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David Bowie’s Must-Read Books

October 2, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Via Liz Bury at the Guardian, here’s David Bowie’s list of must-read books that’s been released as part of an exhibition about the pop star at the Art Gallery of Ontario:

  • The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby (2008)
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2007)
  • The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard (2007)
  • Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage (2007)
  • Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (2002)
  • The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens (2001)
  • Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler (1997)
  • A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes (1997)
  • The Insult, Rupert Thomson (1996)
  • Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon (1995)
  • The Bird Artist, Howard Norman (1994)
  • Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard (1993)
  • Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C. Danto (1992)
  • Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia (1990)
  • David Bomberg, Richard Cork (1988)
  • Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick (1986)
  • The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin (1986)
  • Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd (1985)
  • Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey (1984)
  • Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter (1984)
  • Money, Martin Amis (1984)
  • White Noise, Don DeLillo (1984)
  • Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes (1984)
  • The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White (1984)
  • A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn (1980)
  • A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980)
  • Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester (1980)
  • Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1980)
  • Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess (1980)
  • Raw, a “graphix magazine” (1980-91)
  • Viz, magazine (1979 –)
  • The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels (1979)
  • Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz (1978)
  • In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan (1978)
  • Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed Malcolm Cowley (1977)
  • The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes (1976)
  • Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders (1975)
  • Mystery Train, Greil Marcus (1975)
  • Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara (1974)
  • Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich (1972)
  • In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner (1971)
  • Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky (1971)
  • The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillett (1970)
  • The Quest for Christa T, Christa Wolf (1968)
  • Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn (1968)
  • The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
  • Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg (1967)
  • Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr (1966)
  • In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1965)
  • City of Night, John Rechy (1965)
  • Herzog, Saul Bellow (1964)
  • Puckoon, Spike Milligan (1963)
  • The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford (1963)
  • The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, Yukio Mishima (1963)
  • The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (1963)
  • A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
  • Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell (1962)
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (1961)
  • Private Eye, magazine (1961 –)
  • On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding (1961)
  • Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage (1961)
  • Strange People, Frank Edwards (1961)
  • The Divided Self, RD Laing (1960)
  • All the Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd (1960)
  • Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse (1959)
  • The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
  • On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
  • The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard (1957)
  • Room at the Top, John Braine (1957)
  • A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1956)
  • The Outsider, Colin Wilson (1956)
  • Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)
  • The Street, Ann Petry (1946)
  • Black Boy, Richard Wright (1945)

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“The Eggers Novel I’d Love To Read Is The One Dominated By The Best Of Intentions”

October 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I posted an excerpt from the new Dave Eggers novel earlier, and here’s part of a riposte to the book that Felix Salmon wrote for Reuters, which contends that the author gets Silicon Valley all wrong. Because the novel doesn’t come out for another week and I haven’t read it, I don’t know what to say about this critique. Eggers seems to have purposely written about the Valley without firsthand experience in the same way that Kafka imagined America or Stephen Crane the Civil War, hoping to create something of an impressionistic truth. At any rate, this is from Salmon:

“The thing about the Valley that Eggers misses is that it’s populated by people who consider themselves above the rest of the country — intellectually, culturally, financially. They consider themselves the cognitive elite; the rest of us are the puppets dancing on the end of their strings of code.

Besides, we all share the downside of being part of an always-on, networked society, whether we participate on social media or not. If you’re going to suffer the downside, you might as well enjoy the upside — that’s all the motivation that anybody needs to get involved, there’s no need for crude coercion.

In science, there’s a phenomenon called ‘herd immunity’: if you vaccinate a high enough proportion of people, the entire population becomes immune. The evolution of the web is similar: enough of us are connected, in many different ways, that no one has real privacy any longer. Eggers can see that, but he then tries to reverse-engineer how we got here, and, by dint of not doing his homework, gets it very wrong.

The Circle is a malign organization; you can almost see its CEO, Eamon Bailey, stroking a white cat in his suburban Palo Alto lair, dreaming of Global Domination. In reality, however, the open protocols of the World Wide Web led naturally and ineluctably to our current loss of privacy. Tim Berners-Lee is no evil genius; he’s a good guy. And the Eggers novel I’d love to read is the one dominated by the best of intentions. Rather than the one which thinks that if technology is causing problems, then the cause must always be technologists with maleficent ulterior motives.”•

_________________________

Eggers visits Conan in 2004:

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“My God, Mae Thought. It’s Heaven.”

October 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dave Eggers’ latest novel, The Circle, is a satire about, among other things, social networking, that really good and really bad idea. Here’s the opening of an excerpt from it running in the New York Times Magazine this week:

“My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven.

