The Book Blog

July - August 2002

Blog   |   Sound Track

Read More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction by Elizabeth Wurtzel.  She also wrote Prozac Nation, about her depression, and Bitch, an academic work.

     It would make sense to have read Prozac Nation first, but I thought I had already read it and then I was into More.  Now I want to read Prozac Nation to answer the following question:  how could she have written an entire book on her depression, in some way think that she had made it to the last chapter, go through all that introspection and serious thought, and then end up in as much trouble as this?

     Wurtzel is a wonderful writer.  I've read several reviews that blast the book for it's inward facing detail, but Wurtzel isn't just writing about her life, she is writing well and the detail is beautiful.  I also have to laugh at anyone who wants to judge her for her moral lapses- the only reason you know about them is because she owns up to them!  No where in the book does she blame anyone else or misuse her power as a public figure to settle a score, something most women writers can't manage to do.

     I flipped through a copy of Bitch today and it looked original, if a bit dense.  Perhaps I'll read it in a couple of weeks...

Neither of whom would probably be entertained to find themselves listed in the same header.  Nonetheless, this is what you get for a Friday "lite."

Dan Pink is a former (I guess) speech writer who wrote for Bill Clinton and Al Gore during Bill's first term.  He writes for Fast Company magazine and keeps a charming little blog.

P.J. O'Rourke is the "Republican Party Reptile" who has written a variety of humor books.  The Amazon link below mainly shows the newer stuff, but I suggest some of the older books like Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, and, of course, Republican Party Reptile.

How much time do you spend surfing the internet at work?  A conversation at MetaFilter.  (Told you I love MetaFilter).

Okay, I shouldn't start a novel on a weekday because I can't put it down.  Spent all last night reading the second Bridget Jones book, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.  As you know, I've been concerned about the amount of cynicism in these "women's'" fiction books.  The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (below, 08/13/2002) is too cynical.

     In the Bridget Jones books, however, both books make a trip through being cynical about women's' cynicism.  The second book is subtitled "The Edge of Reason," as Bridget makes further steps in distinguishing reason from cynicism.

Gotta love those folks at Metafilter.  A lot of times the comments are better than the actual article.  Check out this one about some fishermen that found a severed head and decided not to let it ruin their fishing trip.

Ever try to write a daily blog when nothing happens for days on end?  Honestly, the best  I can do is the fatal traffic-and-horse accident back home- three people dead, presumably the horse as well.

     But I've been thinking about something important, something really important.  After the summer of the dead kids and as we head into the one-year anniversary of the 09/11 attack on America, let's remember the difference between "honor" and "remember".  We remember children killed by crazy people, adults killed by airplanes.  For that matter, here in my town we remember the drunken frat boys killed when their house burned down on Mother's Day.  Some people we remember with more fondness than others.

     We honor the men and women who brought down the 9/11 plane in Pennsylvania, the rescuers at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and young men and women who live clean, sober and virtuous lives.  Try to keep it straight.

Well, the big news of the day (CNN) is that 1-in-32 American adults is either in jail or on probation or parole.  Social critics highlight this as evidence of America trying to deal with its social ills through the prison system.  That statement could mean a lot of things to a lot of people- one of the things it means to me is that we have out-sourced shame to the government, and clearly the government doesn't do that good a job.

     A social theme I've been noticing is that Americans both long for and carefully avoid connectedness.  We want the small-town life where everyone know you, but in real life we make absolutely sure that no one knows us.

     A thought that has crossed through my mind is that this is because we have so little actual experience with shame (the social connection the regulates behavior in a community) that we are terrified of it.  Children are raised on "high self-esteem" rather than meeting and succeeding at challenges, and certain rather than meeting and succeeding at moral dilemmas.

     In the absence of shame experience in a real community, e.g. in a family or other small group, shame is mainly experienced in impersonal rantings or religious or political leaders, or in equally impersonal experiences with law enforcement.  In this setting, shame is merely hurtful and alienating.  We do not feel the loving enfoldment of those who would shame us; that small-town experience that we want so much and are too scared to create for ourselves.

     My job is to connect my thoughts to a book by a better thinker...  First let me mention Violence and Crime in Cross National Perspective  by Dane Archer.  I first read this in high school and recently re-read it.  The book is a statistical survey of how violence and crime meet up with punishment options through history and across nations.  When does crime go up?  What works to make it go down.  The book is out of print, but it seems to be at most university libraries.

