I would agree with you Ben on both counts regarding Vowell and NPR. However, the alternatives for news radio are non-existant. Since I can't read The New York Times driving to work, and "entertainment" radio is terrible, I gotta settle for this.

I thought I'd try the Vowell book because it sounded interesting and I wanted something different to read. I was surprised that I enjoyed the book, but I didn't find it a laugh-riot, or even that insightful. It had good information and the presentation was organized and carefully considered.

The above criticism sounds a lot like a critique of a speech given in a high school speech class, which is sort of how I felt about the whole thing. The smartest girl in the class gives the best speech. She's intelligent, but not experienced, and it shows. Maybe when she's turned 50 or 60 I'll be able to read something else of hers.

One of the things that really annoys me about books like Assasination Vacation and that's the lack of a solid bibliography. She presents some interesting information, particularly with regard to the guilded age and Garfield. I would have enjoyed reading up on some of that, but she doesn't site a reference, and there isn't a bibliography.

Just finished reading this all the way through...for the third time ever! What a great show. Goddamn.

Not sure how I fell about it yet.

I'm curious about it. Please tell me.

I found these statistics interesting. I thought I'd share them with some people who, like me, might ask, "who the hell are these people???"



Now rereading:


What's your favorite Mr. Show Factoid from the book? I used to have this book, but now I don't and I never got a chance to read it. (Don't ask)

about to start "Timbuktu" by paul aster

I love that book. Auster is one of my favs.

That's really interesting!



It's been a while since I read that -- I am curious to know what you think of it.

That was a great book. One of Vonnegut's more "serious" novels.

Well? What's the deal?

About half way through. Very good. Learning a lot. Will report back more later. Most fascinating is Mencken's lifelong (well, technically I'm not to the end yet) admiration for the concept of the German master race. Hardly what he's thought of for today. The biographer, a journalist and critic like Mencken, is gutting his subject's "superficial" reading of Nietzsche in the most elegant manner imaginable. Dreiser is so much more interesting when you understand why Mencken praised him so much (all politics).

I always thought Mencken's racism is pretty well documented today. His ear for a turn of the phrase was outstanding though....



An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.


Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Every normal man must be tempted at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats

Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at a homely girl.

Not so much his ugly remarks (nasty things about jews and blacks) so much as his adoration for the idea of the ideal state as an aristocracy of german ubermen. I don't think that political view is well known. The nasty stuff about jews, sure. Apparently he censored himself severely during both world wars in an effort to avoid attack by the public and government. Because he managed to avoid being denounced, I don't think that part of his personality has affected his larger reputation.

I've been brushing up on a few of the classics. Tony, you're right--Moby Dick was pretty funny after all.

Just started

just picked this up



I'm inspired to read this after listening to Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
Original Soundtrack

I have no idea what it's about but I'm in the need to read something lyrical and if it's half as good as his songs are I will be pleased.

BTW, how come I haven't heard anything about that film coming out until I saw the live soundtrack at the store yesterday?

Am I slipping or is the board slipping?


edit: written in the style of Henry Millers Tropics which is a style that always makes me want to sit down and write some scattershot stream of consiousness novel and travel the world, btw that Cohen live recording guest soundtrack is pretty great, the Wainwright's really nail it.

By the author of "Infinite Jest"
Entertaining essays about everything from playing tennis in the midwest, to David Lynch, to a trip on a vacation cruise line.

^Read this a few summers back. Interesting, but Wallace's prose is so dense that I have a hard time digesting it.

just finished this Def Jam Inc., which was a history of Def Jam.

For some reason i have been on a real hip-hop reading kick, are their any "must read" books about hip hop?

"It's people like this that make me realize how little I've done with my life. It is a sobering thought to realize that when he was my age, Mozart had been dead for two years." - Tom Leher

On Deck:

Haven't started this one yet.

Jeff Chang's "Can't Stop Won't Stop"
Whatever the most recent incarnation of "Rap Attack" is (i think its "rap attack #3")

And for an incredible story,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/140009523...glance&n=283155

Not as cheesy as the title suggests, its talking about NY's 80s drug kingpins that are always referenced in 90s NY rap. (i.e. "supreme team a jamaica queens thing" from Nas's "Memory Lane")

I just finished reading this book for the third time:

it's frickin great...

Ronin Ro's "Have Gun Will Travel" is a great account of Death Row Records and Suge Knight.

History never repeats, never repeats... Oh hell, I guess it does.

Reagan = W

This is kind of crap. I was hoping for it to be a nice follow up to the Mencken book.

picked this up today. read abridged parts of it in jr. high, and they still stuck with me to this
day. I figure I owe it to Homer to revisit it in it's entirety.


it's funny how the subtext of the title is "knut hamsun's greatest novel" couldn't have been his idea.
not as good as Hunger, but better than Mysteries.

Forget that Royko book.

i'm just over 1/2 way through this one. while the characters and voices are fascinating, there's no apparent direction the story is going and I really don't care about any of them. It's definitely not a book i'm making time to read.

next up:

This one had been on my list for a long time. I've been doing a little climbing since I've been out West, so I bumped it to the front. Harrowing, intense shit. I don't know what urge centers in my brain the book acted on. It should be a cautionary tale, but I'm somehow more fascinated and intrigued by the mountain than fearful of it.

Cool. Doing that could prepare you for Joyce's Ulysses, if you are inclined later and if you don't mind the soemwhat minor liberties he takes with the myth's chronology and characterizations.

The Rape of the A*PE* (The American Puritan Ethic) by Allan Sherman.

Most folks know him as the "Hello Muddah Hello Fuddah!" singer. In 1973, he set out to write a book to ask why America's so-called "morals" went down the tubes. Published by Playboy Press (naturally).