The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands. On land that had once been a shipyard, then a drive-in movie theater, then a flea market, then blight, there were now soft green hills and a Calatrava fountain. And a picnic area, with tables arranged in concentric circles. And tennis courts, clay and grass. And a volleyball court, where tiny children from the company’s day care center were running, squealing, weaving like water. Amid all this was a workplace, too, 400 acres of brushed steel and glass on the headquarters of the most influential company in the world. The sky above was spotless and blue.

Mae was making her way through all of this, walking from the parking lot to the main hall, trying to look as if she belonged. The walkway wound around lemon and orange trees, and its quiet red cobblestones were replaced, occasionally, by tiles with imploring messages of inspiration. ‘Dream,’ one said, the word laser-cut into the stone. ‘Participate,’ said another. There were dozens: ‘Find Community.’ ‘Innovate.’ ‘Imagine.’ She just missed stepping on the hand of a young man in a gray jumpsuit; he was installing a new stone that said, ‘Breathe.’

On a sunny Monday in June, Mae stopped in front of the main door, standing below the logo etched into the glass above. Though the company was less than six years old, its name and logo — a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center — were already among the best known in the world. There were more than 10,000 employees on this, the main campus, but the Circle had offices all over the globe and was hiring hundreds of gifted young minds every week. It had been voted the world’s most admired company four years running.

Mae wouldn’t have thought she had a chance to work at such a place but for Annie. Annie was two years older, and they roomed together for three semesters in college, in an ugly building made habitable through their extraordinary bond, something like friends, something like sisters — or cousins who wished they were siblings and would have reason never to be apart. Their first month living together, Mae broke her jaw one twilight, after fainting, flu-ridden and underfed, during finals. Annie had told her to stay in bed, but Mae went to the Kwik Trip for caffeine and woke up on the sidewalk, under a tree. Annie took her to the hospital and waited as they wired her jaw and then stayed with Mae, sleeping next to her, in a wooden chair, all night, and then at home, for days, had fed Mae through a straw. It was a fierce level of commitment and competence that Mae had never seen from someone her age or near her age, and Mae was thereafter loyal in a way she’d never known she could be.

While Mae was still at Carleton, meandering between majors, from art history to marketing to psychology — getting her degree in psych with no plans to go further in the field — Annie had graduated, gotten her M.B.A. from Stanford and was recruited everywhere, but particularly at the Circle, and had landed here days after graduation. Now she had some lofty title — Director of Ensuring the Future, Annie joked — and had urged Mae to apply for a job. Mae did so, and though Annie insisted that she pulled no strings, Mae was sure Annie had, and she felt indebted beyond all measure. A million people, a billion, wanted to be where Mae was at this moment, entering this atrium, 30 feet high and shot through with California light, on her first day working for the only company that really mattered at all.” 

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“He Invented A Machine That Can Read What You Type”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Just amazing footage of the late inventor David H. Shepard demonstrating his Optical Character Reader on a 1959 episode of I’ve Got a Secret. From his 2007 New York Times obituary: “David H. Shepard, who in his attic invented one of the first machines that could read, and then, to facilitate its interpreting of credit-card receipts, came up with the near-rectilinear font still used for the cards’ numbers, died on Nov. 24 in San Diego. He was 84. …

Mr. Shepard followed his reading machine, more formally known as an optical-character-recognition device, with one that could listen and talk. It could answer only ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but each answer led to a deeper level of complexity. A later version could simultaneously handle multiple telephone inquiries. …

In 1964, his ‘conversation machine’ became the first commercial device to give telephone callers access to computer data by means of their own voices.  …

Mr. Shepard apologized many times for his major role in forcing people to converse with a machine instead of with a human being.”

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“If It Had Been A Plague It Would Have Been A Historic Event”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The jobless recovery is a complicated thing, and not just a political one. So many jobs have become ghosts in the machine. Luddism doesn’t work, but the new normal can scare you to death. Are an automated society and a capitalist one compatible? From Katharine Rowland’s Guernica interview with George Packer about his recent book, The Unwinding:

Guernica:

There’s also a story that reads almost like a parable of the fall occurring between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What’s happened in that period with regard to the middle class? 

George Packer:

That’s part of the story. I had seen this in more political terms as sort of the end of the conservative era. The Reagan era began in 1980 and ended in 2008, that was my historical hypothesis. Now I’m remembering other false starts, like I spent months reading the literature of the neoconservatives of the 1970s to get into the mindset of the early Reagan years. But all of that fell by the wayside when I figured out I could do it through characters. It was these people who took me to the big theme of the social contract. It was in all their lives. It used to be that jobs were going to be there when you left high school in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Screw-up students went to textile factories, and better students went to the RJ Reynolds Warehouse, believe it or not, and the really good students went to community college. And that doesn’t happen anymore, those jobs aren’t there. The screw-up students are doing meth and hanging out at the pool hall and the bowling alley.

