Best Book Ever

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

2012-01-10T16:18:00.001-08:00

My all-time favorite subway read. So absorbing that I forgot the chaos and congestion around me -- although my headphones help with that too. The last paragraph is so beautiful that I almost cried on the A train.

It's been a while

2011-12-31T07:50:00.000-08:00

I started a new job relatively recently, and my workdays are longer than they were. Also have been running around with visitors, getting ready for the holidays, traveling and so forth.

I recently read Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead, which is a perfectly fine book, but not what I wanted it to be. Too much teenage boy stuff. Way too much. Not nearly enough about everyone else in the book, whose characters seemed way more interesting. Probably if I'm going to read coming-of-age novels I should either stick to ones about women or expect this sort of thing.

Now I just started Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. It's a short story collection, which is normally not my thing at all, but I love her work and it should be good for the train. The first story was excellent.

Other work other places

2011-12-05T16:27:00.001-08:00

I recently wrote this piece for my friends' website, Bully Pulp:

http://www.bullypulp.com/articles/2011/11/29/the-culture-of-white-people.html

It's a little ... strident. People who understood what I was trying to say saw what I was getting at, but I'm thinking I could have said it better.

I also just wrote this, which was published today, on my two-year anniversary of moving to New York City:

http://rustwire.com/2011/12/05/rust-belt-expat-story-2-finding-career-that-buffalo-couldnt-offer/

I hope a lot of people read the second piece. The editor called it "relatable." I like that. I think it's the most personal piece I've published anywhere besides my own website since I was writing opinion columns for The Bona Venture back in, gasp, the 90s.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

2011-11-26T06:26:00.000-08:00

To me, this is a classic highly readable modern novel, a la Freedom. It's about people who seem real, and takes place in a real place and time -- New England and New York in the early 1980s. There's no complicated chronology, no scenes set in the future, no characters who reappear under different names, none of that. There's not much in the way of literary device (that I noticed anyway) except the plot itself, a re-imagining of the classic choice between the difficult maverick genius and the "nice guy." My roommate was just telling me about the latest Twilight movie and it sounds exactly like this book, if this book were terrible instead of being awesome, and also included vampire babies (?).

Adding to my enjoyment of it was that it begins in Providence, RI, one of my all-time favorite places. Eugenides' depiction of the mixture of college-town bohemia and uber-WASPiness (I have such a soft spot for WASPiness, croquet and summer homes and martinis at five and not talking about feelings ...) that characterizes Providence's east side was spot on. Just writing that makes me wish I was there right now, taking in the perfect Revolutionary War-era colonials, cobblestone streets and sidewalk cafes.

Bottom line is: definitely read The Marriage Plot if, like me, you real novels instead of watching television. And no matter what you read, visit Providence if you ever have the chance.

Look At Me, by Jennifer Egan

2011-11-19T16:29:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, my number-one recommended book of the past year or so, is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. While I think anyone who enjoys literary fiction would enjoy Goon Squad, Look At Me is a different kind of novel. I've read so many books about which I thought, "that was good enough, but it was by, about and for men." Look At Me is the rare novel a man might not "get" at all.

The themes are gender, beauty, identity and power, what it means to have control, and what it means to be an object. It's dark and searing, not dark in say an Oryx and Crake kind of way -- that one I had to put down -- but dark in a "this is forcing me to face up to a lot of things I thought I was good at ignoring" kind of way. One of the themes Egan explores that I don't think I've read about before, ever, is the contempt beautiful women have for women who are not attractive, and vice versa. I spent a lot of my life pretending that didn't exist, but it does, and she nails it. She also takes a deep dark look into the advantages beautiful women have in life, and the ones they really do not. There's a great scene where one of the main characters, a 35-year-old former model, sees a young model walking down the street in Manhattan, watches the power the young woman thinks she has in her ability to attract so many male gazes everywhere she goes. And she remembers how she, too, once thought that's what power was, having other people own and control you because of this fleeting quality, and how now she knows real power comes from what you say and do, from autonomy, not from who owns you and how much money they have.

There are a lot of flat and unrealistic elements to this novel, but I really don't care. It's incredibly engrossing, and it has really made me think.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

2011-10-31T13:43:00.000-07:00

This is the latest in a series of books that were the perfect thing for me to be reading during what was going on in my life in New York right then. Since my second week here, almost two years ago, I had worked at a social services agency in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a working-class, largely Hispanic community where a lot of young people from outside New York are moving for affordable rents and access to the L train. Ten or fifteen years ago, those same kids would have moved to Williamsburg, which is also along the L train, closer to Manhattan. Parts of Williamsburg are becoming expensive, but some of the housing projects and ratty old large apartment buildings look pretty much the same as I expect they did 50 years ago, and in the case of the apartment buildings, maybe more.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is set in Williamsburg, just north of Broadway off the J train (it's referred to as the El in the book, a reference to it being an above-ground train I think). Then as now, the parts of Williamsburg off the J train are poorer than the L train regions, teeming with immigrants, overcrowded apartments and small shops.

Several of my coworkers grew up on Williamsburg's south side, as some call it, the children of poor immigrants just like Francie, the main character, and her family. The immigrants are largely Puerto Rican (they're not technically immigrants but still need to learn English) and Dominican now, but the Jewish and Italian neighborhoods in the book are still semi-intact to this day, although few recent immigrants live there anymore.

Point being, the book helped me reflect on everything I had learned in the last two years, how New York changes constantly, but at the same time, some things never change. It's a classic of young adult literature about a bookish girl finding her way in the world and about the struggles of a poor urban family in the years before World War I when the world, as was New York, was becoming a different place.

I finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn yesterday. Tomorrow I start a new job in the Bronx.

This Land is Their Land, by Barbara Ehrenreich

2011-10-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Published three years ago, this book's title and theme feel very current, with references to the 1% cropping up everywhere these days. I love Barbara Ehrenreich, but this isn't her best work. It's a collection of short essays and I guess newspaper columns; the shorter format doesn't seem to be a good showcase for her writing, which is characterized by a curmudgeonly tone, old-fashioned liberalism, and, usually, reliance on facts and empirical reason. In the shorter format, though, she kind of glosses over the "fact" stuff, replacing it with a punchy humor that sort of falls flat a lot of the time.

But there are still some great moments, like when she says she was caught trying to spread a rumor that Disney's "princess" line of toys are contaminated by lead, or when she honestly discusses why women, including herself, choose abortion. Still, if you haven't read Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed is definitely a better choice, and Bright Sided, better still.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

2011-10-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't left for D.C. yet, but I started reading yesterday. Today I read this exchange, on page 58, in a story about the author, Michael Lewis, visiting a Greek monastery:

... he pauses and asks, "But what is your religion?"

"I don't have one."

"You believe in God?"

"No."

Thanks for including that, Michael Lewis. I like his work either way, but now I'm adding him to my list of favorite "out" atheist writers and media personalities, along with Sarah Vowell and Ira Glass.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

2011-10-19T18:14:00.000-07:00

I purchased this today with some of my 32nd birthday money, but I like to think of it as a gift to myself.

Early Saturday morning, I'm taking the subway to Penn Station, and then Amtrak to visit my sister in Washington, D.C. I'll settle into my seat with a nice big cup of coffee on what will no doubt be a perfectly crisp fall morning, and maybe when the train stops and the cool air drifts in, a little steam will roll off the top of my cup. I'll be reading Michael Lewis's latest with my knees up against the seat in front of me, enjoying the fact that this is my life, educating myself about the global financial meltdown while on my way from one global city to another, a girl from Bradford, Pennsylvania, taking trains up and down the east coast like some sort of European or something, like it's nothing.

The Influencing Machine, by Brooke Gladstone

2011-10-13T11:08:00.001-07:00

I reviewed this book quickly on Goodreads. I think it's viewable to non-users.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/210477095

Similarly, I reviewed Little Bee recently. My opinion can be summed up as: pretty okay book for the first seven chapters, although Little Bee's voice sounds more like a movie voiceover than an actual person. After that, it makes no sense. The end.

I anticipate doing less reading in the next few weeks. I have been traveling a lot on weekends, celebrating my 32nd birthday (next week!), and just got a new job, which I start November 1. Though when that begins, I will be spending a lot more time on the subway. Maybe it's time to give audiobooks a try ...

Hark! A Vagrant

2011-09-29T04:22:00.001-07:00

After finishing Midnight's Children, I read One Day (it's okay, don't run to the bookstore and buy it or anything) then decided on something a little lighter. My friend lent me Kate Beaton's book of comics about history, literature, and occasionally just whatever:

http://beatonna.livejournal.com/135788.html

I really, really wish I could illustrate this post with "Stupid Rooster Comics," but the format doesn't work that way, so please follow the link and go see it. It never stops being funny. Also look around for Jane Eyre, Gatsby and the Brontes.

http://harkavagrant.com/archivecat.php

I was familiar with Beaton's work only because my friend who lent me the book is a big fan, but now she's everywhere. We saw her at the Brooklyn Book Festival, and now she's about to be on WNYC in 20 minutes or so.

Life And How To Live It

2011-09-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

In the spring, I wrote a two-post series about my commitment to loyalty, duty, hard work and being a square. I wrote it largely about The Wire, which I see as in many ways a tribute to what's worthwhile about institutions and eras we'll never get back.

One thing I didn't mention, because I don't spend a lot of time thinking about high school thank god, is how long I stick with things. Friends, haircuts, being a vegetarian (14 years and counting). For years and years, my favorite band was R.E.M. I started listening to them sometime between Automatic for the People (1992) and Monster (1994) because I loved their songs, but it turned out that what R.E.M. was about was not only alternative rock, but about knowing who you are, knowing what works, and sticking to it. They were from an era where selling your song to Microsoft made you a sellout, and they wouldn't do it. No drama, no feuding, no nonsense and no backing down, for 31 years.

Today R.E.M. announced that they're going the way of well-staffed newspapers and Rust Belt economies and breaking up.

Excuse me while I sit on the floor all night listening to my cassette tapes (which I still have! see what I'm saying!) of Fables of the Reconstruction and Life's Rich Pageant, remembering when it was still sort of okay to give things those kinds of earnest names.

When Automatic for the People, which I *think* is their best album (it's debatable for sure) was recorded, Michael Stipe was 32 years old. Unlike R.E.M., I am likely to live another month, and I will see 32 in just a few weeks' time. Not only do I not feel old, but I think this is further proof that I'm at the height of my powers. Bands break up, the world changes, but I'll still be here same as always, eating tofu, reading novels and caring about things.

Brooklyn Book Festival -- where to begin

2011-09-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

Today is the day that I think I will start calling Nerd Thanksgiving (Election Day being Nerd Christmas). As with regular Thanksgiving, it's something of an all-day binge. You have to pace yourself to be able to sample everything you want to try. But at this Thanksgiving, no one watches football, or, that I noticed, even gets drunk. Today was the Brooklyn Book Festival, possibly the coolest annual event ever created. It's a full day of panel discussions and book signings, a place where people line up around the block to get tickets to see Paul Krugman or Jonathan Safran Foer, a day on which you will see more tweed and spectacles than at your average academic conference.

One of the most impressive things about this year's lineup is that it somewhat reflected the diversity of Brooklyn and of New York City. I have been to panel discussions that were comprised solely of not just white men, but middle-aged, middle-class, straight white men. I learned some things from those panels, but I probably could have learned more if more than one perspective was represented. Today not only did I see a single panel comprised only of straight white men, I didn't see one comprised only of white people at all. At the Brooklyn Book Festival, the value of diversity becomes immediately obvious, because we don't just hear the perspective of privileged white men (which I am interested in -- I love Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace and all sorts of classics written by dead white guys -- I'm just not interested in it *exclusively*). We hear about the perspectives of all different kinds of people from all over the world. There is no way an event that was centered around the Mailers and Updikes of the world (if they were still alive I mean) could have the same mind-opening potential as one at which I heard a women who lives in Cairo, two celebrated female novelists of color, and three black media critics (one is a cartoonist, but he's a media critic too I think).

The list of writers I saw:

Jodi Kantor

Toure

Ben Smith

Kevin Holohan

Tayari Jones

Justin Torres

Michael Kupperman

Keith Knight (my pick for hottest writer of the day; sorry ladies, he's married)

Kate Beaton

Jennifer Hayden

Hisham Mattar

Yasmine El Rahsidi

Lucette Lagnado

Sinan Atoon

Adam Shatz

Jhumpa Lahiri (she stood next to me for five seconds! fangirl alert!)

Liesl Schillinger

Brooke Gladstone (I met her and she signed my book! double fangirl alert!)

Patrice Evans

Jennifer Pozner

Juan Gonzalez

I think their names alone speak to the range of ideas I am still somewhat overwhelmed by. So often, white people only talk to white people about race, or Jews only talk to Jews about Israel, or academic or literary gatherings will relegate The Black Perspective to a panel or two that is specifically about race. Today I saw women disagreeing about whether reality TV is reflecting or influencing reality and the progress of feminism, Arabs and Jews arguing (in a civil way) about the Arab Spring and how optimistic we should be about the future of Egypt, and white, black and Hispanic novelists talking to each other about writing, about the creative process and where their ideas come from.

My brain is so full.

Oh! And today I also learned one piece of what I would call news: Jhumpa Lahiri's next novel will be set in Calcutta in the late 60s and early 70s, which is in part where Midnight's Children, which I'm finally almost done with, takes place. I can't wait to read a book by an author I enjoy that's about the same era, now that I know more about it, but where there will be female characters who do something besides cook and have babies. For what it's worth, what she read today was great. I could have sat in the Episcopal church for the full hour listening to that and not regretted missing her actual talk at all.

Midnight's Children

2011-09-15T10:59:00.001-07:00

My friend and I are reading this (well, she's done) as a sort of two-person long-distance book club. I can't say I'm crazy about it, but I had a moment in the breakroom at my office today where I said to myself, "wait ... I think I ... get it!"

