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Literary Comfort Food

Last weekend I wasn't feeling so great -- a summer cold was coming on -- so I curled up with some ice cream and its literary equivalent. "Mr. Darcy's Diary" by Amanda Grange. This is what I would call fan-fiction related to Jane Austen. In this case, Grange imagines the male side of the great novel Pride and Prejudice and writes from the hero's perspective, as opposed to the heroine's.
There's a lot of this kind of Jane-related fiction if you care to read it: sequels and prequels and alternate takes, all generally summed up under the category of "para-literature." I generally steer clear of this stuff because reading these impersonations of Jane Austen's inimitable style can be quite painful.
On the other hand, I really liked "Mr. Darcy's Diary." It's title explains it; the jottings of Mr. Darcy as he meets and courts P&P's Elizabeth Bennet. This was a very smart approach on the part of Ms. Grange because there's no need for her to imitate Austen's style -- Mr. Darcy's musings are appropriately masculine, plain-spoken and to the point.
Did I learn anything new from hearing Darcy's side of the story? Not really. But oh how I enjoyed it. And I soon got to feeling better.

Read an excerpt from Grange's Web site. In this scene, we find out what happens after Elizabeth's sister Lydia runs off with the scoundrel George Wickham. In P&P, Darcy sets it aright, but we never really learn details of what happens. Here's Grange's take on the meeting between Darcy and Wickham:

I met Wickham at my club and the negotiations began.
'You must marry her,' I said to him shortly.
'If I do that, I give up forever the chance of making my fortune through marriage.'
'You have ruined her,' I said. 'Does that mean nothing to you?'

Continue reading ...

1001 Books

I love lists, and really, who doesn't? So first thing, I went through the new list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," and checked off all the ones I've read. My haul was pretty pitiful. I've read 80 of the books on the list. William Grimes of The New York Times has read 300! Don't I feel inadequate.

I was also startled because if I were to divide the books I've read into categories, the number one category would probably be books I read in high school, followed by books I read with my book group. It really depresses me that I didn't read more in college. Sure, I read some, but not nearly as much as I could have. I wasted so much time in college hanging out, partying, etc. Very dumb on my part. I also read -- by my own choice -- a lot of literary theory in college that has not held up well over the years. That's a whole other post, but I think theory was useful as an analytical tool in some contexts. Now, though, I would prefer that I had had a broader exposure to the history of literature.

I hope to create a new master list of books I would like to read, and then methodically read them, to make up for lost time. But is this realistic? I work a 40-hour job and have friends and family members to attend to. I also have library school and my beloved violin lessons.

College-goers, may this sad tale be a warning to you!

Here are the 10 favorite books of the most recently published 80 books I have read:

• Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
• Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
• The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
• Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
• In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

The New Yorker on Ezra Pound

The New Yorker has a fascinating review of a new book about Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound! Has anyone touched more great literature? Friend and adviser of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. Also the lesser lights: William Carlos Williams, H.D., Robert Lowell.
The New Yorker essay really captures the weird dynamic about Pound: While he redefined literature with his slogan "Make it new," he was also, quite literally, a treasonous, Fascist anti-Semite. What a juxtaposition. In Pound's defense, there is some evidence that he was mentally ill.
For a humorous take on Pound's political leanings, read McSweeney's The Ten Worst Films of 1942; As reviewed by Ezra Pound over Italian radio. "CAT PEOPLE: A race may civilize itself BY LANGUAGE, not film. Cat People is filth."
I'm told that Pound was the one who came up with the title of Eliot's "The Waste Land." Eliot himself wanted to call it ... (oh dear) ... "He Do the Police in Different Voices." Good lord, what a dreadful title. If that's all Pound did, he did literature a favor.
And then there's Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his Paris years, "A Moveable Feast." A really marvelous book. Hemingway writes:

Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble. He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T.S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.

Love Papa Hemingway! That writing just jumps off the page for me with it's elegance. I especially love "insufficient time and bad hours."
If only Edgar Lee Masters had had a Pound to help him with Spoon River Anthology. He would have trimmed off the ponderous pseudo-epic-poem finale "The Spooniad." (Not kidding! That's how SRA ends.)

If I seem tense ...

An article in American Journalism Review gets at some of the difficulties facing my beloved newspaper industry right now. It discusses projections made by consultant Mark Potts that show online advertising is not increasing fast enough -- not nearly fast enough -- to make up for the declines in print advertising.

