the rix mix

By Peter Guralnick. Second book in  massive two volume biography of Elvis. The first, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, took the story up to Elvis' induction into the Army. This one goes the rest of the way.

 But for a few well-made movies & the '68/'69 comeback, this book is so bummer I read it as fast as I could. For all the careful research, the message is  pretty much "what you saw is what you got." From the time El came home from the Army (where he became permanently hooked on pills) there wasn't a prayer of getting through to him, not a chance he would become the kind of "serious" actor he fantasized. Everyone in his insular life was an enabler, including Colonel Parker, banished if they weren't.

He was incapable of sustained intimacy - not just sexual intimacy. Most of the Memphis Mafia were thugs. When the one thing that could keep him focused & creative became unimportant, his music, he was doomed.

I used to blame the Colonel for driving Elvis through those mid-Seventies tours & Vegas engagements when he was a bloated, sick addict & his fans - until the very last year - were such indiscriminate consumers of his increasingly ugly performances that Elvis felt as much contempt for them as he did for himself. But without the income both he & Parker really would have gone broke, realizing his father, Vernon's, worst fears. Elvis went, quite literally, insane. He was incapable of making sound, rational decisions. By 1975 a  judge may well have concurred & allowed his family to force him into rehab. Which of course they wouldn't do because Elvis was supporting hundreds of people & handing out cars, houses, jewelry & bags of money on any whim. The relatives & hangers-on lined up with their hands out. RCA had numerous opportunities to sue Elvis for delivering bad product or no product at all, Nowhere in the book does Guralnick say RCA was losing money on him. The profits kept on coming.  Elvis earned $60 million in 2011.

Perhaps the only thing that could have changed the outcome would have been a bust of him & his entourage for the massive amounts of drugs (including cocaine) & firearms they carried around on tour, across state borders. But he was Elvis Presley, not The Rolling Stones. Every cop at every stop was hoping for a new Cadillac. It is pointless to be discriminating about Elvis now. Love him or leave him be.

Guralnick is the kind of writer who doesn't analyze his subject, ot tell us  what Elvis is thinking, or imagine conversations, all part of Nick Tosches' style.

Labels: culture, Elvis Presley, music, what I'm reading

Stonewall Jackson by James I. Robertson, Jr.

(Macmillan Pub.; 1st edition; February 18, 1997)

Not so impressed on second reading over a decade later. Still huge, still wonderfully researched. But my fascination with Jackson's story & personality the first time around made me overlook the book's flaws, the author's slant & prejudices (among them an aversion to calling a slave a slave, as if we might be reminded what this war was really about). In a book so cognizant of the importance of Jackson's religious beliefs that hardly a page passes without reference to them, the author will not face up to their terrible wrong-headedness, even as he compiles a massive testimony to how mistaken Jackson was. It all culminated, by Jackson's own harsh faith, in his "Prince of Peace" smiting him at the hour of his greatest triumph, insuring the escape of Hooker's army & the failure of Lee's attack on Meade's left at Gettysburg, thereby sealing the fate of a treasonous slave "nation" that never had a moment of political or moral legitimacy,

Labels: Rix reviews, what I'm reading

 A Village Voice Reader (1962)
Great Irish Short Stories, edited by Vivien Mercier
Out of sight Leonard, Elmore, =
Betrayers : a "nameless detective" mystery Pronzini, Bill.
My New York, Pete Hamill
The last king of Texas Riordan, Rick.
Thereby hangs a tail : a Chet and Bernie mystery Quinn, Spencer.
The dog who knew too much Quinn, Spencer.
The astounding, the amazing, and the unknown Malmont, Paul.
Fun House : A John Ceepak Mystery Grabenstein, Chris
The gods of Gotham Faye, Lyndsay.
All I Did Was Shoot My Man : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery Mosley, Walter
Raylan Leonard, Elmore,
Taken Crais, Robert.

Trail of the Spellmans : document #5 Lutz, Lisa.
LaBrava Leonard, Elmore,
Explosive Eighteen, Evanovich
The Drop, Michael Connelly (Bosch 2011)
Boca Mournings Forman, Steven M.
God doesn't shoot craps : a divine comedy of dice, Armstrong, Richard,
Beat the reaper : a novel Bazell, Josh.
J.D. Salinger: A Life, Kenneth Slawenski
Boca Daze. Steven M Forman 2010
Crazybone, Bill Pronzini 2000
Wild Thing, Josh Bazell   2011

The ragtime fool Karp, Larry.
Outwitting Trolls : A Brady Coyne Novel Tapply, William G.
Cop out Dunlap, Susan.