     I also read quite a bit on shame in the last year.  By far the best book I read was Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology by Stephen Pattison, an Anglican priest.

    If one wants to delve back into the wacky self-help world, I think that Bradshaw's books, Shame: Healing the Ties that Bind You and Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child are both useful books to the individual.  Behind the self-help, the author is a former seminary student who has a good grasp on the nuances of his topic.

     There is one other book to suggest- Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.  However, this books is more a description of how and why communities are breaking down in America.  The "why" being the alternate choices we have to live in the suburbs and be yuppies.  It doesn't deal with the issue I have raised above, which is that we are actively choosing not to be a part of communities.

This week's Friday "lite" is W.E.B. Griffin.  The Amazon.com box below should be showing links to some of his books (let me know if it just says "shop now and save").  These are airplane books that could keep you for more than a year.  He writes very long military dramas that follow a set of characters as young men, and then as they rise through the ranks and become old, high ranking, men.  They are sort of "ra-ra" military- war is great, everyone is a hero (except for the required bad guys that everyone else has to overcome), soldiers are gentlemen and always get the girl.  And of course the soldiers are men and the women are not soldiers and are charmed.

Fun, fun.  Check out the site developers' log at Oddpost (click on "blog" in the lower right of the page).  An example:  "Greetings, world. A small but influential percentage of you may be interested to hear about the status of our paragraph spacing bug. What paragraph spacing bug? You may now leave. Gone? Okay, the rest of you remember the problem..." [link seen on Metafilter]

Yuck,Yuck.  Read Paul Vitello's column in Newsday today: "Broken-Down Male Psyches."

      After reading the article I thought to myself that there aren't too many serial killers of men, men don't run around killing men.  But that isn't true, of course.  Men kill men a lot more than men kill women, it's just that their rage is covered by another motive (robbery) or focused (a bar fight, a war) and so we don't ask "Where did this rage come from?" the way we do when a man kills a woman.

     The problem isn't gender; it isn't lax morality or punishment.  The project is very obviously homicidal rage.  When are we going to get more interested in the roots of the rage that so many member of our society carry?

But while we're on Newsday, and male violence, there was also an interesting review/social commentary of the movie XXX.

America cynicism is like an onion- every time you peel away one layer, you just find another layer underneath.  And at the center is a green growing sprout of the stuff.  This may be a human thing, but I'm only qualified to write about America.  From what little I know of America, it probably is a specifically American issue.  In cultures with a religious core, when they finally give up they say genuinely, "It's God's will."  When Americans give up they shake their heads and give up on the meaningfulness and coherence of the universe.

I've seen all the travel planning woes posted on blogs, and who really wants to hear it!  But today it took me two hours to make my flight plans.  I returned to the flight I had checked yesterday, only to find that the price had gone up $100 overnight.  Much flopping through itineraries finds that I could get $80 back if I agreed to play hop-scotch across America, but no one could pay me $10 per loading and unloading to do that.

Advice:  I'm a loyal American Airlines customer because of the legroom.  Honestly, with that much legroom the seat feel wider, even if they're not.  Apparently Travelocity.com has the same special web rates as aa.com and is much, much more user-friendly.  Um, but better buy that web rate when you see it (see above).

More advice:  This has never actually happened to me, but I heard it recommended by the Savvy Traveler and several of my friends have found themselves in this boat- always get real, paper tickets.  If something happens to the flight or if the airline goes out of business it is easier for the airline to flop you around, even onto another carrier, if you have paper tickets.  I even heard of a case where rental car discounts were available to some stranded travelers, but only if you had a paper ticket.

Psychiatrist to advise NBC on Sept. 11.  Wire story seen at Salon.com.

For Grand Web Surfing... The Museum of Online Museums, speaks for itself.  Look At Me, a museum of found photographs.

Looking back over my notes about Flow.  From page 115:

But repression is not the way to virtue.  When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished.  They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.  Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted.  A fanatical devotee of food is just as boring to himself and to others as the ascetic who refuses to indulge his taste.  Between the two extremes, there is quite a bit of room for improving the quality of life. [emphasis added]

This is a good turn on an old saw- moderation in all things.  The mark of wisdom is that it is true in more ways than the person who stated it was aware of.  Great literature touches on more points of truth then the author knew at the time.  We know "moderation in all things."  And we know that the food fanatic, or the jazz fanatic, or the baseball fanatic is boring and annoying.  But why?  Because he is replacing himself, replacing his true self and authentic interest, with this cartoon of what he can be.