A great, funny book...Mark Twain, PJ O'Rourke levels of humor and thought here...read amazon.com reviews for more. You know a book is great when one page features the word "fuck" typed in a paragraph at least 50 times.

If you find this out of print book somewhere, snatch it...collectors are paying upwards of 300 bucks for it. I was lucky to find a paperback at the Newberry Lbrary book sale for 50 cents.

Yeah, I just passed the halfway mark, but I know what you mean. I just read the scene where Irene meets the old man for the first time. That scene has me hooked. Yeah, not much of a story so far, but after reading up to now I say to myself, "Man, these people are assholes"--which I think is the author's intent. Hopefully it will pay off.

I read this in high school and don't remember a lot about it, other than the idea that "when a true genius arrives in the world, you can be assured that there will be a confederacy of dunces to greet and surround him when he arrives." Or something like that.

Totally agree...it made me want to attempt a climb for whatever insane reason.

Abandoning this halfway through. It's been promoted as an unbiased look at the myths and the facts about cosmology and evolution, and what biology, geology and physics really tell us about the beginnings of the world and the universe. The premise is intriguing: an award-winning journalist interviews experts in a variety of scientific fields to get their take on some big questions. Does God exist? Did God create the universe? Is God still alive? And so on.

However, every scientist he interviews is pro-intelligent design and a born-again Christian. The back-and-forth dialog with some of these characters gets pretty irritating after a while, and most of the book is spent with Strobel lobbing up one evolutionary or naturalistic scientific theory after another (few of which I was even familiar with to begin with) for the "experts" to knock out of the park. Maybe in the second half of the book there's actually some pro-Creation evidence that gets introduced. I don't know. Anyway, this is pretty much just ID propaganda but I guess I was kidding myself if I really thought it was going to be a balanced study that would give both sides a chance to present their case. The guy was a pastor at Willow Creek Church, after all.

I beat his son in a pool tournament in college. He was an RA and thought he was hot shit. BMOC.

A book called 'The Case for the Creator' bills itself as unbiased?

I just read some of the reviews on Amazon. "A Home Run Has Been Hit" one writer titled his 4-Star review. My question is this: Wouldn't a 4-Star review be more of a triple than a home run? Unless, of course, the 5-Star review would be a grand slam. But what is a grand slam, though, but a homer with 3 additional RBIs? RBIs shouldn't be factored into it. A 5-Star review should be a home run; the 4 a triple; the 3 a double; the 2 a single; and the 1-Star review might be a batter who reaches first on a dropped third strike or, at the most, a base on balls.

Anyway, the Publishers Weekly review said Strobel was a big hit among evangelicals.

Insofar as it deals with matters of science and not other subjective matters, sure.

The thing I hate (well, one of many) about allegedly scientific "proof" of intelligent design is that much of the argument rests on "if we can disprove anything about evolution, then it must be intelligent design." Disproving one does not equate with proving the other.

Lately, fundamentalist types just annoy and piss me off. Reason #2,110 to not ever vote Republican.

Replying to one's own postings is sad, but I am a lazy bastard.

Anyway, the book is really dense and overburndened with details, but it's good. Julia attacked everything in her life with gusto and made up for her lack of experience and natural talent with hard work, organization, and good humor. I found it interesting from a couple of angles-- Julia's life (working as an OSS Secretary in India and China during WWII, and then recasting herself as a person who just wanted to learn how to cook well [she didn't really set out to become a chef]), and all of the knock-on effects of that track.

She and her collaborators published Mastering The Art Of French Cooking because they thought there was a market for it in America, but also because they felt that the cusine itself was disappearing from France-- techniques and knowledge were disappearing as France's great chefs were dying. French cooking wasn't standardized, really, and it certainly didn't have an American equivalent. It took years of recipie testing to get the dishes to work with American ingredients that could be found at the A&P. So, when the first volume was published, it really pulled the shroud of the mystery (and intimidation) of French cooking. What's more, it showed that you could produce an outstanding meal with just a bit more effort than you would if you "assembled" pieces from the freezer and a couple of cans.

Similarly, she became The French Chef because she was in the right place at the right time and had the right personality to carry it through on and off screen. And there was a pragmatic aspect-- the programs were a good way to promote her books. I watched her programs when I was a kid; she was so comic, even if I didn't really understand what the deal was, she was fun to watch.

If the book has a real problem, it lumbers. It's got too many details of who, what, where, when-- there are a lot of foodie world names listed, but I have no idea who they are or were. There is a lot of detail about where and when she and her husband travelled, and a lot of it doesn't really add to the overall narrative.

I actually meant to ask you about this one, but got sidetracked and forgot. Thanks for the info.

Have you read this:



Very entertaining read.

Not yet-- I remember you mentioning this one, and I meant to ask how it was. If it's at the liberry I will be getting it (after I finish my current crop o' books).

It's good. He comes across as being very personable and pretty humble. He recognizes that while he is a very talented dude, that he also was very fortunate in a lot of instances, and just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and seems to be genuinely greatful for the breaks and opportunities he's had.

If you are a fan of any of his shows or books, I'd check it out. It's a very quick, light read, and a lot of fun.

It's odd that you have this impression given the details that you're describing about it.
My wife is quite the foodie (MFK Fisher being a fav too) and she loved this book.
Can't say I would be as intrigued to read it myself.

Speaking of Pepin, the last show Childs did with Pepin was sort of intriguing because they had very different ways of preparing things when it came to recipes and they really did get along in this strange sort of fashion even though they were clearly at odds on almost every single episode.

Dude, my wife got me the DVD collection for X-Mas, and it is so great. It's really a joy to watch these shows: They are entertaining, they are informative, and they don't talk down to you or yell at the camera. Great stuff.