Shimmer, Norman, Hilary.
The risk of infidelity index : a Vincent Calvino novel, Moore, Christopher G
The flaming luau of death : a Madeline Bean novel. Farmer, Jerrilyn.

City of whispers   Muller, Marcia.
You suck : a love story   Moore, Christopher, =

Jersey law Liebman, Ronald S.
Pronto Leonard, Elmore,
Dog on it : a Chet and Bernie mystery Quinn, Spencer.
Pale kings and princes : a Spenser novel Parker, Robert B., =
Life: Keith Richards
Wanna get lucky? Coonts, Deborah.
L. A. mental : a thriller McMahon, Neil.
A few minutes past midnight Kaminsky, Stuart M.
Indemnity only : a novel Paretsky, Sara.
Lucky stiff Coonts, Deborah.
A whisper to the living Kaminsky, Stuart M.
A fatal glass of beer Kaminsky, Stuart M.
Minor in Possession Jance, J.A.
True grit; a novel Portis, Charles.

A trouble of fools Barnes, Linda.
Shakey : Neil Young's biography McDonough, Jimmy.
Indemnity only : a novel Paretsky, Sara.
The Big Bounce Leonard, Elmore
Feelers Wiprud, Brian M.

Labels: what I'm reading

I was standing on a kiddie chair at the branch library, which is how most people browse the top two shelves of the new books section, when I heard a voice ask, as if calling from afar, "Sir?" Took a few seconds to realize I was the "sir," because I had to step out of one universe & into another. I looked down & there was the young part-time guy who mainly reshelves books looking up at me. He'd seen me numerous times before returning & checking out books.

I said, "Yes?"

He said, "Can I help you, sir?"

I had some difficulty processing this, so I said, "What?"

He repeated, "Can I help you, sir?"

I consider browsing the stacks at the public library one of the finest personal experiences known to humankind, emphasis on personal. I never look lost or confused at my local library. I don't like even being thought confused, it's like disrespecting a gangbanger. I was turned loose in a public library at a very young age. I fixed him with my steeliest Scorpio glare (I do have one, not often displayed), & said, in a fairly hushed, even tone of voice, "I'm looking at books."

He stood there gazing up at me for a long moment, his expression slowly changing as he realized how close he'd come to a terrible miscalculation, said, "Oh," & walked away.

I was about to call after him a favorite phrase of my dad's when he saw his kids lounging around on Sunday afternoon: "If you can't find something to do around here, I'll find something for you to do."

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, what I'm reading

Three poems in Big Scream no. 50.  50? This beautifully printed 6" x 9" perfect bound paperback with the great front & back cover photos & title on the spine? The first Big Scream I was in around 1980 - it was already a number of issues into its long  run - was an 8 1/2" x 11" zine, mimeographed, staple bound, with a line drawing cover. That's the way it was for awhile. Then it became a copy machine mag with photo covers, & over the years it looked better & better until it became what it is today.  Publisher & Editor Dave Cope used to publish  them as  often as he felt like doing them, then they became an annual. They are still published under Dave's Nada Press name.  Dave is Nada Press, & has issued some other things, including an a collection of my stuff.

I used to write a lot of open-form, open field poems that wandered all over the page;  it was mostly the thought of Dave painstakingly retyping those kinds of poems from me into a mimeo stencil that made me reassess what I was doing & conclude almost every poem I wrote could sit comfortably against the left hand margin if I simply willed it so a little more. That & an admission from poet Ed Dorn in a preface to his collected poems  that he no longer understood how some of his earlier poems functioned. Meaning he had forgotten the personal language of his forms, & the poems failed to explain their own workings. So according to the general rule of thumb (not strict  doctrine) that I & most of the poets on my side of the literary fence use, "Form is an extension of content," an open field poem is complex thing. Was I determined to write complex poems? Not really.

Big Scream has a large "stable" of regular contributors  Dave's  collected over the decades.  I've been in a dozen to fifteen issues, as a guess. If I didn't have at least five poems for him to choose from  - he was bound to like one of them - I didn't submit any at all.  There were always two or three other literary zines & editors I liked contributing to, they came & went, & I've never been a prolific poet. I've known poets who would write poems the day they had readings just to have something brand new. That was never my way.