I didn’t look for it, it was there everywhere—the sense that not necessarily a wonderful life, but a decent life had been available to the majority, and it was gone. You could see its absence on these main streets. It was traumatic. It’s become normal to people who live there, but you get people talking about it and there are ghosts everywhere. As one man said to me, if it had been a plague it would have been a historic event, but it was economic dislocation, so it’s considered a natural process.

Guernica:

It was your sense that it had become normal for the people going through it?

George Packer:

I didn’t sense that they thought it was normal, but that they had stopped thinking about it all the time because they had to live in it.•

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“To Add A Way For Authors To Sign E-Books…Would Be A Boon For Readers”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I buy books just to read them, so I don’t want any author signatures inside. I paid for that book! Do not write in it! But readers who’ve made the switch to ebooks will likely soon have the option of having them autographed. From Carolyn Kellogg at the Los Angeles Times:

“Want to hand over your iPad so an author can sign your e-book? You might be able to soon.

Apple has registered for a patent that would allow an e-book owner with an iPad get his or her book signed by an author. Readers might even be able to pose for a photo with the author as authentication to go with it — a photo that would go right into the e-book on the traditional signature page.

As Publishers Lunch tweeted Friday, the patent-following website Patently Apple has posted a description of the patent application. ‘On September 26, 2013, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals a new iBook autographing system and more specifically to techniques and systems for embedding autographs in electronic books,’ the report said.

To add a way for authors to sign e-books — and do something extra, like add a photo that would be embedded in the e-book — would be a boon for readers.”

“In Terms Of Books Or Things Written On Paper, Nothing Much Is Going To Change”

September 29, 2013 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1999,  Michael Crichton played what he knew to be a fool’s game and predicted the future. He was not so successful. Things he got wrong: Printed matter will be unchanged, movies will soon be dead, communications will be consolidated into fewer hands. Well, he did foresee YouTube.

Crichton, who was fascinated by science and often accused of being anti-science, commenting in a 1997 Playboy interview on technology creating moral quandries we’re not prepared for: “I think we’re a long way from cloning people. But I am worried about scientific advances without consideration of their consequences. The history of medicine in my lifetime is one of technological advances that outstrip our ethical systems. We’ve never caught up. When I was in medical school—30-odd years ago—people were struggling to deal with mechanical-respiration systems. They were keeping alive people who a few years earlier would have died of natural causes. Suddenly people weren’t going to die of natural causes. They were either going to get on these machines and never get off or—or what? Were we going to turn the machines off? We had the machines well before we started the debate. Doctors were speaking quietly among themselves with a kind of resentment toward these machines. On the one hand, if somebody had a temporary disability, the machines could help get them over the hump. For accident victims—some of whom were very young—who could be saved if they pulled through the initial crisis, the technology saved lives. You could get them over the hump and then they would recover, and that was terrific.

But on the other hand, there was a category of people who were on their way out but could be kept alive. Before the machine, ‘pulling the plug’ actually meant opening the window too wide one night, and the patient would get pneumonia and die. That wasn’t going to happen now. We were being forced by technology to make decisions about the right to die—whether it’s a legal or religious issue—and many related matters. Some of them contradict longstanding ideas in an ethically protected world; we weren’t being forced to make hard decisions, because those decisions were being made for us—in this case, by the pneumococcus.

This is just one example of an ethical issue raised by technology. Cloning is another. If you’re knowledgeable about biotechnology, it’s possible to think of some terrifying scenarios. I don’t even like to discuss them. I know people doing biotechnology research who have decided not to pursue avenues of research because they think they’re too dangerous. But we go forward without sorting out the issues. I don’t believe that everything new is necessarily better. We go forward with the technology while the ethical issues are still up in the air, whether it’s the genetic variability of crop streams, which is a resource in times of plant plagues, to the assumption that we all have to be connected all the time. The technology is here so you must use it. Do you? Do you have to have your cell phone and your e-mail address and your Internet hookup? I was just on holiday in Scotland without e-mail. I had to notify people that I wouldn’t be checking my e-mail, because there’s an assumption that if I send you an e-mail, you’ll get it. Well, I won’t get it. I’m not plugged in, guys. Some people are horrified: ‘You’ve gone offline?’ People feel so enslaved by technology that they will stop having sex to answer the telephone. What could be so important? Who’s calling, and who cares?”

“Having Power Can Backfire”

September 29, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian interview with Malcolm Gladwell, in anticipation of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, his latest book of unconventional wisdom:

“The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn’t a miracle, he argues: it’s just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong. (Sample sentence: ‘Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.’)

‘With each book that passes, I think my personal ideology becomes more explicit … and this one is a very Canadian sort of book,’ says Gladwell, who was born in Fareham, in Hampshire, but grew up in Ontario. ‘It’s Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power. Someone told me – did you know that there’s never been a luxury brand to come from Canada? That’s never happened. That’s such a great fact to have about your home country.’

