BuggBlog

A man who made the world

I haven't been blogging much, in part because I've found myself swamped with actual paying work and in part because I felt I was getting too wrapped up in the ongoing campaign to be president of Pennsylvania.

But the news yesterday of the death of Arthur C. Clarke saddened me. As a pre-teen, science-fiction geek bookworm, I naturally read a lot of his stuff -- as an adult I didn't keep up, aside from the Rama series. But 2001, Rendezvous with Rama and short stories such as "The Nine Billion Names of God" left a huge impression on me. People who dismiss science fiction as mere genre are unfortunate in what they miss -- good science fiction, particularly the "hard" science fiction of Clarke and the writers he inspired, grows not only the imagination, but the sense of wonder and sense of reason.

It was just a few weeks ago that I introduced Cavin to the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. His verdict: "It's slow." True enough. But it contains indelible moments from our shared culture, the kind of things that most artists and writers only dream of creating.

To live 90 years and create a body of work that will likely live another 200, if not more -- that inspires a sense of wonder.

When smart people say stupid things

When it comes to politics I'm pretty much resigned to hearing lots of smart people say incredibly stupid things -- it is, after all, what many of them are paid to do. Not that it excuses Mark Penn.

But anyway....

Outside the realm of presidential politics, a blogger/writer I generally enjoy reading for his erudition and keen analysis, Matthew Yglesisas, took a brief political breather this morning to chime in on the latest scandals of non-fiction memoirs that turn out to be totally fiction. After referencing 19th and early-20th century novels that would set themselves up to be narrations of "the truth" -- I'm thinking Edgar Allen Poe off the top of my head, but plenty of examples from both the high and low brow apply -- Yglesias lets loose with this howler:

Meanwhile, contemporary fiction is pretty sharply bifurcated between crappy "genre" fiction and literary fiction that often seems very artsy-fartsy. For a well-crafted but basically straightforward story of people doing things and interacting with each other in a moderately realistic way, you need to turn to narrative non-fiction.

Now, this is the statement of someone who either hasn't read any fiction since wrapping up John Dos Passos back in college or has cast aside all evidence to the contrary in order to feed the blog beast by making a "point."

Let's start with the slam on "genre" fiction, which is all the more amusing coming from someone whose last name sounds like a Old One from an H.P. Lovecraft novel. As some others have pointed out in his comments, the argument that genre is automatically crappy is wrong because pretty much 75 to 90 percent of all creative endeavors -- novels, non-fiction, movies, television, magazines, political blogs -- are crap. That doesn't mean that everything is crap -- it actually is the reason to appreciate the truly artistic moments, particularly those that flourish within the sometimes overwrought rules of "genre" fiction. Just for a quick example, Yglesias might want to have a chat with Michael Dirda over at the Washington Post Book World about science-fiction/fantasy genre writer Gene Wolfe, of whom Dirda writes: "Gene Wolfe not only entertains, he invests his work with a complexity and trickiness that place him among the most important American novelists of our time."

And that's without even getting into Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R.R. Martin, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, or any number of others who have proven that genre boundaries by no means exclude literary fiction. And the same can be  said for just about any other genre, be it crime, thriller, western, horror -- in each you will find exemplary practitioners of their craft, just as you'll find the standard ranks of hacks and pretenders.

I don't fell like extending this for a full essay length -- unless, of course, the Atlantic might want to pick up, wadda ya say? -- but I also feel compelled to defend the honor of literary fiction. Sure, the same as genre, the same as non-fiction, the ranks of so-called literary fiction is swelled by the artsy-fartsy products of MFA programs. But there remains more quality out there than most of us will ever have time to read. Myself, I'm a near stalker-level fan of David Foster Wallace, whose Infinite Jest is one of the most difficult, intelligent, funny, sad and deeply human novels I have ever read. And he's not alone.

To believe that contemporary fiction is either crappy genre or artsy-fartsy is to show that you don't bother to look beyond the table placed at the entrance to Barnes and Noble or click beyond the Amazon home page that tries to sell you the latest Dean Koontz novel or Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.

There's plenty of smart stuff out there, if you take a moment to look.

Be careful what you put in your mouth

I have watched my dinner die.