Labels: poem, what I'm reading

Elizabeth isn't the ugliest city in New Jersey. But on a gray, damp, chilly March afternoon it seemed like it as two female  cabbies gave me tours of some of the ugliest streets, avoiding downtown traffic. Downtown is ugly, too. Not for the most part residential streets,  but light manufacturing, machine & suspicious looking  auto body shops, specialized building supplies, fenced in lots with junked cars, boarded up commercial buildings, bumpy pot-holed streets.

I was alone with the shrink's MSW assistant for awhile,  attractive young woman of oriental extraction, not long out of college. Good listener & I had some things to say, she prompted me well, I tell the stories well. Not someone I'd yet ask for advice - bring practical matters  to the older social workers who've heard everything & know what to do about it.  This wasn't a practical matter. Chat saves time with the shrink, who can only handle digests of anything important from the past two months. I think  she enjoyed what I had to say, talking about love, grief, memory, distance.   They're wonderful subjects. Would've been a  great session with my former Ph.D therapist.
***
I'd read everything readily available by author J.D. Salinger by the time I finished high school. There wasn't much of it,  & I wasn't drawn to his upper middle class characters, too young to learn from how he wrote, never went back to him.   I was recently was given the paperback edition of a recent biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life,  by Kenneth Slawenski, & read the entire book, though not front to back. Most interested in his horrific WWII war experiences in Hürtgen Forest, a tragic, ill-conceived campaign that turned into The Battle of the Bulge. It led me forward & backward in the book. I didn't recall many details about Salinger's writing. I've never understood why so many people became so  obsessed  with Salinger's withdrawal to New Hampshire, decades of seclusion (his neighbors saw him often enough),  & fanatical protection of his published works. He wrote it, put it out there, & gradually concluded he didn't owe the world anything else just because he was J.D. Salinger.

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, mental health, what I'm reading

For poets, an elaboration on something Picasso said:



It seems like every day I read a poem on Facebook that's "poetic" but it's only  a simple observation that should have stayed a simple observation. Transform or stop. Otherwise it's just fancy bulldoodle.

I recently read a small collection of poems by Adele Kenny, What Matters {pdf file], filled with trans-formative moments.  I've known Adele  for decades, but I kept her at a distance. I think I recognized a darkness in her similar to mine but which we handled in very different ways.    Adele was serious, orderly, responsible, had very cute, well-groomed, well-behaved Yorkshire Terriers, the  distinctive way she handled her environment.  She's also an expert in rare Staffordshire ceramics.  I was flippant, emotionally messy & guarded at the same time, improvisory, distracted, undisciplined, & if an expert in anything, it was rescuing scratchy, abused flea market records that I treated hardly any better than their original owners.  Adele's poem account of her childhood in a white, working class neighborhood of Rahway NJ, literally squeezed between chemical plants,  Route One, a railroad & a polluted river  was probably the most enjoyable poem I read last year, in a book I very much enjoyed reading all the way through.

Labels: New Jersey, poem, Rahway NJ, what I'm reading

The event is nothing. It's what made the event happen - which is no longer where the event is. The event is the leftovers - it happens so the entity, the spirit, or what made the shit happen can move on.

So all these events, no matter what the hell they are, are nothing. What is meaningful is what is left and  gone beyond that. So all we have is people standing around a pile of shit, looking at it. You wouldn't expect the thing that shit to go back and sit in the shit, would you?

Neil Young, Shakey

He was talking about Woodstock, & more. I understand what he's saying.

I'm learning more about Neil than I need or want to know from Shakey, a semi-authorized biography published in 2002, took over a decade for Jimmy McDonough to write - assemble may be  a more apt  word. That's why I avoided reading it for years.  Neil, perverse Scorpio  that he is (rumored double or triple Scorp), basically dared McDonough to dig up what he could dig up, sat for several extensive interviews, but didn't smooth the author's path through Neil's associates & employees, many of whom have been with him for decades & would take a bullet for him, although he's terribly difficult to work for. 