Is that the point of reading Great Books that one only sort of enjoys? To gain some sort of enlightenment and then, if you do it enough, maybe even insight or depth of character? One can hope.

At any rate, it's like this: the main character of this book was born at the exact moment India achieved independance from Great Britan. He and the other midnight's children all have special powers, and a special ability to communicate with each other; they have a special connection to India itself. There's a whole unreliable narrator dynamic, like is the main character making up this whole crazy life he's led where he was present for various important moments in the history of India and Pakistan and could communicate telepathically and so forth. There is also another midnight's child whose life is specifically parallel to his, and this is all set against a backdrop of repeated revolutions and civil wars, so that the reader is always able to observe what could have been if fate had twisted just a little bit differently.

To me, the larger point is this: all of our lives have epic qualities. Look at who you are, where you came from, how things have changed, and how differently it all could have turned out. In a way, we're all midnight's children. Metaphorically speaking of course.

Also by me

2011-09-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote a guest post for my friends' blog today.

It's about what's going on here in Brooklyn.

You Must Go and Win

2011-08-20T16:30:00.001-07:00

One of my good friends has a thing about quitting. He thinks it's important to quit something that isn't working out, or just isn't working for you, and to do it as soon as reasonably possible. And he feels this way to the point where I think he respects people a little bit less (maybe even a lot less?) if they just keep plugging away. I forget what the exact logic is, but I think it has something to do with not wasting your life.

I have historically seen things the opposite way. To me, there's honor in sticking with a crappy job or a degree program you're not too sure about. Quitting seems flighty and immature. It's also something I would have a hard time owning up to, ending a relationship or dropping out of law school (which I didn't do). It would feel like failure.

Ultimately, sometimes it's best to admit something isn't working and cut your losses, and other times the smart thing to do is tough it out. But how do you figure out which is which?

If there's a theme tying together the stories of You Must Go and Win, a sort of memoir/essay collection by a struggling musician who was born in the USSR, it's that. Alina Simone, the author, moved from Ukraine to the Boston suburbs as a child when her father fell out of favor with the KGB. As one might imagine, such a history paves the way for a lot of seeking, and a lot of colorful tales. Many of them are set in Siberia. This is mostly what the book is about -- here are some crazy stories about a quirky singer/songwriter in search of her past, and, also, herself. Some of them are pretty funny. Some are like a slightly boring knockoff of Sarah Vowell. But one can see how a book about a struggling musician can also be a book about whether it makes sense to keep trying. The answer may not be what you think it is.

The Quality of Life Report

2011-08-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of years, I have read several novels about moving to New York or living in New York. Now, one about leaving New York. The Quality of Life Report looks at first like a trifle. I bought it in Michigan with the thought of reading on my grandma's pool deck, or on the bus ride home. My first observation was that it was a well-written trifle.

"When my friends and I were not discussing the lack of available men, we were usually discussing moving out of New York," Meghan Daum, the author, writes. "When somebody came home from an unusual location -- a wedding in Nova Scotia or a snorkeling trip in Australia -- and spent two weeks obsessing about moving into a yurt on the Bay of Fundy, we called it an Alternative Lifestyle Alert. The guiding principle of the Alternative Lifestyle Alert was that it was never acted on. Until now." Alternative Lifestyle Alert! That sounds like something my friends back in Buffalo would have said!, I thought, and kept on with what I still thought was a beach read.

For us professional-type people who did not grow up in or near New York City, the choice is roughly something like this: on the one hand, The Outside offers affordable housing, the proximity of friends and family, comfort and convenience. On the other hand, New York offers the opportunity to do and accomplish things you otherwise could not, the idea that even in this day and age, you can just sell your things, pack up what's left, and go really make something of yourself. The question is not only where do you want to live, but who do you want to be.

Lucinda, the main character in The Quality of Life Report, describes it as a conflict between substance and style. Leaving New York, she decides, will make her become a person of substance. Slowly she realizes that when you leave your stupid, fake problems (childish men, bad fashion, too-small apartments) behind, what you find out in the real world are real problems.

If I say more, I'll give too much away. Friends who have been torn between the big city, the small city and home sweet home, please read this. And then discuss it with me.

The Big Short

2011-08-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

If the first Wall Street movie is to Liar's Poker as the second Wall Street movie is to The Big Short, then Michael Lewis has outdone Oliver Stone by far. In both cases, the original was better, but in this case, the second volume still tells a new great story, updated for and relevant to a couple decades later.

The Big Short is a character-driven story of highly complex financial transactions and a corrupt system that works for no one but the handful of people who are making tens, sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars off of it. So was Liar's Poker. The difference is that Liar's Poker was an autobiographical story. Lewis himself had recently left a lucrative Wall Street job where he made, he felt, way more money than he was worth doing something that had no social purpose. He wanted to chronicle a time of irrational excess that he thought wouldn't last, and he wrote about it in a way that was funny and a little self deprecating here and there. Twenty years later he reports, not only was I wrong that it wouldn't last, things got worse than ever, and the whole economy nearly went down with them.

The choice in The Big Short to focus largely on people who saw subprime lending and mortgage-backed securities for what they were, and to tell their story, was a great one. We get to see how these people had unique perspectives and personalities that led them to believe that although everyone said they were wrong, they weren't wrong. Like so many of the books I've written about here, it made me think of Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. In that book, Gladwell shows how the people who are the best at what they do got that way by not just intelligence and hard work (lots of people are smart. lots of people work hard. But there's only one Steve Jobs.) but also by unique combinations of circumstances. Steve Eisman, one of the main characters in The Big Short, was the child of investment bankers who became a corporate lawyer, hated it, then had his parents get him a job at the one investment banking firm that still tolerated renegades. If he hadn't learned about the field from his parents, and they hadn't gotten him a job at what was probably the only firm where he could thrive, he would not have become the man who foresaw the meltdown, no matter how brilliant he was. That's not the point of the story -- the point of the story is that everything sucks and we're all screwed, I'm pretty sure -- but it's an interesting point nonetheless.

Chronic City

2011-07-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

One review of this book describes the main character, Chase Insteadman, and his astronaut fiancee, Janice Trumbull, as both being "adrift." That's the best way to put it, I think. Jonathan Lethem, the author, grew up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and has written at least two novels I know of about those hard-luck streets. Here he's taking on a very different type of subject matter: Manhattanites who have sold out, come unglued, or, as someone else described it, gone adrift.

Chronic City isn't a self-involved meditation on privilege and the lack of meaning in modern life, though it can seem so at first. It's about how modern life in Manhattan, and maybe the rest of the U.S., is driven by nothing more than a desire to be entertained. In Insteadman's Manhattan, The New York Times publishes a "war free" edition filled with updates on a tiger that's said to have escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and dispatches from space, where a tragic group of astronauts are floating forever with no way to get home.

Neither I nor Lethem is the first person to reflect on how New York City, center of so much that happens in the world, can often seem like nothing more than an amusement park for the insanely wealthy, shockingly idle, and impossibly privileged. To say anything more would be to give away events that happen more than 200 pages in.

Lists

2011-07-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, a New York Times blog published this post, about Times' writers favorite novels. A former journalist myself, I shouldn't be surprised there's so much overlap between their lists and mine. Mine, if it existed. How does one pick five favorite novels? If I could make a top-ten or top-twenty list, though, it would include The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Infinite Jest, and maybe Franny and Zooey and Anna Karenina. I prefer On Beauty to White Teeth and A Widow For One Year to Owen Meany, which I haven't read and doubt I ever will due to the eye strain-inducing way the dialogue was written.

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/as-if-you-dont-have-enough-to-read-fiction-edition/?ref=books

Reading this list was like flipping through an old photo album. I remembered a college professor harrumphing about the baseball team's loud get-pysched music in the class where For Whom The Bell Tolls (which I didn't care for) was discussed. White Noise is also a college memory; I first read it in an honors seminar for a philosophy class. I can see how someone would think it was overrated, but I find myself thinking about it and referring to it 11 or 12 years later all the same. I can't separate Remains of the Day (god I love that book so much) from the memory of the last summer I spent in Ithaca, in a cramped and devestatingly charming studio apartment without proper window screens, and with no money whatsoever, working an unpaid internship at City Hall and a night job at the local paper. Graham Greene -- nerd camp, summer, 1995, Alanis Morisette and Green Day and not being old enough to drive and hating it. Invisible Man -- the shoebox of books my uncle salvaged from the end of a library sale and mailed to me from Michigan. That's how I got The Awakening too, now that I think of it. Anything by Henry James reminds me of the time my best friend and I both tried to check Washington Square out of the library at the same time, just a few months into knowing each other, 14 years ago.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the book of moving to New York.

A Visit From the Goon Squad is the book of being here, no longer a recent arrival.

Sports Night

2011-07-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

There are weeks when I have too much to think about to do a lot of recreational reading. When I have time during those weeks, I like to lie around watching The West Wing or 30 Rock and petting the cat.

This week the show of choice is Sports Night, a largely forgotten early Aaron Sorkin gem that takes place where I spent my formative years: the newsroom. The year was 1998. Bill Clinton was still the president. The World Trade Center (featured in location shots in every episode) was still standing. "Journalism" was both a reasonably practical thing to major in and something one could do for a career. Irony existed, but it was okay to be without it too. Caring about things was permitted and sometimes even encouraged. People were just starting to use email and cell phones for practical day-to-day communication. The world was full of possibility and un-dashed hopes. Or so I remember it ...

Though on the other hand, Netflix instawatch wasn't invented yet back then. You had to go to the "store" to rent "videos." Hard to picture, isn't it?

Goon Squad, final thoughts

2011-06-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

At my grandfather's wake, my sister said to me, "I keep looking at Grandma and thinking, in 25 years, Mom will be that old."

"And I'll be as old as Mom," I said.

That, in a nutshell, is what A Visit From the Goon Squad is about -- those moments when you feel the years that have gone by.

Goon Squad is, among many things, a triumph for feminism. I know there are many reasons women authors are rarely behind the next East of Eden, the next Infinite Jest, the next The Corrections. The first is outright discrimination. But I think a more significant reason is the way women are socialized from birth. I have been to so many panel discussions in New York where women panelists came off poorly because they were not only obviously nervous, but, worse, constantly apologizing for their work and making self-deprecating jokes. I do it. I don't mean to be accusatory. Women learn to provide emotional support and pick up after others. Men learn not to sweat the small stuff and to focus on big ideas.

I know all of this. And yet, there must have been a part of me that wondered whether women really were capable of doing everything men could. Otherwise, when I read Goon Squad, I would not have known for the first time that women can write novels that are 100% as equally impressive as those written by men. I haven't read Jennifer Egan's other books, but if they are of similar quality, I wouldn't say she's as good as David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen. I would say she's better.

You know how even if you don't agree with everything Barack Obama has done since he was elected (or ever I guess), there's a quality about him that seems too perfect to be real? You'll never catch him getting mixed up in a sex scandal, or choking on a pretzel, or puking on the prime minister of Japan. And do you know why that is? Because if he did things like that, he wouldn't have made it anywhere close to this far. Black people don't have as much leeway to fuck up, period, and so if a black man was going to be elected president, it's not because he's "as good" as white people, it's because he's twice as good at what he does. I think Jennifer Egan is the Barack Obama of Great American Novelists. Her work has all the sweep and ambition of the other novelists I was talking about, but with so much less ego and so much more discipline. Someone please, read the book and tell me if you agree.

Lush Life, by Richard Price

2011-06-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

Richard Price has written episodes of The Wire. I am one of those people who feel okay about saying The Wire is the greatest television show ever made, even though I haven't, you know, seen every television show ever made.

So I start reading Lush Life, which I salvaged from a friend's stoop sale box, and it's just not my speed at all. I can see the similarities to The Wire -- the characters from every aspect of life in a high-crime urban area are portrayed, lots of "gritty," lots of "real," plot looks like it's going to be pretty complicated and a little on the confusing side. Watching The Wire, I wasn't too concerned about figuring out who was who and who did what to who seven episodes ago and what that was about and etc. I just sort of let it unfold and figured I would figure it out sooner or later. I guess reading a book is different; I feel like if I don't keep track of the characters and the plot, I'm going to have absolutely no idea what's going on. And I guess I don't like the book enough to not mind the possibility of going back and reading it all over again.

Also in Lush Life, I feel like I'm supposed to be trying to figure out who the killer was. In The Wire, you usually know who the killer is; you're just watching all the stuff that happens around that happen, and maybe if you're the sort of person who likes to try to guess what will happen next, trying to figure out which bodies are going to drop next.

The other possibility is that in Lush Life I'm supposed to know who the killer is and I just didn't get what the hell was going on.

Further, there's an indescribable quality about Lush Life where the author seems to think he's being really clever knowing all these little things about life on the Lower East Side and all the different disenfranchised groups of people who live there. Like some 24-year-old suburban kid who feels all in the know when he or she is like oh, don't go down that block, crackheads hang out down there. Except I'm not saying he's not knowledgable. So far as I can tell, he is. The tone just really annoys me. The Wire seems to be saying: there's a tragedy unfolding here that no one knows how to stop. Where Lush Life is saying: look how street I am.

I haven't decided whether I'm really reading this book or not. I'm 80 pages in.

I Totally Meant To Do That

2011-05-31T11:40:00.000-07:00

I spent my lunch break reading this and while I still love it, sometimes it seems like Jane Borden doesn't know the exact type of Williamsburg, Brooklyn cliche that she is. Struggling young person from a small town loving the anonymity and unpredictability of city life, sure. But she also comes across sometimes as one of New York's most loathable types: rich hipster tourist kid slumming it with "the real people" for a few years so as to pretend to be interesting even though he or she will be returning to his or her world of shelter and privilege soon enough.

But still. I find her New York references less annoying than those of say Peter Hedges or Gary Shteyngart, maybe because rather than being throwaway in jokes or just plain pointless, they actually add something to her story if you're familiar with, say, the J train or The Abbey.