To grow up in farm country is to have a better understanding of the connection between the meat on your plate and the animal you see grazing in the field outside the dining room window. While my parents weren't farmers, my grandparents and aunts and uncles were, and our rural Kentucky home was surround by fields: an uncle's field across the road, my grandfather's pasture along the creek, a second cousin's rows of corn out back. We all had gardens, from which we all traded fresh vegetables -- and, yes, home-grown tomatoes are superior to the generic ones you find stocked in your grocery's produce section.

I never saw a cow slaughtered -- though I did have a small hand once in helping convert a bull to a steer by slicing off his testicles -- but I understood the cow-to-hamburger process. Chickens, though, were a food source I understood even better. Granny had a chicken coop behind the house, where I would sometimes go with her in the mornings to collect the big brown eggs from the nests. And I watched from the kitchen window as Granny took a hatchet to a chicken's neck and the headless bird briefly ran around the yard in a bloody slapstick routine.

It really is the kind of chore where you want to be sure the dogs are put up before you start.

For Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, this up-close experience of the food chain should make me -- potentially, at least -- a better, more careful eater.

A little bit of Buggery for you

If you've been around here for a while, you probably already know that I buy more books than I'll probably ever be able to read. They're just so pretty and shiny and they feel so good when you pick them up and they smell really nice. They also, you know, contain some information you can absorb if you open them up. This week's Buggery column at Metro Weekly tries to explain my passion for the printed page and, as a bonus, make up a new word,"arboranity." I have a  feeling it won't be the new word of 2008.

I've also got a new Gears up on the 2008 Mini Cooper S. In short, there's a lot to love about the Mini, and the new enhancements, mostly stylistic, don't do anything to change that. The new Mini Clubman -- a larger version of the car that should address some of the Cooper's problems with storage area and back seat passengers (it doesn't have any and it doesn't hold any) -- is out soon and I'm awaiting my chance at the wheel. Given the interest in the car, though, I don't expect to get a crack at it until mid-summer at the earliest.

Because I've been sort of slacking on the one hand and obsessing about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the other, I totally forgot to highlight a couple other recent pieces. First, I have a quick overview of my video game obsession, Rock Band -- although I'm not playing it around the clock at the moment, as I'm in the midst of working my way through Lost Odyssey and leveling up some characters in World of Warcraft -- more on those later. Second, I had my first Food article for Domestic Partner, with suggestions for putting together an easy but impressive Valentine's Day dinner.

I do like to keep my interests broad.

The To-Be-Read Pile: Monstrous Stories

The past weekend brought a much-needed trip to the bookstore -- I was jonesing for a little hardcover and mass-market paperback action. I managed to restrain my worst impulses by not just grabbing whatever seemed mildly interesting. My husband tends to frown on that. So I didn't hit the bank account too hard, thanks to some difficult choices and my store discount card.

America's most prolific retired author has yet another book out, Duma Key. I have a long history with Stephen King novels. I read my first, The Shining, while in elementary school, promptly giving myself all sorts of nightmares and a phobia about closed shower curtains -- but I was totally hooked. Looking back, I think my parents had somehow convinced themselves that either I wasn't really reading the grown-up books I always pulled from their shelves or that I didn't understand them. Lucky me, no one stepped in to say no to my reading habits, at least until I started in on the V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic series, which I then proceeded to read on the sly.

So I have a soft spot for King, even for some of the lower points of his work (Tommyknockers, Dreamcatcher, etc.). Given my propensity for reading high-, middle- and low-brow, I have some sympathy for King and his battle to make the literary establishment consider story as well as style in the determination of what makes something "literary." Not too much sympathy, mind you -- the man is wealthier than God and has the creative freedom to continually inflict bad screenplays upon the public. His books, though, manage to grab your interest even when the work isn't his best (Lisey's Story). I'm not sure what to expect from Duma Key, but I'm hoping I'll be reasonably entertained.

I also grabbed a couple more horror paperbacks, one that I'm already so bored with I'm not even going to mention the name. I haven't started Brian Keene's Dark Hollow yet. Keene is a writer like Bentley Little for me -- someone I really want to like and enjoy, even though I've been disappointed in most of his books. Joke's on me, I suppose, since I keep buyin' and they keep writin'.

I picked up No End in Sight just because I'm building a little library of books about why the Iraq war turned into such a clusterfuck. I'm sure the "surge is working!" crowd won't burden their shelves, but in their case history is unlikely to be kind.