I took positive notice of Neil Young with  "Mr. Soul" & "Expecting to Fly" on the Buffalo Springfield Again album. Bought his first solo album. liked some of the songs, hated several, & disliked the production, thought the album was a mess, & forgot about Neil.  Some months later, visiting a friend in his dorm at Fordham around final exam time,  we smoked some weed & he asked if I wanted to hear the new Neil Young LP, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. I said, sure, why not? It was a revelation. Something completely unexpected. Neil had stripped his music of artifice, the attempts at Beatlesque studio creations  were gone. Crazy Horse sounded like a band he'd found in a bar, which wasn't far from the truth.  Raw emotion untempered by any display of virtuosity.  It was artless art. Some of it sounded like Link Wray influenced by Ornette Coleman, or vice versa. Some of it was great country rock. To this day it remains one of the most powerful,  memorable first-time encounters I've had with a record. & I played organ in a band. You couldn't imagine an organ on that record.

I've been a fan ever since, although I probably don't like half of what Neil has released. I never assumed he was a nice guy.  I figured  he was single-mindedly, selfishly, sometimes brutally  devoted to himself & his own art, & it cost him plenty in busted friendships, busted tours, & crap album sales. Much of the misery the asshole side of Neil  brought upon himself.

Throughout his career  Neil has pushed  me to think about love & hate in the starkest ways.    No rocker deals with this more explicitly than Neil Young. You don't need to understand his lyrics to get it.  In  his best performances, the process by which he creates the music does it.  Some Neil Young purists (& a few music critics) - I think they're masochists - can't abide when Neil is just being pretty, or choo-ga-looing. But the majority of his older audience  still expects him to play the flannel hippie.

Labels: music, what I'm reading

it is happy only when it is dancing."  -Robert Benson

Labels: what I'm reading

I'm a fan of Janet Evanovich's numbered Stephanie Plum novels. Clearly "chick" books, they take place mostly in Trenton & are so silly & slapstick (& occasionally surreal) that guys - especially from Jersey - can enjoy them. There's nothing about Stephanie to indicate she's especially good-looking, or good in bed, but she attracts two contrasting, muscular good bad boys who, when they are in bed with her, perform oral sex on Stephanie then boink her to multiple orgasms   while she mostly just lays there & enjoys it.  Why are these guys  attracted to her? Kind of difficult to say. I suppose it's why Evanovich sells millions of books.   But up to Smokin' Seventeen one of the running gags was how infrequently Stephanie had sex. In Smokin' Seventeen she has lots of sex, apparently due to a curse put on her by one of her stud muffin's Italian grandma that's supposed to turn Steph into a slut.

It's the weakest of all the Plum novels. Smokin' Seventeen isn't very funny, although all the characters are behaving to form. The sex passages must be a throwback to Evanovich's earlier incarnation as an author of romances for Bantam.

Evanovich supposedly has a rigorous six or eight-hour-per-day writing routine, when she's not on a book-shilling tour. But I don't get it.  It should take only six weeks to knock off a Plum novel. Half of the book writes itself when Evanovich pastes in the standard gags & routines readers expect, involving the regular cast of characters, everyone acting according to form. These gags do little to advance the story.  The plots aren't much. The characters are barely three-dimensional & each book adds only minimally to their development; grow them too much & they'll stop being who they are. Evanovich isn't a great writer, her prose doesn't make you want to read a paragraph twice just to savor it.

Took a long time for this series to "jump the shark," but I think it finally has. Stephanie Plum is not a  complex character.  In fact, when she's not bounty hunting she's boring. She has no interest in music, movies, sports.   She's not a great sleuth. She's become a more confident bounty hunter, but she still isn't  that good at it. Many of the laughs are from her failures to apprehend, often because her stun gun doesn't work. The older she becomes  (although the books don't track her in years) the more pathetic she  seems.She's going nowhere, stuck in a crummy apartment at the edge of a crummy city in a nowhere job. She's not dedicated to her vocation & craft like, say, female P.I,'s V.I. Warshawski & Kinsey Millhone. dogged, brilliant investigators who take great pride in their abilities, charge substantial fees for their work,  & whose dedication to their vocation makes long-term relationships problematic, although both try to have them. Stephanie doesn't like to cook, admits to not having a very nurturing, maternal disposition, & can't choose between her two hunks (one of whom wouldn't get married anyway, & the other who would expect her to give up her mostly penny ante bounty hunting & have babies).