Example: "After leaving Black Betty, John and I popped by a new bar in the building next to mine on Bedford Avenue. But we stopped short in the doorway; something was slightly off. It was too loud to be so empty. And it was a bit too, if this is possible, red. Plus, the bartender eyed us desperately. It was like the bar was trying to be a bar, instead of being a bar. And it was trying too hard."

I know that place. I spent part of my 30th birthday there, before I moved to New York. Later, a friend arranged to meet an Internet date there, not knowing they'd be showing porn on the big projection screens in the back.

I'm completely not kidding, and, yes, that is her entire description of the bar, and, yes, I'm sure I have the right place. Who's the Brooklyn jerk now, we ask ourselves.

The Cartoon Assassin

2011-05-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

"The Cartoon Assassin" is as spot-on a description of what it's like to move to New York as anything I've read on the topic. It's an essay in Jane Borden's book I Totally Meant To Do That. I saw her speak at Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore a while back and when I returned to the store with more money in my bank account and a long weekend in front of me, I picked it up. It's the tale of a well-bred southern debutante moving to Manhattan and struggling to fit in.

New New Yorkers find ourselves constantly swapping tales about all of the stupid things we did and discovered -- standing around on the A train platform at Penn Station forever until realizing oh, if the A is running local, it will be stopping on the C/E platform (duh), nearly stepping in chicken guts when innocently walking home from the local bar, learning what "train juice" is when it drips down off the M train tracks first thing in the morning. Borden describes this parade of disaster perfectly.

"The city isn't evil; it's simply in it's nature to destroy. It can't help itself. Kind of like the god of the Old Testament. Except New York is craftier, enjoying the chase. It will sneak up behind you, giggling, and stuff dynamite in your backpack. And if you happen to spin around too soon, it will hid its weapon, look the other way and whistle ... And sure enough, you later find a skull-and-crossbones bucket propped above your door. The city relishes it's perdition. It's a gremlin, a cartoon assassin."

And when I read this, I had to pause, put down the book, and wipe away tears from laughing so hard: "A gust of wind covered my fresh vanilla ice cream cone with dirt and trash. A falling Diet Coke can -- origin unknown -- bounced off my head. It was empty, but still: That is absurd."

I will never forget my first truly miserable hot summer day in New York. I was crossing Dekalb Avenue below Fort Greene Park directly behind a stopped bus. The bus roared away in a cloud of hot, nasty pollution and grime, including a piece of trash that, yes, bounced off my head. It was a harbinger of so many things to come.

All Families Are Psychotic, by Douglas Coupland

2011-05-16T18:32:00.001-07:00

I think this book is about how Canadians see America, if the way Canadians see America is: incredibly fucked up and terrifying, in a "whee, that was a wild ride" sort of way.

It reminds me of an episode of a British TV show that I loved. The show is called Top Gear and it's about cars. In this particular episode, the hosts go to the U.S. to drive from Miami to New Orleans in cars they purchase in Miami for $1,000.00 or less. They go around in these like rusty pick-up trucks spray painting "Richard Petty is gay" or what have you on each other's vehicles and trying not to get punched and it's all fun and games until they get to New Orleans a year after Katrina. Then they're like "well ... how messed up America is is actually not that amusing at all. And boy do we feel like jerks." And they give the cars to poor people and return to Europe looking haunted.

Learning to Drive, by Katha Pollitt

2011-05-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

I have an unfinished post about A Visit From The Goon Squad. That's because I think three posts is plenty, but I haven't finished the book, either. I haven't finished the book because I had 20 pages to go when I gave it to my mother. Drat. I plan on just going out and buying it, as I'm going to be pushing it on friends for years to come.

Meanwhile, I had a stack of library books rapidly approaching their due date, so I reread The Great Gatsby (had been meaning to do that for ages), then started on Learning to Drive. Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation; I've seen her work but don't read it with any regularity. She's the sort of middle-aged left-wing Manhattan intellectual who does not seem to have any counterpart in my generation, maybe because the counterparts can't afford to live there. Regardless, while I thought that Julie Klausner, who is my own age, didn't really have my number, Pollitt surely does.

" ... I had always thought that left-wing men were the worst. In college I would look around the cafeteria tables where the anti-war activists sat for hours over tuna melts and Cokes and think how sad it was that my politics had led me to this very small pool of potential boyfriends, all seriously problematic. The Maoists of the Progressive Labor Party were rigid and bizarre and always trying to get you to hand out leaflets at six in the morning. The rock-and-rollers and Weatherman sympathizers were callow and conceited and usually stoned. And yet it was not possible to be with a man who was conservative or apolitical, or even just a Democrat, someone who might have, say, voted for Hubert Humphrey. Even a McCarthy supporter was pushing it. Those people were so naive."

Har har. Marxists. Don't think they're not still around.

A Visit From The Goon Squad

2011-05-01T18:40:00.001-07:00

It just gets better. Franzen without the hokeyness. Foster Wallace without the self indulgence.

Though I fear certain aspects of getting older, as most people do, in other ways I feel like I was made for it, because I always want to know what happens in the end. In my early 30s, I am already starting to learn who lives, who dies, who stays married, who gets a divorce, who succeeds, who fails. I'm getting to know people I knew when they were babies as adults, and I remember thinking about them when they were very young, I can't wait until you're old enough to have a real conversation with me.

A Visit From The Goon Squad is the perfect book for someone who always wants to know what happened. We see characters at 40-something, then back at 17, and others at 17 and then at 40-something. Some characters we meet and learn the fate of all in one chapter, almost as an aside: this is what happened to that person.

I also love this book because it is filled with women who make what one character terms "disastrous choices," but doesn't portray them as without agency. That seems obvious: choices, agency. But it isn't. In so many cases, the younger ex wives of a record producer would be portrayed as pitiable victims, and also as secondary characters, relevant only as per their role in his path toward redemption and maybe treating women better someday. Here, they are people who, as anyone does, make mistakes that they learn from. One woman comes back from an international expedition with her wealthy older boyfriend thinking, well, that was fun, but time to get on with my graduate work. She looks around at her ratty apartment, sees year after year of squinting over textbooks and living on lentil stew stretched out before her and thinks, hmm, pitching grad school to marry a guy who is fun and rich, maybe not so bad. Then, later, she's like, well, that was stupid, but what can you do. Pretty much everyone I know thinks just like that.

***

When I'm in a certain mood, this is also how I feel:

Jules put his arm around her. "If you'd ask me this morning, I would have said we were finished," he said. "All of us, the whole country — the fucking world. But now I feel the opposite."

Stephanie knew. She could practically hear the hope sluicing through her brother. "So what's the answer?" she asked.

"Sure, everything is ending," Jules said. "But not yet."

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

2011-04-27T19:03:00.001-07:00

Tonight I went to my local bookstore for a reading and interview. The featured novel/novelist were So Much Pretty and Cara Hoffman, respectively. Hoffman came across as a very significant and solid intellect. She was self aware without being self-deprecating in that way women often are, where we/they constantly apologize for their work or their presence. I was interested in her book because it takes place in rural New York, but I learned it's more about violence against women.

At any rate, while I was there, I purchased A Visit from the Good Squad, Jennifer Egan's very recently Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. My mom was interested in reading it and I'm going to see her next week. There are no bookstores where my parents live and while she could order it from Amazon, could she get an autographed copy that costs nothing extra, is just there for the buying because the author lives nearby? No she could not.

The book is not mine. It belongs to my mother. But a little peek wouldn't hurt, why not, it will just be sitting there for a week ... within minutes I felt the urge to shun all human contact, to read at the bus stop, to read in line at the grocery store, to read while I'm on hold with New York City government. I was about 9 pages in when I started to think, who needs people when you have books. The feeling is similar to the one I had when I finally broke down and purchased Freedom, and I was happy it was rainy and miserable that day, because who wanted to do anything anyway.

This is going to be good.

I Don't Care About Your Band, by Julie Klausner

2011-04-26T08:13:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine lent me this book, unsolicited. I think he was trying to tell me something. Maybe I should explain by using the book's full title: I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I've Dated.

Some of Klausner's stories are pretty funny, and some of her points are pretty feminist. On that second point, it's weird that she's ... so down on women. She says female friends are of limited use because inevitably having them leads to drama, competition and hating each other. I have found this to be the case a couple of times in my life, max. Maybe her perspective comes from life in the entertainment industry, but if it does, she shouldn't generalize. I guess I should be happy that I've had many, many great female friends in my life and leave it at that.

Bored to Death

2011-04-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

My new favorite New York story.

Bored to Death is an HBO series staring Jason Schwartzman as New York author Jonathan Ames. Jonathan Ames is an actual author living in actual New York, and he wrote the show. It's shot here, largely in Fort Greene, which is thoroughly recognizable. The other scenes are too; I was immediately able to place a bridge over the Gowanus Canal, the boardwalk at Coney Island, and Grand Army Plaza.

And I also noticed that the main characters were running through Grand Army Plaza, turned a corner and ended up in front of Moe's, a bar on Lafayette Street in Fort Greene, which must be a good mile away. And that the main character is always riding the F train, which doesn't go to Fort Greene. Is Fort Greene playing Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens?

But no matter. So many shows in which New York plays a central row show stuff everyone knows about -- exclusive clubs, high-end boutiques, hailing cabs, the view from skyscraper windows, endless location shots of the Brooklyn Bridge. Those shows don't look any different to me now than they did before I lived here. Bored to Death is different. It's about shady Russians, Hasidic Jews, giant strollers, the Park Slope Co-Op, and, of course, working artists and writers sitting around Brooklyn cafes going "I hate my life." That is the New York that I know.

I should also note: as I told my friend Matt, and nearly forgot to repeat here, this show is basically Entourage for nerds, or at least the brownstone Brooklyn set. In this male fantasy, you get to meet Jim Jarmusch, draw comics for a living and smoke pot in a Suburu.

The Heights, by Peter Hedges

2011-04-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

I picked this one up while I was wandering around Brooklyn's central public library waiting for Internet time. It looked like a nice light New York City-centric story to enjoy on my lunch breaks. Which, I guess it was, because that's what I did with it. Or, I read it during lunch, anyway. "Enjoy" might be a stretch. I found the characters to be neither believable, nor, worse, likable. But I guess I cared enough about what happened to see it the whole way through, so it must have had some appeal.

The Heights is about a middle-class couple with two boys struggling to make ends meet in Brooklyn Heights, a tony neighborhood one train stop from Manhattan that's home to a lot of Wall Street types and old money. Brooklyn Heights is my favorite rich neighborhood in Brooklyn. It's not trendy at all; I consider it to be more "classic." The streets are lined with gorgeous old co-op buildings, 19th-century rowhouses, and normal places like a plain old not-organic grocery store, a nice liquor store, coffee shops, a health food restaurant, dark old bars, a ratty old movie theater, even a diner.

In addition to neither half of the couple seeming like a real person, the other characters were even worse. They all appeared to be excuses to make up the most old money-sounding names the author could think of, like Anna Brody-Ashworth and Claudia Von Somethingorother. Hedges also does something that I found really annoying in Super Sad True Love Story, which is filling the book with unnecessary specific New York detail. Does it really matter whether someone walks down Hicks or Henry street on their way to the 2/3, and that they pick it up at Clark Street as opposed to say Borough Hall? Does it matter whether they live on Orange, Cranberry or Pineapple? Gary Shteyngart's characters were forever taking the F here or there. Why does it have to be the F? How does that detail help anyone who isn't familiar with the city? Or anyone who is, for that matter, because if you recognize his Lower East Side location and you know the characters are going to Midtown, you don't need to be told it's the F. Are such a huge percentage of their readers occasional visitors to NYC who will feel oh-so-in-the-know because they've been to the Connecticut Muffin on Montague Street? I really don't get this at all.

Plus, it shows that the details had no relationship to anything like a creative process, being 100 percent copied from real life.

One star.

2011-04-07T08:32:00.001-07:00

I don't know why the returns in the post below won't take. I redid them three times.

Update: fixed! Somehow.

New York happenings

2011-04-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

On Monday night, I ventured to Midtown to see "Who Took The Bomp?," the new Le Tigre tour documentary, make its New York debut at the MOMA. As I walked up to the museum, I tried to determine which door to go into to buy movie tickets. I started to pass the first one, but then turned around when I realized, oh yeah, those are the Le Tigre fans. Silkscreened t-shirts, canvas bags, vintage glasses, tightly clutched notebooks -- near everyone there looked like he or she had graduated from a Seven Sisters school. The movie was fun, and I learned a thing or two during the informal panel discussion that followed. (By informal panel discussion, I mean that they called two band members and a couple of other people who had been involved in making the film up to the front and they stood around and took a few questions. Kathleen Hannah herself, just standing around talking to people. Oh New York.)

As I told a friend in an email, the best thing I took away from it was Kathleen Hannah's take on 90s nostalgia (in the panel discussion and the film). She said that she loves that people in their 20s wish they were around for the 90s, and that the attention she gets now is gratifying, but that it was not all that great to live through. Music critics said horrible things about her, she was constantly called fat, a slut, a feminazi, other feminist bands thought they weren't feminist enough, etc. and she felt up against it all the time. In a weird way she reminded me of Hillary Clinton. I can't imagine standing up to the barrage of misogyny and insults every single day for 20+ years has been worth it for her, either, but at some point she must have decided that history was more important.

***

Yes, that's right. Young people now were too young to know about bands or see shows or what have you during the NINETIES.

*picks up cane*

*hobbles off*

On Friday, Tina Fey is going to be at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble promoting her new book. I may brave it. I also may leave my glasses at home, so as not to look like an absolute fool/superfan/nerd girl.

Generation X, by Douglas Coupland

2011-03-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure I like how much this book spoke to me. It was published 20 years ago to all sorts of "voice of a generation" type accolades. Twenty years ago, the characters were in their late 20s -- which is to say, if they were real, they'd be 15-20 years older than I am. But their lives looked just like those of everyone I knew a few years ago, when I was in my late 20s. They way they lived, their jobs, their instantly close friendships, the way they *talked.* My god, as you can see below, they talked exactly like the people I knew. Maybe it means there is something to the seemingly random business of where generation lines are drawn. Xers were born up through 1980, which means that I'm one and so are all my friends I wrote about in the last two posts. All in all, I rate this book the thinking woman's Reality Bites. Gold star.

