End of January 2012

Reading as many contemporary novels as I can in 2012, and we’ll see how long that lasts. So far:

1) Outer Dark (1994) by Cormac McCarthy
2) The Hunger Games (2008) by Suzanne Collins
3) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
4) A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan
5) The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” (2010) by Aimee Bender
6) Golden Compass (1996) by Philip Pullman

Reading in 2012

If you enjoy reading, meet me over on Goodreads.com. I’m on a mission to read as many NEW books as I can in 2012, by which I mean many 21st century novels, but I’m willing to stretch back to, say, the latter half of the 20th. I got a head start by reading two in December, because cheating is allowed, so that puts me at four books so far:

1) Outer Dark (1994) by Cormac McCarthy
2) The Hunger Games (2008) by Suzanne Collins
3) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
4) A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan

And I’m currently starting on The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) by Aimee Bender, thanks to a strong recommendation by a trusted reader.

Speaking of sadness, I can’t believe that even if I can maintain a two and a half books per month average, I will have only read 30 books this year. I have at least that many on my mental to-read list already!

December 2011 Books Read

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

On listening to Bon Iver’s eponymous record

I’ve been spinning Bon Iver, the good winter, and I skip the needle back to Holocene a few times. I miss a few beginnings and listen through to the end. It charts an epoch – for miles and miles, the existence of humanity or of the one – and the epoch seems to return on itself.

It’s all so short. And I am not magnificent.

You fucked it friend; it burnt away; we learned to celebrate; now to know it in my memory. There’s something there, something about the things that are gone from us. I can’t quite seem to grasp it though.

I’ll let the record play. Don’t want to wear it out, this musing. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Have to get to rest.

 

Q & OWS

As I’m reading the novel Q (see previous post), set during the turbulent Reformation years, I think of the Occupy movement. There are, I suspect, some lessons to be learned from it, such as:

1) The powers-that-be begin to villify and condemn protestors from the start. They stereotype, denigrate, and search for what they can perceive as a principled stand.

2) This principled stand is no more than the self trying to keep a hold on its power.

3) All power corrupts, and the protestors are not the moral superiors of those in power; they only are in a position to seem like it, because they do not yet have their hands on power.

4) Strong individuals are often seen as the catalyst for movements. They are not. Ideas are. Ideas rise and fall on nothing so much as their merits. They carry a will of their own that indifferently devours both supporters and detractors.

5) American society absorbs protest. The US, wherein Miley Cyrus can make a protest song in support of OWS and nobody notices the hypocrisy; wherein we are lulled to sleep by our comforts and even more by our striving work ethic; wherein we are wage slaves but better off than the masses have ever been throughout history, is a sponge.

6) Power seeks to hold on to power; protestors seek to attain power.

7) Real power is not in money, but in numbers.

8) Ideas and numbers will mean everything, if the ideas aren’t forgotten and the numbers don’t forget.

Currently Reading: Q

Q by Luther Blissett, 1999

I’m just beginning the novel Q by Luther Blissett. Well, not really by Luther Blisset. See, four Italians decided they’d write a novel and use that nom de plume. They are nameless like their protagonist, the “Survivor,” who is a 16th century theology student on the run from Q, the heretic hunter. The novel bills itself right on the cover as a “Thriller, novel of ideas, the cult European bestseller.” I’m hoping it’s 600+ pages will fly by as briskly as Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, have the significance of Mann’s Magic Mountain, and the evocation of a foreign time and place like The Canticle of Leibowitz. A tall order.

Awake with ironic musings on truth & ambition (or the reason we’re all such assholes)

Truth is rhetoric, a tautology so obvious that we forget it, and which deconstructs itself and destroys truth even as it defines it. Language’s primary function has never been to pursue truth. Language is a game of power and control. It may be an innocuous, humble pursuit of a personal control over the world, a sort of orientation. It may also be a violent, political, or dogmatic control that needs to convert or destroy the opposition. Truth is a weapon wielded by a terrified human standing naked in a wilderness and attacking the wind.

(It does not follow that all language is equal. There are still a host of idiots who write and are not worth reading. There are some writers who capture things beautiful, encouraging, groundbreaking, etc. Such things can, and should, be called truth, too. The word has infinite volume.)

