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This week’s Musing posits several questions so they’re presented separately.
What are you reading right now?
I’m just finishing Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith.
Why are you reading what you’re reading? Pleasure? For review? Something else?
I’m reading it for pleasure because it made the Man Booker Prize longlist, it’s set in Stalinist Russia and seems to have garnered fairly good reviews.
What did you recently finish reading?
The book just prior was Marty Beckerman’s Dumbocracy, the review of which was posted Sunday on Blogcritics and here today.
What do you think you’ll be reading next?
Either The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War by Asne Seierstad or The Forever War by Dexter Filkins. I picked up both at the library late last week and which I read will depend on which “feels right” at the time I pick them up. (As an aside, Joe Haldeman evidently is not happy that Filkins’ book carries the same name as Haldeman’s novel, which won the Hugo Award in 1976 and was scheduled for a new reissue early next year.)
What was the best book you read this month? Why?
Marilynne Robinson’s Home. Her prose style and storytelling abilities are simply superb.
What was the worst book you read this month? Why?
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead by David Shields. It seemed Shields couldn’t decide if the book should be be a collection of facts and figures, a look at aging ala Mary Roach or a memoir. Thus, it came off as muddled and directionless and I gave up about one-third of the way in, something I rarely do.
The past was a very fine thing, in its place.
Marilynne Robinson, Home
If the title of Marty Beckerman’s latest book doesn’t clue you in on where he’s coming from, he erases any doubt with the first sentence. “Opinions are like genitals: if you force others to swallow yours, something is seriously wrong with you.”
Since Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and Other American Idiots lays out plenty of opinions, Beckerman may well be saying there’s also something seriously wrong with him. To describe the book as snarky would be an understatement. A self-described “professional asshole,” Beckerman’s tone brings to mind more war-oriented phrases, like search and destroy or scorched earth policy. All this, of course, with a heavy dose of sardonic humor.
Beckerman’s attack isn’t on the mainstream. The people and organizations most often in his sights are the true believers, the hard core on both the left and right, the extremists. In search and destroy mode, Dumbocracy explores how dyed-in-the-wool believers see only black and white and then pinpoints facts and statistics showing the fallacies and dangers of many absolutist positions. Beckerman’s detailed marshaling of facts — the book contains more than 800 endnotes documenting the sources of his factual statements — helps justify his tone.
The 25-year-old Beckerman is an equal opportunity insurrectionist, blasting away at both left and right. For example, President Bush is invariably called “King Retard” while former President Clinton is “President Blow Job.” And Beckerman is apparently as audacious in person. When he overhears former Education Secretary William Bennett, who lost millions gambling in Las Vegas, say he is rooting for a particular college basketball team in an upcoming game, Beckerman asks Bennett if he wants to bet on it. That’s just the tip of his scorched earth approach, which permeates both his empirical and satirical attacks.
Beckerman’s point is that following true believers can lead to truly inane and asinine positions and laws, moving us from a democracy into the titular dumbocracy. He contends we are better off finding and following a rational middle ground and that while the vocal extreme tends to dominate political discourse, they do not represent what most of us think and believe.
Just as war is graphically brutal, some may take offense at some of Beckerman’s humor. It is often explicit and can border on raunchy. At times it moves the book from satirical to bawdy, perhaps undercutting the points he’s making. Yet it is part and parcel of the overall tone and the book’s take on the U.S. becoming “Prohibition Nation.”
Dumbocracy also suffers from a feeling that the three sections into which it is divided are parts of three different books (although the acknowledgments suggest why). The first section is aimed at outlining and attacking the unreasonableness of those who seem to see the world and current political hot buttons in black and white terms. The second examines what Beckerman considers the puritanism of American culture. In assessing national debates on pornography, marijuana, alcohol, cigarettes and fast food, Dumbocracy displays a palpable Libertarian bent. Finally, although the title refers to “American Idiots,” the third section is largely devoted to Beckerman’s travels in Israel during and after a July 2007 “Global Summit for Young Jewish Innovators.” In fact, throughout the book Beckerman cites laws and events in other countries to illustrate how extremist positions impact reason.
Dumbocracy may not place Beckerman in the upper tier of today’s political satirists but he certainly is another trenchant voice for the politically disaffected.
I’m proud that I don’t give a shit about politics, because people who do give a shit cause ninety-nine percent of the world’s problems.
Marty Beckerman, Dumbocracy
Bulletin Board
Some artists go to Wal-Mart. Bob Dylan goes to NPR. Beginning at midnight Monday, NPR will be streaming the entirety of Dylan’s forthcoming Tell Tale Signs. The two-disc set is the eighth volume of Dylan’s bootleg series and will be officially released Oct. 7.
Today is Museum Day, which means that if you have a card you can download here, you get free admission to a variety of museums around the country, including several in South Dakota.
Congrats to Denise Ross, whose Unplanned Democracy won the Best Documentary jury prize at the South Dakota Film Festival last weekend.
Are book festivals the new harvest festival? Last weekend was the (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest, this weekend is the South Dakota Festival of Books and the Twin Cities Book Festival is Oct. 11.
Speaking of book festivals, the National Book Festival is underway today on the National Mall in Washington. Maybe that explains why Salman Rushdie and Richard Price aren’t at the South Dakota festival.
