The Sellout

Soooo.... this might just be a book review this year.  But probably not.  Politics is exhausting, Iowa is tomorrow and for all the passion, all the talk of precipice and disaster... I would rather read something.  My law school classmate Richard Dooling recommended this to me.  He knows my tastes and in the first ten pages I admired the authors style... his..."patter".  Beatty immediately establishes a tone and a cadence which separate his prose out from the pack.

I don't know if it s "post Ferguson" book.  I rather doubt it because it is too lovingly scripted to have just come about in the last year and a half.  The story is narrated by a young black man who recalls growing up in urban LA in a town that has since been swallowed up, called "Mitchell".  If this were not odd enough the man's father and then the narrator himself farms land in this urban wasteland and he takes pains to point out through the book, is not a wasteland at all.

The book revels in blackness.  I cannot recall if there is single white character other than perhaps the police who wade in occasionally and with impact.  His father is a self schooled intellectual and an expert on the black struggle who raises his son on books and pop quizzes about America, racism and history and is a great case for the premise that no one impacts a child's upbringing like his or her parents.  His father holds court in the neighborhood with a group of like minded characters at Dum Dum Donuts and they hold forth, big time one another and solve the worlds problems.  This west coast, black Algonquin Round Table features his fathers cohort and nemesis, Foy Chesire who rights blackcentric rewrites of American classic literature. for example, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn becomes “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.”  You get the idea.

When the narrators father is "Accidentally" shot by the police he takes on his fathers mantle locally and also has a sidekick who is the narrator's slave named Hominy.  Hominy is the sole surviving "Little Rascal" and he adds sadness, humor and weirdness to an already offbeat story as the narrator attempts to date, surf, recreate the town of Mitchell and re-segregate schools to challenge ALL thoughts on race, racism and the American dream. 

It is a funny book and sad book and above all a well written book which causes people like myself, who have the best intentions, to evaluate where this intentions and instincts come from and whether they are real empathy for the sufferings of others or does that empathy just serve to allow us to maintain the status quo and feel bad about it with our half hearted hearts.  There is nothing half hearted about Beatty's book and it a really good literary read.  It is also an easy read.  Buy it.

Book Review of Nicholson Baker's "The Traveling Sprinkler"

Soooo…. Nicholson Baker.  A national treasure?  Maybe not.  A really, REALLY solid contemporary author...absolutely.  This guys body of work is as good as it gets for a guy still kicking around.  “Vox” and “The Fermatta” knocked me out 20 years ago and he has published good work since those.  He is a maturing guy who after those books had the elbow room to write what he wants.  The books range from Presidential assassination fantasies to diatribes questioning the politically correct narratives of World War II.  All of it cogently written in a particular voice.  That voice also lent itself to storytelling in “The Everlasting Story of Nori”.  If you want an overview of a diverse writers life, check his Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Baker

“The Traveling Sprinker” brings us back poet/anthologist Paul Chowder (from his prior book “The Anthologist” who is struggling to write poems but instead forays into popular songwriting, dance music, electronica and beats.  It is a classic middle aged man’s take on his own mid-life crisis as he deals with:

Not knowing what to do with his life

Failed relationships that are not quite dead yet

Health issues

Cigars

Drinking

Childlessness…

and the like.  He uses the title subject as a nice metaphor for...everything. It is one of those things I refer to as a "tractor" sprinkler but it follows the course of the hose that feeds it as it goes on whatever path is set for it and waters and... lets just say there are a lot of metaphorical opportunities there.

But it is an endearing book and an easy read as he learns about modern music and listens to it and creates his own amidst what appears to be the abundant debris of his life.

He cannot keep his liberal politics out of it but throws off shattering statistics regarding deaths related to drone warfare while remembering his passion for the bassoon as he smokes cigars and tries to write, primarily in his car.  The portrait is one of a talented guy who is occasionally brilliant as he wanders, literally through his life and… other than the brilliant part, I could certainly relate.  