This malleable truth serves ambition, which is a desperate longing to feel important in an indifferent world. The fact that it is desperate should not be read as a criticism of ambition. When fulfilled (i.e., when the longing, through determination and fortune, or just fortune, is achieved), it is the emotional equivalent of “winning” an argument, converting a heathen, or conquering a nation: it makes the self giddy with the perception of a mastery of its own fate. When ambition is not fulfilled, the self finds orientation in some new myth. The American Dream, a utopian commune. It will usually only tweak, not abandon, whatever position it held, afraid that to heed Emerson’s words is to collapse the entire self so carefully constructed:

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

Sometimes, though, a conversion takes place, when one is able to find more power in a new myth, or the old has simply become untenable. The self doesn’t want to realize it is power-hungry Sisyphus trying to trick death, continually climbing and falling again, pushing that rock, always up hill, for all his days.

Of megatrons, Obi-Wan, organized sport, & amusement

In a lonely little corner of my room on Tuesday afternoon, I have whiled away an hour each week with a shameful secret. I’ve been keeping power rankings on the NFL to entertain myself. A deliciously subjective enterprise that is based on lists! What’s not to love? And now that Detroit has broken my top 5, I must, like a level 32 Dark Elf Wizard, emerge from the darkness of my geekdom to be exposed before the judgmental eyes of the great unwashed!

The Top Ten
1. Green Bay Packers 5-0
2. New England Patriots 4-1
3. New Orleans Saints 4-1
4. Detroit Lions 5-0
5. Baltimore Ravens 3-1
6. Buffalo Bills 4-1
7. San Diego Chargers 4-1
8. San Francisco 49ers 4-1
9. New York Giants 3-2
10. Oakland Raiders 3-2

Those top eight teams feel pretty definite, but the ninth and tenth slot were up for grabs. The Giants, despite blowing one to the Seahawks? The hot but uneven Raiders? The injured Texans? The Titans who just got a beat down from old Pittsburgh? And what about Pittsburgh?

Middle of the Pack
11. Houston Texans 3-2
12. Tennessee Titans 3-2
13. Washington Redskins 3-1
14. Atlanta Falcons 2-3
15. New York Jets 2-3
16. Pittsburgh Steelers 3-2
17. Chicago Bears 2-3
18. Tampa Bay Buccaneers 3-2
19. Cincinnati Bengals 3-2
20. Dallas Cowboys 2-2
21. Philadelphia Eagles 1-4
22. Carolina Panthers 1-4

The Eagles are just one Redskins loss away from likely falling into the bottom ten. With Vick still dynamic, even after a 4-int day, it’s hard to imagine them there. This whole category still has a lot of potential movement, up or down, depending on the next couple of weeks.

The Shameful Ten
23. Cleveland Browns 2-2
24. Minnesota Vikings 1-4
25. Denver Broncos 1-4
26. Kansas City Chiefs 2-3
27. Seattle Seahawks 2-3
28. Jacksonville Jaguars 1-4
29. Arizona Cardinals 1-4
30. Indianapolis Colts 0-5
31. Miami Dolphins 0-4
32. St. Louis Rams 0-4

Denver’s savior has at last arrived, whether the rest of the country knows it or not. (Hint: that fullback in the picture.) The three winless teams have all suffered injuries as well as general suckiness.

AND FINALLY…

Game of the Week
#8 San Francisco @ #4 Detroit – How strange is that?

Honorable Mentions
#7 Buffalo @ #9 NY Giants – There’s an outside chance this is an all-New York Super Bowl preview. (Surely Fitzpatrick, Jackson, and Stevie Johnson won’t do what Kelley, Thomas, and Reed couldn’t.)
#11 Houston @ #5 Baltimore – I think Houston might be unable to compensate for the losses of Andre Johnson and Mario Williams. They’ll be lucky to finish 8-8, but this game could make me rethink that.

Toilet Bowl of the Week
#30 Indianapolis @ #19 Cincinnati – Sure, the Bengals are 3-2. But they’re the Bengals. Besides, four of the bottom ten teams are on byes this week.

That is all. There’s nothing to see here. Move along.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

Steve Jobs, 2005:

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.