Waltzer Wonderland

Oh yeah, I totally forgot what you had going for you, which was nice!

So I finished that book Rapture Ready. It was pretty good. A lot of it was a little ho-hum for someone more familiar than not with the subculture about which the book was written, but that's okay. There were a couple parts that made me laugh out loud IRL. Like the part in the introduction when the author is talking to some kid (a friend of his sister-in-law's or something) about the music at a Christian rock festival and the kid says something about how he doesn't need to listen to a lot of secular love songs because they're all, like, "Oh I love you and you left me so now I'm going to break into your house and cut your body into pieces!" In my opinion that would be, probably, the second worst love song ever. The worst love song ever is, obviously, We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)

Also, there's this funny part where the author conducts a fake interview of Alec Billy Stephen(?) Baldwin with all of Mr. Baldwin's responses to the questions pulled from some book that he wrote. I laughed, I cried, I finished the chapter and went on to the next.

If there's one thing I would change about the end of it (the part that that Maclaren dude said was so powerful) is that it was way too reasonable. If you're going to spend 200+ pages pointing out the absurdities of something, don't be so reasonable at the end. Don't be all "Oh, but really it's not that different and why can't we all just get along?"

All in all, though, I would recommend it. If you want to read you can just borrow it....from you local library!

I Guess Maybe I'm Not Ready

So the other day I was reading something on the internet and I heard about this book called "Rapture Ready." I thought it sounded interesting so I went to my library's website (sorry, but I'll pay that $18 fine as soon as I can! Honest!) and put a hold on it. Then, the next day I went to pick it up. I was pretty excited because I always like to read an outsider's account of weird and popular subcultures (THEM by Jon Ronson is a great example) and I figured I was far enough removed from church and religiousness in general to find it funny yet non-condescending.

But then we got in the car and my wife read me the blurbs on the back. Two of them were good, but the third was written by.......wait for it........Brian Maclaren.

Just when I thought I'd finally escaped, there's that shiny bald head again. It's like you can't even throw a book without hitting a book either written or blurb by that dude. I know. I tried it when I got home. I hit a book blurbed and written by him.

Anyway, if I get around to reading the book, I'll let you know how it was, so you've got that going for you, which is nice.

Building a Foundation

So a friend of mine recommended some Isaac Asimov books to me and I went to a gigantic used book store (>1,000,000 books) and bought them: the original three Foundation "novels."

Let me say this: what they lack in grandiosity, they make up for with interesting characters. That is, there is absolutely nothing they lack in grandiosity and an absolute dearth of characters that you care about, or are really even interested in.

Maybe I should stop taking recommendations from a guy who doesn't read fiction. I'd tell him what I think about the books, but he's not here. He's in Peru tripping with some shamans. I'm not even making that up.

Seriously.

Sixteen Tons, and What Do You Get?

So, I was reading this book the other day. It was pretty good.

Then, after I finished reading the book, I listened to a new CD. It was pretty good, too. Then I listened to it again and it was a little better.

After that, I went to work. It was pretty good.

After I got home from work, I went to some store or another. I was pretty good. Not as good as NOT going to the store, but better than eating a shit sandwich.

Then I started finishing another book. It was pretty good in a different way from the other book that I finished.

Then I went to work again.

You Are Not My Typewriter

Okay, here's a question for you. Why had I never listened to The Long Winters before? I mean, sheesh, somebody could have told me that I would like them. They are totally right up my insufferable white person, blogging, thinks-he's-too-cool-for-most-things alley! You can even tell all this just by looking at the cover of the album that I stole out of my sister-in-law's former basement bedroom last week. She obviously doesn't need it any more if she didn't take it to San Francisco for college. Probably because, in SF, you're required to act like you're not one of those insufferable people, that you're actually better than them, while actually being one. I can't wait to move there. I would fit right in.

Also, since I've got nothing better to do, here's another list of books that I've read in the last couple weeks.