Labels: what I'm reading

Of all the tough guy writers I admire (some of the tough guys are females), I'm most in awe of Elmore Leonard. Ross Macdonald wrote paragraphs that absolutely stopped me; the  Archer novels are my favorite P.I. series. I'm generally fond of Californian settings; writers have to be aware of the standards set by Hammett & Chandler.  But Elmore's craft is so invisible, his mastery so complete, his range so wide, his humor so dark & quirky, his amazing ability to fill out a character's character in so few words ...   Sometimes I can guess where he's going  - he has his predictable story  traits - but how he gets there is almost always a trip.  I've only read about 1/4th of his novels. His most recent, Djibouti, is one of the few that disappointed me, but by comparison with Elmore.  It was still a really good read. Elmore has a special gift for finding the strange ethical code or good heart at the core of a seemingly amoral personality, & showing how a seemingly  moral person may be amoral.  The latter is a feature of American popular fiction, since our peculiar arrogance regarding our moral superiority  constantly  needs debunking. Elmore completely comprehends what  philosopher Alan Watts called 'the irreducible element of rascality" in human beings.

Labels: culture, what I'm reading

Re-reading the early chapters of poet Amiri Baraka's Autobiography (1984), A fascinating & surprisingly affectionate  picture of Newark NJ in the late-forties, especially the subtle (& not-so-subtle) class differences within the large & growing African-American community, by economic status, skin tint, & family origin. What comes across is a community that,  although mostly poor & seriously oppressed in a declining city, is  culturally vital, diverse,  has some strong internal structures,  not yet at the crux of despair & explosive anger reached in the Sixties. The soundtrack music was terrific.

The story of Newark after World War II is the story of a number of Jersey's cities. As the manufacturing base disappeared, the white (& much of the black) middle class moved out, & the corrupt ruling white political machines adopted a siege mentality &  channeled more of the shrinking economic pie out of the black communities, making the black political ward bosses more & more ineffectual & unable to deliver the basic goodies - patronage jobs & city services -  to their constituents. To add injury to insult, the new Turnpike, Parkway & interstates sliced through urban  neighborhoods with no regard for their inhabitants & distinct identities (the superhighways  also set in motion the ruination of much of rural Jersey).
***
It's a sad irony that Jersey has at least a million more residents than 20 years ago (our population has never declined), we're now spread out all over the state, yet we lose congressional districts after every census. Among political scientist Larry J Sabato's  many proposals (some quite radical) for changing the Constitution & reforming national government, the most logical one is for expanding the House of Representatives, where we now have too few representatives,  each representing too many people.  100 years ago when the number was fixed at 435 congressional reps had relatively intimate connections with constituents, much more local.

Labels: what I'm reading

The shrink took me first yesterday. I'm  accustomed to waiting 30-45 minutes past my appt time, but I gotta get there on time anyway. From there I walked to the main library, then through downtown, stopping in Payless to look at sneakers, & at that point  a buck-fifty for a bus to my corner seemed like a good investment.  Nothing interested me on the new book shelves at the library. One Civil War history book could have but it was too large & the print too small & light. I recently had a disappointing  experience attempting to read the huge first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography.

I am reading Keith Richards' autobiography, Life.  Skipped his childhood, picked it up at the formation of The Rolling Stones, & probably close the book at "Start Me Up."  Keith is unapologetic about his massive consumption of drugs. Why should he apologize?  He doesn't recommend it, or consider himself a criminal for doing drugs. There were periods when they worked for him & periods when he regrets doing them. Heroin didn't destroy or nearly destroy a generation of American jazz musicians, but rather the criminalization of those musicians, or a personal self-destructiveness that was hardly dependent on smack when booze was legal & it was easy to get a doctor to prescribe addictive pharmaceuticals. What should have been sax great Art Pepper's best years were largely wasted either in jail or desperately  existing at the fringes of society in a never-ending search for his next fix & the money to pay for it. If he had just been given his daily dose he would have gone on gigging as usual.

Keith tells most of the stories we want to hear (& have heard before), but he's at his best talking about music. Several times already he mentioned his surprise & delight that the musicians he idolized freely shared their "secrets" - their signature licks, riffs, tunings.   It reminded me of a baseball All-Star game a few years back; before the game the peerless Yankee reliever, Mariano Rivera, was shown in the outfield  surrounded by admiring younger pitchers, Mo obviously demonstrating to them the various grips  he  used  to throw a "cutter, "  a pitch that has shattered a thousand bats.  Knowing how Mariano does it doesn't make you Mariano. Same goes for all the blues & country greats Keith has met & played with over his long career.  The Stones have always been a what you see is what you get band.  They said years ago, "It's only rock & roll," & meant it, & a lot of people still thought it was more. They haven't disguised their bullshit moments.  Bullshit is one function of the blues.