Finally, after I'd paid for all that and some magazines, I spied Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake on the bargain table for just $6.98. Well, I can't pass that up. For that cheap I don't even have to worry about reading it, I can just enjoy having it. But maybe I'll schedule a little post-apocalyptic reading week and take on this and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

The To-Be-Read Pile: Boston and Japanese Noir, plus Fascism for Dummies

Frighteningly enough, I haven't had time in the past week or so to go bookstore browsing, instead spending my time going to they gym and, oh, working. But thanks to the pre-existing stacks of books that already await me, plus the joy of an Amazon free-shipping account, I still have some items to move to the top of the pile.

Last week I mentioned Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone, hoping that it would make up for my disappointment with Shutter Island. It certainly did that -- after tearing through Lehane's Boston-noir, mystery thriller, I ordered the next book in the series (I hadn't realized that Baby was the third or so book in a series), Prayers for Rain. Generally these aren't the types of genre books that draw me in, but Lehane is a smart and talented writer. At its core, it's simply a greatly told and plotted store -- the strong writing is a big bonus. Honestly, I'm consistently amazed by how much demonstrably bad writing gets published every week -- unlike those others, Lehane's work is well worth killing a few trees.

A few weeks back, I finally got around to Natsuo Kirino's Grotesque, a bizarre tale of women, prostitution and high-pressure high schools in Japanese society. And I'm waaaay oversimplifying. In short, Kirino's Tokyo is as noir as Lehane's Boston -- but from a different universe. So now I have to read her prior big-spash-in-America novel, Out, about a woman who kills her abusive husband and recruits the women she works with to dispose of the body. Nifty!

Not so nifty, and undoubtedly not worth killing a few trees, is Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg's contribution to the ever growing category of conservative books that provoke liberals by calling them names. I grabbed it because I wanted to read it before I complained about it. Goldberg doesn't seem to be batshit crazy like Ann Coulter -- or at least he didn't until he put this book out. I'm still stuck in the introduction, which establishes he wanted to write the book because liberals like to call conservatives fascists and it's wrong and it really hurts their feelings.

I wish I were joking.

I'm not sure at this point if I'll get around to it because I'm not sure the world needs more commentary on it. Excellent take-downs from both the left and right are here and here.

Other than that, still working my way through War and Peace. I will get there, I tell you. I will get there.

The To-Be-Read Pile: Thumbing your nose at God, bad science and things that go bump in the night

I'm continuing my vacation from War and Peace, although I expect to pick that back up this weekend. In the meantime, I've been catching up on one of the many sub-weaknesses that make up my overall weakness of going crazy with the credit card at the book store. In this case, I'm talking about paperback horror novels -- I tend to pick them up at the end of my run through the store, just after I pick up some things at the new release tables and before I head over to browse the magazines. I've also been picking up a number of thrillers and serial-killer tales as well.

So over the weekend, I finished a British tale of a biblically-scaled flood that precedes a possible invasion of body snatchers, The Deluge, which was pretty much an exercise in eh -- reasonably well told, but without any particular point, growth or resolution. Since I've been watching the first season of Dexter through the magic of Netflix, I also read the first two novels that inspired the series (Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter) -- punchy, short and funny, but with badly rushed endings. And I'm about a third of the way into Dennis Lehane's Gone, Baby, Gone, a thus-far gripping book that I really hope has a better ending than Lehane's Shutter Island (which has a horrible Shyamalan-esque twist).

Anyhoo, I'm actually clearing some of my paperback novels off the To Be Read pile, which fills me with a sense of accomplishment. Not that it stopped me from adding to the height of the pile by using the Barnes and Noble gift card I got for my birthday (thank you, Joe and Hoai).

Right now, at the top of the pile I have Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. I picked it up mostly because I enjoyed his anti-religion polemic (does Hitchens write anything other than polemics?) God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything -- also, while there are a lot of vituperative writers working in the political mud, Hitchens is one of the very few who manages to be vituperative, cogent and hilariously entertaining. Unless you're, like, a priest or something, in which case I suppose he comes across as a grating, drunken, gas bag. But I'm no priest.

