Little Children, the movie

I don't usually write about movies, even when they're based on books. First, there are too many; it would turn this book blog into a movie blog. Second, books are usually better than the movie, and there's no sense in repeating that over and over. But I'm optimistic about the movie of Little Children, based on the book by Tom Perrotta. I thought the book was a compelling little novel mining rare territory -- boredom and self-obsession in contemporary suburban family life. Movies are pretty comfortable with this landscape (see American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands and The Truman Show, to name but a few). So it will be interesting to see what results.
Here's a bit from a review in the Los Angeles Times. The reviewer seems to differ from me and agree with me in a few ways:

"Little Children" is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind -- a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring--— the movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

Read the whole review here. Perrotta also wrote Election, which was turned into a movie -- a biting satire of the high school student council starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
And while I'm going all multi-media on you, I will point out that my favorite band, The Shins, has a new website that shows the band members hanging out at the library. Cool!

The Looming Tower

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 is an exceptional book about the historical background of the 9/11 attackers. It explains in details why they did what did what they did, what their motivations were, what their strategies were, how the moved around the world and organized the attack. The main focus is on Osama bin Laden and the history of his ideology. It is marvelously concrete and detailed.
Before I read this book, Osama bin Laden always seemed to me more like a movie villain, like Darth Vader from Star Wars or Sarumaun from Lord of the Rings. Now he seems much more real, which is of course a bit scarier. The ideology these guys operate with is truly frightening.
There's a dialogue on Slate between the book's author Lawrence Wright and his fellow journalist Steve Coll. Coll summarizes the book so well I'll simply quote him here:

The book opens with an account of the influential Egyptian Islamist writer Sayid Qutb's radicalizing experiences in America during the late 1940s, when he was a young man far from home. It then develops biographical portraits of the young Ayman Zawahiri and the young Osama Bin Laden, who both read Qutb ardently. The book follows the pair to Afghanistan during the 1980s and tracks the origins and formation of al-Qaida during the anti-Soviet war. The evolution of the group after it was forced into exile in Sudan during the early 1990s, and then returned to Afghanistan, in 1996, is blended with reporting about the FBI agents who were assigned to understand and pursue al-Qaida. The book follows all these strands of narrative to Sept. 11 and then to Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora the following December.

Read the whole dialogue here.

Severance

I heard a report on National Public Radio tonight about a new book of (very) short stories called Severance, by Robert Olen Butler. Each story is the thoughts of someone who has just had their head cut off. Each story is short, just enough to capture what they would be thinking as the blade does its work. It sounds interesting: The stories includes John the Baptist, Medusa, Robespierre and a chicken, among others.
It also reminded me of Spoon River Anthology (of course!) which also is a book of people speaking briefly and poetically about their deaths. The difference is that Spoon River's conceit is that it's everyone is in the same graveyard, as opposed to Severance's method of death.
I think I will pick up a copy of Severance soon.

Crunchy Cons

Rod Dreher is a noted conservative commentator -- his day job is opinion editor of the Dallas Morning News. But more importantly to me is that he is an alumni of my high school, the beloved Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts. This has motivated me to keep an eye on his career. Plus, he's a really great writer and highly readable.
He wrote a book recently called Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party). I read it, and I really liked it. (It comes out in paperback next week.) It is a trenchant critique of the rampant consumerism of the culture and the knee-jerk pro-corporate stance of the mainstream Republican Party. It also has interesting insights on living a good life, advocating organic farming and the restoration of older homes. My favorite advice: Everything in your home should be either useful or beautiful -- if it's not either, get rid of it! The book also shakes up our notions of the right/left political divide, which is another one of my pet interests.
Dreher has a Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet.com that is consistently fascinating reading. He announced recently on his blog that he is converting to Orthodoxy, and it set off a firestorm -- more than 431 comments and counting. Wow!
I just did a search to see what's the most comments I've ever had on my blog. In case you were wondering, it's four.

Banned Books Week

It's Banned Books Week, so read something shocking this week!
Need ideas? The American Library Association has its list of banned books here, while Google has a list here. The ALA's list is mostly children's books, while Google's leans toward adult classics. To Kill a Mockingbird or Ulysses, anyone? I'm fond of the outhouse scene in "Ulysses," so I'll have to read that again this week.
Thanks to Ryan F. for the links! Sorry, Ryan, no commission.

Today is J. Alfred Prufrock Day!