Everything is better this way

2011-03-16T06:23:00.001-07:00

New theory: all conversations are better when written in the style of the famous author and friends quoted below.

"So then Tara was like, Remember that guy Tom? And it didn't ring a bell and she was like, you know, blonde, tall, military guy, made that creepy comment about the skirt you said looked okay?
"And I was like oh, Parakeet Tom! And she pratically fell off her bar stool laughing, all 'parakeets! How could I forget about the parakeets! hee hee hee *wheeze*'
"Tara, I said, how could I remember anything else about this guy but that he came to that happy hour you won at OPM Lounge when it first opened and it was double weird because the place was new so there was no one in there and also law school just started so you invited a bunch of people you didn't really know to your thing and this *dude* came and hung out and talked to us about his parakeets and how he would breed them and like put a little cover over their cage ... augh oh god ew.
"and at that point of course Tara, in true Tara fashion, is like clutching herself laughing, wiping tears, unable to move or speak. Everything she cracks up about becomes twice as funny due to this sort of behavior. It's like, don't even bring up Teddy Ruxpin or nothing will be said for half an hour probably."

Let's play a game

2011-03-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Which of these passages were written by an author hailed as the voice of his generation, and which are just stuff my friends wrote on the Internet?

A.) Him: he's so...he's so manly. Like, throwing his Dickies messenger bag in the back of his truck and starting up the truck with a cig hanging from his mouth, and then idling while saying good bye, his leg tucked into the door frame, with his 1940's matinee idol socks and, for lack of a better word, saddle shoes, his foot held just so- a kind of sprung nonchalance.

B.) "Anyhow, this rich broad, this real Sylvia type" (Elvissa calls rich women with good haircuts and good clothes Sylvias) "comes out from the spa building going mince mince mince with her little shoey-wooeys and her Lagerfeld dress, right up to this guy in front of me. She purrrrs something I miss and then puts a little gold bracelet around this guy's wrist which he offers up to her (body language) with about as much enthusiasm as though he were waiting for her to vaccinate it. She gives the hand a kiss, says 'Be ready for nine o'clock' and then toddles off."

***

A.) I will attempt to do justice to this photo: taken in 1983, when Tomtom was about 2 or so, it's him, his dad and a huge white rabbit on a deck or table of somekind- Tommie is propped up on his forearms and hands kissing the bunny, his AWESOME 1980's "racing" parka falling over half his face, but the other half that we can see is 100 percent focused on kissing that bunny! His father, puffy late 1970's do, slight mustache and all is holding the bunny still. It's typical upstate NY Easter weather, which means it's about 12 degrees out and overcast, and the muted, yellow-orange palette of photos from the era warm the scene up. Something about Tommy's innocent, pudgy face kills me. I can see his character- giving, open, loving, and yet forceful and a bit eager, all in this photo. His father's face-- at first I thought he was concentrating on Tommy with the same amount of concentration Tommy was giving the bun, but then I saw it: he's just focused on holding the bunny still. He left Tommy and his mother shortly after that.

B.) "One night Mom came out onto the patio in a pink sundress and carrying a glass pitcher of lemonade. Dad swept her into his arms and they danced to the samba music with Mom still holding the pitcher. She was squealing but loving it. I think she was enjoying that little bit of danger the threat of broken glass added to the dancing. And there were crickets cricking and the transformer humming on the power lines behind the garages, and I had my suddenly young parents all to myself — them and this faint music that sounded like heaven — faraway, clear, and impossible to contact — coming from this faceless place where it was always summer and where beautiful people were always dancing and where it was impossible to call by telephone, even if you wanted to."

***

A.) "I mean, it's just so DIRE! It all sounds so damn serious in print. Men never do that shit. I mean, nothing, nothing induces more stomach- churning dread than the sight of an email with the headline "please read" from your soon -to- be- ex in your inbox. The Declaration of Independance? Thomas Jefferson's wife wrote that shit, you know it! Breaking up with the King of England...a man would never do that by letter! You just know she wrote that for him...'George, we have to talk'. I mean, that's a break up letter if I ever saw one."

B.) "Suddenly I was into this tres deeply. Well, if I'm going to quit anyway, might as well get a thing or two off my chest.

" 'I beg your pardon,' says Martin, the wind taken out of his sails.

" 'Or for that matter, do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest. You really make me sick."

Part two

2011-03-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

So what does my re-dedication to loyalty, duty, hard work and being a square have to do with The Wire, aka the greatest television show ever made? To me, The Wire, especially its second and fifth seasons, is a 60-hour eulogy for communities and ways of life that are dying all around us.

The second season focuses on Baltimore's struggling shipping industry and dockworkers union. It's about what it means to come from the Rust Belt. Sons can't make a living in the industry that their fathers and grandfathers did. The next generation has to either leave home, or stay at great economic sacrifice. Nick Sobotka, a young dockworker, is a central character of the second season. Over its course, he loses so much in terms of his family, his livelihood and the future he thought he would have. The life of an honest day's work paying enough to own a home, family close by in the neighborhood, camaraderie in the union hall, drinks after work with your best friends -- it's all been lost to smuggling and fancy condos, big paydays for a handful of people and nothing for everyone else. The second season closes with a montage of all of those changes. When I watched it, I noticed one thing was missing: someone like me packing up the u-haul and hugging friends and family goodbye.

In addition to the small-town America I grew up in and the no-nonsense values of the Rust Belt city that became my adopted home, the life that I knew as a young adult is disappearing too. I applied to journalism school at 16 and showed up at the student paper at 17, earnest, idealistic, and full of ideas for opinion columns I wanted to write. Dedication was the number-one quality for succeeding at The Bona Venture and when I demonstrated it, they put me on staff right away. Journalism was my life until I was almost 24, when I pitched it and went to law school. My reasons for doing so were not well-formed but it turned out to be a good decision. After I left, my old colleagues, incredibly bright and incisive people and good writers too, started getting laid off in droves. Newsrooms shrunk, contracted again, and shrunk some more. In my kitchen cupboard here in Brooklyn I have a mug that says "Circ's up!" -- the whole staff got them when the circulation of our small-city daily newspaper rose. It looks like a rotary phone or an eight-track tape, just eight years later. Newspaper circulation rising and profits going up, when did that happen?

The small-town main street where my dad had a sporting goods store when I was young now looks battered and broken, infinitely more commerce taking place at the Wal-Mart outside of town.

The factories where generations of Buffalonians made their livings are shuttered and the old neighborhoods are largely abandoned too, filled with boarded houses, weedy vacant lots, drug dealing and sad corner stores with almost nothing for sale.

The newsrooms where I began my career, learned who I was and what mattered to me and formed lifelong friendships are now ghosts of their former selves, scores of literate and smart people left adrift in a world that doesn't always value those qualities.

In The Wire's fifth season, we see seasoned veterans taking buyouts as the staff of the Baltimore Sun contracts, the paper loses institutional memory, and its quality declines. David Simon, who created The Wire, was one of those veterans who took a buyout. It's no wonder journalists and former journalists love The Wire so much; Simon sees the world through our eyes. We see sweeping narratives everywhere, in the lives of everyday people. It's all part of the larger story. The final episode of The Wire is called simply -30-, which is the way reporters once signaled the end of an article. It's the end of a brilliant piece of work that chronicled the end of so many other things. Just -30-. It's over, done and gone.

On life, and also The Wire: A two-part series

2011-03-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

I am not a religious woman.

One of my grandfathers died last month. When my uncle Andy and aunt Priscilla flew in from Taiwan for what they hoped was a chance to say their final goodbyes but turned out to be for the funeral, they came into my grandma's living room bleary eyed, having spent 24 hours traveling. It was about 7 a.m. their time. My mom was running through who was doing what during the funeral -- "And Andy, I have you down for the eulogy!" "What the ... eulogy?" he said, sounding annoyed but more likely just exhausted. My uncle is a preacher and theologian; who else to give a eulogy. At the funeral home, I saw him scratching notes, trying to keep his eyes open.

The funeral, held in a Catholic church, had little to do with my grandfather or his life. To someone with no religious background, it was a series of rituals, songs and Bible readings that may as well have been chosen at random, with a casket sitting at the front of the room. Towards the end, my uncle approached the podium. In his eulogy, he never strayed from simple truths. In doing so, he not only imparted great meaning on what was in many ways an unremarkable middle-class life; he also gave me a whole new sense of clarity about my values and how I got this way.

My grandparents met in high school (where they were first and second in their graduating class), became a couple in college and married in 1950, when then were 23 years old. By 1960, they had six kids. My grandfather took the bus from their suburban neighborhood to the city every day. He earned a good living but they never had more than one car -- it must have seemed wasteful to them. Imagine that. He's working hard, he's earning all the money, but he's the one getting on the bus. The bus was fine for him -- more important to chip away at the mortgage and save to put six kids through school. He never thought he needed a sports car, or fancy electronics, or a membership at an expensive golf club, but he bought jewelry for my grandma and made sure my mom and her brothers and sisters had everything they needed. When I was young -- I had forgotten about this -- he visited his mother every Saturday and took care of all of her finances. He never complained about here I am doing everything for mom and what's my sister contributing and blah blah blah. He never complained at all, that I can remember. Life was good to him, but that didn't give him a sense of entitlement. He used the opportunities he had to go out and do the right thing, and do what needed to be done, every single day.

On its face, my life bears no resemblance to that of my grandparents. They had the house in the suburbs, wife at home (for 15 years anyway), dad goes to work in the city, church, carpools, first communions, family dog, red meat for dinner every night, station wagon in the driveway. I share a rented condo in an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood. I'm single and childless at 31, have a lot of unconventional friends, a law degree, enough spare time to read and write. I eat tofu and date musicians and wear black and campaign for lefty causes and candidates and hang out in cool bars.

But sitting in that horrible suburban church listening to my uncle, I realized that I'm just like them, and my parents, and my dad's parents too. My peers don't understand why I've never been to Europe, why places like the Lower West Side of Buffalo and Bushwick and Bed Stuy mean so much to me, why I insisted on living in a barely furnished studio apartment with no TV and no car when I was in law school, why I keep the credit card debt in check and hang onto my savings and have never had my nails done or owned a remote control. They make fun, and they try to convince me to loosen up a little, but who do they turn to when they need someone to move their car, water their plants, feed their cat, do their taxes, give them legal advice ...

At times I get tired of being the boring, responsible one but when I need something, I get it and then some. When my grandfather died, I was in Buffalo visiting friends. The wake and funeral were in Pittsburgh two days later. I had no way to get there, nothing to wear, no idea what to do. My friends, and my sister, came through with everything -- rides to the store, use of their computers, a black dress, even a car to borrow to drive to Pittsburgh and back. Their generosity, and my uncle's words, convinced me that I'm not a loser for going to work when I don't want to and showing up to things when I don't feel like it, just because I said I would. In a world of selfishness and broken plans and competitive consumption and so much crap that nobody needs, I stand for the possibility that old-fashioned values still matter. It is my hope to work towards shedding the conformity and rigid gender roles of my middle-class suburban roots while hanging onto everything that is admirable about that legacy, and to build a life that matters.

I haven't gotten to The Wire yet. But I will.

Advice

2011-03-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

If you're feeling a little depressed, or experiencing negative emotions of any kind, or even are in a state where you could end up feeling that way if given just a little push in the wrong direction, do not read anything by Wally Lamb. A few chapters of I Know This Much Is True and some rich asshole tying his dog out in the rain was all it took for me to go from good day to near meltdown. What is wrong with people.

brief hiatus

2011-02-26T08:35:00.001-08:00

It is my plan to start writing on this site again shortly. I have done hardly any reading in the past couple of weeks due to travel, a death in the family and minor upheaval in my work and personal lives. There's a lot going on. Plus I need to accept that I'm not going to finish some of the books I started, put them away, and start something else. Dreams From My Father is okay but ... sort of boring, honestly. Hooray for living in a free country where I can say that about a book by the president. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, an account of traveling with David Foster Wallace, is also sort of boring, though I covered that already.

Last night I finished The Wire. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but I agree with those who say it's the best show ever made. The best show I have ever seen, anyway. There's a montage at the end of the second season, which is about the decline of blue-collar work in Rust Belt cities, that encapsulates all the forces that brought me away from where I came from and to New York in search of stability and success.

Sometimes I think about starting another blog and calling it Rust Belt Exile. But what would I write? Maybe I could interview the people I've met in New York who come from Detroit, Grand Rapids, St. Louis, Syracuse ... there are no shortage of them.

Empire of Illusion

2011-01-27T04:20:00.001-08:00

I was sitting in my living room/let's call it a home office just now when I heard someone on NPR talking about what's wrong with global corporate capitalism and being pushed on "But did you say Marx was right about some things???" all Fox News style. "Who on earth is this radical?" I wondered.

Answer: Chris Hedges, author of one of my favorite books, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I'm reading his Empire of Illusion now. So far, it is not one of my favorite books, despite detailing a lot of things I'm concerned about -- the downfall of reason, failures in American education, etc. He makes a lot of undeniable points, but Barbara Ehrenreich made them better.

New York I love you, but you're bringing me down

2011-01-24T18:44:00.001-08:00

No matter how big of a liberal you are, being constantly surrounded by people who are different from you in terms of language, accent, culture, background, life experience, clothing preferences, food preferences, weather preferences, volume of indoor speaking voice, you name it, can wear on you in ways you never expected.

No matter how much you hate cars, and I really hate them, carrying everything you might need in a day -- gym clothes, sneakers, lunch, files, book to read -- on your back or shoulder can make you feel like a pack mule after a while. A grumpy pack mule with a persistent ache.