The lead character is also a Quaker and I know nothing about Quakers so found that interesting.  The idea of going to a “meeting” and sitting in silence and contemplation for an hour or so seems… very healthy.  I tend to only go to “meetings” where people are fighting about money or opening by saying, “Hi, my name is Mike and I am an…”.  I guess this is what I like about Baker as an author.  He takes me outside my realm of experience and really outside my normal way of thinking about things and there is something liberating about that in a book, but here is a comfortableness and reality to his characters that ring true.

Wives should read this to have a better handle on what a mess their husbands are.  Younger men should read it so they can see what they will become (and that is assuming everything works out) and middle aged men should read it so you can go, “that seems about right”.  

It is a nice read from a nice author.

I Come Here Not To Praise Books, But To Bury Them!

Sooooo...reading.... The newspapers are dying. Books are threatened. Kindle is being suggested as “the next big thing” for reading books, newspapers and magazines. Dogs are sleeping with cats, we have a socialist in the White House and apparently all is NOT right with the world. But what about reading.

I was brought to this rant by my friends at Borders. I like Borders more then Barnes & Noble. I am told if I go to the Barnes and Noble at West County it will change my mind but as a matter of preference I prefer Borders. Cannot tell you why. Perhaps they at first seemed less corporate. I still feel guilty every time I do not go to locally owned Left Bank Books but they are inconvenient and book shopping for me is always spur of the moment.

Anyway...the Rant was started by my quest for Izaak Walton’s “The Compleat Angler”. It is a remarkable book and I had a friend who I wanted to give it to a friend who is struggling a little in his professional and personal life. It is a great primer on fishing and contemplation and has been in publication for 350 years which is no mean feat. Which leads us to Borders. They didn’t have it in stock.

I have gotten use to their stocking system and that they only have best seller hardbacks and paper backs by mainstream authors but you can always find the classics tucked somewhere in some form. It was like going to a book store and not being able to by “Old Man and the Sea” or “Crime and Punishment” or the “The Grapes of Wrath”. How can this be?

It has been explained to me that only assholes read. I hope that this is not true. Not because i do not want to be labeled an asshole but because over all I do believe most people are not assholes so I continue to hope that most people will read. Readers have probably caused our own demise with condescending (assholes) people like me pretentiously dismissing other peoples books, popular books, Grisham novels, self help literature and of course religious books (other then the Bible). Readers as a stereotype are not lovable but seriously, we need to read.

Never has our world been more in need of people reading, talking and thinking about difficult, big concepts. Forget about National Health Care for a minute and think about the challenges of world population growth, a global economy, nuclear war and yes, even though by a recent poll well over 70% of Republicans think it is myth, global warming (in 2007 only 23% of Republican Senators thought it had been proven to any reasonable certainty, even after President Bush had come around).
Despite what people might tell you, reading is good. I have been hugely benefitted by reading a lot. When you read it expands your vocabulary dramatically. People often (almost always in my experience) confuse a large vocabulary with intelligence. I am a living refutation of that theory. It also can challenge your own thought processes. While I believe fiction and non fiction have value I have a heart for fiction. Reading other peoples constructs and losing yourself in them can initiate thought processes that examining the factual world can never arrive at. 

Fiction is not for everyone. Grown men seem to eschew it instead reading books on management techniques, money making techniques, organizational techniques, sports books and sometimes porn. Women are more likely to relax with a book and I guess I am nothing if not womanly. I like all kinds of fiction but prefer modern authors and hate anything Irish. James Joyce and his legion of followers remind me of the new big hat country music that sounds like the Eagles. Everyone is so concerned about being so authentic and if you want to be that authentic then do it like Joyce and like Hank williams and drink yourself yourself to death.