Actually, buying each of these treatises against the divine gave me a little moment of fear and excitement. No matter how far away I get from my childhood church -- the Fredonia Valley Cumberland Presbyterian Church -- there's still a tiny part of me that warns from a deep corner of my brain that God's gonna send me to hell for reading that stuff. It's part of the reason I maintain a healthy agnosticism, rather than an aggressive atheism. I could be wrong to dismiss a higher power in such an infinitely large and ill-understood universe (although I doubt I am). It's not exactly a Pascal's Wager on my part -- even a third rate minor deity would see through that selfish ploy -- but I have a real habit of hedging my bets.

The other very interesting item I picked up is Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. Lomborg was hailed as a secular Satan for his previous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which, contrary to his detractors, didn't argue a case against global warming -- it argued a case against bad science in support of global warming. It's been a while since I've read it, and I haven't read Cool It yet, but basically, his point generally runs that A) while global warming is a real and growing problem, there may be better ways of addressing it, and B) science and human progress have been a net plus for humanity, not a net minus.

Andrew Sullivan was a huge booster of Lomborg and The Skeptical Environmentalist, but now that he's become a "conservative" advocate of enormous gas taxes and free public transportation, I'm curious to see if he'll pick up the torch for Cool It. I'm not betting on it.

The To Be Read Pile: Longwinded Russians, bloodthirsty communists and crazy Southerners

It was about a year ago that I undertook the task of reading War and Peace, in large part because I simply want to be the type of person who has actually read War and Peace. Unsurprisingly, after about a hundred or so pages, I took a break to crack some of the other books waiting on my pile and before I knew it, months had passed and I knew that I would have to start over from the beginning if I were ever to finish the thing.

So I elected to procrastinate on Tolstoy, in favor of completing some of my other half-read novels. Hey, that copy of The Ruins wasn't going to read itself. Unfortunately. Man-eating plants in the Mexican jungle snacking on vacationing American twenty-somethings? Good idea. Whining, annoying, flatly-drawn vacationing Americans meandering through a plot that plods to a 1970's-horror-movie bleak and world-weary ending? Not so much.

Anyway, back to the highbrow stuff. Or, my attempt at highbrow stuff. While my trade paperback copy of the Anthony Biggs translation of War and Peace collected an impressive amount of dust on my nightstand, I came across a number of reviews touting a fantabulous new translation of the novel by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It keeps the French passages intact, along with translations of Tolstoy's original translated footnotes. It maintained Tolstoy's penchant for repetition, repetition, repetition.

It was, in short, an excuse to run out and buy a new, hardback copy of a book I already owned. And I live for those sorts of things.

I did put off the purchase for a while, though. One evening while wandering through Barnes and Noble with Cavin, I pointed the book out to him and said I wanted to get it, eventually, and thought no more of it. Later, a few days before Christmas as I was taking a break from shopping for others by shopping for myself, I decided to go ahead and snag the book -- it would make excellent reading during the nine-hour drive home to Kentucky for the holidays.

That very night, Cavin come home, saw the book lying on the couch next to me and said, "I just bought you that book." Now, Cavin has bought me a book precisely once in our relationship, back when we first started dating and he took a stab at buying me one because he knew I read a lot. It was a gothic, supernatural romance something-or-other and, despite the fact that I'm not the type of person who exchanges gifts, I took it back and told Cavin that while I loved the idea that he wanted to make me happy, it would probably be better if he didn't try guessing what I liked in books. So, I didn't believe him when he said he bought War and Peace. I was wrong.

I assume it's universal that just when you've decided your spouse never listens to a thing you say, they go off and do something wonderfully attentive that makes you feel like an ass.

So, after all that, I'm now compelled to read the thing. I've made good progress, starting over from page one and moving on through all of volume one over Christmas. I likely would have gotten farther, but that Nintendo DS wasn't going to play itself. I'm running a risk right now by taking another break from the novel, but it is a little wearing to read 300 (entertaining and thought-provoking) pages, and see 700 pages still to go.

But I will be that guy who read it. I will.

Speaking of large countries with interesting histories that plunged into 20th-century, ideologically driven bloodbaths, I'm partway into Mao: The Unknown Story. I'm actually pretty shamefully undereducated about Asian history in general, and Chinese history in particular. Given the amount of time I've spent reading up on the Hitler, Lenin and Stalin over the years, I really need to finish this one.