     I'll add that I also find it infuriating.  It looks like excellence, but it isn't.  The connoisseur often looks down on those of us who are bumbling along doing the best we can, and being authentic too.  And doesn't it just make you so mad?

I'm afraid it is going to be another week of self-help books, wisdom literature light.  They are just so darned addicting- read and read and think and think and don't do anything at all.  Very much like drugs indeed.

Went to the Greensboro Quilt Show today.  Saw some beautiful glass-sided trunks for displaying quilts and whatnot from Kerry's Kollectibles (slow loading photos).

While there, picked up a book called America from the Heart: Quilters Remember September 11, 2001.  The Houston Quilt Show was scheduled for 6 weeks after September 11th.  They decided to put up quilt about September 11th- they would take anything they were sent except hate messages or quilts that cause too much duress to the viewer.  Three hundred quilts came in; this is a book of photographs and stories of some of those quilts.

Some would say this has been a light fortnight- all self-help books.  I think I've argued on that matter enough below.  My entry for Friday "lite" is Protocol by April Christofferson.  Good airplane book- a murder mystery about the pharmaceutical industry.  She has another book called Clinical Trial.

Here is a selection from To Begin Where I Am by Czeslaw Milosz that is re-printed in Cross Currents.  I haven't read this particular book, but I'm a big Milosz poetry fax- I've attached a link to The Collected Poems.  Though there is a newer book- New and Collected Poems.

I find the story of the baby snatching in Texas very touching because of the lengths the mother went to try to protect her baby- hanging onto the kidnapper's car and being dragged through the parking lot.  I hadn't heard about the actions her 13-year-old son took and what his heroism means to him.  Go here and look at the last paragraphs of the story.

     Today I flew out of LaGuardia airport and over the empty lot where the World Trade Center used to be.  Yesterday, on the first flight of my trip, I thought to myself that one has to believe in animism if one is on an airplane. You can feel the joy of a successful take-off; an airplane is pleased to have been shaped into such a magnificent creation.  And I feel certain that the materials of the plane itself would feel great suffering at an mishap.  When you see a tail fin sticking up out of a crash site, it is in mourning.

     I never wanted to go to the Murrow Building site.  I don't tour battlefields.  But I had been wanting to go see the Trade Center.  Considering how much this event has engraven itself in my heart, I thought that seeing it may somehow settle the matter.  Of course now it is all gone; it is difficult to imagine that it was ever there.  And now I don't want to see it anymore, I want to touch it.  There will be original pieces of the Trade Center in memorials across the country, and I want to touch it and feel the mourning contained in the materials.  I know it will be there.

And in the news:  USA Today's article on the flight controllers that order all planes to land on September eleventh. part one, part two [link seen on artsandlettersdaily.com]

The reason I was looking for "cynical" was because reading Bridget Jones's Diary (below) made me think of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing.  Just about as charming, but a little more cynical than I think I can go for.  It was charming, but just a little too cynical.  I think someone with a stable life would find it charming, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise and I wouldn't suggest giving it to an underage girl.

Looked up "cynical" on Google because... well, I'll probably write about that tomorrow.  Anyway, found a darling web site called American Cynic.  I probably shouldn't even give you this link since my entire original purpose was anti-cynic, but there you are.

Silence Yields Mental Thud.  What are people going to think about on September 11th?  The results of a memorial day study from the University of Washington show how much trouble we have filling a minute of silence. (article from Newsday)

You did what on an MRI machine?  PDF reprint (takes a little while to load) of MRI images of coitus from a study done in the Netherlands. Also includes an image drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. Also a scientific article about just how they convinced people to get personal on an MRI machine and what was learned from the study. [link seen on metafilter.com, headline from metafilter]

Went to the bookstore yesterday.  Actually, wandered around the new mall for a while and discovered that Americans have more or less given up on clothing- they just wander around naked.  We have a Nordstrom's that appears to only make clothing for naked teenagers or anyone who would like to look like a naked teenager.  I remember the old Nordstrom's as a fashionable and classy place... so much for classy.