I almost missed it, but my trusty poem-a-day calendar reminded me that today is T.S. Eliot's birthday, which means it's J. ALFRED PRUFROCK DAY!
This is a day for me and my fellow English Lit classmates from high school to celebrate our love of poetry by reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
You can read my previous posts celebrating J. Alfred Prufrock Day here, here, here and here.
So ... Do you dare to eat a peach?

New from Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis has a new book coming out next week -- The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game -- and it looks like it will be good.
The New York Times Magazine exerpted part of it this weekend; read it here while it's still free. Meanwhile, another favorite author of mine, Malcolm Gladwell, praises the book on his blog:

It's about a teenager from the poorest neighborhood in Memphis who gets adopted by a wealthy white family, and who also happens to be an extraordinarily gifted offensive lineman. Simultaneously Lewis tells the story of the emergence of the left tackle as one of the most important positions in modern day football. I thought MoneyBall was fantastic. But this is even better, and it made me wonder if we aren't enjoying a golden age of sportswriting right now. ... The Blind Side is as insightful and moving a meditation on class inequality in America as I have ever read--althought to put it that way, I realize, makes it sound deadly dull. It isn't. You should read it.

Read Gladwell's entire post here. Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.

Cane River

I finished Cane River for my book group last week. It's an intergenerational saga of mothers and daughters who lived as slaves, survived the Civil War, and continued raising their families into the 20th Century. What makes this book different is that author Lalita Tademy based the novel on her own family tree. She used genealogy records to create the plot's outline, and then imagined the details and the motivations of her ancestors.
This book was picked for Oprah's Book Club in 2001, and it's not hard to see why. Stylistically, "Cane River" is an easy and pleasant read. It also has a strong theme of female empowerment. Finally, it deals with important issues of racism and oppression in complex and realistic ways.
I have to add that I literally could not put this book down. The last book I remember being that absorbing was Running with Scissors. That's such a TOTALLY different book (wacko mother abandons her gay teenaged son to her guru shrink), I hesitate to mention it in the same post as "Cane River." But it did have that one identical quality, where I just had to find out what happened next to these fascinating characters.

The price of higher education

The New York Times has a darkly humorous opinion piece about the cost of higher education and the expectations game:

Laudable could be cheaper, but you wouldn'’t like it. You and your parents have made it clear that you want the best. That means more spacious and comfortable student residences ("dormitories," we used to call them), gyms with professional exercise equipment, better food of all kinds, more counselors to attend to your growing emotional needs, more high-tech classrooms and campuses that are spectacularly handsome.

Our competitors provide such things, so we do too. We compete for everything: faculty, students, research dollars and prestige. The more you want us to give to you, the more we will be asking you to give to us. We aim to please, and that will cost you. It's been a long time since scholarship and teaching were carried on in monastic surroundings.

Laudable's surroundings, by the way, will remind you of where you came from. That'’s because your financial circumstances are pretty much the same as those of your classmates. More expensive schools have students from wealthier parents; less expensive schools draw students from families with fewer financial resources. More than half of the freshmen at selective colleges, public and private, come from the highest-earning quarter of households. Tell me the ZIP code and I'’ll tell you what kind of college a high-school graduate most likely attends.

Read the whole op-ed here. The author is William M. Chace, author of 100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way, which I'll have to check out.

Katrina anniversary coverage: books

The Times-Picayune has a great story on all the books about Katrina that have been published in the past year -- "enough books to buckle a bookshelf," says the T-P.
Read the story here.

Katrina anniversary coverage: SPT

I'm proud of the work my employer, the St. Petersburg Times, did on Katrina and its anniversary.
You can see the Times' work via this link.
Times photographer Kathleen Flynn took the picture of Sadie James, which ended up on the cover of Time magazine last year. Flynn kept in touch with James and photographed her again recently. She also recorded James talking about her life since that photo. It's powerful. Access it here; click on Sadie James.

Katrina anniversary coverage: Times-Picayune

Here's a better link to six days worth of Times-Picayune coverage. Two more stories stand out. One is on the horror of the Convention Center as the storm hit. That's surely what I will always think of when I think of Katrina, the poor people just marooned at the convention center, desperately talking to the TV cameras but unable to get food, water, comfort.
The other is about a Metairie man who used his fishing boat to rescue people off the roofs of their flooded homes. The matter-of-fact way he went about helping them is touching and decent.