(T)he scariest problem — which Potts himself points out — is that many papers won't share in the online growth. There will be winners and losers. And even as the industry as a whole survives, we may begin seeing, pretty soon, big American
cities with no daily newspaper.
"It's going to be really bloody, incredibly devastating," Potts predicts. "And I think there are going to be a lot of major metros that don't make it."

Books and the presidential candidates

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed John McCain about the Middle East, and one of his questions was about favorite Jewish writers. (Goldberg interviewed Obama previously, who mentioned how much he liked Philip Roth.)

JG: A final question: Senator Obama talked about how his life was influenced by Jewish writers, Philip Roth, Leon Uris. How about you?

JM: There’s Elie Wiesel, and Victor Frankl. I think about Frankl all the time. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life. And maybe on a little lighter note, “War and Remembrance” and “Winds of War” are my two absolute favorite books. I can tell you that one of my life’s ambitions is to meet Herman Wouk. “War and Remembrance” for me, it’s the whole thing. ...

JG: Not a big Philip Roth fan?

JM: No, I’m not. Leon Uris I enjoyed. Victor Frankl, that’s important. I read it before my captivity. It made me feel a lot less sorry for myself, my friend. A fundamental difference between my experience and the Holocaust was that the Vietnamese didn’t want us to die. They viewed us as a very valuable asset at the bargaining table. It was the opposite in the Holocaust, because they wanted to exterminate you. Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself, which was very frequently, I thought, “This is nothing compared to what Victor Frankl experienced.”

The mention of Victor Frankl brought back a ton of memories for me, and McCain is absolutely right that it's an incredibly moving and thought-provoking book. Frankl was a psychiatrist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, and Man's Search for Meaning was the book he wrote afterward based on his observations there. I still remember his articulation of "the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's own attitude in any given set of cirumstances, to choose one's own way."
I also vividly remember where and when I read this book -- when I was 13 years old and a Catholic school girl. Certainly this is a testament to Frankl's skills as a communicator (and definitely NOT to any extraordinary perception on my part) that his book resonates with people of different ages, social standings and circumstances.
Here's the summary of "Man's Search for Meaning" from Google Books:

Man's Search for Meaning tells the chilling and inspirational story of eminent psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and other concentration camps for three years during the Second World War. Immersed in great suffering and loss, Frankl began to wonder why some of his fellow prisoners were able not only to survive the horrifying conditions, but to grow in the process. Frankl's conclusion - that the most basic human motivation is the will to meaning - became the basis of his groundbreaking psychological theory, logotherapy. As Nietzsche put it, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how". In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl outlines the principles of logotherapy, and offers ways to help each one of us focus on finding the purpose in our lives.

Spoon River Anthology and spoonriveranthology.net

The most commented post on this blog is "Why Spoonreader?", one of my first posts that I wrote way back on Sept. 14, 2004 when I was just getting started. Recently, a student posted a question there about marriage and Spoon River Anthology. Here's our exchange:

Anonymous said...
I have to write a paper for my english class including 15 epitaphs and 20 outside sources on a spoon river theme. some possible themes are corruption, death as the great equalizer and so on. I had thought about doing something with fakenesss of marriage or along those lines, any thoughts or help?
May 13, 2008 10:40 AM

Angie said...
20 outside sources?! That sounds like a lot. I hope this is a college class.
I think marriage would be a great topic. Though I would call my paper something like "Master's Kaleidoscope of Marriage," that way you can talk about some of the poems that say good things about marriage, too. Here are some of the poems you should look at: Amanda Barker, Mrs. Pantier, Benjamin Pantier, Julia Miller, Mrs. Williams, Margaret Fuller Slack, Willard Fluke, Amos Sibley, Mrs. Sibley, Tom Merritt, Mrs. Merritt, Roscoe Purkapile, Mrs. Purkapile, Elsa Wertman. For a more positive outlook on marriage, try Lois Spears, Lucinda Matlock and William & Emily. That's just off the top of my head, there are other poems, too, I'm sure.
As for your critical sources, I can really only recommend one: the introduction to Spoon River Anthology: Annotated Edition, edited by John E. Hallwas. Please email me a copy of your paper when your done, I'd love to read it.
May 13, 2008 11:00 AM

Anonymous said...
haha yes it is a college class, the paper will surely be huge. And thats good that you cited John Hallwas because I did add him in my list of sources. I think im going to relate the theme to corruption of marriage and human nature as a sort of subtopic, thanks for the epitaph listing! It helps a lot.
May 14, 2008 2:16 PM

To dig up all those names, I used a very cool web site, www.spoonriveranthology.net The poems here are hyperlinked so you can easily see which poems talk about each other. There's also some neat analysis of words used in the different poems. You can also comment on the poems, and the comments include the gamut of responses you would expect. Because "Spoon River Anthology" is a town of people talking about each other, it's similar to a network, and the hyperlinks really draw out that aspect of it. I like the site a lot.