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, music, photograph, what I'm reading

Sarah Vowell's story of the Americanization of Hawaii. 

I like how Sarah Vowell  writes history. She does her research (which includes the touristy experience), mulls it over, absorbs it, then rolls  out what she's learned  in an anecdotal style - including digressions, centered in first person. You rarely get the impression she's referring to a stack of index cards.  She provides a brief bibliography but no index or footnotes.  It's the kind of writing that wins you an A+ in high school English & sometimes History, but in college you usually get away with it only in Creative Writing. It does count for something with me that she majored in Modern Languages at Montana State. 

The virtues of Unfamiliar Fishes are the virtues of all Vowell's books & essays: Intelligence; dogged research; biting wit;  the courage to confront the ugliness & horrific violence of American history, particularly with regard to our  mash-up of the protestant imperative to evangelize   & the capitalist imperative to exploit (a national psychosis that plagues us still)  & how these are uniquely allied in our history in both chattel slavery & manifest destiny. Our deadly march across the continent  made the British Raj in India look benign by comparison.

Her drollness (which may be a character flaw harnessed as  an asset, who can tell? )  & inability to overlook an irony (Is anything not ironic in American history?) wears on me after awhile. Fortunately, her books are brief. A coffeehouse date with her is sufficient, &  when she's a guest on Letterman,  I don't find myself wishing  Sarah had a third segment; only that Dave would let her finish a complete thought & give her a chance to sell her book.

Unfamiliar Fishes, although a history of Hawaii after Europeans found it, feels like an extended appendage to  The Wordy Shipmates. It follows a small bunch of  New England protestant missionaries  - elite descendants  of those shipmates - to Hawaii where they, in unwilling concert with New England whalers, set in motion the terrible energies that destroyed indigenous Hawaiian culture with religion, disease, & good old capitalism, & basically conquered Hawaii from within, like the  infectious diseases we brought to the islands that reduced the native population from an estimated 300,000 to 40,000 in a few decades.

The Great Irony for me is that Hawaii had produced a tyrant-king, Kamehameha I, before the missionaries arrived,  whose bloody unification of the islands (thanks to the introduction of cannon & muskets) & whose son's subsequent destruction of the old religious order,  priestly caste, & taboos  had made it easier for missionaries to infest the place.  Like the Sioux when they became a buffalo-hunting horse culture, Hawaiians had to re-imagine their history & origins when Kamehameha I took over. Sarah does not idealize Hawaiian culture. Rather, she makes clear that the Hawaiian Islands group had embarked on its own messy path to nationhood & development of a common identity, which was tragically foiled - as history tells us too-commonly occurred - by foreign imperialists.

I found myself putting the book aside, picking it up, & rushing through the last  quarter  of Unfamiliar Fishes. This happens  often enough with overlong novels, but  Vowell  writes  a companionable sort of prose in which the author is  almost as much the subject as the ...  subject.  A few possible reasons: Pasty-faced Sarah in Hawaii is a bit like Santa Claus versus the Martians. She loves Hawaii. But everyone loves Hawaii whether or not we've been there. Authentic old Hawaiian culture is not only really alien to western culture,  it's far more unfamiliar & exotic to us mainland Yurrupean-Americans than  the Native American cultures of North America we conquered nation-by-nation & tribe-by-tribe over 300 years. Vowell's juxtaposition of humor & horror didn't work for me the way it did in The Wordy Shipmates. The Puritan colonist shipmates really were my ancestors on my mom's side.  But by the 1890's there were serious, vocal dissenters to America's  expansionist designs, including Mark Twain. One  can imagine siding with Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch.  I thought,  maybe it's just me, that I can't accept the limitations of the book. I concluded that was not the situation.  Sarah tried to cram way too much information into a 238 page book. She had to give us three back stories: The Hawaiians', the missionaries', & the discovery of Hawaii by Europeans. She had to tell us how America annexed Hawaii. & she had to provide a travelogue,  a sort of tourist's guide to the popular & obscure attractions, geological & historical.   So she flits all over the place, from island to island, past to present, with her precocious & annoying nephew Owen popping up here & there (next time, leave him home, Sarah. He's a kid  an aunt appreciates, & adolescence won't improve him).  She's eating & explaining a multi-cultural take-out lunch in a Honolulu park, then is suddenly transported to a remote location accessible by crawling over an extinct volcano  on her knees.