Linkage
An (unfortunately) highly accurate flowchart of America’s immigration process.
Now this could change my position on oil drilling.
My kind of obituary. (HT)
Is today’s SF guilty of “a failure of imagination“? Responses here and here.
The National Book Foundation has announced its “5 Under 35” fiction selections. I’ve only read one of the books and, while a decent read, I didn’t find it particularly noteworthy.
So, is it a burden or a joy when the headline in a newspaper article describes you as the “world’s best writer of prose“?
The Bookstove picks Five Great Books for the “C” Student (which is about where my attitude put me in high school).
Here’s a bank we should all be interested in helping. (HT)
Random observations
Note to City: It takes more than painting a symbol of a bicycle and an arrow in white on downtown streets to create a bike lane. A bike lane is, at least according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, a part of a road “designated by striping, signing and pavement markings for the preferential or exclusive use of bicyclists.” One other technicality. All the markings I’ve seen are in the left hand lanes of one-way streets. You might want to know that state law requires bicyclists “ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway.” Just saying.
Well the dawn cracked hard just like a bull whip
Cause it wasn’t takin’ no lip from the night before
“Spare Parts I,’ Tom Waits, Nighthawks at the Diner
Tomorrow marks the beginning of this year’s Banned Books Week, which runs through October 4. According to the American Library Association, more than 400 books were challenged last year.
In honor of Banned Books Week, here’s the 10 most challenged titles last year and the reasons why. It is plainly an appropriate time to familiarize yourself one or more of these works, whether for the first time or once again.
- And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. This illustrated children’s book is based on a true story of two male penguins who adopted an abandoned egg at New York City’s Central Park in the late 1990s. Reasons given for its challenge include anti-ethnic, sexism, homosexuality, anti-family, religious viewpoint and unsuited to the age group.
- The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. The tale of a high school freshman who challenges a secret society at his all-male boarding school is claimed to be sexually explicit and contain offensive language (such a broad, all-encompassing term) and violence.
- Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes. Claims of being sexually explicit and containing offensive language have prompted the challenges to this coming of age story of a 12-year-old girl that focuses on a journal entry of a classmate killed in a car accident.
- The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. This fantasy novel is claimed to be anti-Catholic. (You may recall the Vatican condemned and a U.S.-based Catholic organization called for a boycott of the film of the same name when it was released last winter.)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Racism is the justification for challenging this American classic.
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Forget the fact this novel about a young black girl growing up in the South during Reconstruction won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Some dislike the fact it refers to homosexuality, is sexually explicit and uses offensive language.
- ttyl by Lauren Myracle. Using only instant message texts among three 15-year-old girls, this is a 21st century coming of age story challenged because it is sexually explicit, contains offensive language and is unsuited to the age group.
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. This autobiography is challenged for being sexually explicit.
- It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris. This book for young people about puberty and sex is, not surprisingly, challenged as sex education and sexually explicit.
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Another tale of adolescence in high school that looks at the issues boys face at that age, including sex, drugs and not fitting in. Naturally, then, it is challenged because of references to homosexuality, being sexually explicit, containing offensive language and being unsuited to age groups.
Sadly, it seems we haven’t come far in our history. While the Nazis were burning books in Germany in 1939, our country was banning The Grapes of Wrath for containing “profanity, lewd, foul and obscene language unfit for use in American homes.”
Burning a book means more than giving up a part of one’s possessions: it means selling one’s soul to an evil spirit.
Paul Verhaeghen, Omega Minor
What was the most unusual (for you) book you ever read? Either because the book itself was completely from out in left field somewhere, or was a genre you never read, or was the only book available on a long flight… whatever? What (not counting school textbooks, though literature read for classes counts) was furthest outside your usual comfort zone/familiar territory?
And, did you like it? Did it stretch your boundaries? Did you shut it with a shudder the instant you were done? Did it make you think? Have nightmares? Kick off a new obsession?
Two relatively recent books quickly come to mind — Robert Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
Bolaño makes the list because his book is a collection of biographical sketches of fictional fascist writers in North, Central and South America and their literary styles. I certainly didn’t shut the book with horror but, as I said in my review, I guess “I just don’t get it.” I know his massive 2666, set for release in November, is highly anticipated but my experience with Nazi Literature and the nearly 1,000 pages in 2666 will likely keep me away.
Cloud Atlas makes the list for the opposite reason. As I said in my review, it is “a novel perhaps unlike any other I’ve read.” It contains six separate but loosely related stories in different genres whose settings range in time from the 1850s to a post-apocalyptic world. What makes it so unusual is that narrative is like nested Russian dolls. With the exception of the last story, each story stops abruptly and we go to the first half of the next story. The pattern is then reversed so that each story is picked up where it left off and the story that opens the first chapter concludes in the last chapter. Yet this device (which some consider a gimmick) simply adds to what would otherwise be an excellent book as Mitchell does a wonderful job handling a variety of genres.
From the standpoint of a genre never (or rarely) read, I have to mention two books that helped create a new obsession. In June 2007 I happened to read The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent and Literature from the “Axis of Evil”: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations in succession. The two collections of works originally written in a language other than English truly brought home just what great writing is out there that I was missing. Since then, I have had and continue to thoroughly enjoy a passion for foreign literature, having read 20 this year alone.
People are obscenities.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
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