     Anyway, I bought The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, First Things First, and The Color of Water.  I know, the last week of this blog has been nothing but self-help books and here I am setting us up for another week of it.  Maybe I'm feeling a little insecure.

     While I was in the store I saw Love, Greg and Lauren.  Lauren Manning was the woman burned over 80% of her body at the Twin Towers who was the last victim to be released from the hospital.  The books is a compilation of the almost daily emails her husband Greg sent to their friends as she lay in the hospital.

     I read a smattering of pages through-out the book and a couple of things struck me about it:  Ms. Manning worked (and works) at Kantor Fitzgerald, where more than 100 of her co-workers died.  As she emerged from her pain medication and began meeting with a psychiatrist, she had to face what had happened to her body as well as what had happened to her friends.  Several times she had to be sedated because her fragile body could not handle the level of emotional upheaval she was experiencing.  The book renews for us and makes real the amount of suffering and loss created by the attack.  Ms. Manning's emotional pain is the real suffering from the attack: most of the rest of us just got splashed by it.

     Also, so many books of this type say "and the heroic victim never suffered any emotional trauma."  You may have seen some early reports after the rescue of the Pennsylvania miners that said that they were doing so well that they could be expected not to suffer from PTSD.  Such things are of course absurd and isolate and alienate survivors experiencing normal emotional responses.  Furthermore, it prevents such survivors from finding comfort in the shared experiences of other survivors.  This book honestly described the response to the horror, the meetings with the psychiatrists, and the strain the trauma puts on this marriage and everyday life of Mr. and Ms. Manning.  I think this book will be a valuable resource for trauma survivors in the future, and I thank the Mannings for their honesty.

Links from Today

Silence Yields a Mental Thud - www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/columnists/
ny-nybres112818880aug11.column?
coll=ny%2Dhomepage%2Dmore%2Dbreaking%2Dnews

You did what on an MRI machine? - http://bmj.com/cgi/reprint/319/7225/1596.pdf

This week The God Squad answers questions about the miracle of the rescue of the miners in Pennsylvania and also about whether it is okay to pray for death.

The Wilson Quarterly is a publication of the Smithsonian featuring a few in depth articles.

Articles currently available online:

     The Crisis Within Islam: "Today´s crisis grows in part out of the structure of Islam itself--a faith without denominations, hierarchies, and centralized institutions. The absence of such structures has been a source of strength that has permitted the faith to adapt to local conditions and win converts around the world. But it is also a weakness that makes it difficult for Muslims to come together and speak with one voice on important issues--to say what is and what is not true Islam."

     Do the People Rule?  "Popular sovereignty is the foundation of the American political system, but the nation's leaders--from James Madison to Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan--have been divided over its meaning for practical government."

Here is a review of John Rawls' new book, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. [link seen on artsandlettersdaily.com] This is why I ended up at The Wilson Quarterly today.

     John Rawls is the author of A Theory of Justice, one of the most influential books on justice of the last century.  He also has a book of essays called Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.

This weeks Friday "lite" is The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh.  After spending some time in gleeful amusement at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles, this British writer wrote a parody involving a pet cemetery next to a huge corporate people cemetery that closely resembles Forest Lawn.  Being from California I used to have to explain this, but Forest Lawn is now franchised across America so most people understand the concept.

     Forest Lawn was not amused when the book was published and sued Waugh for liable.  For Waugh's defense, a British aristocrat produced a will directing that he should be buried in Forest Lawn cemetery and stated that he had made this choice based on the wonderful description of the place in Waugh's book.  The defense was successful.

     I adore all of Waugh's books, however I find this one the easiest to read.  Waugh was writing in an older class conscience Britain and you have to mentally transport yourself there to understand a lot of his books.  Plus he is engaging in questions of behavior that for the most part American's think have been settled, so one also had to re-engage oneself with serious questions about just how adequate our answers are.

     On the other hand, The Loved One engages the absurdities of the American death industry and Hollywood- two issues that are very much a part of the national dialogue.

     As an aside, I used to drive by Forest Lawn on week-ends home from college.  My freshman year they had a billboard showing an elderly woman sitting on a park bench with a small child.  The text indicates that she is explaining to the child that when she is dead she will be buried at Forest Lawn and it will be very pleasant for him to come and visit her there.

