He's very old and a lifetime smoker. It's to be expected.
I'm just glad that he hasn't lost his attitude and sharp wit.

i'm reading the book about the whaleship essex.

Beowulf for my brit lit class. What a worthless, boring book.

One bright spot I noticed though. Beowulf participated in a swimming contest while wearing his armor and carrying a sword so he could slay any whales he might run into

I'm done with it! Thank you jesus!

Sounds like a gay metaphor to me.

I saved that bastard's life once and he still hasn't dedicated a book to me. Ingrate.

haunted by palahniuk. only one I never read by him, and its great so far.

Details?

we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - philip gourevitch

i'm only two chapters into this, but it is a very heavy, very sad account of the rwandan genocide. excellent writing.

i'm reading the new suskind book, 'the one percent doctrine'. i'll report back when i'm done.

ooh, can I borrow that when you're done? It sounds like a good read.

absolutely. one of my coworkers has it reserved, but i'll give it to you when she's done.

Distant early warnings from lit MBs:

according to reliable sources on the Pynchon List, Pynchon's next
novel is a large affair set at the Chicago Fair at the turn of the century,
and will be published December 5.

Thought y'all might be interested to know - unless you know already -
> that Mark Z. Danielewski is having a new novel out in September 2006.
> It's called "Only Revolutions" and is published by Random House.

I was looking at a copy of this my friend has the other day. I've read Ficciones, which is a much smaller book of selected stories. "The South" is great, I haven't read most of the other stories in a long time.

Never read any Bradbury, but a friend wrote the biography.

And no... I'm not all up on Ayn Rand and objectivism. I work in architecture and I last read this in high school, curious to see how it holds up now.

My gf loves this author.

*waits for words of warning*

To quote Dan Savage, DTMFA.

Wow, what a mess this book is. Picked it up because she's been compared to Donald Miller so much (and vice versa) and I enjoyed the books I read from him. But this is a lot less focused. Just a lot of rants from a menopausal leftist. Not as funny or clever as I hoped it would be. You probably have to be a mom to get into this because I'm really not digging these anecdotes about her son or her thoughts on parenthood at all. I mean, it's insightful, but not applicable to me at all.

Perhaps her rants about Bush were a little more poignant whenever this was first published, but appearing now in the paperback edition in the middle of 2006, they're kind of toothless and depressing. There was a time that I would have ate this up and begged for more, but now I think I'm starting to see how a lot of people (the Ben Welshes of the country?) feel about Bush-bashers. True, the shortcomings and hypocrisy of the current administration are bad enough to still be able to be contained and dismantled by such simple rhetoric. But once again, that doesn't seem to have changed anyone's mind on the other side. In spite of the great points she makes, Evangelicals probably hate this book and have probably branded her a heretic and a common hippie.

A few chapters are good but overall this is a bit overrated. Notable for being the first Christian book I've read where the author unapologetically drops f-bombs, but sadly that's not enough to bare recommendation.

I probably don't want to know what that stands for, do I?

dump the motherfucker already

(making it up but i'm sure the first word is 'dump')

oh shit

Undo is dating an Ayn Rand acolyte? Oh that's juicy. Is it a youthful V-for-Vendetta, admiration of authentic principle sort of thing? Or like a hardcore individualist WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL sort of thing?

She liked the movie but wasn't nuts about it or anything. I was probably more into it than she was, heh.

I think she's more intrigued by Rand's ideas than an actual student of them. She's a strict Libertarian too. But she never pushes any of this on me or gets upset that I don't agree with her about it. Naturally, she voted for Badnarik. Since I haven't delved too deep into objectivism myself (I'm preferring to keep it at arms length and let it remain a mystery to me - couples can benefit from such disagreements and mysteries, I feel, so long as they don't become irreconcilable) I can't answer these questions of "authentic principle" or anything. Time to revisit Wikipedia, I guess.

My personal feelings about it? I'll just quote something my mom said a year ago when I was telling her about her: "She's not a Republican, is she? Oh, good."

she's a republican who wants to do drugs.

obligatory "she-could-be-president" joke to thread.

so anyway, i'm about half-way through (only had a chance to read in bits and pieces since last week) and, surprisesurprise, it paints a highly disturbing portrait of decision-making at the white house. whereas woodward is king of the anecdote but relatively unconcerned with process, suskind sees the decision-making apparatus as THE telltale. this is my sixth or seventh book chronicling the bush presidency or initiatives championed by his administration (i.e., Iraq as in 'The Assassin's Gate'). and with the exception of the woodward books--which are largely uncritical narratives of the who, what, and when rather than the all-important why--all have depicted bush as incurious and ignorant to a frightening degree. it's a case where the caricature does, in some respects, capture the subject. it's impossible not to be struck at very least by the guy's appalling lack of management skill -- i literally don't think he knows what he's doing.

with respect to cheney and his portrayal, it's pretty chilling stuff. one representative example is the saudi prince abdullah's post-9/11 visit to the ranch in Texas. this was supposed to be a showdown -- the saudis venting about W's hands-off policy towards the israelis and palestinians as well as assorted other grievances. what happened? it never escalated since W basically sat there and listened impassively, once in a while nodding in assent or acknowledgement. he interrupted abdullah's presentation to invite him to take a ride w/him in his pickup truck around the 1600-acre ranch. when they returned, abdullah once again pressed the saudi demands, meeting with little resistance but no committment from W. thus, the saudis left w/o anything to show for their efforts. why did W act this way? turns out that the saudi complaints/demands--which they've furnished to the white house in advance--never found their way to W. rather, cheney intercepted them. as such, W had no clue going into the meeting why the saudis were there.