No matter how much you are creeped out by an America that aspires to nothing higher than positive consumer experiences, gleaming floors, wide aisles and bright lights, you will get sick of buying your food in places where the floor is dirty, it smells weird, they have no squash you can recognize but are well stocked in these thingys that look like anteater snouts, and the brands and flavors of yogurt they carry vary by the day.

No matter how much of a "foodie" you thought you were, making tea with what looks like an old-fashioned shaving brush, coffee with a set of glass tubes and cocktails in barrels for aging is bullshit. And putting bacon in everything is really not that cute or clever after a while.

No matter how good of a sense of humor you have about things that are both gross and inevitable, you don't want the first thing you see when you emerge from underground to be someone's vomit frozen to the metal stairs.

Not everyone has these experiences, of course, particularly not the first. But if you come to New York neither wealthy nor idle, be prepared for a pretty serious grind. It conjures visions of the capital city of an on-the-rise third world country, a glittering playpen for the fortunate ringed by layers of crowded and dirty shantytowns for everyone else, complete with benevolent billionaire overlord. At least we have really excellent drinking water, I suppose.

Just Kids

2011-01-18T17:41:00.000-08:00

Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship and creative partnership with the late Robert Mapplethorpe, may be the ultimate New York story. When Smith and Mapplethorpe met they were barely 20 years old, trying to make it as artists, so poor they couldn't afford food. They inspired and drove each other for decades and both achieved great success. Along the way, they performed for Bob Dylan (well, Smith did), found their way into Andy Warhol's social circle, witnessed the golden ages of CBGBs and the Chelsea Hotel, acquired wealthy patrons and saw the world. The world Smith describes is colored by celebrities and drugs but ultimately driven by a passion for art and a passion to succeed much more than a passion to know the right people. Art and rock music may sound glamorous, she seems to say, and maybe they were, but what you really need to do is to put in the time. Smith worked in New York for the better part of a decade, running cash registers and living hand to mouth, before her first album was released.

Smith wrote Just Kids to fulfill a promise she made to Mapplethorpe before he died, 20 years ago, of AIDS. It's a fitting book for me to be reading right now; I've been thinking a lot about my obligations to do something with my life, and to do the things people who couldn't be on Earth for long never had the chance to. Yesterday I found out that a kid I used to tutor died of cancer. He was in his early 20s. Salim was a refugee from Somalia, by way of Kenya and Tanzania. He was a sharp kid and a good person with an excellent attitude. While other teenagers on the West Side of Buffalo were out getting into trouble, being irresponsible and destroying things, he stayed home taking care of his younger brother and his nieces and nephews. And he never bitched about not getting to be a normal teenager. Salim did get to go to college for a couple of years, which is something he had wanted, but other than that, never had much of a chance to enjoy life. And now he's gone.

His story, and Smith's, and Mapplethorpe's, are all reminders that our time on Earth is limited and that we only get one chance to make it count. Smith approaches her subject with honor and reverence. She is also a wonderful writer. It's a compelling read.

Big Girls Don't Cry

2011-01-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, when I reviewed restaurants for a local magazine in Buffalo, I went into a vegetarian-centric new place called Merge for the first time. The menu included black bean cakes, various derivations of the chickpea, crunchy grilled sandwiches, spicy soups, even fried pickles dunked in marinara sauce. "Wow," I thought. "Everything I ever want to order is on this menu."

Big Girls Don't Cry, Rebecca Traister's book about the 2008 election and the status of women in politics and society at large is that menu, in book form. Everything I want to read about, all the time, is there. Finishing it before she speaks at my favorite bookstore in a week and a half should not be a problem. I may finish it today.

Update: I finished the book, but did not make it to the reading. Flu had me down. But, I saw Traister read at the Brooklyn Book Festival this past summer and, as she lives in Brooklyn, I'm sure there will be other chances to see her again.

Although of Course, You End Up Becoming Yourself

2010-12-27T12:47:00.000-08:00

This book consists almost entirely of transcriptions of conversations between David Foster Wallace and a Rolling Stone writer who was sent to profile him toward the end of his Infinite Jest book tour. It makes me want to put it down and pick up Infinite Jest again. Every time they talk about it I'm like "Infinite Jest -- now *there's* a book. Why am I reading this crap?"

Got some good holiday loot this year -- Big Girls Don't Cry by Rebecca Traister, Just Kids by Patti Smith (another New York story), Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges and some Laurie Notaro for the plane or for relaxing at cocktail hour in the suburbs.

Tomorrow: back to New York.

Super Sad True Love Story

2010-12-23T10:46:00.001-08:00

Did not live up to the hype, but I liked it okay.

The author, Gary Shteyngart, managed to take subjects that can trigger a good old rant from yours truly -- stupid trendy NYC bars and their even stupider names, "the kids" walking around practically naked, overreliance on the Internet -- and, by satirizing them in what I thought was an alarmist, clumsy and tone-deaf way, make me downright defensive of young people today.

I am re-reading Female Chauvanist Pigs by Ariel Levy and when I'm done I'm going to have more to say about exactly how Shteyngart gets it wrong.

2010-12-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

According to the records I keep on Goodreads, I read a book just about every two weeks. So I'll probably read about 25 books this year. It doesn't sound like a lot, does it?

I just finished An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel. I started reading it because a friend left it in my apartment, and also it's a lightweight paperback, perfect for schlepping back and forth to work for lunch break reading. It's extremely well written, but the affect is flat.

Here's a good example:
"They were brown lace-up shoes, like school shoes. The laces were very badly knotted. Julia picked at them. Her occupation made her look humble, like someone in the New Testament."

Mantel paints a beautiful picture. But everything in the book is like this. The main character describes the scene in front of her, nothing further.

New York stories

2010-12-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

So much of what I've watched and read since moving to New York -- a year ago tomorrow! -- have been New York stories. That's partially because so much takes place here, of course. I would have read Freedom, where maybe 1/3 of the novel is set in New York, whether I was here or not. Probably still would have gone to see the Wall Street sequel. Maybe would have read Liar's Poker. But then, I definitely would not have read There's A Road To Everywhere Except Where You Came From, and probably not Super Sad True Love Story, which I started the other day, either.

Freedom and Liar's Poker are excellent books, and also universal stories. You don't need to have ever been to New York to enjoy them. Super Sad True Love Story is so far ... kind of an angry but not really on-the-nose joke about New York today. I have to think more about it. There's A Road To Everywhere rings completely true, and it should -- it's a memoir about the recent past.

But today I saw a movie that surpasses them all in terms of being so true to life it could be a documentary. It's called Tiny Furniture, and the set-up is a standard one: twenty-something returns home from college, directionless, to live with mom, takes up with crazy friend, meets bad news guys. Everything that is said and done I swear I have already seen said and done. Yet it feels original. Not-quite-right New York movies show people living in sprawling spaces with a sort of gleaming minimalist aesthetic. But this tony Tribeca loft was lined with storage cupboards and the daughters' rooms were really just one room with a fake wall down the middle. Young actors bitch about staying in Bushwick. A drug-addled daughter of privilege complains about how weird her mom's gotten since taking up with the Landmark Forum. One character doesn't know the difference between Ohio and Ontario. Manhattan dwellers take cabs home from Dumbo instead of the train. They never make little references to the 6 or the L to make it sound real -- they don't have to, because everything they say and do sounds real. Highly and completely recommended.

Cranksgiving

2010-11-25T05:55:00.000-08:00

A tale of two readings in two nights in the same part of Brooklyn that one might think would appeal to the same crowd:

Tuesday night: The Best American Music Writing, guest edited by Ann Powers

The name Ann Powers has appeared in this blog before; I read her memoir Weird Like Us almost two years ago and on whole quite enjoyed it. So when I saw she was going to be part of a free reading in Brooklyn on a night where I had no particular plans, I couldn't think of a reason not to go. Next time, I will have plenty.

Ms. Powers had a generally likable demeanor (she just hosted, didn't read her own work) and the writing presented was fine. But the venue made the experience a none too pleasant one. It was way too dark, but with harsh lighting on the stage so you had to shield your eyes or squint to look at whoever was talking. Before the reading, which started late, a DJ (who turned out to be one of the writers) played loud, bad hip hop music to a crowd of largely 30-something white people who think they're still cool because they can wear jeans to work -- because they're writers and they work from home. I hate listening to all-hip hop playlists in 95% white crowds, especially white people with money like this bunch. These people would never consider going to an actual hip hop club for fun (going to a black neighborhood at night at all might be pushing it), but they can stand around with each other and nod their heads and pretend to be badass for liking music with swears in this specially created little safe environment. Bleah.

Pretty much everyone there had a hand in the book or was friends with someone who did, giving other audience members the feeling of being an uninvited guest at a party. A bad party.

Wednesday night: The Talent Show presents Cranksgiving

Once again, I took the C train to Fort Greene then hiked down to the same general area of Park Slope (technically Gowanus due to being west of 4th Avenue). Once again, I walked into the bar area of a concert venue filled largely with nerdy white people. But this time, a Talking Heads cover played at a reasonable volume, the lighting was pleasant, the crowd convivial and excited, arriving in twos and threes. I was able to order a beer at the bar and read until the seats started to fill up and I felt like I should go take one; at the other end of the bar, another woman by herself paged through a magazine.

I had scored a ticket to this event because I am Facebook friends or whatever with This American Life. They posted a link like "This American Life contributers performing in Brooklyn. Tickets are 5 dollars, here's the link!" and I jumped on it. So though I'm sure the performers had many friends in the audience, it's safe to assume that a lot of us were just public radio fans. The theme of the evening was "complaints and rants" or some such and they let audience members get up on stage and do 30-second rants between acts. One guy totally stole the show. His rant went something like this:

"So I get an email from my dad the other day, saying my mom had been in a car accident. She hit a light pole, and the light pole fell on her car. The car was totaled. She broke her sternum and had to be rushed to the hospital."

At this point the crowd is silent, cursing the questionable choice to encourage audience participation.

"And the subject line of this email is 'Say goodbye to the Prius'." Happy Thanksgiving Mom and Dad!" *raises drink* *leaves stage*

Thanks for that, guy, whoever you are.

I had had a terrible day and could only think of rants that were not funny in the slightest. It was only when I sat down to write about Tuesday night that I realized I had plenty of material.

Other highlights: Jonathan Hodgman did a really funny bit where he mediated a dispute between a woman and her boyfriend who criticized her writing because parentheses should not be used in fiction. This was an audience with opinions about punctuation.

Also I saw Ira Glass! After taking a seat I went back to the bar to get a beer and he was just standing around talking to someone like a normal person. Later Jonathan Hodgman made a joke about him babysitting his kids and like gestured toward him in the audience so it was definitely him. OMG. That's the only New York celebrity sighting I really wanted. Of course, it was a TAL-approved event and therefore possibly not a true celebrity sighting, like when Elizabeth Wurtzel was next to me in a crowd at a panel discussion, when she had been part of a different panel discussion as part of the same event earlier that day. Seeing Ira Glass in the grocery store or like walking his dog, that would be amazing.

There's a Road to Everywhere, Except Where You Came From

2010-11-21T19:43:00.000-08:00

I must have been feeling a little self-indulgent tonight, because I visited what has to be one of the world's greatest bookstores and walked out with a memoir about moving from the Rust Belt to New York City. I'm maybe 65 pages in and already the author has twice referenced going to the store where I bought the book.

The store in question is St. Mark's Bookshop. I gather it is something of a famous landmark, but I had never heard of it or been to it before today. While my beloved Greenlight specializes in what I would call mainstream literary fiction, St. Mark's devotes a lot more shelf space to academic disciplines, art, architecture, and design. They also have a lot of cool magazines. Like Greenlight, it's a great place to walk in not looking for anything in particular and walk out with a book by an author you had never heard of. After my visit, I walked to Tompkins Square Park and called my uncle, who is a librarian and former bookseller. "There's an art criticism SECTION!" I said.

2010-11-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

It makes me happy that someone found this Web site by searching for "the book and the bowl." Michael Lewis is awesome.

more on freedom

2010-11-18T04:17:00.000-08:00

If I had tried, I couldn't have picked a better novel that followed themes I described a couple of posts ago than The Namesake. It's about a family that leaves Calcutta for the United States, where their lives are both much easier and much harder than they would have been had they stayed. Unlike the characters in Freedom, Ashoke and Ashmina don't spend a lot of time under the delusion that they can escape the parts of the past they don't like. Ashoke wants to come to America to expand his horizons and build a better life, but he never pretends or tries very much to be different than he was brought up to be. They enter into an arranged marriage, seek Bengali friends, eat mainly Indian food, keep as many of their customs as they can.

For their children, though, compromises are made, and in many ways as time progresses the family adopts a more "normal" suburban life. It's up to the children, then, to figure out how and whether to shake the past and become someone new.

For long stretches, the book oddly had almost no plot. Things just happened, one after the next, with no suspense and no twists. Toward the end though, it had me close to tears in a dentist's office waiting room.

Buy local, read local

2010-11-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

I spent some of my 31st birthday cash on The Namesake, a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri lives around the corner from the bookstore where I purchased the book. Jennifer Egan lives in the neighborhood as well and her A Visit From The Goon Squad is high on my to-read list. And, I also finally bought Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shtyngart. He doesn't live in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but he used to.

Having a local bookstore in Fort Greene, a couple of miles from my apartment, has introduced me to several very very local authors I might never have learned about in my life before New York City. I'm not always good about taking advantage of the city's cultural opportunities -- I visit museums rarely, have never been to the theater -- but I do think that when it comes to reading at least, my horizons have been broadened.

on freedom

2010-10-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

The theme of Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom is that people are trapped by everything they need to do in order to have it. Trapped by an insistence on being self-sustaining and self contained. Trapped by never settling down. Trapped by having to stay far from their families. Trapped by independence. It reminds me of someone I used to be very close to -- there were so many things he could not do in order to remain "free." It's a type of freedom that means not only shaking off the past, but refusing to build a future. It requires you to say no to a lot of things.