David Foster Wallace on tennis, again

David Foster Wallace wrote a new essay on his old obsession -- tennis -- for last week's New York Times. He waxed rhapsodic about Roger Federer. (Too bad, though: It looks like Wallace got bit by the correction bug, too, involving the mechanics of a Federer vs. Agassi match. The correction is appended to the story.)
In other Wallace news, The Howling Fantods, a fan site, says a 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest arrives later this year, with an introduction by David Eggers. The Eggers intro is a little weird to me. I like and respect Eggers (especially for his work with teaching writing to underpriviledged children), but I think Wallace is better known and more accomplished, so why is Eggers writing the intro? On the other hand, maybe Wallace asked Eggers to write the intro, because Wallace has published pieces before in Egger's literary project McSweeney's. All just speculation on my part.
I was thinking the other day how much I would like to read IJ again. Maybe the anniversary is just the occasion.

Katrina anniversary coverage: Bush's photo

Here's a case of two newspapers doing the same story with weirdly similar leads.
First, The Washington Post on Saturday. Headline: "Katrina's Damage Lingers For Bush." Lead:

For Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), three images define George W. Bush's presidency: Bush throwing out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush with a megaphone atop the rubble of the World Trade Center -- and Bush staring out the window as Air Force One traversed the Gulf Coast thousands of feet above the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
The first two images epitomize strength and resolution, the image the Bush White House likes to cultivate. But in one year's time, the last one -- of the president as aloof, out of touch, even befuddled -- all but erased the memory of the others, according to pollsters, pundits and Republican politicians who say they have suffered in the wake of the president's decline.

Next up, The New York Times on Monday. Headline: "Years After Katrina, Bush Still Fights for 9/11 Image." Lead:

When the nation records the legacy of George W. Bush, 43rd president and self-described compassionate conservative, two competing images will help tell the tale.
The first is of Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, bullhorn in hand, feet planted firmly in the rubble of the twin towers. The second is of him aboard Air Force One, on his way from Crawford, Tex., to Washington, peering out the window at the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina thousands of feet below.
If the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina called into question the president’s competence, that Air Force One snapshot, coupled with wrenching scenes on the ground of victims who were largely poor and black, called into question something equally important to Mr. Bush: his compassion.
A year later, he has yet to recover on either front.

Katrina Anniversary coverage: the weekend before

I'm going to blog this week about the Hurricane Katrina anniversary. I plan to highlight the news articles I find most compelling, interesting and insightful. Here's the first installment.
The Times-Picayune's story "On Their Own" takes a hard look at the local planning process and Mayor Ray Nagin's role. The big question: Should the government follow the lead of the people who return, or should it set the agenda for rebuilding? The TP shows that, so far, the local government has not set much of an agenda, and that's not a good thing.

Even with the huge infusion of federal aid on the way, it's unthinkable that all parts of the city will thrive, most observers agree.
At the neighborhood level, that will have unpleasant consequences.
Shortly after the storm, experts warned strenuously that in the absence of a carefully planned and controlled revival, New Orleans would succumb to the "jack-o'-lantern effect" -- a gap-toothed revival in which renovated homes were interspersed with blighted and abandoned structures that eventually would bring down the neighborhood.

The Washington Post decided to take a look at rebuilding on a single street, and was able to contact 15 of 18 families who before the storm lived on Beechwood Court in New Orleans East. The results of their survey aren't particularly heartening. Ten families said they were unlikely to return.

Many asked: What is there to come back to?
"We loved our neighborhood, we loved our life, we loved our home," said Denise Charbonnet, 53, a Navy contractor whose job was transferred from New Orleans to Memphis. "But it's not the same. There are no stores. There are no gas stations. They do have streetlights on the main streets, but within the communities, it's dark. Can you imagine being the only person living on a block?"

The Post also has a compelling story on Baton Rouge, which absorbed a great number of evacuees from New Orleans. At times, Baton Rouge's infrastructure seemed taxed beyond its means, and class differences emerged between the black communities of the respective cities.

Jeff LeDuff, the city's no-nonsense police chief, was credited by many with keeping order in the city. There was aggressive policing, officers rolling en masse to reports of crimes. "I'm willing to be my brother's keeper. That's what I said at the time," says LeDuff now, referring to the immediate aftermath of Katrina. "And I also said, 'While my brother is in Baton Rouge, he must behave.' "
Some assailed LeDuff, who is black, and his police force, saying they were too aggressive. But Mayor Melvin "Kip" Holden, who appointed LeDuff and who also is black, lauded his chief's stewardship of the department during the crisis.