Difficulties and afflictions, the book shows, frequently foster creativity and resilience. Studies on ‘cognitive disfluency’ have shown that people do better at problem-solving tasks when they’re printed in a hard-to-read font: the extra challenge triggers more effortful engagement. We meet dyslexics whose reading problems forced them to find more efficient ways to master law and finance (one is now a celebrated trial lawyer, another the president of Goldman Sachs); we learn why losing a parent in childhood forges a resilience that frequently spurs achievement in later life, and why you shouldn’t necessarily attend the best university that will have you. (The answer is ‘relative deprivation’: the further you are from being the best at your institution, the more demotivating it is; middling talents perform better at middling establishments.) Conversely, having power can backfire, not least because it tricks the powerful into thinking they don’t need the consent of those over whom they wield it. In a compelling account of the Troubles, Gladwell argues that the British were plagued by a simple error: the belief that their superior resources meant ‘it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them.’ More isn’t always more.”

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“What She Made Me Think About Is Bioengineering”

September 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Margaret Atwood: Our Most Important Prophet of Doom,” Judith Shulevitz’s New Republic meditation about bioengineering, which has the potential to be wonderful and terrible:

“Every generation takes for granted beliefs or practices that strike later generations as unconscionable. Just try explaining to your children public executions, chattel slavery, or eugenics. Your offspring will gape, stunned, until it dawns on them that the society you’re raising them to take part in has an astonishing capacity not to think things through. So, what’s not being thought through right now? The competition is stiff: the continued use of fossil fuels when catastrophic storms batter our shores, feeding our children off toxin-leaching plastic tableware, etc., etc.

You’d think that the professionals most likely to predict our regrets would be statisticians, trained as they are to rank the likelihood of negative outcomes. But prognostication of this sort is more gift than skill, since you need a finely tuned moral sensor as much as, if not more than, advanced numeracy. You can’t say what history will deem barbaric unless you feel a punch in the stomach every time you encounter it. This is why it was a novelist, not a statistician, who first sounded the alarm—for me—about a fast-tumbling cascade of changes I hadn’t thought hard about before.

The novelist is Margaret Atwood. What she made me think about is bioengineering.”

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“If You’re Doing It For Money Or Fame, Don’t Do It”

September 26, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

In the poem “So You Want to Be a Writer,” Charles Bukowski cautioned, “If you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it.” But his estate has gone for the cash and let that piece of writing be used for a really crappy Dewar’s commercial, which is populated with the kind of faux tough guys and artists and carefully disheveled males he would have deplored. Hank was an ass, sure, but he was right about such people. The spot only would have been acceptable if it included footage of Chinaski vomiting scotch or showing X-rays of his damaged liver.

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“Hey, This Thing Is Happening Without Us”

September 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Following up his authorized Steve Jobs bio, Walter Isaacson is writing a book about the icons of the Digital Era. Let’s hope he employs a large team of fact-checkers because such people tend to be fabulists. There’s an excerpt at Harvard Magazine from the forthcoming volume, about Bill Gates, who’s told a yarn or two in his day and is no stranger to the author. The opening:

“IT MAY HAVE BEEN the most momentous purchase of a magazine in the history of the Out of Town Newsstand in Harvard Square. Paul Allen, a college dropout from Seattle, wandered into the cluttered kiosk one snowy day in December 1974 and saw that the new issue of Popular Electronics featured a home computer for hobbyists, called the Altair, that was just coming on the market. He was both exhilarated and dismayed. Although thrilled that the era of the ‘personal’ computer seemed to have arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down 75 cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slush to the Currier House room of Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore and fellow computer fanatic from Lakeside High School in Seattle, who had convinced Allen to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. ‘Hey, this thing is happening without us,’ Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.

What Gates and Allen set out to do, during the Christmas break of 1974 and the subsequent January reading period when Gates was supposed to be studying for exams, was to create the software for personal computers. ‘When Paul showed me that magazine, there was no such thing as a software industry,’ Gates recalled. ‘We had the insight that you could create one. And we did.’ Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, ‘That was the most important idea that I ever had.’

In high school, Gates had formed the Lakeside Programming Group, which made money writing computer code for companies in the Pacific Northwest. As a senior, he applied only to three colleges—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—and he took different approaches to each. ‘I was born to apply for college,’ he said, fully aware of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized the month he had spent in Washington as a congressional page. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three, and chose Harvard. ‘There are going to be some guys at Harvard who are smarter than you,’ Allen warned him. Gates replied, ‘No way! No way!'”

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“The Computer Is My Timekeeper, It Is My Courier And Library”

September 25, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I clearly have no qualms about reading off of a screen, but posting Junot Diaz’s improvised reading list made me think of this passage from Terrence Holt’s “Charybdis,” a short story about a troubled space mission to Jupiter:

“The computer is my timekeeper, it is my courier and library. It stores in its memory the pages I call up on the screen. For my collection I chose Shakespeare, Melville, the old myths. My crewmates left their libraries with me. Stern loved mysteries; Peterson was more a western man.

