstate how much I loved this record when it came out. She brings so much emotional power to her lyrical short stories that I listened again and again. Haters will argue that the only reason indie guys like her is that she is A) hot and B) frequently given to dirty, dirty talk. Both of these things are true, and are in fact, awesome. This is certainly an element in her success, but without it we would like only slightly, only slightly less than we used to.

Still, the sex element can't be dismissed. You can point to her covering the classic ode to masturbation Turning Japanese, or lyrics as blue as "I want to fuck you like a dog, Ill take you home and make you like it." I still maintain it is the truth in songs like Divorce Song that makes her the special artist she can be.




So I await the new album with measured excitement. It could be something quite good, if she really is going back to the roots. Yes, she is working with Banana Republic, but indie gods Sonic Youth put out a hits ALBUM with Starbucks. So I am willing to cut her some slack there. Won't you?

Fuzzy

Back in the late 90s, we lived in Boston. Some of our friends regaled us of tales of bands we missed by getting there too late. One of them was Fuzzy. By the time we heard it, the band's time had passed. The alterna-guitar sound had moved into a quiescent phase. The band wasn't around for the return. Here is 4 Wheel Friend, my favorite from the self titled CD. You may find the singing a bit languorous, but it works for me.

Crossing over county lines

We just got back from a week long trip to Central Oregon. From my experience, when people think of Oregon, they think of Portland -- rainy, green and filled with beer drinkers and hippies. Central, and particularly eastern Oregon is dry, brown and sparsely populated. It reminds me of Utah really. Below is a photo of Ayers Rock/Uluru like Fort Rock which rises out of the flat desert. Highly recommended.


While out there, we visited the farming family of my wife's cousin. They do have neighbors, a handful or so within a circle of ten miles. So I am very pleased to be reading Michael Perry's Population 485, a collection of autobiographical essays about working as an EMT in a very small Wisconsin town. While the geography is different, I am looking forward to reading about life in small communities.

The book is part of Citizen Reader's upcoming book menage. Do participate, won't you? Also, congratulations are in order, as CR will be guest blogging on Book Ninja!

A bit of military history

There are a number of books that I want to read, but then I see them on the remainder table. More often than not, books on the remainder table are bad news, but sometimes bad luck or publisher overestimation of interest lands them in book purgatory. Stephen Budiansky's Air Power: Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, From Kitty Hawk To Gulf War II is a book that interested me, but I saw it on the dread remainder table AND it had that word revolutionized in the title.

That word appeared to me, at least, to be code for the idea that Air Power had transformed warfare and made all other forms of power redundant. For the most part, the book isn't like that at all. Instead, it reviews the history of airplanes as a weapon from World War I all the way up to the Second Gulf War. Budiansky is critical of most of the leaders of Air Forces. He criticizes the World War 2 generals in particular for their single minded focus on strategic (read: city) bombing at the expense of tactical support of armies. These leaders became the leaders of the new Air Force who then built a bomber centric air force incapable of handling the tasks before it in Korea and Vietnam.

So far so good. Lots of critical analysis, the right balance between technology and application, a great discussion of airframes, and a number of great stories. It all falls apart in the last chapter.

In the last chapter, Budiansky seems to become a convert to the Air Power cause with the advent of precision munitions. He lauds the use of these weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan and notes that these weapons essentially won the war. Well, we now know they didn't.

These problems aside, the book is a good read for a narrow audience. For those who want to go beyond a basic understanding of airplanes as weapons, it is a good place to start. Many will find it too long. Those more deeply read in the field will dislike the cursory treatment given to many subjects.

2012

Have you seen this ridiculously awesome looking trailer for 2012, Roland Emmerich's disaster movie? There are so many excellent scenes, but the aircraft carrier rolling onto the White House has to be one of the best.

Off to lovely Central Oregon

Back in a few days.