Poems I love, Part 2

Lately I've found it hard to concentrate on any one book. There are a bunch of half-started books littering my home, almost all of them nonfiction. Certainly this is a byproduct of stress. The newspaper industry in which my spouse and I make our livings is in severe recession and transformation. The future is unpredictable. Also I find aspects of this modern life worrisome, everyone so busy and filled with the need to acquire.
When I feel anxious about what's happening, this Wordsworth poem comes to mind:

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I love everything about this sonnet, except perhaps the last two lines. I don't think neo-paganism will solve my problems, or Wordsworth's. And old Triton blowing his wreathed horn is a hokey image. If I were a wealthy philanthropist, I would sponsor a contest to re-write the last two lines.

Poems I love, Part 1

One of my favorite poems is "Anecdote of the Jar," by Wallace Stevens. This came up lately because my mother got two cats, and she was trying to decide what to name them. Now of course I set about trying to think of literary names. (I once knew a cat named Percy, named after Louisiana author Walker Percy, and I thought that was so cool.) These cats are Siberian cats, so I thought, why not name them after the greats of Russian literature? So I suggested Fyodor (Dostoevsky) and Leopold (Tolstoy). Well, this suggestion did not go very far for a variety of reasons, including that one of the cats is female.
Another pertinent fact about the cats is that the breeder lives in Tennessee. So I suggested Wallace and Anna. Wallace after Wallace Stevens and Anna after Tolstoy's famous heroine Anna Karenina.
Why Wallace?, mother asked. Because of "Anecdote of the Jar," I replied.

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

What does that poem mean?, mother asked. Well, it's hard to say what a poem really means, but I think it's about architecture, roughly speaking. We build things, and those things change the way we see the natural world. And the natural world changes the way we see the built environment. In other words, the natural world and the built world influence and change each other, so we should take care of what we build.
On another level, I just love the delicious language of this poem: "Like nothing else in Tennnessee". "The jar was round upon the ground". "It took dominion everywhere".
Well, mother didn't like that suggestion either. In retrospect, I should have made one last Tennessee-related suggestion: She really should have named them Stanley and Stella, from "A Streetcar Named Desire," the play by Tennessee Williams.
But she ended up naming them Angel and Mimi, after her two children. Yep, so now I have my very own familiar ("a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person").
The photo above is me with Mimi.

Crunch Time!

Sorry for the light blogging, I'm in the final week of my most recent library science class, Digital Libraries, and I have a paper to finish by Thursday. (Yikes!)
For those of you keeping track at home, this is the seventh class I've finished. I have six more classes to finish the degree, so I'll be getting my MLS around 2010.
Getting the degree at this slow pace -- once class per semester --has been mostly about the satisfaction of learning for me. (I had written " for the sheer joy of learning," but that's a little too exuberant for my exhausted outlook at the moment.) Nevertheless, I look forward to each class being done in anticipation of graduation.
As for what I'm reading right now: I'm re-reading the last Harry Potter book. Our book group pick is "Mudbound," which won a big prize for literature in support of social change. I'll start that this weekend. And I'm still addicted to the RealClearPolitics site for election coverage.

Writing and Grief

I'm mostly posting this here for Howellsreader, I thought she would like it. It ran in on the front page of our paper today, and it's about a father who writes science fiction and who lost his son in the Virginia Tech shooting. It was written by my colleague Michael Kruse. It begins:

LAGRANGE, Ga. — Michael Bishop, whose son was a German instructor at Virginia Tech, sat one morning last month in a classroom at LaGrange College, ready to read one of his stories to his students in Creative Writing 3308.

"This was Jamie's idea," he told them.

Jamie Bishop left behind on his computer 10 notes. Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction writer, saw them and saw stories. At first he wanted to honor his son by finishing what the son could not. It was a way to keep a connection, and to cope. Keep reading here ...

What your lover reads

Some women break up with their boyfriends because said boyfriends have crappy taste in books. Thus reported the NYT Book Review recently in an essay with the snarky title, "It's Not You, It's Your Books":

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.

It goes on to explore more salient points: Literary taste can point to important differences in education or class; and the dumpers tend to be brainy women.
I myself side with Marco Roth, an editor who's quoted in the story:

"I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level."