Today I finished Eat the Document, a novel about a Weather Underground-style radical who went underground at the age of 22 and, who, now approaching 50, is living quietly in the suburbs with her teenage son. Her first years as a fugitive, moving every few months, working in restaurant kitchens, changing names and hair colors, are chronicled. She observes, "People with real freedom never do really 'free' things, like reinvent themselves, leave lives behind, change everything. Only trapped, desperate people did that."

Two apartments ago, I kept a postcard on my refrigerator. It pictured an endless traffic jam and the words, "Enjoy the freedom of a car." I have for years felt that way about driving -- it's a fake form of freedom sold to us so we'll consume more. You have to pay for the car, so you have less money to do whatever else you want. You constantly have to worry about where it's parked, whether you're getting a ticket, whether someone hit it, what that strange rattling noise is, etc etc. It's the ultimate possession that people become enslaved to -- except for a house I suppose. And here we were, acting like a car is freeing because you can go anywhere you want, whenever you want. But of course you can't go wherever you want. You have to work tomorrow. What will enable you to "just pick up and go" is time and money, and if you have those things, you don't need a car. You can get a cab to the airport.

There have been a couple of slaves to freedom in my life in recent years, and they really like to drive.

Does all of this mean Big Brother was right, and freedom really is slavery? I don't think so. It means that being an adult isn't about running away, and it certainly isn't about pretending that you could if you wanted to. You have to face who you are and where you came from. Start there.

In Defense of Pessimism

2010-10-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

I went to Greenlight, my beloved local Brooklyn bookstore, this evening to see David Rakoff read and answer questions. His new book, Half Empty, sounds like a more personal answer to Barbra Ehrenreich's Bright Sided, which I read recently and just loved. Ehrenreich writes about how stigmatizing pessimism can often mean stigmatizing foresight and rationality, and how the broad-reaching impact of that is bad for society. I have not yet read Half Empty (didn't even purchase it due to lack of funds, but I will, and I buy a lot of books from Greenlight I'll have you know) but it appears to tackle the same themes, but in essays that are more about the author's life and less about, say, the financial crisis.

Like Ehrenreich does/did (not sure of her current health status), Rakoff has cancer. He had it as a young adult and recovered, and the new tumor is a result of the old treatment. This did not come up tonight; I heard it on Fresh Air. I admire both of them so much for facing down sickness and mortality, and coming out of it with their worldview perhaps deepened, but essentially unchanged. Perhaps there are plenty of atheists in foxholes after all.

Liar's Poker

2010-10-03T17:50:00.000-07:00

Michael Lewis moved several steps up my must-read list when both Ira Glass and Jonathan Franzen raved about his work in recent interviews. Since I was all psyched for the Wall Street sequel, and since I'm a huge fan of Bonfire of the Vanities, I picked up Liar's Poker. It's Lewis's first book, written in the late 80s after he worked at Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank.
Liar's Poker is an inside look at the beginnings of mortgage trading (which had a huge part in the most recent economic meltdown), the invention of hostile corporate takeovers and the run-up in the junk bond market. It's incredibly sharp, funny and insightful. I think what I'll remember most about it is the part where a bond salesman Lewis looks up to tells him to "consider the book and the bowl" when estimating the value and predicting the future of the bank's own stock.
To mark some corporate milestone or other, Salomon Brothers gave its employees a silver-plated bowl inscribed with the firm's name and a book about the company's history. "The bowl was good for putting Doritos in," Lewis writes before adding the book was good for nothing at all. I think the phrase "clumsy piece of fascist propaganda" was used.
The other bond salesman, by bringing up the book and the bowl, was saying that Salomon had strayed from its gutsy hard-charging roots, becoming stale and corporate. To its detriment of course. The old Salomon brothers would have just given employees the money it took to produce all the crappy corporate swag. Everyone would rather have the money.
The book was a fantastic parallel to the third season of The Wire, the HBO crime drama that's really about the disasters that are modern politics and government. In The Wire, a group of police officers is investigating a wealthy, powerful and violent drug gang. Over time, the gang loses its edge. Some of its best people end up dead or in jail. The two leaders disagree on whether to cooperate with other gangs and try to stem the violence, or whether to keep trying to be more brutal and fierce than anyone else. They turn on each other, and the gang falls apart.
At Salomon Brothers, the mortgage trading department had an identity all its own, loud, uncouth, overweight men with unpretentious educations in a white-shoe world. When a change in Federal Reserve policy leads to windfalls in mortgage trading and money starts rolling in, they remain loyal to the department rather than the firm at large. Meanwhile bonds, equities and all of the other departments build their own identities as well. The firm leadership becomes consumed in turf battles. And when junk bonds and hostile takeovers come along, they're too busy squabbling to cash in on the next Wall Street windfall. A lot of the top money-makers leave the firm, because there's more money to be made elsewhere. Millions of dollars are lost. Salomon Brothers are no longer, as they say, the masters of the universe.
In both cases, nimbler, hungrier, perhaps more ruthless capitalists surpass the slow, the stubborn, the resistant to change.

Possibly unrelated note: So far as I can tell, the membership of Goodreads is largely female. But when you click on the Liar's Poker page, the first I would say 10-15 members to review it are all men. And the first woman on the list read it because her fiance told her to so she could understand what he does. She just isn't interested in finance, unless it's about figuring out whether she can afford an expensive designer dress.

I wish I was kidding.

Ladies, high finance isn't about boring columns of numbers. It's about the way the world is run and who gets to be in charge. It doesn't matter if you understand how a mortgage security is created and sold. Hardly anyone does, not even, as we have learned, members of Congress. But it does matter who has all the money in this world (hint: not women) and why they have it. It matters a great deal.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

2010-09-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

This movie had its points, but was ultimately formulaic and did not make a ton of sense. I loved all the sweeping skyline shots and real estate porn though.

There's a whole series of events in it in which someone's life falls apart, piece by piece, when the real estate bubble bursts in 2008. That happened to me. And yet, probably the most significant thing I took away from watching it was that the "and then it goes viral!" musical montage needs to be put to rest! I can already hear the teenagers of the future watching that going, "that's so two thousands."

Freedom

2010-09-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

Perhaps Jonathan Franzen has heard the same thing that I have about The Corrections, the National Book Award-winning novel he published 9 years ago. As with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, another truly great modern novel, several people I've talked to said they "just couldn't get into it." In both cases, the first 100+ pages were admittedly a bit of a slog, one that was well worth it.

In contrast, the first 100 pages of Freedom are enthralling. I'm having a really hard time putting this book down to go to bed. So far it is completely living up to the hype.

2010-09-01T17:05:00.001-07:00

I'm still reading The New Kings of Nonfiction, though I have just a story and a half to go. It turns out that it's largely a collection of serious and dense writing that is best digested piece by piece.

Until today, I thought the best work in the book was Power Steer by Michael Pollan. I have never bothered to read Pollan's books -- I've read a few articles by him, heard him on Fresh Air and figured I had the gist of what he has to say. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Etc. In 1997, I stopped eating meat due largely to concerns about the factory farming industry so I thought he's preaching, I'm already converted. Power Steer, though, is such an incredibly well-written piece, full of short, clear sentences and well-composed thoughts. It is also much more practical than sentimental when it comes to the consequences of factory farming. Some industry practices have become more humane in the past 10 years, but the facts remain that corn is not good for cows and that corn-fed beef is not good for humans.

This evening I dug into a story called Tales of the Tyrant. It lays out what it's like to be Saddam Hussein, how he got this way, and how he came to rule Iraq. How and where the author got so much information about this I don't know; I worked in a newsroom during the run-up to the U.S. war there and I saw very little of it. The author allows one of his sources to expound on his theory of Hussein's power: that he exemplifies what he calls a tribal mentality, taken to its furthest extent. Paranoia and violence reign and those outside the favored circle are not to be trusted. Power, not money, is the ultimate goal.

It makes me think of the other reason I'm still reading this book a month later: in addition to moving late last month, I have been watching The Wire. It's just as good as everyone says it is. Actually it might be better. It tells a story of drug kingpins who take and keep power in the same way Hussein does: rule by fear, concentrate power within the family, serve the leader above all else. And the housing projects in West Baltimore are roughly as well served by this as Iraq was.

Plane reading

2010-08-02T19:12:00.001-07:00

I love preparing for a trip I'm excited about -- packing snacks, digging out old maps and guides, incessantly emailing my friends about plans a week or more in advance. Though I love being somewhere else, I hate flying, so I like to save up my favorite podcasts, or maybe a book I'm really looking forward to reading. Something entertaining, not too heavy, but worth mulling over.

This past weekend I purchased The New Kings of Nonfiction, a collection edited by Ira Glass. I sneaked a peek at it today when I was stuck in a dentist's waiting room for half the morning and so far it has kept its promise to make me almost look forward to sitting around the Jet Blue terminal on Thursday.

Among many activities planned for my trip, I get to watch the second and third episodes of the new season of Mad Men. So much has been written about it that I'm not sure what I can add, even as I become one of the millions of Americans who have started over in New York City during the past two plus centuries, running away from a mess of a life to create something better. Every time I hear the swift *zing* of Don Draper's Zippo flipping open, I think of my grandfather lighting a Lucky Strike.

Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism

2010-07-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

On one hand, I really should have read this when it came out. At the time, the dominant narrative was that liberals are out of touch with "ordinary Americans," the right wing is growing and represents the mainstream, the Democratic party is in crisis. What a difference a few years make -- now, due to the results of all of two national elections, we hear about how Republicans are becoming a permanent minority due to demographic changes and the liberal social views of young people.

The book itself is overly hyperbolic and annoyingly equivocating at the same time. Goldberg talks about how liberals are being disenfranchised, ruled by people from other states that we don't understand, with little control over our country's future. She also constantly writes things like "this is not to say that all Christians feel this way" when she never said that all Christians feel that way. She writes that liberals and secularists should not apologize for who we are, while at the same time apologizing constantly via taking back statements she never made.

Which is to say, the writing style of this book made me crazy. But her conclusion -- that secularists need a stronger grassroots network and should not buckle under claims that right-wing Christians are the "real" America -- is a reasonable one to be sure. Here in New York, a city of liberals, of immigrants, of open gays, unmarried and childless adults, artists, bohemians, radicals, lefty Jews, and every other group vilifed by people who would use the attack on this city as justification to oppress most of the people in it, we are just as "American" as everywhere else. It's our country too.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men II

2010-06-15T17:45:00.000-07:00

In retrospect, David Foster Wallace's work is clearly that of someone with a significant mental illness.

I love this book at first. It was so gripping that I barely noticed someone's kid screaming in a Brooklyn cafe. As it went on, it got more disturbing. A story that I didn't entirely read reminded me too much of a teenage neighbor who committed suicide. And the overdue fees were racking up. But I read most of it, and the parts that I loved absorbed 100 percent of my attention.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

2010-06-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Ruth Reichl's memoirs make an excellent companion to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I read about a year ago and don't appear to have written about.

In Outliers, Gladwell demonstrates how external factors work to make some smart, talented, hard-working people into billionaires and sports champions, while others lead unremarkable lives. Reichl, who grew up in the 50s and 60s in Greenwich Village, was sent to boarding school in Montreal on her mentally ill mother's whim, toured Italy with a favorite professor, then lived in a Berkley commune around the time Alice Waters was coming into prominence, is an excellent example. Her writing is wonderful, her life filled with unique opportunities (and some unique challenges as well). And she makes this point herself.

When Reichl, who went on to write for The New York Times, was first offered an opportunity review restaurants, she writes, "I wasn't sure I could do it, but I was willing to try. To my surprise, I had a lot of help. When I walked into La Colombe Bleu a waiter was standing at a table boning a fish, and without a moment's warning Marielle materialized at his side, casting a critical eye on his every move." She describes how other people who taught her how to cook, serve, eat and appreciate were all on her mind as she began to evaluate the restaurant. "With this chorus of voices the review practically wrote itself."

Her article was well received, she reports:

"You were born to do this," said the editor when I turned the piece in.

"No," I said softly. "but I was very well trained."

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

2010-06-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

I had always suspected men were like this. And now I know.

How to be alone in a crowd

2010-05-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like about New York is that, for the most part, one can do things on one's own without feeling like a pariah. Along the same lines, it's socially acceptable to be neither outgoing nor hostile, merely low-key and self contained. But even in New York, I have gone into a bar at the end of a not-so-great day, ordered a whiskey and settled in to sit and stew only to have some patronizing old man be all, "What's the matter, honey? It can't be all bad!" No, it can't, but being condescended to makes it that much worse.

Today after work I spent way too much time getting to Brooklyn's central public library, where Jonathan Franzen and another New York author were giving a free reading and talk. I had no idea what the setup would be and whether I needed to get there super early to get in at all, and I arrived a good 50 minutes before the start time. Also scoping the scene were dudes with uncool backpacks and unkempt hair, making no effort to look detached. Ah, nerds. Hello fellow travelers. I got my ticket, ordered a quick dinner at the cafe in the library and sat down to eat alone, over a book -- amongst several other people who were doing the same thing. Bliss. When I went back downstairs many of the seats still available were between people who had also come alone, many of whom were either reading or writing as they waited for the program to begin. I sat between two of them. We did not talk.

The reading itself was also calming and wonderful. Franzen got a reputation for being an asshole a few years ago when he was the only author to turn down a chance to be part of Oprah's book club. When I raved about The Corrections, people (okay, an ex boyfriend and his bestie, but other people too) said 'but he's such a dick, blah blah' but I wasn't saying anything about whether he was or not. I had never met him. I had no opinion on his personality. I just liked the book. And I liked How To Be Alone, an essay collection that followed it and is more personal. On stage, Franzen was ... actually quite engaging, funny, charming even. He laughed at his own jokes a couple of times, like Ira Glass used to in the early years of This American Life. During the Q&A, either he or the other author made a point about how seriousness is often confused with snobbery. Myself and my unfashionable fellow travelers, we didn't cheer our agreement, just pondered and nodded, and smiled ever so slightly.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguis

2010-05-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

I've been a vegetarian for almost 13 years, but I ate part of a chicken dumpling the other day.