My favorite authors are people like Richard Russo, Madison Smartt (two T’s) Bell and Cormac Mc carthy but I also have a lot of Grisham Books, every murder mystery by Jonathan Sanford and a large embarrassing number of volumes of Dick Francis’ horse race mysteries. I like em all. I am not really, despite my pretenses, a very selective or discriminating reader. As i think I stated in an old blog my book collection has been likened (by a former friend) to a Barnes & Noble remainder sale.
I guess my question is whether people are really not reading or whether people have never read. Sometime when you get a minute hit this site:

http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp#literacystatistics

It will tell you among other things that:

“When the State of Arizona projects how many prison beds it will need, it factors in the number of kids who read well in fourth grade. “ (poor readers, more prisoners)

“46% of American adults cannot understand the label on their prescription medicine. “ (How does that effect health care reform? How about the cost of health care?)

“U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy”. (Makes competing in a global economy pretty tough).

I don’t know what all that means but it would seem that reading might be linked to some types of success in our society. But how are we going to read? The Kindle is all the rage among the reading intelligentsia but the Luddites among us like our books. It will be interesting to see where these reading devices take us. Will I really read my paper on it? Will I even want to read the Post Dispatch on it? I like the feel of a news paper like I like the fell and the smell of a book. I cannot imaging having a machine in my hands with display screen being at all esthetically satisfying or soothing. It seems like work. Then there is also the issue of someone knowing what I am reading and recently we had Amazon zap and erase off of everyone’s Kindles copies of Orwell’s “1984” which evidently came from an inappropriate source. Ironic? Sure. Chilling? Maybe.

Encourage someone to read. Buy a book. Buy a used book. Buy a paperback. Read a magazine that does not talk about Jon and Kate’s troubles but read. Encourage other people to read and stop wasting so much damn time on line. There is no there, there.

Book Review Number 8: Huckelberry Finn

Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckelberry Finn
Barnes and Noble Classics 292 Pages

So...who cares about Mark Twain. He is dead...right? I like to read. I read a lot of crap. I read a lot of cynical, negative crap. Every once in a while it is time to get back to a classic or two. Last year it was Anna Karenina which was as hard as I remembered it but much more rewarding then it was in college. Twain seemd easier, shorter and yes more American.

Written in 1884 (although most of it was allegedly written pre civil war when “Tom Sawyer” was released, many have pointed to this book as the start of American literature and pegged and perhaps unfairly saddled with the title of “Great American Novel.” I thought it would be easy to read and it is...if you gloss over, skim and just kind of take in the narrative swing. But you can’t. Twain demands attention because he is so biting, so critical and so funny that it is embarrassing to miss the jokes.

Twain wrote this in a “style” that sought to mimic the rural Missouri and rural south which he experienced. This is similar to many hip hop authors, and southern authors since that time. The idea that you could write out bastardized king’s english and that all printed word whould not be written like Jane Austen (who was born right in the middle of Twains life) was an anathma. But the book is just so good.

A classic story of adventure and human nature. Starkly drawn characters which allow the reader to identify with each one and the bad characters are never totally bad and the heroes...Huck and Tom... are never really that good. From his abusive father to the rivercity con men that he “befriends” the bad guys are richly drawn, complex and ultimately sad characters and the fact that he can make you feel empathy fo these cruel and stupid characters is for me one of the books greatest traits.
In our politically correct day this book would not be published due to his use of the word “niger” over 200 times, primarily with the character “nigger Jim.” While it certainly would be totally unacceptable and unjustifiable in ANY modern society at this point, his use of the word has been defended and contextualized but I am not sure that Twain was not deeply familiar with the offensiveness of the term and it’s odious nature. In using it so casually throughout the book is evinces a contempt but in one of the most quoted and most biting indictment of time and really of human beings there is the sequence where Huck is explaining that a dirver blew on a steam boat and Aunt Susie asks:

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?" she asks.
"No'm," comes the answer. "Killed a nigger."

