Mad Men Running The Asylum

Sooooo....we have a problem with our government. Hopefully NOT with our governance. No, I think it is definitly with the government or more specifically the people we have sent there. I have always had a fascination, indeed a sick fascination with the mentally ill. Even as a small child the idea of being “cuckoo” or “crazy” seemed very freeing to me. As I got older I just aspired to be an individual and that often met abhorant or “crazy” behavior and now that I am ancient I still like the idea of being “a little off”. I believe those who know me can attest. But also as I have gotten older I have realized that mental illness is no joke and most of the people who really suffer with it are deeply and profoundly unhappy people. These people are often marginalized by life or education or employment. They are often ostracized by friends and even family and they find it very difficult to lead a meaningful and productive life. Sadly for many of them, this leads them to a life in politics.

I know this might seem cruel or random but these are the thoughts that arrive at four A.M. when I am not thinking about my clients and they are a welcome, welcome distraction so humor me. Think about the gathering rabble we have who are just about to really start in earnest competition for the right to take the White House from Obama. Shit, think about Obama. The go back with the Presidents and it is easy...Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford*, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower. You really have to go back to Eisenhower to find one whop is not a genuinely damaged person and Ike probably was too but it was just far enough back that I was not born yet and there was no 24 hour media circus to explain how crazy they were. Ike at least had the sense to identify “The Military Industrial Complex” and warn us about them on the way out the door. Thanks Ike. Carter of course is someone I like and perhaps he was not a manic depressive, megolomaniac...but he was a shitty President. Wonderful person though and probably the only one in the group I would want to have a beer with other than Clinton but with Clinton the conversation would have denigrated into discussions of women.... and in his case girls.

The point is not that our Presidents are mentally ill. In this day and age you really have to be mentally ill to want to be President. To think that “making a difference” means being President. To think that is the way you have to serve of God forbid to think that “God has called you” to the office. On that note, let me quickly say that God could not care less who is president of the United States. I think he cares about that in the same way he cares about Notre Dame and Tim Tebow and that is (and this is what is so great about God) more than you could ever know and less than you could even comprehend. The point is that we now are calling crazy, manic depressives, bi-polars and people who are a few clowns short of a circus at EVERY LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT!

State and Local Government, as I sit, are a huge dis functional problem. On the local level we still have the divided St. Louis, City and County. We still have a City police that are run out of Jefferson City and we still have people trying to do artificial, tax driven development in north city. All recipes for disaster. In the County we have Charlie Dooley, struggling to remain in power and spreading a lot of dis function as he asserts authority. On the State level the Republicans OWN both bodies of the legislature and yet can agree on nothing and can get nothing done and passed. Somehow saying “NO, I will not compromise on my principles no matter what!” has become a sick badge of honor. The people who we are electing have forgotten that once elected they are representing everyone. Not just the people who agree with them. That there is some obligation or social contract to work for the greater good but to make sure that government works.

We are totally screwed on the Federal level. I don’t even need to comment on it. The sad thing is that I agree that government is too big. I agree that government cannot solve all of our social ills. I agree that they often make things worse. But what I am seeing is that the conservative approach appears to be to shut down government through inaction. Make sure nothing gets done, no one gets what they want and slowly through inertia and financial strangulation government dies. Which in a vacuum and on paper might seem fine. Have government provide police, maybe some courts, some very basic laws and just let the market work it out. Have a standing army to protect our trade and oil rights. Health care, copyright law, it all can be worked out by the free market. Until your son is autistic. How does the free market deal with that? Or mental illness...your daughter is bi-polar and shoplifts and hordes. How does the free market serve her? Or you are returning 100,000 vets. Who takes care of them after the price they paid? Charities? Our Churches? In a perfect world yes. In the real world, no. But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is my theory on WHY this happening. Quite simply, we have gathered up all the crazy people and asked them to govern us. Nancy Pelosi/Eric Cantor. Harry Reid/Mitch Mc Connell. Just different sides of the same coin. Fundamentally broken people who are crazy enough to be gathered in one place to govern us. One of my favorite authors is a guy named Will Self. He is a Brit so he is probably a socialist and a commie but he writes a lot of interesting stuff and is a studier of human nature and people. I continue to believe that artists and writers of fiction continue to have some value. A long time ago he wrote a collection of short stories called “The Quantity Theory Of Insanity”. The premise was that there was only so much sanity and inanity around at any one time and it was spread among the population. So you could gather groups of sane people in a room or in a city to help balance the sanity in that place and influence outcomes. Our problem right now is that the sane people have opted out of the system and relegated it to the bi-polar, manic depressive, power seekers. They are not fit to govern. They are destroying us.