I spend hours at the screen now, and though I am grateful for the machine, it leaves me skeptical. I wish often for the weight, or at least the solidity, of a book, instead of the image of words on glass. The transience of the picture worries me, and I have caught myself calling back earlier pages, comparing them to my own memory to see if the text has been altered by the computer’s traffic with so much other information. Sometimes, I am tantalized by a suspicion—surely that word was not noses, but something starting with a g; and that was cave, not save; not screen, but—I catch myself, and read on.”

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“We Can Destroy Privacy, We Really Can”

September 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I know I said I would stop, but there is one more interview from David Frost’s 1970 book, The Americans, that I want to excerpt. It’s an exchange about privacy the host had with Ramsey Clark, the noted Department of Justice lawyer. At the outset of this segment, Clark is commenting about wiretapping, though he broadens his remarks to regard privacy in general:

Ramsey Clark:

[It’s] an immense waste, an immoral sort of thing.

David Frost:

Immoral in what sense?

Ramsey Clark:

Well, immoral in the sense that government has to be fair. Government has to concede the dignity of its citizens. If the government can’t protect its citizens with fairness, we’re in real trouble, aren’t we? And it’s always ironic to me that those who urge wiretapping strongest won’t give more money for police salaries to bring real professionalism and real excellence to law enforcement, which is so essential to our safety.

They want an easy way, they want a cheap way. They want a way that demeans the integrity of the individual, of all of our citizens. We can’t overlook the capabilities of our technology. We can destroy privacy, we really can. We have techniques now–and we’re only on the threshold of discovery–that can permeate brick walls three feet thick. 

David Frost:

How? What sorts of things?

Ramsey Clark:

You can take a laser beam and you put it on a resonant surface within the room, and you can pick up any vibration in that room, any sound within that room, from half a mile away.

David Frost:

I think that’s terrifying.

Ramsey Clark:

You know, we can do it with sound and lights, in other words, visual-audio invasion of privacy is possible, and if we really worked at it with the technology that we have, in a few years we could destroy privacy as we know it.

Privacy is pretty hard to retain anyway in a mass society, a highly urbanized society, and if we don’t discipline ourselves now to traditions of privacy and to traditions of the integrity of the individual, we can have a generation of youngsters quite soon that won’t know what it meant because it wasn’t here when they came.•

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Junot Diaz Recommends Short-Story Collections

September 23, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In his Ask Me Anything at Reddit, writer Junot Diaz was asked to recommend short-story collections. Here’s the exchange:

“Question:

What are some short story collections you’d recommend to those people who are averse to reading short stories? Ones that would definitely change their mind about the genre.

Junot Diaz:

TE HOLT In the Valley of the Kings dennis johnson’s Jesus’ Son maxine hong kingston (memoir) Woman Warrior Edward P Jones Lost in the CIty Sandra Cisneros Woman Hollering Creek Sherman Alexie Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Octavia Butler’s BloodChild and Other Stories Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life.

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“Every Species In The History Of Biology That Outgrows Its Resource Base Suffers A Population Crash”

September 22, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Alan Weisman’s 2007 thought-experiment, The World Without Us, isn’t just one of my favorite books of the past decade but one of my favorite books, period. His soon-to-be published follow-up, Countdown, concerns world population, which still is booming. We’ve heard before of population bombs that never detonated, but Weisman has run the numbers and is not pleased. From Kenneth R. Weiss’ Los Angles Times interview with the journalist:

“‘Our numbers have reached a point where we’ve essentially redefined the concept of original sin,’ Weisman writes. ‘From the instant we’re born, even the humblest among us compounds the world’s mounting problems by needing food, firewood, and a roof, for starters. Literally and figuratively, we’re all exhaling CO2 and pushing other species over the edge.’

The theme of the book focuses mostly on the ecological question, how many people can Earth support without capsizing? It’s not a new pursuit, of course. Scholars dating to Tertullian, in 2nd century Carthage, have written about a teeming population being ‘burdensome’ to the world.

Weisman sets out to define an ‘optimum population’ for a sustainable Earth, one that balances the overall human numbers with how much each person consumes. As far as per capita consumption is concerned, he proposes a European lifestyle as something that would be widely acceptable but not something as energy-intensive as living in the United States or as difficult as living in much of Africa and Asia.

He doesn’t specify an optimum target population, although he sketches some 20-year-old calculations by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and colleagues that set the number at 2 billion or so. Instead, Weisman argues that we should get on a path of reducing our numbers or suffer the fate of the profusion of deer on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon that starved to death in the 1920s.