Seriously...where do you go with that? Devaluation of human life, social commentary, indictment, whatever...all in about ten words. Arthur Petit wrote a great summary book of Clemens relatioship with the south, slavery and blacks called “Mark Twain and The South.” Here is the link:

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/enam482e/reviews/swilson.html

Throughout the book he is constantly throwing out other beauties such as when his discussing a farm house preacher and says:

”....and he never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too.”
Beautiful.

The story waxes and wains but many commentators including Twain believe that the novel should have ended after about 200 pages when Nigger Jim gets stolen from Huck. The rest of the book after that is a somewhat long winded happy ending. The brevity of style is what is also amazing. If T. Corghassen Boyle or David Foster Wallace Wrote this book now it would be 800 pages with footnotes. Twain did it 150 years ago with incredible grace. Bottom line is that if you need a good read and you need a little bit to think about, this is a nice break and a good refresher on life, writing and what is great and bad about people... and authors....and America.

Book review #3 The Book of Dave

Will Self: The Book of Dave

Will Self is one of my favorite authors. Other then being British (hate them) he has written some of the more disturbing and alienated prose in modern english ficition...at least fiction that was not scribbled on subway or bathroom walls or spray painted on rail cars. His book of short stories, “The Quantity Theory of Insanity” was one of the best collections I ever read and he has recently visited such classic themes as a planet of the apes “Great Apes” and the picture of Dorian Gray, “Dorian.” He is dark, he is twisted. I like him.

The new book is “The Book of Dave.” It is really hard and really annoying to read...but totally worth it. Without giving too much away Dave is a modern english cabby who mentally falls apart after having a child with a model and marrying her. He gets divorced and loses visitation rights to his child and goes into a slow, mentally ill rage that burns through the book. he also joins a fathers rights group that although he loathes it...shapes and reinforces some of his demented views regarding marriage and child rearing.

Amid all the craziness and injustices he writes his own "book' in a prozhac induced rage and has the pages engraved on steel plates which he buries in his ex wifes yard for his son Carl to find....at some time in the future. The awkward part is that somewhere between that and some other time...the apocalypse comes. The book switches back and forth between Dave in England...and 500 years later where his “book” is the center of modern religion and his crazy screeds regarding relationships between men and women are now governing. They are conservative. They are inflexible. The "book" of Dave is their Bibble or Koran and there are liturgical references toeverything related to being a cabby and all believers are "fares." Their liturgy is all the "points and runs" of the various routes to get from one place to another in London and these are chanted at all religious observances.

Most of the future part of the book takes place on the island of Ham where they are ruled or governed by a religious "Driver" who decrees how they live their life in day to day observance of faith which includes all manner of sexual seperation later augmented with the rape and physical abuse of woman. The people of Ham "Hamsters" are fairly innocent sheeplike people who live with strange creatures called motos which we are told are vaguely human though much larger and have the functional intelligence of two year olds. It is all...very odd. The relationship between Hamsters and their Motos is one of caqring codependence which culminates in the religious slaughter and rendering of the Moto.

It is also annoying because Self in his typical “look no hands,” “I can write anything I want and it is brilliant” style, he invents his own phonetic but incredibly hard to read language that they speak post apocalypse. It took about 200 pages before I could get into the rhythm of the book. It is really difficult to read and tiring but when I got into it...i thought it was like all of his stuff. Brilliant and troubling. If you are religious...and I am...the book is a harsh indictment of all the doctrine that governs my faith. It does not bother me but...it does make you examine your faith and why you believe all the unbelievable things that faith requires.

He never answers a lot of questions (or perhaps I could not read it closely enough to decipher all the clues) basic questions that hound the simple minded diner. What was the apocalypse for example. Why did people in the future have a lot the same paternal names as the present day characters? Is there a God? He never gets to a lot of that stuff and in the end it is a great critique of religion and society and a great overview of the main characters life taking us through agony and heartbreak and coming to a little peace in a very tumultuous life. It is not Self's best work but it is hard to fault a guy who is this good.
7 1/2 Sliders out of 10.




BACK OF WILL SELF'S HEAD