So what? Where does that leave us? A lot of us elected Obama because he had the opportunity to be a game changer. Instead he was the opposite side of the Bush coin. He played the same game, the same way. He called us to nothing better. Just a different version of the same. Granted he was greeted with a vitriol and hate no President had to deal with in my life, but whether he has done a good job or a bad job with the hand he was dealt means nothing. He did not change the game. He missed an opportunity. We do not have a chance to really change things in 2012. We will Obama or we will have Romney and they are the system. They are mentally ill demagogues trapped in a non functioning system. We need to elect smart, selfless people who will do the right thing, compromise, work for small, smarter government but recognize that government in any moral environment must take care of those without a voice. That is what has made America the shining light and the city on the hill. The compassion has left our leadership, as has the intelligence and we are left being ruled by the crazy and the ill. Elect thinking people who do not spout catch phrases. People who realize it is complicated, it is hard and it will take shared sacrifice, and who have the balls to lead us through it. Happy 2012!

In case I do not get to it. Romney wine Iowa by 5%.

WHAT I AM READING (With Apologies To Nick Hornby)

There is a magazine I read called The Believer (which I somewhat prematurely and optimistically labeled the new New Yorker) and one of my favorite columns in it has been written by Nick Hornby, the guy who wrote Hi Fidelity. The column was called “What I Have Been Reading” and the guy reads a lot and has turned me onto some good books. In fact some very good books. But Hornby is moving on from the column and the magazine so with imitation being the best form of flattery I give you the St. Louis Diner Review version of “What I Have Been reading”.

Michael Chabon: “Yiddish Policeman's Union”
Harper Collins 2007
416 Pages

Chabon is one of the writers that Hornby turned me on to. I think i did not think i would like him because it sounded like he had a French name and well... we hate those people. I like it when my instincts are wrong because you often find something new, and they were very wrong here.

Chabon invents a whole new world historically where after world war two when the state of Israel is started that the Arabs and Palestinians push the Jewish re-settlers into the ocean. The U.S. for reasons that are never quite clear through Secretary of State Seward offer the Jews a 50 year homeland in Alaska and 10s of thousands of Jews settle and prosper there. Like any ethnic group this band of wanderers has it’s share of normal people and crazies and the politics of Jewish Alaska are.... convoluted at best.

Our hero and narrator is a detective and he is living post divorce in a seedy hotel where someone else murdered. The investigation of the murder is complicated by the fact that the 50 years is up and most of the Jews are being forced to leave and those that stay are not necessarily welcome or being offered jobs in the new administration AND his ex wife has gotten the job as his boss.

The gentlemen who was killed also was expected at one point in his life to be the chosen one who would lead the Jews to their right place in the world and perhaps bring on Armageddon and the last days. I think Sarah Palin would have been in favor of this. Anyway, it is NOT a murder mystery but is a book deep in relationships and it is beautifully written if slightly long. This guy can just flat out write and like my earlier review of his book “No Map No Legend” this book is a highly recommended read.
Wikipedia has pretty good entry on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yiddish_Policemen's_Union
Among other things it tells me that the book is in pre-production for a film by the Coen Brothers.
*****
Will Self: “Liver”
Penguin Viking 2008
277 Pages

OK....I love this guy. It does not make me a bad person but it does make me think a little sickeningly about the things I find pleasure in. Self reminds me of Will Sheff of my favorite band Okkervil River. In a recent Paste Magazine Interview he said:
“What I’m hoping is that people walk away from the songs feeling … a subtler kind of violence,” Sheff says, “that they feel uncomfortable and like a lot of their feelings have been stirred up and they’ve been entertained—but in a way that made them feel a little sick.” read the whole thing at: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/09/river-of-screams.html
I think Self goes for the same thing. This is actually not a novel but a collection of novellas which are tied together as near as I can tell by the following:

1. Alcoholism
2. Liver Maladies (some caused by Alcoholism).
3. The complexity of the human psyche
4. A Soho bar called “The Plantation Club”
The stories are in no small part, beautiful, depressing and creepy. The inhabitants (becuase they spend almost all their waking hours there) of the Plantation Club make you yearn for their demise, timely or untimely. One of Self’s gifts is to display peoples weaknesses and fragility while still making them obscenely unlikable. It is not at all important that the novellas have anything in common. All four of them are well written and compelling. I got a British Hardcover of this and it is beautifully bound with no dust jacker. Very nice.