‘Like Kaibab deer, every species in the history of biology that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash — a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species,’ Weisman writes. ‘…Inevitably –- and, we must hope, humanely and nonviolently — that means gradually bringing our numbers down. The alternative is letting nature –- the new nature we’ve inadvertently created in our own image –- do that for us.'”

“See What Happens When A Lady Listens To Her Husband?”

September 21, 2013 in Books, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Jacqueline Susann, that love machine, appearing on some sort of strange 1971 game show/physiognomy experiment called All About Faces, three years before her death. Her partner in the competition is her husband, Irving Mansfield, the publicity agent who tirelessly and skillfully plumped her books. They square off against Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows.

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“The Comic Book Has Seized The Format And Exploded”

September 20, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

So far 28,000 students have signed up for an online course on comic books and graphic novels to be taught by William Kuskin, English professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, which speaks to our shifting notions of education and literacy. A couple of exchanges from the teacher’s Ask Me Anything at Reddit.

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Question:

Why do you think comic books and graphic novels are such a successful storytelling medium?

William Kuskin:

Great question. You know, my own feeling is that comics are like medieval manuscripts from the fifteenth century. They are best, best, best artform for the book. They are something to have and collect and sort of worship. As the internet has made books only one medium of many for communication, the comic book has seized the format and exploded. That said, a lot of the energy has to do with community. People need a community of the imagination. Comics provide the platform for that community.

________________________

Question:

Looking forward to the course. My question is about the collapse of higher education. I was in the phd program at UPenn’s English Department (had to drop out because of severe depression unrelated to that). Anyway, I spent what free time I had trying to organize grad employees (we had already suffered the fatal(?) blow of the NLRB’s decision deeming grad employees at private unis not actually employees, so our election results had been impounded and never counted). Anyway, I did a study of the school of arts and sciences, and more than 70% of the courses were taught by adjuncts. Any thoughts on the ‘casualization of academic labor’? Also, the year most of my cohort went on the job market, there were 3 tenure-track jobs in the entire country…

William Kuskin:

This is a major question. A major one, and a difficult one. You are not alone in your experience and your # of 70% is sad, but not inaccurate. I have to put my ‘chair of the department’ hat on now to answer this. I would say three things: 1. Higher Education has been in a process of change to adjunct labor for some time. This is a painful and unplanned process. 2. Nevertheless the mission of higher education–to educate, to ennoble, and to foster new research–remains the same. I do not believe that mission will go away. Ever. In terms of graduate education, the only wise thing is to try, but also set a time limit to how long you can afford to stay in. There is much to be gained from going to graduate school, taking lessons, and moving on.•

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“They’re Proposing In Some States That Marriage Contracts Should Automatically Dissolve At Periods, Say, Of Ten Years”

September 20, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

One final interview excerpt from The Americans, the 1970 book by David Frost which also gave us the Jon Voight and Ralph Nader pieces. Here’s an exchange in which the TV host and the author and politician Clare Boothe Luce talk about the future of marriage in the U.S.:

David Frost:

Do you think marriage will change, Clare?

Clare Boothe Luce:

Oh, I think it’s changing very rapidly, yes. In some states in the Union now there are definite proposals that marriage should be contractual over a period of time, like any other human engagement. And they’re proposing in some states that marriage contracts should automatically dissolve at periods, say, of ten years, when the children presumably are grown.

I think that the reasons for this are, first and most importantly, that ours is now a very mobile world. And people move around very fast. The old traditions, all of them, religion, all the rest of them, seem to be collapsing. One out of every three marriages today ends in divorce. 

And there is a drive now to legalize that thing, so that there’ll be no more divorce trials, and no more struggles over alimony. Simply that people marry, and the union dissolves every ten years.

Now as a Catholic and a Christian, I deplore this. But this seems what is likely to happen. And another thing too, we’ve got to remember that the life span has been greatly lengthened, and that people now live to be eighty. Women outlive the men. In the old days, not a hundred years ago, you go into a New England graveyard and you’ll see on the gravestone, over and over again, ‘Here lies John Jones and his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, Jean, and his third wife, Kate. A man wore out three women, of course, that was before they conquered childbirth fever.

Now women outlive men, according to statistics, by five years. So any kind of Christian marriage, normal marriage, will probably last fifty years. And it’s highly debatable how many people there are in the world who aren’t sick to death of one another after twenty, no less fifty.•

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“I Loved Being Pregnant With A Sciatic Nerve”

September 19, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

I suppose Enormous Changes at the Last Minute is my favorite short-story collection by Grace Paley, that wonderful pain-in-the-ass. But you can get all three of her best volumes for roughly the same price. Why not do that? Some Paley footage from Robert Kramer’s 1975 film, Milestones.