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Probably one of the most bleak books I've ever read. I think it might be allegorical or something. Even if it's not, it's still a very interesting book. It's one of those post-apocalyptic books that's not really a story about the post-apocalypse era. Nothing is ever explained other than that the Man and Boy have to keep walking and walking because everything has been destroyed. Also it rains a lot. Also, cannibalism.



2. The Devil's Larder by Jim Crace - You wouldn't think that a book of 64 short (some very, very short, as in 2 words short) stories all about food could be very interesting, but it is. To be fair, the stories aren't really about food, per se, but it does play heavily in all the stories. Also, pathos, love, irony, sex, death, poop, poison, comedy and drugs.



3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - Huh, turns out I'm probably a Beta, possibly a Beta-plus. If you haven't read the book, that means that I'm born to be a consumer who doesn't like to fix anything and would rather buy it new and who also dislikes the actual country but loves country sports. That way, I buy lots of sporting equipment to use in the country and thus consume more. Spending is better than mending. Also, it's a very funny book. Also herds of midgets and vomiting.



4. 1984 by Erich Blair aka George Orwell - You want a picture of the future? Picture a boot stomping on a human face forever. F'n Big Brother, man. He sucks. Also, I love Big Brother.



5. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut - Nothing to say, really, but that this is a collection of short stories. Some are good (The Euphio Question), some are really good (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow), and some are not so good (I don't remember what they were called). Also, the Handicapper General shoots people with shotguns.



One more thing, to save you time next time I write a list of books that I've read recently you can check the list below of books in my quick trick book stack to see if you're at all interested. Just so you know.

The Quick Trick Book Stack (to be read in no particular order)



• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath


• The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich


• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn


• Raising Cain by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson


• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson


• The Final Solution by Michael Chabon


• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro


• Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse


• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco


• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad


Any more suggestions? Once winter starts next month, there is literally nothing to do but read.

Phone My Family. Tell Them I'm Lost.

Books I read in the Last Few Weeks: Brief Reviews and Arbitrary Ratings

1. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – Like a bad episode of the Twilight Zone complete with “Where are they now???” epilogue.
   9 Cans of Miller Lite



2. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – What I always thought a read-in-one-day book should be.
   9 out of 10 pieces of eight



3. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut – I, for one, welcome our new machine overlords!
   9 buns out of a baker’s dozen



4. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – See the cat?? See the cradle????
   9 aces



5. Terrorist by John Updike – It’s as if Mr. Updike, the magnificent writer of the Rabbit Angstrom stories, of which I have read none, went to the store for hackneyed characters and bought a few. Here they are:
   
   All the Middle-eastern characters: 5 terrorists, one CIA informer
   
   The one black woman: Whore
   
   The one black man: Pimp
   
   The one Jewish guy: short, depressive
   
   The one artist: flighty, slutty, bad mom
   
   The one Older American Wife: overweight, addicted to soap operas, has a cat
   
   The one Older American Spinster: scarily devoted to her job and boss
   
   9 pieces of sand out of some Alaskan beach.



6. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman – The book I would write if I had the time, imagination, keen wit and flair for the almost truthy that Mr. Hodgson does.
   9 facts in the whole book. Maybe less.



7. The Pesthouse by Jim Crace – Not about post-apocalyptic America, set in post-apocalyptic America.
   9 sentences written in iambic hexameter per page.



8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling – Snape Kills Dumbledore!!!
   9 dead, 25 missing



9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling – Deathly Hallows?? More like Deathly Harvests!
   9 chapters out of 10.

There’s Only One Thing That I Know How To Do Well

For awhile there in the last couple months I was all, like “I’m gonna try to stop being so lazy and actually do something with my 30 minutes to myself that I get every morning instead of just laying there in bed after the alarm goes off dreading the moment at when I really REALLY have to get up in order to make it in to work ‘on time.’” I’m sure you can guess what I decided to do. Yep, that time-honored tradition of pompous, self-important and repetitious people everywhere: read non-fiction books to widen my understanding of the world. Unfortunately for me, a previously dyed-in-the-cotton fiction reader, non-fiction books generally do not offer any world-view-broadening capacity. They do offer gimmicks, though, so at least I had that going for me.