It wasn't on purpose. All the others were vegetable, so I had no reason not to dunk the last one in ginger sauce and take a bite. The taste, texture and overall sensation appalled me so that I think I will stay a vegetarian for another 13 years, possibly for as long as I live. And for that reason, I will never be a serious restaurant critic.

Reading Ruth Reichl's account of her years as the New York Times restaurant critic didn't make me want to eat meat, but it made me wish that I wanted to. I want to introduce friends to the wonders of organ meat, savor well-prepared fois gras, take the 7 out to Flushing for the perfect red-cooked pork belly and crispy chicken, be all-knowing about the cemitas and pernil of Bushwick and the bracciole of Caroll Gardens.

Sometimes Reichl writes about food as an end in itself, but more often it's an allusion to a memory or experience. And ultimately, the book is really about the experience of being a woman -- lots of women. Reichl learns early on that the Times critic is recognized in all of New York's fine-dining restaurants and so, with the help of an old friend of her mother's, she creates several elaborate disguises, each with a whole persona and even a back story to go with them. Chloe, with her champaigne-colored bob, red nails and little black dresses, speaks in a breathy voice and admires the wine knowledge of the men who vie for her attention. No cab ever passes her by. Brenda's bright, crumpled clothing, long messy red curls and warm disposition draw strangers to her, even in New York. Betty, with her grey hair, stoop and sensible handbag, is all but invisible everywhere she goes. Reichl never talks about feminism, never makes a point about how society has no use for unattractive women. As with all of the best show-me-don't-tell me writing, she doesn't have to.

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

2010-05-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

I had been coveting this book for at least a few months, but it was only when I rediscovered the joy of a library card that I got hold of it. In it, Barbara Ehrenreich, a woman I very much admire, takes on so many things I absolutely cannot stand: prosperity gospel, pink-ribbon breast cancer culture, The Secret, even Oprah herself here and there. The central thesis of this book, so far as I can summarize it, is that the positive thinking craze that is the common thread through these hated trends represents yet another way our society is moving away from reasoned empiricism to a more malleable way to look at "reality." And that that trend is not good for us long term, because it encourages us to downplay serious problems when we should be marshaling resources to fight them head on.

As one might imagine, this is a helpful lens through which to view the recent real estate downturn and financial crisis. Being a former real estate attorney (and current devoted Planet Money listener), I'm pretty familiar with the basics of how all that went down. But I was especially impressed by the way Ehrenreich drew a line from the evolution of CEOs from ruthless but efficient technocrats to visionary shamans who glorify gut instinct over ledgers and tough decisions, to the growing economic disparity between average workers and top earners, to the growth of motivational speeches and personal coaching, to the idea that we shouldn't be resentful of those earning 300x what we do because, hey, we could be that rich one day.

I also love her biting humor, particularly when she's describing her own breast cancer diagnosis. Her complaints about grown women being given teddy bears and boxes of crayons are funny to be sure, but she also shows how stressing the need to think positively in order to beat cancer can become a form of victim-blaming, not to mention demonstrating pre-Feminine Mystique ideas about how illness should be handled.

I could go on and on. I won't. This book is wonderful, and so needed.

things I must do

2010-05-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

My library books are due on Wednesday.

Before I return them, I want to write a post about Kingdom Coming, by Michelle Goldberg, and Bright-Sided, by Barbara Ehrenreich. The theme will be: if you're going to say something, just come out and say it, and use facts to back up what you're saying. If you're going to equivocate and make every paragraph about "while I'm not saying it's like this ..." and then say it's like that, and then take it back again -- just don't bother. Make a claim you can stand by.''

It will also be about how my dream in life is to be more like Barbara Ehrenreich.

time lapse

2010-04-21T17:05:00.001-07:00

I stopped writing in this blog for several months.

Since then I have:

Turned 30

Become single again after 3+ years

Found a new full-time job and career path

Sold my car and most of my furniture

Moved to Brooklyn, where the slate is clean. Mostly.

I never stopped reading though. New Yorkers are great readers. You would wonder where they find the time but the answer is: on the subway. And sometimes on the bus.

As mentioned previously, I was thinking about picking up Dry, by Augusten Burroughs. This is by far and away his masterpiece. I enjoy all of Burroughs' work but it's mostly just funny stories, some with no real cohesion or conclusion. Dry holds a mood like the best works of art do, like the way the intensity of the opening credits in Do The Right Thing never lets up. It's gripping and relentless, yet still manages to be funny more than on occasion. You can finish it in a day, but yet it's not a trifle. Highly recommended.

I am even more in love with Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a story, like so many others, of newcomers dreaming grandiose dreams and living big, sweeping lives in the city that never sleeps. When I began it, I had not made up my mind to move. I finished it in my Brooklyn bedroom, spring rain rattling the windows. It's a modern myth, an ambitious epic that lives up to what it sets out to achieve. One of my all-time favorites, perhaps.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, last word

2009-10-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh features many examples of that classic coming-of-age novel character: the wild, unpredictable friend. I have always enjoyed this sort of person, at least for a period of time, and also enjoy a related character (in life and in fiction), the life-of-the-party charismatic friend. People who do things I wouldn't make life exciting.

Michael Chabon was interviewed on Fresh Air today. He was not talking about Mysteries of Pittsburgh when he said this, but it applies to the central relationships in both it and Wonder Boys:

"I guess I'm a more orderly person -- and, therefore, chaos has its appeal."

Me too, Mr. Chabon. Me too.

2009-10-04T20:39:00.000-07:00

Sometime this past summer, I stopped trying to make myself read the books that are lying around my house, and allowed myself to just read whatever I felt like. I also now have permission to put things down if I don't like them. And so I read about 1/4 of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, raced through Running With Scissors in less than a week despite the Cornell West tome and last 1/3 of The Shock Doctrine lying around my house, and caught up on just about everything Laurie Notaro has ever written. Reading is entertainment. Reading is an alternative to Netflix. And there is more than one kind of good book.

After The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I zipped through Wonder Boys as well -- it goes quickly, probably because most of the book takes place over the span of a couple of days. I'm going to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay next -- it's twice as long and probably more complicated, so I wanted to save it until the weather went bad. Before I know it, darkness will fall before cocktail hour and it will be time for 700-page books.

I also want to read Dreams From My Father, and, I think, Dry, by Augusten Burroughs.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

2009-08-09T07:10:00.001-07:00

I love everything about this book.

When I started reading it, I didn't know that a movie version had recently come out. In it, they remove a gay character who is central to pretty much everything about the story and, apparently, make the main character's girlfriend some sort of misogynist cartoon. Can't speak to the second bit, as I haven't seen it. A straight male character is made bisexual, I guess to make up for getting rid of the gay guy? If so, that's a mess.

I may have to see it, just to see for myself.

IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

2009-07-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, my significant other started reading a New York Times collection called Class Matters with the thought of assigning it to future students. Bored during one sporting event or another, I picked it up and started reading. It turned out that I had already read 50% of the book's content, if not more. Articles I remembered included one about an attorney who grew up dirt poor in Appalachia, got out, and ended up returning to help family members in need; one about a marriage between a wealthy woman and a working-class man; and one about a family who moves from faceless exurb to faceless exurb every few years for the father's job.

A few days ago, while the Yankees were on TV, I demanded something to read and picked Chuck Klosterman's IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas off the shelf. Here, too, a few pieces rang oddly familiar. In my mind, I haven't read SPIN (where many of these articles first appeared) since the late 90s, but I guess I pick up a copy from time to time. I know I already read the article about Bats Day (when goths take over Disneyland) and the one about Morrisey's LA-area Latino fans.

Beginning a piece about a classic rock cruise (members of Styx, REO Speedwagon and Journey were on board), I thought, "another one of these"? I had recently read a Laurie Notaro collection in which the final story details an Alaskan cruise, as well as, as chronicled below, David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Oh well, what to do about it? Turn my attention to Major League Baseball? I pressed on. About four pages in, Klosterman writes,

"There are three main hurdles involved with the writing and reporting of this story. The first is that the definitive cruise story has already been written by David Foster Wallace, who published the essay 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' in 1995; this is evidently the most popular essay ever produced, as roughly six thousand people have mentioned it to me during the fourty-eight hours prior to this trip."

IV, Split

2009-07-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

I have something to say about Chuck Klosterman, as soon as I can get his book that I'm reading from my significant other. In the meantime, I wandered into the library after work today and walked out with, among other things, Split by Suzanne Finnamore.

This memoir of the author's divorce is nothing I would seek out. But, the branch library up the street from my work is so small that I was able to browse the Biography section in a few minutes, and this was the most interesting-looking thing in it. So I'm reading it. For the first 100 pages, it was a pretty easy though not uncommon read. The author's life is mildly interesting, but her prose is really good -- I always appreciate someone who can say a lot with a few words. She is self aware about her status and privilege, yet not overly, constantly self effacing.

A hundred pages in, a childhood friend shows up to keep her company. Then, so does his Airstream trailer named Bambi. And its driver, a sometime transvestite called The Betty Lady. Now things are getting good. The Betty Lady has determined they will ransack the soon-to-be ex's office.

Backlash, epilogue

2009-06-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

"For what has been largely forgotten in the backlash era -- where women are encouraged to please men by their demeanor or appearance rather than persuade them by the force of their argument -- is that men don't hold all the emotional cards. Men need women as much as women need men. The bonds between the sexes can chafe, and they can be, and have been, used to constrain women. But they can also promote mutually beneficial growth and change."

Backlash, by Susan Faludi

2009-06-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

At first, this book gave me a bit of a headache. It's a barrage of facts and proper names, each segueing quickly into a conclusion, some undeniable based on whatever the fact is, some quite debatable. But now, nearly 200 pages in, I just started giggling, then really laughing out loud, as Faludi's take on the women's underwear industry.

It appears that in the late 80s (I was around then, but not casting such an exacting eye on politics and trends, being more into Anne of Green Gables at the time.) there was a big marketing blitz about 'the new femininity,' trying to get women to spend money on a lot of poofy dresses and whatnot instead of economizing on pantsuits and jeans. This crossed over into lingerie -- it was around the same time that Victoria's Secret went national, and women were told that teddies and garter belts were back. But, perhaps the Victoria's Secret trend more than met the eye.

***
From the book:
>>> On a late afternoon in the summer of 1988, row after row of silk teddies hang, untouched, at the original Victoria's Secret shop in Palo Alto's Stanford Shopping Center. The shelves are stuffed with floral-scented teddy bears in tiny wedding gowns. At $18 to $34 each, these cuddly brides aren't exactly big sellers; dust has collected on their veils. But over at the bargains table, where basic cotton underwear is on sale, "four for $16," it looks like a cyclone has touched down.

"Oh God, the panty table is a mess," groans head "proprietress" Becky Johnson. As she straightens up for what she says must be the tenth time that day, two women walk in the door and charge the bargain panty table. "The prices on these panties are wonderful," Bonnie Pearlman says, holding up a basic brief to her friend. "But will they shrink?" she wonders, pulling the elastic back and forth. Asked if the are here for the Victorian lingerie, they both shake their heads. Pearlman says, "I look for what fits well." Suzanne Ellis, another customer, surveys the racks of gossamer teddies and rolls her eyes. "I've had a few of these things given to me," she says. "It was like, 'Uh, gee, thanks.' I mean, I really don't need to sit on snaps all day."<<<

Faludi finds out that while men account for 30-40 percent of Victoria's Secret shoppers, they also account for about half the chain's revenues, no doubt with good intentions of buying a romantic gift. If anyone's been brainwashed into thinking that women "want" to be more feminine, it may not be women. I love the image of all that pink crap and lace and perfume everywhere and women huddled around the panty table snapping elastic grunting, "D'ya think this one'll hold up?"

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace

2009-04-30T04:37:00.000-07:00

I started with the title essay on this one, then skipped back to the beginning and am reading the rest of the way through. The second piece, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," made me feel kind of smart at first, because it's extremely dense and reference laden and yet I almost understand it. Then I noticed the thing was written in 1990 when the author was maybe ... 28? Possibly I'm not such a genius after all.

On page 31 (of the hardcover edition I checked out of the library), Wallace discusses an episode of an old TV show called St. Elsewhere in which a mental patient thinks he's Mary Tyler Moore. A woman who had been in the Mary Tyler Moore show is in this episode and when the patient sees her he calls her by her former character's name. In 1988, this was the height of post-modernism in television, apparantly. I wonder what Wallace thought of 30 Rock.

***
I read Infinite Jest, Wallace's master work that numbers over 1,000 pages, when I was barely 18. It was a Christmas present in 1997, when I was home over break from my freshman year at St. Bonaventure University. I had nothing to do but work maybe 6 hours per week, and, thus, plenty of time to read a 1,000-page book.

Or was it Christmas of 1998, during my sophomore year? Because I have a distinct memory of bringing the book with me when I went to work one of those overnight lock-in things at the local YMCA, and I think I only worked at those my sophomore year. Specifically, the kids were sleeping, or supposed to be sleeping, in the gym upstairs, so all the lifeguards scurried downstairs to abuse our free reign of the place. Everyone else decided it was time to go skinny dipping in the Y's pool, but I put the ixnay on that (ew, after all) and, instead, sat in the parent waiting area reading a really, really thick book.

It's possible that my memories of a youth filled with hedonism and debauchery are not exactly accurate.

Next up

2009-02-02T18:47:00.000-08:00

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein

Speaking of a conscientious adulthood, I briefly considered going to a bar tonight, but opted to stay home and get started on this book instead.

Several years ago I read and loved No Logo, Klein's best-known work. I spent a lot more time reading Adbusters and listening to Democracy Now whenever that was, and I put The Shock Doctrine on my Christmas list in the interest of fending off complacency. So far, Shock Doctrine is a little ... ham handed? just unsubtle maybe? ... but extremely informative, bursting with carefully referenced facts and plenty of reasons to maintain a good head of outrage.