     Sorry, that punch line lands a little flat.  Fortunately, Evelyn Waugh is there to pick up the story.

From the Journal Nature:

     "The grounding of commercial flights for three days after last September's terrorist attacks in the United States gave David Travis at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and colleagues a chance they never thought they'd have: to study the true impact that contrails from jet engines have on our climate." (article)

     Same journal, a month before 09/11: "Measuring contrails' impact is not an exact science." (article)

From the Atlantic Monthly: "Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is now considered to be "literary fiction"—not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance."  B.R. Myers is a little jaded on currently fiction as he explains in this article, which he later turned into a book. (seen on Metafilter.com) The book is A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.  I'm quite certain I agree with him.

From Bridget Jones: the edge of reason*:  "Do self help books help self?"

The problem with self help books is that the author must write a book length work in order to make a sentence length idea real.  No, this is the problem with all books- this is why someone goes to all the trouble of writing a book.  The problem with self help books is that the book length work must contain only one idea.  Then, to justify your purchase of the book (and it's dozen sequels) the author must make it seem that this one idea is the key to life.  This is because most Americans are only going to purchase one book in the next 20-odd years and THIS is the book you must buy.

     So self help books are a little over-sold.  I think that's a hazard a reader can avoid if one reads plenty of books and broadens one's horizons and if one never, never, never reads the dozen sequels.

     I was thinking this morning about the fact that it actually did add something to my life that I read Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus.  There is more to life than the one idea that men and women are different, one of those things being that men and women are also similar, nonetheless I gained something from reading this book.

     By the way, other self help authors should probably beware the megalomania that has beset John Gray since his own dozen sequels started raking in the bucks.  He was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as stating that he had ideas about how to solve all the worlds problems but the world just wasn't "ready" for his solutions.  There's no need to follow this man off a cliff, but you could safely read just one of his books.

     Re-read People of the Lie: The hope for healing human evil 0684848597 by M. Scott Peck.   The Road Less Traveled 0684847248 is a his most well-know book.  However I last read both these books nearly 10 years ago, so we'll stick with the book I just re-read.

     M. Scott Peck writes this book from the perspective of a Christian and a psychiatrist.  Quite simply, evil people lie.  Because, perhaps, they cannot stand to displease themselves*. (page 11)  Peck calls God "He"; God is the our pursuer.  He calls Satan "it"; Satan does not create and thus cannot be a sexual being. (page 12).

     The book presents several cases of how people manage to lie, manage to completely avoid displeasing themselves.  Nonetheless, I think his image of Satan as non-creative is incorrect.  I can understand how a psychiatrist would reach that conclusion: a psychiatrist's creativity is expressed in eliciting change in his clients.  If the client is completely immune to change because the client will not engage self-awareness, it is certainly a place of nothingness and nonexistence.  However, all the choices and lies required to mesh unreality with the outside world requires great creativity.

     Beyond that, it is the interplay of good and evil which creates the meaningfulness of human history.  A humanity attached directly to God would be as meaningful and interesting as a bare bulb hanging in a dark and empty room.  But others have said that before me.  And, in the end, Peck's stories are pure enough that the reader is free to decide whether or not to interpret them in the same manner as Dr. Peck.

     Is it a book worth reading?  Everyone has experienced the dynamics described in the book- you've seen it before.  The book is helpful in presenting "the lie" at a distance.  We're constantly wrapped up in Satan and his lies in one way or another and the book lets you see that it's not about you.

     According to the introduction, Dr. Peck would like that to be read more than one way.  The lies and the evilness that ends up directed at you is not about you.  But also your own lies and owners of all the other lies are in some way separate- the lie is condemnable but the liar is not; hate the sin but not the sinner.  Harder said than done, for the reader and, apparently, the author.

(Beware the bottomless pit of the perpetually publishing self-help guru, of which Peck is one in a crowd.  Read the first two books if you want and then move on.)

Bought my first CD in 5 years and discovered that The Big Lie is actually only The Second Biggest Lie (you do know what The Big Lie is don't you?).  Yes, The Big Lie is really that CDs are going to get cheaper.  Remember that?  CDs are cheaper to produce than cassettes and as soon as everyone buys CDs they will be very cheap.  Now CDs appear to be about three dollars more expensive than they were then.  (This is why there are no books today- had to listen to the CDs.)