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America by Barbarbarbara Ehrhenrheich

If you can get past the (not) incisive parenthetical “not” in the title and actually get into the book you’ll find, well, you’ll find a book about how hard it was for the author to live like the poor folk she feigns compassion for. I was hoping for an insightful look into the lives of the people out there that work minimum wage jobs and have to somehow string things together. Or not. Instead, this book provides a wonderful portrait of just how annoying it was for the author to have to live in rundown hotel for a few weeks and how much working a minimum wage job sucked for her and how all the poor people she worked with (ancillary characters at best and typically just Socratic foils for the author's self pity) just didn’t get it that if they would just demand better pay, unicorns and rainbows would start shooting out of their asses. Oh yeah, she also loved to take stereotypical pot shots at the people whose houses she cleaned when she worked as a maid because they thought they were better than the people who clean their lovely suburban houses, but really, HA HA, THE JOKES ON THEM because Ms. Ehrenrhehich is so totally their intellectual and moral superior!! Take that!

At first I was frustrated that the book took such a one-dimensional (not to mention demeaning) look at the minimum wage subculture and didn’t delve into what life is actually like for that class or how they got there or what obstacles they face. But then I realized, hell, that kind of stuff doesn’t move copies! Gimmicks move copies (well over a million so far) and that’s what being a “muckraking” writer is all about, isn’t it? Making your readers think you care (and vicariously they themselves (not a real word, but whatever) care) while simultaneously using your story about being a fake poor person and your superficial dealings with actual poor people to make yourself a good chunk of money! Oh Irony of Ironies. But then again, writers got to make a living, too, so I guess I have that going for me.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by The Most Awesomest and Brilliant Young Economist in the History of the World

I should have read this book before Nickel and Dimed because then the gimmickries of the first book wouldn’t have bothered me as much since I wouldn’t have expected anything deep or incredibly insightful. While well-written and interesting, Freakonomics explores the hidden side of things if your idea of “the hidden side” is “around the corner.” If you were thinking “buried under 50 ft of molten lava hundreds of miles off the coast of Madagascar,” sorry, but nothing is that hidden. For instance, did you know that drug-dealing organizations funnel almost all the money to the top and that the street soldiers, the ones that deal directly with the customers, hardly get paid anything? Shocking, I know. Dealing drugs is NOT the socialistic, money-sharing utopia we all thought it was! The other annoying thing about the book, for a statistically minded person such as myself, was that, as is typical of mass-marketed stuff in general, statistics were used extensively without any discussion of their significance or applicability. I trust the economists who wrote the book understand and are correctly using statistics, but man, I wish they would have used their position to encourage a more stringent statistical methodology in published materials. But still, it was a fun, gimmicky book to read so I guess I have that going for me.


Silent Spring by Rachael Carson

This book is so important that I learned about it in one or maybe two of the countless classes I had on American History in my formative public school years. Blah blah blah, pumping noxious, carcinogenic chemicals into our water and food isn’t good for us. The crazy thing about this is that 40 years ago, when the book was written, a lot of people DIDN’T know that all these amazing new chemicals could be dangerous. Now that this danger is common knowledge, the book loses some of its “I DON”T BELIEVE IT!!!!” punch. But hey, Al Gore like it, so I guess I’ve got that going for me.


The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson

Gimmick: Mankind has systematically, throughout history destroyed all life on earth up to and including humankind and a huge die-off of 80% of the world’s population is needed to return the Earth to its natural condition. L

But since the US is such a rich and powerful country, you and I probably will be among the surviving 20%, so I guess I’ve got that going for me! J

P.S. the book doesn’t say that last bit.