Who wants a romantic partner who agrees with you on everything? How boring is that? Though I must confess, my own spouse impressed me early on in our relationship when he told me his favorite book was Cannery Row.
"Cool, Steinbeck," I thought. Then I read it and thought it was just OK. It's nice, but it's not much compared with "East of Eden" or the luminous "Grapes of Wrath." And it's kind of a "guy" book.
Years later, it's pretty obvious we have very different tastes in books. He not much for fiction, but reads quirky histories about things like the Dust Bowl or the evolution of the public swimming pool.
We do bond over other reading material, though: We're total news junkies, and we're often turning each other on to different news stories or Web sites. It's been six years, and we're still reading the news together.

C'mon, America! Let's meditate!

Oprah's latest book pick is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I haven't got a copy yet, but I expect I will: It's on sale at Amazon for the insanely low price of $7.70. That is so cheap it's sure to sell a bazillion copies, as if Oprah's picks don't sell a bazillion copies anyway.
The books is not fiction; it's more like self-help. (And loyal spoonreader afficionados will remember by dark secret love of self-help.) "A New Earth" sounds like handbook on mediation and its corrollary, "mindfulness." Picking this book seems to be Oprah's way of saying, "C'mon, America! Let's meditate!" Tolle himself is something of a mysterious figure; read a New York Times profile of him here.
My favorite author on meditation, though, is Pema Chodron, who has also been interviewed by Her Royal Oprah-ness. (Chodron is Buddhist and I'm not, but she writes in a way that's inclusive of a multiplicity of beliefs.) The book of hers that I'm reading now has the most marvelous title: The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Love that title! It begins with the Tibetan epigraph:

Confess your hidden faults.
Approach what you find repulsive.
Help those you think you cannot help.
Anything you are attached to, let it go.
Go to places that scare you.

Poetry.

Politics, Literature, and Romantic Poetry

I spent part of today selectively reading parts of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John F. Harris. This is kind of background reading for work, but I liked it very much. Harris is a reporter, formerly of The Washington Post and now of the always-interesting politics web site Politico.
I think journalism is the ideal genre for writing about politics. Fiction, on the other hand, is best for writing about love and religion. Fiction and journalism are both good for writing about social issues, for example The Grapes of Wrath, which started as journalism and then became a novel. There are probably lots of exceptions to these overly broad generalizations, but what the heck.
Another political/literary connection that's been on my mind: Last week I read a column by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. She's consistently interesting, too. She was reacting to Obama's speech on race, and here's just a snippet of what she said:

Near the end of the speech, Mr. Obama painted an America that didn’t summon thoughts of Faulkner but of William Blake. The bankruptcies, the dark satanic mills, the job loss and corporate corruptions.

Maybe I'm being too literal, but I really don't think William Blake is the right author to make that point. The better reference, I think, would be Charles Dickens. But maybe "Dickensian" has become an overused perjorative. I don't think Blake was concerned with corporations, but possibly I'm wrong. I'd like to hear from the Pisan Circle (former Romantic Era Poetry classmates) on this one.
Of course all this gives me an excuse to copy one of my favorite poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This is from Songs of Innocence:

THE CHIMNEY-SWEEPER
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,
‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind:
And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Book group on The Ha-Ha

My book group met last night and we had a good discussion on The Ha-Ha. This novel begins when we meet Howard, a Vietnam vet who hasn't been able to speak since the war due to a brain injury. His addict ex-girlfriend Sylvia is being forced into rehab, and she asks him to take care of her nine-year-old son Ryan.
Lots of different reactions to Howard. When we meet him in the novel, he's basically given up on communicating with other people. Some of our group sympathized with this reaction while others felt he should have tried harder. We compared Howard's reaction to his injury to the guy who wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Howard just gives up on communication, while the paralyzed author of DB&B writes a memoir by blinking out letters. So there's a tremendous range there, to say the least.
We all agreed that we hated Sylvia, though I thought she was a well-rendered, realistic portrayal of a selfish, whiny addict. J opined that Sylvia might be the biggest bitch in all of literature, but then I reminded her of Cathy from East of Eden, and she conceded the point.
The main topic of discussion was how believable were the character motivations. The novel is told from Howard's point of view, so it's interesting to try to fill in the blanks on the other characters, especially Howard's friend Laurel.
One thing I really loved about this novel was how beautiful some of the scenes between Howard and Ryan are. They are really just everyday father-and-son type interactions, but author Dave King imbues them with this really lovely tenderness. You couldn't write a whole novel just about a father who loves spending time with his son, so the plot for "The Ha-Ha" works well to reveal these same types of interactions.
This concludes my report on our book group and The Ha-Ha. Our next book is Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. More on that later.