other interesting asides --

- numerous sources say that the relationship between W and his dad is frosty, not warm as popularly portrayed.
- the decision to torture was basically tenet's. the white house legal justification--via gonzalez and john yoo--merely coalesced around what was already agreed upon, codifying it.
- the book alleges that the white house intentionally over-stated zubaydah's (sp?) importance to al queda. he was one of their first signficant catches and they sought to wring him for all that he was worth (literally...the guy got waterboarded, beaten, the royal treatment). turns out that, whoops!, the guy was mentally ill, authoring entries in a self-kept diary in three distinct personas. he reportedly fed the CIA a bunch of faulty 'leads' (e.g., Queda targeting supermarkets, Queda targeting malls, Queda targeting banks, Queda targeting nuclear facilities, etc.), which in turn ended up being fodder for administration talking points and worry-mongering. despite early and abundant evidence that he knew little and was unreliable, the white house played up his capture--and procured 'intelligence'--to the hilt on a variety of occassions.
- on numerous occassions, W's micro-management of intel or enforcement squandered resources on pusuit of dead-ends and, it's implied in a least one case (lackawanna six) that his impatience served to jeopardize an active intelligence-gathering operation.
- at one point, the CIA thought that they'd gotten Zawahri. in fact, they even exhumed a body thought to be his and sent his head in a box back to washington for dna testing. however, to dna test it, they needed a biological sample to confirm his identity. so, they called the Egyptian intelligence, who were holding Zawahri's brother (who was presumably rendered there...nice). to paraphrase, the Egyptian intelligence official, when asked if they could send something back which would help them to DNA test said 'sure ,we'll just cut off his arm and send it to you' to which the mortified FBI agent said something like 'no...for god's sake...all we need is a vial of blood'.

Crease, thanks for the book report. Here's a Suskind chat from Washington Post Bookworld....and later...And, to follow crease's line

From Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (p.62):

The last excerpt you highlight distills it nicely. It really is frightening when you combine unsound analysis with the presidential prerogative--deference is presumed in many affairs of state, especially foreign policy.

Man, though, Suskind really can lose himself in bureaucratic-speak, can't he? 'Tactical forcefulness'...WTF?

Re-reading this.

gotta agree with that. it's a sure sign of bootstraps for everyone but the dtmfa.

First book of his I've picked up in a decade. Great stuff so far.

How is it?

Yeah, I really loved this book. I was afraid to post about it because i thought most people here would turn up their noses at coupland. he's really a great writer, though. better than ellis, that's for sure.

life after god, generation x, shampoo planet, microserfs, all good books.

Great little biography of Keaton's life and how his films reflected his own inner demons and problems. It's not a sensationalist biography (Keaton Died in 1967, and hadn't been a star since the mid 1930's; it's hard to be sensational with that kind of history), but it's well-written and researched, and great if you've seen a couple of the movies but don't know much about the guy.


Really enjoyed this, even though some of the references get a bit too clever-clever.

I love it so far. I never read microserfs, but I worked at a bookstore at the time, and I've got a 1st pressing copy of Generation X. Got an Advance of Shampoo Planet, and got em both signed. Got a big publicity poster for shampoo planet signed also. Then, I really didn't like Life After God, and I dropped him like a bad habit.

On the other hand I read THREE Bret Easton Ellis books, (which I loved), before not picking up one of his books for a decade. I haven't read anything since American Psycho.

Am I the only person who holds some indefensible, unreasoning dislike for Sarah Vowell's work? She seems smart, gifted at writing, and a nice enough person, but I amreally really really turned off by everything I read or hear. I can't put my finger on it. But I do get this way about NPR.

You do seem to fucking hate them, and anyone else that doesn't play devil's advocate or give the right its due.

Interesting you'd put it that way. If you asked me directly, I probably would never give that reason, so it's enlightening to hear your take.

What I most dislike about NPR is its cushiness. I feel like I'm more likely to hear natural sound from baying goats in North Africa or a lame self-indulgent "essay" about somebody's trouble purchasing soy milk than any new, enriching information. I think their best stuff rarely tastes more filling than after-dinner mint, which is what I like to compare most of its content with whenever the subject comes up. Even the Iraq stories usually start with some lame lead like "Tal Afar is a gray, dust-swept town of XX,XXX thousand people..." And then the information is from yesterday's New York Times anyway.

Be glad we're not in the same room. You'd have to hear my Ira Glass impersonation.

I know a guy whose favorite book is Kafka On The Shore. Is it good or something?

I thought it was fantastic.

I should've mentioned, this book has probably the best ending of anything I've ever read.

Heh, no I bet I'd like that actually.

I often enjoy their descriptive reporting but I guess that if you want to get to the story and don't want any flowery details, then the form that their stories tend to follow would probably be agonizing to sit through. I still admire their reporting for the different perspectives it brings (specifically and currently speaking, interviews with troops and Iraqi civilians), but that's another topic for another thread, probably.

Now Reading: 20 pages.

5 Things I Pulled Out Of My Ass: 174 pages.

i'm actually now reading page 137 of "5 Things I Think". There's some GREAT exchanges there. You would enjoy the give & take.