The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by Doomy McDoomerson Kunstler

If you live in the suburbs and drive to work every day and go shopping at Target at least once a week (read: me), this guy hates you. He thinks you are blithely driving the world off a cliff and if you don’t know how to brew your own beer, make your own shoes and grow your own vegetables (I am 1 for 3 on these so far, but that’s another post) you are probably going to die or have to fight tooth-and-nail for you life in the near future. Peak oil, blah blah blah, we’re all going to die, the world is going to hell in a hand basket. So what? I know how to ride my own bicycle (if I actually owned one that is), so I guess I’ve got that going for me.


Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Boy, what I wouldn’t give for a gimmick. For all my bloviating about how other lame non-fiction books don’t give you a deep enough view of things, I sure could have used a shallow view here. I’m not even half way through it yet. I can tell because I haven’t got to the pages with the pictures on them yet. If you ever wanted to learn about the medieval Norse society on Greenland, this book is for you. If not, well, it might still be for you but you might want to skip a few chapters. I’m pretty sure he’s going to start comparing these old collapsed societies with our modern globalized world pretty soon, but I’ll let you know when I get to that part. Check back in, say, October. He also writes about the expansion and inevitable collapse of the “Anasazi” in the Chaco Canyon area to which I have been, so I guess I’ve got that going for me.

LIST TUESDAY! DETROIT ROCK CITY!!!

So, for certain reasons, I visited the lovely city of Detroit yesterday (City Motto: Now only the SECOND most dangerous city in the country!). Basically, the only time I listen to the radio is when I go to Detroit and rent a car and forget to bring any CDs or remember to bring CDs but the car is only equipped with a tape player. Seriously. This is what happened yesterday. It's like they built a time machine to bring a car from 1997 to the present just to rent it out and annoy me. Stupid Ford. Anyway, I was listening to 89X, "Detroit/Windsor's only New Rock Alternative!" By the way, Windsor is in Canada. I think maybe Detroit is too. I'm not sure. But that is beside the point. What is so close to the point that it can actually be proven to be the point through simple mathematical analysis is this: a list of songs I heard on the radio.

SONGS I HEARD ON 89X DETROIT'S ONLY NEW ROCK ALTERNATIVE

1. Some song by My Chemical Romance: It starts out with some almost springsteenian lyrics about going to see a marching band with your dad with a nice, insistent drum cadence and builds up to an almost epic sound. All in the first 30 seconds. Then it devolves into your basic emo, pop-goth crap completely indistinguishable from approximately 50% of the songs I heard yesterday. Well, not completely indistinguishable. There was this one part with some awesome squealing guitars that sound almost like Poison or something.


2. Candlebox - Does it really matter what song? Well, okay it was their one hit from I think 1993. Confession time: This is almost of Postsecret caliber - I once voluntarily attended a Candlebox concert in the Yakima SunDome. Wow, it feels good to have that off my chest.


3. Another song by My Chemical Romance. Or maybe Ashes of Soma. Or maybe the Used. Or maybe Chevelle. I know I heard songs by all of those guys because the DJ told me so. I just can't tell the difference. Really, I can't. I must be getting old.


4. That one Green Day song that rips off the rhythm and chord progression from Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4." Another song from 1994! I felt like I was back in middle school playing hackey sack! By the way, compared to the the pop-punk/goth/whatevs stuff this song is not bad. It's almost dirgey and not at all emo. If you don't know what "emo" means, it means whining about how sucky life is and how some girl betrayed you and maybe you should go cut her, or maybe yourself. Green Day on the other hand, whom I don't really like but appear to have real potential to be a three decade band, got big by writing about being bored and stoned and lazy without being all depressive like those grunge %*#$ers. That's a much better reflection of the zeitgeist of the younger generations because it will last. Being a whiny self-obsessed, mopey teenager only lasts a few years. Being lazy lasts forever.


5. Some song about a ghost. Maybe by Sleater-Kinney. It was actually really good. If you know what I'm talking about, please tell me what it is.