What I read during our recent trip

A certain someone (Ryan F.) has compared me unfavorably with my pal over at Sunny Southwest, saying that I don't post as often as she does. Sad but true. In that spirit, I'm going to concentrate in April on posting and not worrying so much about links or multimedia.

We got back from a trip to Pittsburgh this week. The spouse raised his eyebrows because I brought four books on a five-day trip, but I'm glad I did.

I finished Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin on the plane. This is the memoir (it became a movie) of a chess dad and how his little son became national champion. Lots of interesting stuff on where a parent's ambition ends and a child's begins. The father and son also go to Russia for an exhibition -- this is the 1980s, the Soviet era -- and there are fascinating examinations of how the Russian government viewed chess players as important symbols for the promotion of communism and thereby corrupted the game.

I finished The Web Library for my library science class "Digital Libraries." It's a guide to free, high-quality information sources on the Web. My biggest gripe about this book is that it was published in 2002 and some of it is out of date. But it had interviews with information professionals that I found useful and have blogged about previously.

I also finished The Ha-Ha on this trip, which I will blog about later as our book group is meeting tonight to discuss it. (It was very good.)

I did not get to read my fourth book, Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, by Alex Wright. It's good and I'm about halfway through it. It starts at the beginning of human history, and I'm in the Dark Ages right about now.

So reading three out of four books is not a bad record for this trip.

More on keeping books

I'm still thinking about hoarding books versus letting them go. I ran across this interview with Michael S. Hart, founder of the very cool Project Gutenberg, where you can find many, many free e-books. If it's no longer under copyright and a volunteer entered the text, it's on Project Gutenberg.
Here's what Hart said in an interview with Nick Tomaiuolo in the book The Web Library:

Under "ye olde" system, versus under the new system, if you've got a library of 1,000 books, you're pretty cool. A personal library of 1,000 books in a room is impressive. Now you can fit 10,000 books on a DVD, and nobody knows how cool you are because the collection looks small. ... Under the "olde" system you can look cool just by displaying the books. Under the new system you actually have to read them to look cool. It's a big difference. In "ye olde" system you are defining yourself by what you own as property; in the new way you are investing in yourself by reading, not simply in possessing the physical books.

I really liked this sentiment. It's both democratic and meritocratic. It also made me feel better about purging some of the physical copies of books I've already read.
Though I do have to mention that last week author Samantha Power came up in the news, for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster." (Power is an Obama supporter; she apologized for the comment and left the campaign.) It was pretty nice to be able to stroll over to my book shelf and pull down her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. The book is still under copyright and not available as an e-book in the resources to which I have access.

Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston

Here's a recent book review I wrote.

It begins:

Corporations and the rich are taking this country for a ride, sucking tax breaks and subsidies from the public trough in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to avoid public outcry. That's what New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston argues in his new book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

Whether it's jobs moved overseas, the health care system, utility deregulation or taxpayer-subsidized sports stadiums, Johnston's book documents the many ways that the middle and lower classes are supporting big business and the wealthy.

Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, uses real-life examples and everyday people to make his case. He addresses familiar topics and obscure ones, and he presents sophisticated economic transactions in layman's terms.

Life of Pi, again

The spouse was asking me why I didn't recommend one of my favorite novels, Life of Pi, to the presidential candidates. Well, I said, "Life of Pi" is more about personal belief -- the decisions every human being has to make about what they will believe about things they can't see or prove. That includes religious belief, but it's also about what kinds of things are possible in the world, kind of metaphysical questions. I don't think a president in particular needs to consider those questions any more than anyone else. They're important questions for everyone.
Not that the question of faith can't be a political question. It clearly is, and lately you can see it in a round of quasi-political books advocating atheism: Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. Those books (which, to be clear, I have read only reviews of) remind me of what "Life of Pi" says about atheists. Our hero young Pi -- who is so religious he embraces Hinduism, Christianity and Islam equally -- encounters his science teacher, Mr. Kumar, at the zoo. Admiring the animals, Mr. Kumar tells Pi he is an atheist:

"When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me -- it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. One day we will take hold of the means of production and there will be justice on earth."
This was all a bit much for me. The tone was right -- loving and brave -- but the details seemed bleak. I said nothing.

A bit later, Pi reflects:

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

Gnash, gnash

Oh the vexatious cull!
I got rid of my John McCain memoir. Gave it away or something.
What was I thinking?
I was thinking, "He's running for president, every library in the country will keep this book forever. I don't need to keep it."
Now I'm thinking, "I want to look at that book and I don't feel like dragging down to the library to get it."
Grrrr ... .