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“I Have Been In Touch With Him Just A Little Bit By Email”

September 18, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Many feel that filmmaker Roman Polanski should be in prison for the rest of his life, although not everyone agrees. One of those who begs to differ is Samantha Geimer, who was just 13 years old in 1977 when the filmmaker drugged and raped her. Now middle-aged and more bitter with the justice system than Polanski, Geimer has published a new book about the ordeal and actually has something of a correspondence these days with her victimizer. From an interview with Geimer in the Guardian:

“In 2009, after the release of Marina Zenovich’s documentary on the trial, Polanski sent Geimer an email apologising. ‘I want you to know how sorry I am for having so affected your life,’ he wrote. It wasn’t an admission of guilt, exactly, but it was at least a softening of his customary flat denial of any wrong-doing. She didn’t reply, but since then they have been in touch sporadically. This seems extraordinary – both his apology and their continued contact – a subject that Geimer is reluctant to the point of coy about speaking of.

‘Over all these years, our attorneys have communicated. We’re not buddies. But, I mean, I have been in touch with him just a little bit by email. Just personal stuff, nothing worth talking about.’ She gives the impression she is protecting his privacy, and, one imagines, the fragile state of detente between them. Has she sent him the book? ‘No. I don’t know if he’ll read it. I don’t believe he’s seen it. He’s a busy person, so I’m not sure if it’s something that it’s important to him to get to.’ The tone of this – there is no mistaking it – is the deference that creeps into interactions with the famous. It is alive, even now.”

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“You’ve Got This Crazy, Highly Mobile Country”

September 18, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Ralph Ellison, seen here in 1966 discussing the challenge of composing a truly American novel, spoke so fluently about writing but had a tough time turning out pages. Of course, it only took the opening of Invisible Man to prove his greatness. 

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“Donald Barthelme Was The Stephen Sondheim Of Haute Fiction”

September 18, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In addition to having a great suggested reading list, author Donald Barthelme, when everything was clicking, wasn’t just amazing but was also unique. The opening of an excellent 2008 James Wolcott Bookforum essay about Bartheleme at the time of the publication of the posthumous short-story collection, Flying to America:

“Donald Barthelme was the Stephen Sondheim of haute fiction—a dexterous assembler of witty, mordant, intricate devices that, once exploded, exposed the sawdust and stuffing of traditional forms. His stories weren’t finely rendered portrait studies in human behavior or autobiographical reveries à la Johns Updike and Cheever, but a row of boutiques showcasing his latest pranks, confections, gadgets, and Max Ernst/Monty Python–ish collages. Like Sondheim’s biting rhymes and contrapuntal duets, Barthelme’s parlor tricks and satiric ploys were accused early on of being cerebral, preeningly clever, hermetically sealed, and lacking in “heart”of supplying the clattering sound track to the cocktail party of the damned. Yet, like Sondheim, Barthelme was no simple Dr. Sardonicus, licensed cynic. His radiograms from the observation deck of his bemused detachment evidently touched depths and won converts, otherwise his work wouldn’t have inspired so many salvage operations intended to keep his name alive and his enterprise afloat. Mere smarty show-offs don’t garner this kind of affection from a younger breed of astronauts. Just as there always seems to be a Sondheim musical poised for Broadway revival (Company in 2006, Sunday in the Park with George right now), Barthelme’s bundle of greatest hits and obscure outtakes has been parceled out in a series of reprintings and repackagings since his death in 1989. He’s always poised on the verge of being majorly rediscovered without ever quite making it over the crest, despite the valiant huffing done on his behalf.”

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“The Consumers Have A Voice, They Really Have A Part, If They Will Only Speak Up”

September 18, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ralph Nader was a bothersome man, and that was useful when Americans began being called “consumers” rather than “citizens.” He did a great deal of good, alerting his neighbors to all manner of corporate abuses, which were planned and executed according to a playbook. Nader pointed out that corporations, which were definitely not people, were hellbent on gypping us and endangering us in the name of profits, and it made him one of the most important Americans of his generation, a town crier for the advertising age.

Some worried that Nader would be corrupted by the power, but that never happened. His fall occurred for a strange yet simple reason: He told himself a lie, and he believed it. Perhaps he’d been working too long with black and white and not enough gray, but during his 2000 Presidential campaign, he began marketing the lie: That the two major American political parties were exactly alike and nothing would be different regardless of who was elected. Some “consumers” bought in. And when you look back on it, you know that Al Gore wouldn’t have been precisely the same President as George W. Bush, that he likely wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, which cost us 5,000 Americans and maybe 100,000 Iraqis. It was Nader who helped remove those people’s safety belts. It’s a shame for them and their families, and for all of us as well, because we really could use a Ralph Nader right about now.

• • • • •

I’ve made it clear before that I don’t believe children should be admitted to fast-food restaurants any more than they’re allowed to patronize bars or purchase cigarettes. Ronald McDonald and the Wendy’s Girl are really no different than Joe Camel. They’re all there to lure a young demographic to addictive behaviors, disease and death.