6. Nickelback. Hey, they're Canadian too! That qualifies as a rock "alternative," right?


7. Another song by My Chemical Romance


8. Audioslave? Oh yeah! The one's with the Soundgarden guy! Man, remember Soundgarden? They were all "black hole sun, don't you come" and then that chick's face was melting off! Sweet!"


9. The Toadies song about asking someone if they want to die or something. It still kicks butt. Just like 7Mary3. Chugging, slow guitar riffs are to a Nokia-brand cell phone what industrial staplers are to orange elm leaves. Yeah.


10. Three Days Grace? Is that a band?


11. Snow Patrol. Or should I call them......SLOW Patrol? HA HA HA HA HA! Because of their slow tempos? Get it? Get it? Thank you, I'll be here all week!


12. Another song by My Chemical Romance


13. An ad for a concert by My Chemical Romance

Oh yeah, I also read a book yesterday in airports and airplanes: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I think this was the fourth time I have read it. It's only 139 pages long. But it is really good. It has now officially entered my top five books ever. The list now looks like this....

A TON OF BRICKS'S TOP FIVE BOOKS EVER

1. Catch-22


2. One Hundred Years of Solitude


3. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich


4. Lonesome Dove


5. Any book by Thomas Pynchon, none of which I have read, but if someone asks, will claim to have read and really really like.

Beating a Dead House

So we just finished this book. It was pretty good. We bought it in the Seattle airport on Tuesday morning. The airport is where we like to buy all our books about airplanes crashing. It just fits. Anyway, the book was called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Here is a review for you. It even has a bow on it and some expensive wrapping paper.

It is a good book.

Hm, that's too short...Shall we get all loquacious and/or pretentious? Okay.

First, let us say that there are some very disturbing parallels, well, maybe parallels is to generous a word, more like identicals between the protaganist in EL&IC and the narrator of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum: both are named Oskar (Schell and Matzerath respectively). Both are relatively strange children who obsessively play percussion instruments among many other idiosyncracies. Maybe it's just a tribute to Grass, I don't know. Anyway, this review is boring. Long story short, the book uses all the classic modernist cliches, time jumps/mixed-up chronology, multiple narratory viewpoints, intentional misspelings, etc. Mr. Foer even throws in diagrams and pictures a la James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake (which, by the way is not a real book. It looks like a book but no one in recorded history has ever been able to finish it. Anyone that tells you that they read the whole thing is a liar, even your English professors. They are so just pretending). He uses these affectations to tell an interesting and well imagined story about a boy whose father was killed in 9/11. He also throws in a Vonnegutian (Vonnegut-esque? Vonnegutious? Vonnegut-like?) sequence about the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Blah blah blah we couldn't put it down, so now we're finished with it. Hm? Not enough literary references? Okay, well we suppose you could also compare it to the recent novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon in that both are written from the perspective of a precocious/disturbed child on a quest and are intentionally disorienting, probably as a reflection of the ennui/fear/overinformed/cynical/confused zeitgeist of our time. Whatever that means. We just made it up right now. Someone put us on the back of a book cover. We want to be blurbed.

Oh yeah, we also bought some CDs.

Wolfmother - Wolfmother: It sounds like Black Sabbath, the Doors, The Who, AC/DC, and the Clash went on a drunken bender and fell down six flights of stairs only to land one right on top of the other in a giant ice-cube tray and then got doused with 56 gallons of putrid, three-week old bath water. So yeah, it rules.

The French Kicks - One Time Bells: Sound like the Strokes. But the CD was only $1.99 in the used bin, so....

Van Morrison - Moondance: Into the Mystic is perhaps the best single-take song ever recorded. Perhaps.

Matador Records Thingy: Also from the used bin. It is a veritable cornucopia Jack-o-lantern (it's still October) of "popular" indie bands like Cat Power, the New Pornographers, Belle & Sebastian etc. It's not bad. We're listening to it right now infact. Our favorite is Brightblack Morning Light.


We are going to Chicago for three days next week. Look for pictures of birds. And snow.