!!!!!!!!

H.P. Lovecraft: “Call of the Cthulu”
Penguin Classics 1999
419 Pages

In reading Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon I became aware of the work of H.P. Lovecraft and what a powerful influence he has been on both of their work. Because I am a completist and like to find ways to spend idle hours I decided to check him out. Also becuase I am a Mountain Goats fan and they had a song that really kicked it on their last CD called “Lovecraft In Brooklyn”. The Mountain Goats song paints a bleak picture:

“woke up afraid of my own shadow
Like, Genuinely afraid
headed for the pawnshop
To buy myself a switchblade
Someday somethings coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here
It will store our brains in mason jar
And then the girl behind the counter asks "How do you feel today?" and I say "I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn!"
----Mountain Goats “Love craft In Brooklyn” 2008.

I thought this was something I needed to do, to read, to explore. From my perspective I was clearly wrong. Lovecraft did not really write a lot of books. He was a pulp writer for magazines and that resulted in a lot of short stories and novellas. These have been put together in various collections all of which start with a short biography of the guy and other then the fact that he lived with his aunts, liked to write letters and hang out with Robert Howard (Conan The Barbarian Creator) he did not seem compelling. I did find out from the biography that he was almost paralyzed by xenophobia and when he lived in Brooklyn found himself totally alienated and despising the mass of society.... and especially minorities and strangers. Though this might have gotten him a cabinet position with the Bush administration it seems an unhappy life. Here is the Wiki on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hp_lovecraft.

“Call of the Cthulu” is the main story in a group of novellas and never having read him before I was amazed at how relentlessly black all of his characters and prose are. There is no joy. There is not even a fake smile. His characters amble through these barren historical and imaginary landscapes and ultimately get to glimpse ultimate horror or ultimate evil before suffering grizzly death or a life a s a recluse from being scarred by what they found out.

It is not much different from being a lawyer.

You do not need to read Lovecraft’s stuff. better to read about him.

%%%%%%%

Ethan Canin: “America America”
Random House 2008
458 Pages

This was a beautiful book. Canin has long been a favorite of mine. I distinctly remember reading his book “Blue River” while I was taking the Missouri Bar Exam. The night before I was reading and finding comfort in his prose before spilling my guts on the exam the next day. My memory is of course totally suspect in that I took the Bar Exam in 1987 and the book was not published until 1995. So much for my bogus memories.

At that time Canin was new and had not really developed his style but since that time he has cranked out several books to universally critical acclaim. He is good and this book is just simply GREAT. It is a Richard Russo type effort set in upstate New York in a thriving, dying, thriving, dying town. A rich and political family adopts a lower class but hard working young man. He becomes acquainted with the ways of the rich, and their daughters. he gets sent to prep school and then to college while working around their house.

During this period, set in 1972 the family is supporting a Presidential Candidate who is running as a Democrat against Mc Govern, Muskie and Humphrey. It looks like he is going to win but there is a scandal and our narrators benefactors are right in the middle of it. Throughout the book as he benefits from the families largesse and connections there is always a sense that he is being used (and perhaps abused) in ways we do not understand.

He grows to be the local newspaper editor and attempts to adopt a protégé in much the same matter and the book is a retrospective as he tells her the story which begins looking back from the funeral of the politician. The book is heartwarming, heart wrenching and achingly well written. If you love the myth of American politics it is a must read, or if you just like someone who really knows his way around language and storycreft. Do not miss this one. It also would make a great gift for anyone you know who reads.