Heard on the news that in California smokers who want to sue tobacco companies have to prove negligence before 1988 and after something like 1993.  And suddenly I realized that the tobacco companies are shooting themselves in their collective feet by trying to make safer cigarettes.  Cigarettes need to kill people faster!  Get all those pre-1988 people off the roles of the living.  The quicker they die the lower the medical bills.  Make 'em dead before they have time to sue.

Got just one comment yesterday: "hey, update your calendar and pics. Oct. 2001 that's a disgrace."  Hey, I haven't done anything since October 2001!  (Nice to hear from the family- that was my sister's constructive criticism.)

No books today and one extraordinarily distressing link to the testimony a young woman gave before the national legislature on July 20th explaining how she survived her abortion.  By the way, the house and senate have now both passed a law protecting children who survive abortion.

Still reading Flow (see 08/01 below).  The author continues to have trouble reconciling the problem of how much control you have over happiness.  He makes a list of some observed components of flow:

     A Challenging Activity That Requires Skills

     The Merging of Action and Awareness

     Clear Goals and Feedback

     Concentration on the Task at Hand

     The Paradox of Control

     The Loss of Self-Consciousness

     The Transformation of Time

Note the paradox of control!  No kidding!  If we are to continue to believe that we can create these transcendent experiences, "control" is at the very least paradoxical.  At one point in this section the text states:

What these respondents are actually describing is the possibility, rather than the actuality, of control.  The ballet dancer may fall, break her leg, and never make the perfect turn, and the chess player may be defeated and never become a champion.  But at least in principle, in the world of flow perfection is attainable.

Updated the Sound Track page today.

And the heroes fall:  Bill Moyers was arrested for drunk driving (article). Bill, sometimes people make mistakes.  But the police say you blew .10%.  People can chose to respond to their mistakes in an honorable manner- step up to the plate buddy.

From beliefnet.com- Tales of a Muslim Traveler: Will they throw me off the plane? Will security personnel subject my wife to a strip search? By Hesham A. Hassaballa

Are the media hyping the kidnappings?  " There are almost 5,000 non-family abductions per year." (article) I would say the answer to that question is "no."

Yet another article about how white collar criminals cope with the federal prison system [link from Breaching the Web].  Do we need to start a category for this?!

Hmmm... blog surfing finds an artsy site at calamondin.com.  Arty look and feel with a witty sense of humor.  Author linked to Bairata.com, a thoughtful site with a Jewish religious identity and (bonus) a professional writer.

One of the best things around is The God Squad column in Newsday every Saturday. (today's column)  In short it's an advise column written jointly by a Rabbi March Gellman and a Father Tom Hartman.  They get around a lot in the media and have written several books, but I have to admit that I never heard of them before I started reading the column in Newsday.  Their new book Religion for Dummies is due out this month and looks like it will focus on a lot of similar issues as are addressed in the column.

Pam J. of North Carolina thinks that my book choices are a little on the heavy side, so how 'bout a "Friday lite?"  I'll write about humor and airport novels and whatever else turns up.

     For my first Friday lite, I'd like to point the spotlight at Thank You for Smoking, a satirical novel by Christopher Buckley.  Nick Naylor is a tobacco industry lobbyist who befriends an alcohol lobbyist and a firearms lobbyist to form a little death and destruction lunch group.  Things take a turn for the worse with Nick is kidnapped and nearly killed by being covered in nicotine patches.  As he recovers from his nicotine overdose and finds his taste for cigarettes diminished, the novel carries through on its hilarious romp.  Short book; excellent weekend or plane trip read.

     I see that Buckley has also written another highly regarded comedy called The White House Mess, but I haven't had a chance to read it.  Okay, it was written during the Clinton administration so not only have I not had a chance to read it, I didn't even really notice that it had been published.  But if I ever go on vacation again I will be sure to pick it up for what is sure to be a clever look at Washington, D.C. in the 1990s.

"Monkeys rescued an orphaned member of their troop from an Indian police station after its mother was shot dead."  article [link seen on metafilter]

Read a bit more of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience last night.  I'm not even through the first page, so who knows where the book is going to go, but it looks like it is preparing to make the argument that you can be happy all the time if you can organize your mind to be engaged in enjoyable experiences, "flow."  One of the examples of focus and happiness was actually eating when you are hungry.