I also grabbed a copy of The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, which is pretty much duplicative of books I already own, but it's all in one volume and I don't have to dig through my boxes of books I have stored when I get an urge to read "The Enduring Chill" or "Greenleaf" or "A View of the Woods" again. I should have thought of that before I packed my original copies away, but that's what I get for trying to be organized and efficient with my space. I had Cavin read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" -- he didn't quite appreciate it. Maybe O'Connor's blazing Catholicism didn't translate to a Buddhist perspective. For me, I probably share less than zero of the religious belief that drives O'Connor's stories, but they remain for me some of the most compelling and truthful work I've ever read.

I also dig crazy Southerners, so perhaps that helps.

Bookstore Booty: Orwell, Ghosts and Practical Reading

Just because I've finished The Brothers Karamazov (slow first half, phenomenal last half, for what it's worth) doesn't mean I should head out to the bookstore. It's not as if my shelves are barren wastelands, bereft of literature. But, as always, a trip to the bookstore is an excuse to indulge my every whim. To whit:

Essays, George Orwell (Everyman Library) -- I've read Animal Farm, but I have to admit I don't believe I've ever read 1984. Maybe once I got past Brave New World around seventh grade I thought I had the whole dystopian future thing covered. Anyway, I'm lacking in Orwelliana, and I should find something in nearly 1,400 pages to catch me up.

The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier (Vintage) -- An afterlife dependent on being remembered by the living. How can I resist that? Also, I remember reading a good review of the novel, so it lived on in my memory so it would later claim my wallet. This, though, I expect to actually have on my soon-to-be-read list.

Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose (HarperCollins) -- Because my biggest literary error is that I read like a bricklayer. Someone help me!

Classroom in a Book: Adobe GoLive CS2 (Adobe Press) -- Because I'm a sucker.

I kill a forest and behave totally selfishly

Although my Christmas shopping is woefully behind, that doesn't preclude some self-centered shopping. A Friday night stop at Barnes & Noble went fairly predictably, in so far as I bought yet more books to pile up around the house. This was particularly daunting pile, however. First off, I found the new 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. I've been trying to get friends, family or anyone else I know to read the David Foster Wallace opus for years now, to no success. I understand that a giant, footnoted novel can be intimidating. But I can't stress enough how much the effort pays off -- it's one of the funniest, saddest and most moving things I've ever read. So, somebody, anybody, in my circle of friends and family needs to read it and love it, so everyone won't just think I'm crazy for having read the cinderblock of a book three times already.

After grabbing that tome, I stumbled across a "new translation" of War and Peace, and given that I'm in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov, it seemed right to pick it up and continue my efforts to complete some of the giant Russian novels I should have read, but haven't. Up to now, my big Russian forays have been Anna Karenina and Gogol's Dead Souls. Nothing to sneeze at there, and I recall enjoying Gogol's novel for reasons other than that it was short. But that's not really enough to make me feel all smart and stuff, so War and Peace goes onto the nightstand.

Add in the new Cormac McCarthy and the Japanese novel Ring -- yeah, what the movie came from -- and it was a big spending night at the old B&N. Just FYI, if you get the copy of Infinite Jest from me for Christmas, know that I did spend a few minutes reading the new introduction by Dave Eggers. I hope it doesn't bother you that some of the pages are pre-read. I only ask, because I know it would me.

So, after contributing to the deforestation of the planet in the pursuit of Russian literature, on Saturday I finally found my mom's Christmas present. Along the way, I stopped at Best Buy "just to look." Ooo, there's the Final Fantasy XII guide -- maybe that'll get me past the dungeon I'm stuck in so I can finish the game and consign my Playstation 2 to the great closet of videogame systems past. See, there's a practical reason for it, so I have to get it. Then I spotted the wireless headset for my XBox 360, which would eliminate the last unsightly wire tangle associated with that console. Again, practicality.

Right below that was the new HD-DVD add-on for the XBox 360 and, well, I do have the big HDTV I invested in last year. And it's such a shame to have to watch standard definition DVDs when the option for eye-searing color and clarity is so readily and relatively cheaply available. I'd be wasting money not to get it. Right?

Right or wrong, I got it. Plus a couple movies. Best Buy frickin' owns me. Arrgh. The worst part? I still have to go out this week and finish my Christmas shopping, plus do a small something for the Le-Bugg  fourth anniversary tomorrow, Dec. 19. Flowers -- they'll just die when we leave for the holiday. Chocolates -- he doesn't like 'em. Something expensive -- he'll say it's a waste of money.

Ah, romance.