&&&&&&&&

Kurt Vonnegut: “Armageddon In Retrospective”
Putnam 2008
233 Pages

I continue to be very sad that this guy is dead. There is a picture of him on the back of the dust jacket taken by one of his kids or grandkids in front of a door and surrounded by some flowers with boat tennis shoes on. He looks simpatico.
The great thing about Vonnegut is that he was never simpatico. He was questioning, tortured, profoundly disillusioned with humanity and especially government institutions and yet.... he still found a way to love, raise a family and produce some beautiful, beautiful books. Even through disillusionment, depression and despair he always loved people, while seemingly despising what people, especially groups of people, especially groups of people organized as governments.

this book is really just a collection of his wartime writings. Vonnegut was a late arriver in Europe in WWII and was almost immediately captured by the retreating and declining german Army. He was put to work cleaning the streets of Dresden which the allies had left alone because it had no military factories but in the waning days of the war, for one reason or another the Allies, the U.S. decided to firebomb it and level it. He gives that experience the whole book in “Slaughterhouse Five” and his stories here all dance around it. His experiences in the war, as a prisoner, as a survivor of the firebombing and as a liberated prisoner are what make up these stories. All fiction heavily colored by his own experiences.

The stories are short and easy to read and are a sweet glimpse into a young author. the forward written by his son is as revealing as anything written about the man. Families and people are complex and beautiful. War sucks and is dehumanizing. Always. Simple messages by a sweet, brilliant, confused man.

Book Review: Psycho-Yawnography

Will Self
PsychoGeorgraphy
Illustarted By Ralph Steadman
Published by Bloomsbury
255 Pages







This... is unintentionally a coffee table book.

My admiration for Will Self is:

1. Long Standing
2. Well Deserved
3. Well Documented

He is one of the great writers of our time and has written some of the darkest, funniest and most brilliant things which have been scribed in the last ten years. Find him, read him, enjoy him. Start with something like “The Quantity Theory Of Insanity” and then “My Idea of Fun” or even his recent book “Dorian”.

So I was excited to find and buy this book. Steadman has been one of my favorite illustrators since the master wrote Fear and Loathing. There is something stark and upsetting about even his simplest and most pastoral images. I figure you marry him to Self and instead of darkness squared you get darkness cubed. Win/Win.
Wrong/Wrong it turns out.

Instead, I didn’t get much at all, dark or otherwise. It is a cute book and a clever book. Self is like a less self impressed David Foster Wallace. He does not have to write three page paragraph describing the type of “dust” he is trying to define. He is succinct. it helps that he is British and American and Jewish and Gentile and smart. But this muttness of his seems to have screwed him up and he is constantly coming up with theories about why he and the world are so fucked up. The key thing about his theories and his observations are that they tend be salient and wickedly funny, and sometimes very cruel. I mean this is a guy who was kicked of British Prime Minister John Major’s plane for snorting heroin in the bathroom.

In “The Quantity Theory Of Insanity” for example, he opined on the theory that there was only so much sanity to go around and thus you could put insanity and sanity where it was needed by moving groups of crazy people (or sane people) to certain locations and thus you would effect the balance of sanity as needed.

PsychoGeography also has to do with location as his theory is generally that the place makes the person. the place where you are from... the place you are going... the place you once took a dump. They all form and shape you and make you who you are now and more importantly make you how you are now. He got off drugs and started to walk on long sujourns following this theory that we all have become deconnected with “place”. It makes sense but he does not do much to flesh out why we should care.

The most (and perhaps only) worthwhile part of the book is the first chapter which is him walking from London to New York. He does it by leaving his home, walking to Heathrow, getting on a plane, Flying to JFK and them walking the 26 miles into downtown Manhattan. It is an introspective story with typical problems you would not consider such as modern airports are not meant for people to walk in and out of. It simply does not work. This story like amny of the others turns on his observations and the people he meets and it reads like a travelogue.

But... it never gets any better then the first story and his twenty mile romps around London, Iowa etc... do not reveal a lot and you kind of get a sense that he is mailing it in. Steadman’s illustrations are great but ultimately the book tells us very little, reveals very little out us to ourselves and... god forbid, gets kind of boring.

So. Though I love Self and love Steadman. Miss this one, unless you just like to have cool looking books for people to look at laying around like a pretentious prick... like me. then buy it.
6 Slingers on the 10 scale.

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