Should you read Unfamiliar Fishes? Sure. It's a good book. You should read everything by Sarah Vowell. Sarah's  devotees may like it more than I - a mere fan -  did.  It did make me more curious about Hawaiian culture & history.  Unfamiliar Fishes does not pretend to be more than it is.

Labels: Rix reviews, what I'm reading

My liberal/left readers will enjoy Was Marx Right? It's Not Too Late to Ask by Terry Eagleton in Commonweal magazine (hope the link works  for you). "Commonweal is an independent journal of opinion edited by lay Catholics."

What made Marxism seem implausible, then, was not that capitalism had changed its spots. The case was exactly the opposite. It was the fact that as far as the system went, it was business as usual but even more so. Ironically, then, what helped beat back Marxism also lent a kind of credence to its claims. It was thrust to the margins because the social order it confronted, far from growing more moderate and benign, waxed more ruthless and extreme than it had been before. And this made the Marxist critique of it all the more pertinent. On a global scale, capital was more concentrated and predatory than ever, and the working class had actually increased in size. It was becoming possible to imagine a future in which the megarich took shelter in their armed and gated communities, while a billion or so slum dwellers were encircled in their fetid hovels by watchtowers and barbed wire.

It's a lengthy article & drags on a bit. But the important point is that Marx (who was not Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Kim Jong Il) offered up the most comprehensive, intelligent critique of unfettered exploitative capitalism, &  the failure of botched, bloody, imperialistic, totalitarian regimes that would have dismayed Marx himself does not invalidate the use of Marx & socialism to examine & critique the inequities of wealth & income in America. America needs wealth redistributed downward, & by downward I mean to the middle & working classes, because the poor depend on the economic expansion of these classes in order to move up into them. For "safety nets," government programs are far more reliable than largesse of wealthy people or religious groups.

Europeans & Canadians do not want to do away with their state-guaranteed medical benefits - there are a variety of national health services, every nation manages them differently.  Western Europeans  - people & businesses - do not suffer the anxieties over medical care that afflict Americans. They are healthier than us even when their lifestyles aren't as healthy. When you hear a middle class Canadian or Brit gripe about health care, invite them to America & listen to th answer you get: "No way!" They know we're bad. Brag all you want about Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan, but chances are, if that's the top-of-line care  for your special illness, you'll have to mortgage the house & live in hotel, all the while pleading with your insurance provider over out-of-group specialists & uncovered tests,  A few years ago a friend of mine came down from Vermont to be treated for a rare, life-threatening illness. He was treated, went back to Vermont, & died.

"Socialism" is menacing word in America that we tend to think of as meaning a  monolithic political philosophy of oppressive government  when it in fact has many variants.  Marxism is an obscenity. So nobody wants to be a socialist or a marxist. But we desperately need  the hope of community solutions, the empowerment of the weak & powerless (like when only white, male property owners could vote, or one was taxed to vote, or forced to submit to "literacy tests" with questions even the questioners could not answer, or one was a woman & a constitutional amendment was required to extend the vote to females.

Unions were considered communistic. Didn't help that some of the early ones were. But the great growth of unionism occurred when unions pulled away from the ideologues & concentrated on  building a better lifestyle for workers; a living wage, safer working conditions, health care, more leisure time,  & after WWII a house in the suburbs & a more comfortable retirement than Social Security alone could provide.

The proof of the success of unionism was that unionized workers earned more than nonunion  workers in the same jobs. So forcing unions to accept wages & benefits that are the same as non-union workers  will be the death blow to organized labor.Or will it? Perhaps the "sleeping giant"  is not the Tea Party, but unionized workers, their families, friends, allies, & all those who wish they could organize a union at their workplaces.


I have more notes on this. Maybe tomorrow's blog.

Labels: bully pulpit, in the news, justice, what I'm reading

Booker T & the MGs: Love Wheels

I feel halfway cool today. A friend of mine in  the "book biz" sent me an advance copy of "The Fifth Witness" by Michael Connelly, featuring Mickey Haller, The "Lincoln Lawyer," soon to be a major motion picture release.