The New York Times has a fascinating story on the big differences between the people who fled to Atlanta versus those who were evacuated to Houston. The NYT headlines the story, "Storm's Escape Routes: One Forced, One Chosen":

(T)he divergent experiences of those who went to Houston and those who went to Atlanta suggest that recovery depends on more than individual resources and demographics. Just as important are less quantifiable factors: a sense of welcome and connection, the presence of friends and family, even how narrowly they survived the disaster.

I'll be blogging more on Katrina as the week goes on. The anniversary is Tuesday, Aug. 29.

Cool Headline of the Day

I love the whimsy of this headline on a science article yesterday in the Los Angeles Times:

Round and Orbity? Must Be a Planet.

Id est (Mating)

Did you know that the common abbreviation "i.e." stands for "id est"? And that's Latin for "that is"? I guess I knew this already, but I was reminded recently by the novel Mating by Norman Rush. This was a book group pick (not mine). It is set in Botswana, and it's about an anthropology graduate student who decided to romantically pursue another academic, a man who has started a women-only commune sort of development in rural Africa. The novel is supposed to be a "comedy of manners." But it struck me as kind of being an object of amusement. The narrator keeps saying "id est" instead of i.e. Guess what? That's annoying!
On the other hand ... I was looking around for reviews of Mating, and I found this totally amusing blog post. This blogger loved "Mating," and what she has to say about it is pretty interesting:

A couple of people I recommended this book to were extremely annoyed by the writing-voice ... . I, however, LOVE the voice: cerebral, obsessively psychological, yearning, illogical -- It comes from right out of me. I relate.

Read her whole post here.

Cooking for Mr. Latte

I've been re-reading Cooking for Mr. Latte this week and really savoring it. It's so charming, so fun, I think it should be counted among the great food memoirs of our time. Or at least I think it should because it's youthful, exhuberant, romantic and (mostly) unpretentious.
The book drew on the first-person columns Ms. Hesser wrote about her courtship with the man who became her husband, Tad Friend, aka Mr. Latte. During this time she was also a food writer for The New York Times, so there's lots of talk about cooking and restaurants. Each episode ends with related recipes. Though I haven't made many of the recipes because they tend to involve exotic ingredients, i.e. goat's milk yogurt, etc.
I miss the author of Cooking for Mr. Latte ... Amanda Hesser doesn't seem to write much in the first person anymore, though she does still write about food for the NYT Magazine. In fact, I think she is the food editor for the NYT Mag now.
I have to conclude that I just like first-person food writing. Taste, literally, is such a personal thing. It makes sense to write about it in a personalized way. For instance, I just love Frank Bruni's blog, and he write mostly in the first person. He had a recent story about eating his way across Fast Food America that was just a hoot.

Important reporting on the environment

This week, the Los Angeles Times launched a major investigative series called Altered Oceans. It looks at the way humans are changing much of the ocean ecology through things like fertilizer run-off and garbage. These extremely disturbing stories paint a picture of environmental change on an almost primordial level.
This is not a terribly original thought, but I'll post it here anyway: My fear is not for the earth. In the long run, the earth will be fine. My fear is we'll change the climate so much that humans won't be able to survive.

No "Search Inside" - bleh! (Kafka on the Shore)

Ugh, it's sad how dependent I've become on Amazon's "Search Inside This Book" function. I use it all the time to grab quotes from books I want to write about in my blog, or just to look up passages I want to remember. And now it's failing me. There is no search inside function for Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.
This novel was so different, so strange -- almost dada-esque -- but extremely touching and filled with compassion. The narrator, a Japanese teenager named Kafka, is running away from home to avoid an Oedipal prophecy. Meanwhile, Mr. Nakata, a retarded man injured in a mysterious incident during World War II, has the ability to talk with cats. Johnny Walker (yep, the man on the liquor bottle) is a malevolent manifestation who wants to create a magic flute that will let him take over the world. Then there is the transgendered hemophiliac who runs an elegant private library. All that, and it's fun to read.
The quote I was looking for said something like this: We come closest to truth through metaphor.
I'm going to have to re-read the book now. Lucky me!
UPDATE: I just remembered my other favorite quote from KotS: The present moment is the past devouring the future.