Finished whilst on vacation

2009-02-02T15:46:00.001-08:00

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker

Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, by Ann Powers

Toward the end, these mostly different books came to feel like they were saying the same things. There's more than one way to create an identity, an unconventional identity, an adulthood. If you're a grown up, "selling out" is difficult to define. If you want to live a conscientious life, you have to chart the course yourself, and it's best not to let your guard down more than a little. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Powers' book was written about ten years before Walker's, and that is most evident in the different discussions of success and selling out in alternative youth culture. Walker gives us the impression that many young aspiring artists and musicians of today would be just plain puzzled by, say, R.E.M.'s refusal to have its music used in commercials. However, my significant other's dispatches from the college course he teaches in music subcultures would suggest otherwise. Teenage punks, at least, still get worked up over old-fashioned concepts like "authenticity."

I also got a kick out of the way Powers divided her chapters: friends, roommates/crazy living situations, sex, drugs, thrifts stores/dumpster diving/curb finds, poorly paid jobs, youth itself. Indeed, all are staples of a certain kind of lifestyle, one I never fully lived but have been within sight of since high school.

In related news, I will be 30 this year.

Well-behaved women seldom make history

2009-01-05T16:01:00.001-08:00

Some holiday season reading and viewing:

1.) The Portable Dorothy Parker
A Christmas gift from a friend harkens back to the first year in which I knew another. When Heather introduced me to Dorothy Parker, Tori Amos and Sylvia Plath, a bottle of gin never led anywhere bad. Things have changed, but Parker still resonates.

2.) The Wonder Spot, by Melissa Bank
A Christmas gift to myself, thanks to Half Price Books, which has outlets all over the Houston area. The main character has a tendency to never say or do the right thing. I can relate. This novel was so engrossing that I was able to sit next to my boyfriend on the couch for a series of professional sporting events (his parents were watching them and I thought it would be rude to leave the room, yet somehow in my mind it was okay to read silently for three hours), and never get bored or distracted.

3.) Sex and the Single Girl, by Helen Gurley Brown
A friend's castoff -- she got her hands on a first edition. This now-classic is an absolute riot for the boundary-pushing single woman of today (who decidedly does not read Cosmo). Some transgressive insights, courtesy of 1962:
"Now we're going to turn off men for a while and talk about your job. (Don't worry, we'll get back to them!) What you do from nine to five has everything to do with men anyhow. A job is one way of getting to them. It also provides the money with which to dress for them and dress up your apartment for them. (More on these later.) Most importantly, a job gives a single woman something to be."
Married women, we learn, already have something to be -- doctor's wife, banker's wife, ganster's wife. On the other hand, "A single woman is known by what she does rather than by whom she belongs to."
I was laughing but, well, I guess the author is right.
We also learn the pros and cons of accepting expensive gifts from married men, how to outfit an apartment so as to be worthy of your friends donning their best furs to visit and that cottage cheese + peaches = dinner if you want to maintain your figure.

4.) Persepolis, film version, directed by Marjane Satrapi
A friend described it as 'heartbreaking' and I can see why -- it's about bougie liberal types whose joie de vive, not to mention family, is nearly destroyed by Iran's Islamic revolution. But to me, the person who thought Hotel Rwanda was uplifting, this film is deeply inspirational. We see one freedom after another being taken from a young woman, who is forced to cover her hair and drop her eyes to pass through streets she charged through, laughing and carrying on, in pants and sneakers as a child. And we see her buy casette tapes on the black market, creep home, and rock out to Iron Maiden in her bedroom, playing air guitar on a badminton racket.
What truely makes the story inspirational, of course, is that we know this young woman grew up to be an internationally acclaimed writer, artist and director -- because of her uncommon family and because she refused to give in to repression.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames

2008-12-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

***
"Given the state of my Japanese it seems unfair to criticize some of the English I've been seeing. ... What gets me are the mass-produced mistakes, the ones made at Lawson, for example. A huge, nationwide chain of convenience stores, and this is what's printed on the wrappers of their ready-made sandwiches: 'We have sandwiches which you can enjoy different tastes. So you can find your favorite one from our sandwiches. We hope you can choose the best one for yourself.'

"A book in our hotel room includes a section on safety awkwardly titled Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You. What follows are three paragraphs, each written beneath a separate, boldfaced heading: 'When you check in the hotel room,' 'When you find a fire,' and, my favorite, "When you are engulfed in flames.'
***

When You Are Engulfed In Flames was my favorite too, my favorite essay in the book by the same title. For some time, I haven't been sure if David Sedaris's writing has gotten a little limper and darker, or if I've just tired of it the way I do magazines after a couple of years of subscribing. But in the book, he mentions quitting drinking, then drugs, before, finally, smoking. So perhaps a lot of things have changed.

At any rate, the title essay is much improved by its transcriptions of Japanese-into-English translations. I love that kind of thing -- I get such a kick out of the Chinese food restaurant in my neighborhood that also serves Puerto Rican food and advertises "chicken fried banana" on its marker board. (after a bit of head scratching, I discerned that "chicken fried banana" is a meal of chicken and plaintains ... ) I love it, I guess, because it allows you to follow what the hell, exactly, the translator was thinking. It would appear that unlike languages that use our alphabet and evolved with European cultures, Japanese reflects an entirely different way of thinking and communicating -- one that English words are not suited to express.

Items that must be discussed

2008-12-14T16:09:00.001-08:00

• Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, the essay as well as the book it is named for

• When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris, really just the essay. (I love bad Japanese-to-English translations.)

• Watching old episodes of Sports Night on DVD and the ensuing nostalgia for my newsroom days. The writing was exceptional; the show lasted for two seasons.

This from my LJ:

2008-03-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

"... Spitzer was Mr. Clean, a crusading reformer -- and, further, not even just any crusading reformer, but one who targeted rich, entitled people, mostly white, many living in Manhattan, who thought they were above the law. Well look who fits that profile now. Bill Clinton is a run-of-the-mill sleaze. This is a downfall of Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser-like proportions. I've heard the words Elmer Gantry tossed around a lot in the past few years, thanks to the legions of right-wing preachers who have met Spitzer-like fates. But still, being the kind of person I am, that's the first thing I thought about. In college, when Ray Carruth (former NFL player, go on and wikipedia it and I'm sure you'll recall) was accused of killing his girlfriend, the first thing I thought of was 'this is just like An American Tragedy! Ripped from the ... well, not headlines exactly ... ripped from the English lit course!' "

Sigh. I actually believed in Eliot Spitzer. He was no Howard Dean, but, in my view, he went after the right bad guys.

In another case of reading material imitating life, I shall board the Greyhound this weekend and head back to my ancestral homeland (rural Pennsylvania) with a copy of "Braving Home" by Jake Halpern in my bag. We'll see if I get through several chapters or if bumping along down the two-lane country highways + reading = seasickness and I have to stop.

The best article ever?

2008-02-25T16:53:00.000-08:00

The point/counterpoint in the latest edition of Bitch (no. 39) isn't really the best article ever -- but, like the book I wrote three posts on below, it puts its finger on something that bugged me but that I couldn't articulate.

The topic: "Is To Catch a Predator bad for us?" I've never seen the show, but it always struck me as exploitative and sleazy. I couldn't say why -- it's not that I feel any sympathy for the online pedophile predators that they catch. Lindsay Paige Hoffman, though, is able to ferret out why it's exploitative with regard to girls, not just criminals.

>>> Predator, above all else, is contributing to the way an entire culture increasingly sexualizes young girls.<<<

It's like the term "jailbait" -- it implies it's a normal masculine urge to be attracted to a child and this whole system is just set up to trap those who can't help but give in to their lust for the sexy, sexy 13 year olds. The men on the show aren't disordered, just weak. Where oh where is a portrayal of a girl over, say, TEN, that isn't about sexuality? Where is the acknowledgment that by some generally accepted adult standard, children are NOT SEXY??

It's disgusting enough that adult women are sex objects first and people second, or, if we are unattractive, failed sex objects first and people second. (Something, by the way, that I realized only recently. With a high IQ, a law degree, ten years of bylines, a penchant for NPR, a tendency to be judgmental and serious and a moderately conservative wardrobe, wouldn't you think I'd be a weirdo braniac first and a sex object at least, you know, second? But women are defined first and foremost by hot-or-not and everything else flows from that.) It's even more appalling that girls as young as 11 are beguiling, deliciously forbidden sex objects first and people second.

I'm pretty sure that the moral of the story in Lolita wasn't "It could happen to any man if he let his guard down." For heaven's sake, people. I'm not always the biggest fan of men, or masculinity anyway, but I give men more credit than that.

"Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice."

2008-02-17T14:32:00.000-08:00

That's the way Hedges concludes American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I don't disagree, but I do think the turn of current events since the book was written less than two years ago means we have less to be worried about, at least in the short term. Events like the death of Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson endorsing Giuliani and in general the failure of the Christian right to coalesce behind any particular presidential candidate shows, in my mind, that they're losing cohesion and influence.

In the final chapter of American Fascists, Hedges says that if there's another terrorist attack, or a wide-scale environmental disaster, that's when we should really be concerned, and that's hard to argue with considering what happened in 2001 and 2002 in this country. It's pretty much the sole reason I voted for Barack Obama and not Hillary Rodham Clinton -- when dissent was unpatriotic and the Democrats went along with Bush's, to put it kindly, highly questionable agenda, she did the easy thing, not the right thing. Obama was not in the Senate then, true, but he spoke out against the war and he certainly had aspirations to seek higher office, so it's not like he didn't have to be concerned about his viewpoint being used against him.

Anyway, the American electorate seems to be drifting a bit leftward and, bar some sort of disaster, the influence of the Christian Right is fading. I think that this quote from Vasily Grossman, a Russian novelist, that Hedges uses sums up my viewpoint pretty well:
"Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."

When it comes to women's rights, civil rights, gay rights or any other cause, the forces of intolerance can and have won some of the battles. But ultimately, they never prevent progress. They just slow it down, and sooner or later, they always lose and history marches forward.

"The Crusade"

2008-02-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

I've been out of town a lot lately, which means less time for posting, but a little time to read on the Greyhound at least.

More from Hedges:
"When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those the define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight. It is only by grasping our own capacity for evil, our own darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay. When evil is purely external, then moral purification always entrails the eradication of others."

Emphasis mine.

Here, Hedges again revisits the themes of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Us versus them, They are oppressing us, and because They are the oppressors, we can do no wrong. I'm not sure what to take away from the need to grasp our own capacity for evil -- unless by "our" he just means "people who are generally in our camp about things." If someone who I respected intellectually was revealed to be a pedophile, or an embezzler, or who knows what, it wouldn't shake my foundation in their ideas. But if their ideas were more like "We are morally superior to Them" -- I can see how that would be a different story. I don't have this epic good v. evil world view in my day-to-day life, so when people go bad within the movement (feminism, the Democratic party, whatever) it's no great surprise.

This healthy skepticism may also have a lot to do with why there's not much of an atheist movement. Eradicate the believers? Ehn.

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

2008-01-22T16:53:00.000-08:00

First off, this is only the second Chris Hedges book I have read, but I can say, without hesitation, that he is one of my favorite authors. The other one, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, fundamentally shaped my view of human society. In War, Hedges wrote about how the us v. them mentality that war requires gives people a cause, a goal, a sense of fulfillment. It's the same sort of mentality that the oh-so-often-quoted 1984 demonstrated in its extreme: leaders can control people if the people are in a constant state of conflict, united against a common enemy. It sounds kinda obvious, but it's so much better than I'm making it sound. Hedges worked for years as a New York Times war correspondent and he is able to answer the question "why?" that comes up when we see the bodies strewn in the streets in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Sudan. He knows why. And since I've read the book, so I do I.

In American Fascists, Hedges turns that same eye to the Christian Right. Being a person of faith, he's much more credible than I would be when he writes, "Radical Christian dominionists have no religious legitimacy. They are manipulating Christianity, and millions of sincere believers, to build a frightening political mass movement with many similarities with other mass movements, from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia." This is not hyperbole. It is an assertion that is fleshed out throughout the book. This man does not pull punches.

He writes about radical Christians' "ecstatic belief in the cleansing power of apocalyptic violence" about the way that church members pray on the troubled, cult style, as they go in search of converts, about why radical Christian men demand the oppression of women and gay people in order to be secure in their masculinity (I never got this before and now I do). Another central point is that in order for leaders to control people, the people need to feel victimized and persecuted by the "them" in us v. them. This comes up in War and in American Fascists. "The war on Christmas" anyone?

It's eye opening. It's scary. I tend to dismiss religious wackos as harmless, partially because I was so influenced by Thomas Frank and the late Molly Ivins, both of whom felt the Christian right had been taken for a ride by politicians who took its votes and did not implement its agenda. (and partly because I do believe in people's freedom to believe whatever they want) This is true to a large extent but with Mitt Romney saying crap like "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom" (I'm going with false on both counts there skippy), the Bush administration funneling tons of money into abstinence-only sex ed, which studies have shown does not work, and other related nonsense, it's good to get the old outrage flowing again now and then. I'll need it come November.

I've only read five chapters of American Fascists so far. I'm really looking forward to The War On Truth, which begins with scenes of a "museum" that shows people and dinosaurs co-existing, Flinstone style. Ha ha funny, until you realize that with homeschooling and Christian schools, some kids really don't know any better. They have not been exposed to any other ideas. War on Truth indeed. If it sounds like an Orwell cliche, it's only because Orwell was right and Hedges is too.

Inaugural post time

2008-01-22T16:36:00.000-08:00

Soooo ... for anyone who may be in the habit of reading my LiveJournal, this is my new venture. I'm off Buffalo blogging for the time being and writing about my favorite books instead. I may branch out into other media as well -- there's a thesis about how Sex in the City isn't about men at all brewing in my brain and I have oh so much to say about Six Feet Under -- but I'm starting with books for the time being. Due to my choice in reading material, this may well become a blog about feminism and politics. We shall see.