     Now in comparison let's look at the argument of Transforming the Heart: The Buddhist Way to Joy and Courage (link at right).  A lovely overview of Buddhist thought by the a Tibetan Buddhist monk and scholar.  The book is written as a commentary on The Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas, an ancient Buddhist text, but you don't need to know anything about the text to enjoy this beautiful book.

      Transforming the Heart also has a description of eating, but as an example of the flux of the world in which we live and the impossibility of finding continued happiness, because happiness is just a reduction in suffering.  You eat because you are hungry (suffering) until you are stuffed (suffering) and then a relief of being stuffed you become hungry again.  I hesitate to even make the argument here because the book is so beautifully written and my words are far from adequate in comparison.

I see that the author of megnut.com is about to have a book published- We Bog: Publishing Online with Web Logs (buy it at Amazon).  I've put links to two other books on the right- We've Got Blog (green) and Design for Community (orange).  They offer an inspirational glimpse into the little universe of top bloggers and web design.  Sort of People Magazine novels for web authors.  There is another book called The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog (buy it at Amazon) by the author of Rebecca's Pocket that looks like it falls into the same genre.

Very slowly reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (more).

Did a huge surf yesterday to see if anyone had something interesting up about The Nature of Prejudice (more), which I just finished reading, and found NOTHING. -Let me know if you find anything...

Heard an interview with Edward Said on NPR while driving home.  Have been wanting to read Orientalism (buy it at Amazon) for about 10 years and haven't gotten around to it.  Ah, a much more profitable search finds some other writings of Said and, best of all, a someone who has organized it all into The Edward Said Archive.  He writes a lot of articles so you can always get his very, very particular perspective at just about the latest moment, and the archive lists a lot of stuff that I've haven't had a chance to read already.

Fascinating article about the jail experiences of white-collar criminals. [link seen on metafilter]  New York Times had an article about the "no parent family", but the New York Times hasn't quite gotten the point about the web yet so you can't read it.

Take back:  I think Dr. Kilson has a good point about the N*** book and I've removed the actual name of the book from the entry below.  This event in itself is proof of Dr. Kilson's argument that results in his calling the book idiotic.

Blog surfing finds scalzi.com via a circuitous route [memotomyself.org]that landed me on the July 23rd Note to the President: "Please, please, please stop trying to reassure Americans about the economy. You probably haven't noticed this, but every time you give a speech or comment about the economy, the market plunges like an anesthetized pigeon...."

Article about Dr. Martin Kilson's take on the book N*** ("idiotic").  Apparently Dr. Kilson of Harvard is working on a 2 volume The Making of Black Intellectuals that should be published next year. [link seen on metafilter]

Inteview with Garry Wills on beliefnet.com.  Author of Papal Sin, criticizing the institutional Roman Catholic church and, more recently, author of Why I Am a Catholic.  Haven't read either of these books, but I like the tone Wills takes in this interview.

Just finished reading The Nature of Prejudice (more).  After September 11th I made a list of what was making me anxious and what I could do about it.  One of the things I was worried about was how to respond to the high stress cultural discussions and outright racist comments heard everywhere I went.  Fortunately I found this book, an encyclopedic review of bigoted thought patterns and how they are formed.  By reading the book you learn how to respond to those thought patterns in yourself and others.  However the short advise on how to respond to bigoted comments made in public is to calmly state that the comment is un-American (assuming the comment is made by an American in America).  You'll have to read the book to understand why this works.

Just finished reading We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture (ed. John Rodzville).  Which had a lot in common with a book picked up last year, Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places (Derek M. Powazek).

Both inspiring books, though the advantage of a blog is that no one has to actually read it for it to be a successful enterprise, while creating online community can be exceptionally depressing- read my Courage prompt, post a reply, and you may well be the first one... since I posted it in November 2001.

In an initial blog surf found bradlands.com and metafilter.com, both enjoyable.  And some other interesting stuff.  But really, who has time to read all this and truly participate in the online community?  And anyway, artsandlettersdaily.com, which is sort of a blog, remains an old favorite, mainly because it only adds a couple of links a day.

*Design for Community has its own community web site, of course.

39

This page last updated  05 October 2002.

thecactus@loafingcactus.com

Original content copyright 2001, 2002.