From the 1970 David Frost book, The Americans, a passage in which the host and Nader engage in a discussion on children’s food:

“David Frost:

One of your main worries at the moment is baby food, isn’t it?

Ralph Nader:

Yes. Here’s an illustration. The leading companies in the industry are putting monosodium glutamate in baby food. That’s to enhance the flavor, so to speak. They’re putting in salt and sugar. But for whose taste? For the benefit of the mother, because the infant does not have taste discrimination. But if the mother likes the taste she will purchase the product and feed it to the infant.

It just so happens that not only do these ingredients cost more, but they have no nutritional value. And they may be potentially harmful, particularly to infants who have hypertension tendencies, as they develop later in life. And they don’t need them at all.

Do you know how easy it would be to have these baby-food manufacturers delete these ingredients from baby food? All it would take would be about three or four thousand letters from mothers around the country saying in no uncertain terms that they do want to purchase baby food on the basis of how nutritious it is for the infant. And it could change.

The consumers have a voice, they really have a part, if they will only speak up. You’ve got to develop a consumer power organized around things like the food industry, automobiles, insurance, telephone services, all these other industries, in order to develop the voice of the consumer.

David Frost:

You’ve said consumer power. As the years have gone by, you’ve been proved right, again and again. But you’ve also got more and more power yourself. Power to influence, at least. Doe sit ever worry you that power will corrupt you in any way?

Ralph Nader:

No. Because it doesn’t amount to a whit. It just amount to talking. You tell people that frankfurters are filled with fat up to thirty-five or forty percent; you tell them that their appliances are wearing out; tell them that their cars are coming out with more average defects–thirty-two per car in tested cars by Consumer Reports last year. You tell them that–

David Frost:

Thirty-two defects per car?

Ralph Nader:

Thirty-two defects per car. You tell them that there are illegal interest charges all over the country, being charged, and they’re concerned. But they don’t do much about it. They’re pretty complacent. They just sit an watch television.” 

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“What Are You Most Scared Of?”

September 17, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Writer Margaret Atwood, who has a lot more to say than Madonna and can say it much better, received far fewer questions than the pop star during her Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Some exchanges follow.

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Question:

What are you most scared of?

Margaret Atwood:

This might seem strange to you, but a person is often afraid of fewer things as they get (shhh!) Older. We know the plot. We know how this is likely to end. As Anita Desai once said, It Is The Cycle Of Life. But apart from that, spiders, if unexpected.

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Question:

Do you have one or more favorite science fiction films? What are your thoughts on the process of translating literature to cinema, generally or specifically in the genre of science fiction?

Margaret Atwood:

Blade Runner. Beautifully made. Let The Right One In, Swedish version; not SF but same problems faced (plausibility). With SF: I watched a large number of SF B movies when they first came out. The problem then was the low-budget special effects. Now it’s likely to be holes in the plot, or over-slickness. But all of that’s a generalization.

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Question:

I can honestly say that without a doubt, The Handmaid’s Tale was the scariest book I have read. May I ask if you had someone in mind while writing the character of Serena Joy?

Maragret Atwood:

More like a type: women who make a career out of telling other women they shouldn’t have careers. Also the Shelley Winter character in the splendid film Night of the Hunter (Robert Mitchum’s best role, IMHO)

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Question:

Hi, I’m a high school English teacher in Northern California who is rolling out a unit featuring The Handmaid’s Tale–we’re starting Thursday! My question: What would you say to a group of students from an affluent community weaned on science and technology to convince them of the enduring relevance of the novel? Thank you so much for your consideration; it’s been an amazing learning and professional experience teaching your novel—my students brought this ama to my attention and I couldn’t be more thrilled at the opportunity as well as the timing!

Margaret Atwood:

As they already know some science, show them some brain-science and evo-devo studies – folks studying the inherent human story-telling “platform.” We tell stories because we’re human. The novel appears to be the most brain-intensive media form – second only to being there.

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Question:

What are your thoughts on the current popularity (which is perhaps on its way out) of dystopian novels, especially in the Young Adult genre? 

Margaret Atwood:

Lots of thoughts on that! I wrote Oryx and Crake before this wave set in, but there were a number in the 20th C. However, turn-of-century often causes folks to wonder where we’re going, and how they themselves might behave if they find themselves in a bad version of There. And Climate Change and the resulting storms and floods, and the threats to the biosphere.. young people are attuned to all of that.

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Question:

Maybe an odd question but one that interests me: have you written anything that you now regret?

Margaret Atwood:

Several letters.•

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“Now I’m Gonna Tell You What Those Bastards Said To Me”

September 16, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Henry Miller reads from his 1936 novel, Black Spring, a passage about being charged with delivering his aunt to an insane asylum.

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