Labels: music, video, what I'm reading

I just watched a video of a group of young adults sitting around a table at a diner after church, singing "Happy Birthday." As he blew out the candles on the cake, Johnny had a cellphone pressed to his ear & wasn't even making direct eye-contact with his friends. How rude can you get? At least he was smiling. I took an instant dislike to him. Somebody should have grabbed the phone, stuck it in the cake, then handed it back to him.
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Disppointed in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith. The first half of the fanged goth-history book would make a good graphic novel; it had some funny, gory passages & the development of Lincoln as an expert vampire hunter fit well with his early life, the deaths of his mother & brother, his time in New Salem, his flatboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans, & first years as a lawyer & politician in Springfield.

Then the novel exposed secession & the Civil Was as a vast plot by racist vampires to guarantee themselves a reliable supply of slaves &, if necessary, poor whites, for blood-drinking, & as financiers & masters of their living, non-vampire Rebel leaders like Jefferson Davis. Slavery was real & horrible enough without pushing blame off on a vampire conspiracy, & making the conspiracy a focus of Abe's determination to win the war. It felt like an injustice to the truth, & was not humorous.

Although Robert E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson wrongly put their sense of Christian duty in the service of a slave empire, I could not imagine them extending this duty to vampires. I think that's where they would have drawn the line. Unless they were vampires, too.

Labels: what I'm reading

Called library today & reserved The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol 1. Twain dictated it when he was old, it's "a jumble," he admitted. He also agreed with his publisher that it could not be published  at that time in its unexpurgated form, so the versions that later appeared heavily cut the rage, bile, cynicism, score-settling, & political rants. Twain was a bitter old man. He had his reasons. He suffered from depression. Personal tragedy; he  out-lived his wife & two of his three daughters. A business failure  had him lecturing around the world to pay off debts. & by 1900,  the "progress" he had documented in the second part of Life On The Mississippi with all the literary aplomb of a Chamber of Commerce brochure had turned America into an imperialist aggressor abroad  & a  cruel exploiter of human labor & natural resources at home. Like George Carlin in his last years, it was tough for Twain to be funny. But he still could be very funny.

Vol 1 doesn't contain much omitted material. But Vols 2 & 3 will.  Vol 1 is 760 pages & since I  don't plan of giving up fiction I figure I ought to get started.

Labels: what I'm reading

Lost in interest in  several  novels & abandoned them. Not pickin' em well.  But a couple were bestsellers by authors I like,  including Sue Grafton's new one, "U" is for Undertow.   In "T"Is For Trespass, Sue began playing around with her structures, alternating the first person narrative of her P.I. Kinsey Millhone with the voice  of her psycho nemesis. Didn't care for it, but one  could hardly fault Sue for stretching.   I got far into her newest book before I was willing to admit that for first time Sue had lost me. It was expertly written & plotted, but neither the characters nor the plot (which had flashbacks) were engaging me. & Kinsey's  grumpiness  didn't have it's usual humor.   I prefer the  classic P.I.  style Grafton had been using.   Maybe Janet Evanovich's funny, lightweight  Stephanie Plum novels have spoiled me. Easy reads,  slapstick action, Jersey locales by an author who grew up here.

Labels: what I'm reading

Sleeping Beauty by Ross Macdonald. (1973)

Synopsis: She walked into the West L.A. night with a bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. The problem for Lew Archer was that she had taken the pills from him and was in the mood to use them. Her family was behind a huge oil spill that lapped like blood against the California coast, while a 30-year-old family secret refused to stay buried beneath all that money and power. Now the girl was missing, two men were dead, and there was oil everywhere.

I coincidentally had just finished re-reading this fine novel inspired by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, when the Gulf oil platform exploded. It opens with private investigator Lew Archer returning from a brief vacation in Mexico, jet flying low over an out-of-control offshore spill as it banks & descends into Los Angeles. Archer, like most fictional Californian detectives after Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, has an appreciative, descriptive eye for scenery. Before Archer goes home, he drives to the coast for a closer look at the disaster, & the ineffective attempts to stop the spreading oil & cap the well. The spill provides the background for the increasingly complex tale, & at the conclusion the well is still gushing.oil on to the beaches.

Labels: in the news, what I'm reading