Books you should be buying this Christmas

Oh, look, it's a drum and I'm banging the hell out of it. Go ahead and buy Infinite Jest for that special someone this Christmas.

Why? Because it's the best American book of the last eighty years or so. It's the most interesting thing written since Joyce and Woolf were messing around with modernism a billion years ago. Also, it's funny and sad. Life is funny and sad. Therefore, this book is about life.

People you should buy this book for: White males aged 18-35. Men don't read books anymore, but if they do, they're likely to read this one because it makes you feel smarter.

People you shouldn't buy this book for: Parents. This book is way too effing long for that. Don't do that to your parents, and the eye strain they'd get from flipping through the end notes is scary to even contemplate.

Aunts and uncles: Similar problem. Also, drug use. They'll probably assume you're addicted to drugs or alcohol if you give them this book even though it's mostly about people getting over various addictions, (this is really unfair the book is about a lot of stuff and to try and boil it down this way is foolish) and they'll assume that you're recovering as well.

Women-Okay, that's a pretty large generalization. I'm willing to take it back on the grounds that smart people like Zadie Smith love the guy. However, in my experience, women don't like intellectual white guys who write long books. Besides which, yeah, it's a bit more of a coming of age guy story.

Should you buy this book to impress a girl/guy: I'd go with no. That is, in less they're really into literature. It's probably more acceptable for a gal to buy this for her boyfriend to show how cool she is with him spending a month of his life consumed by this book.

Quote:

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

Yeah, I'll write about this book again.

Why? Because it's the best prose, sentence by sentence I've read of any living author. I know, prose, who gives a shi-. How is that going to help them make this into a movie that the mass public can enjoy. Trick. It was made into a movie.

People you should buy this book for: Women between the ages of 18-175. Even if they don't like the glittering prose they'll enjoy the complete lack of male characters. Who hasn't been waiting for a book about rural America that doesn't have men? Certainly not Toni Morrison fans, but for the rest of us, enjoy!

People you shouldn't buy this book for: Men. That is, in less they're really into prose. Otherwise the dearth of long car trips, descriptions of various good looking women they'd like to uh, get to know better, hallucinations from overdosing and lack of war or the Holocaust is going to make this book kind of boring for them.

People you can buy this book for: Mom, sister, aunt, friend.

Should you buy this book to impress a girl/guy: Probably not. It's too short to be impressive, and glittering prose just doesn't sell like it used to.

Quoting:

“There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

Or this:

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

We're talking about Tolstoy. Tolstoi?

Why? Because it's the best realist novel I've ever read, and I've read at least ten books. This book left me but the characters didn't. Did I really just write that hackneyed sentence? Yes, dammit, I did, but that's only because it's true. I still wonder about all the incredibly realistic that Tolstoy came up with in this book, far less than I wonder about Anna who struck me as way less complex than the rest of the lot in War and Peace.

People you should buy this book for: People over 25, who are capable of sitting for long periods of time reading a book. This is not for the faint of heart.

People to avoid: Those who don't enjoy a long history of why Napoleon failed in battle. No really, it's a gigantic section in the book, and it's only going to be interesting to everyone's uncle/father who reads books exclusively about Stonewall Jackson's tactics in the Civil War. It bogs the book way down. And guess what, the book is still amazing. (This is unlike Les Miserables, which goes off the rails so far that you immediately buy tickets to the musical, so you can avoid reading any further).

People this book is okay to buy for: Avid readers. Fathers. Some mothers. Some uncles, perhaps aunts. This one requires some judgement. It's long, but it pays off.

Possibility of buying this to impress someone: Not in less that person is also a huge book nerd.

Quotes:

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.”

I just wanted the opportunity to talk about sparkling prose again. I don't think we talk enough about sparking prose. Virginia Woolf has the sort of prose that wakes us up to ourselves, the selves that lie beneath the humdrum of the every day. It is every bit as relevant as it was eighty or so years ago. It is true now that a woman can sit in an office all day, without ever having anyone know what passed through her mind, or a man can ride a subway in obscurity while his whole world is rocked. She wakes us up to this.

People you should buy this book for: Women. Also, men who fancy themselves poets. Some people will try and convince you that the better work is "To the Lighthouse," but I'll take Mrs. Dalloway every day of the week.

People you should avoid: Men. She's really skimpy on the narratives involving how exactly George Washington survived that first winter at valley forge. In fact, it lacks a whole host of facts. What it contains is everything else.

Should you buy this book to impress a girl/guy: It's probably okay to buy this book for a girl to impress her with your amazing male sensitivity. Mention the sparkling prose and how we all keep our true selves hidden.


Quotes:


“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

“An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .”

Why? Because who, besides the NBA (National Book Award, he is not an erstwhile hoops star) of a few years ago has heard of this guy? Almost no one. And guess what? These stories are fun. They range from a doomed trip to discover an inland lake in Australia, to the Chernobyl meltdown, a woman in space with a cosmonaut lover. So yeah, varied, and fun, and sad. Theme achieved.

People you should buy this book for: Anyone over the age of 20 or so. You might have to talk them into actually reading a book of short stories first. It's okay to read short stories, they won't hurt you. In fact, you might even like them. You see, you begin, and then it ends, rather quickly. Yes, a short story is just a poor metaphor for life or sex.

People to avoid: People who do not enjoy short stories. Who say? You know, I just can't get into them. Feel free to hit them over the head with a good collection of short stories and then leave them dazed and perhaps bloody.

Romance: This book is probably not your best bet. It's better for the fathers, mothers, uncles, brothers, sisters, estranged cousins crowd. In short, no fear of sparkling prose here, just enjoyable and interesting stories.

Quotes:

“I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.”

“You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.”

I try not to write

The bench I'm sitting on is green and dotted by varieties of bird shit. The weather is warm and the sky is suffused with a sort of uniform purple caused by the reflection of the sun through creamy cloud cover. I'm not saying much, am I?

I try not to write when I'm in love. I find that I rely too heavily on adjectives. Just let the damn thing be, I tell myself. The bench should just be a bench, it needn't be green or covered by shit. I'm talking about being in love here, not love. No, the latter is too tough to come by. If you want to know anything about love just read that section of Corinthians, and if you can find me a person who is roughly even half of things then give them my number, and I'll gladly throw down my profligate life. Better yet, ask them if they're capable of even a fourth after their boss has gone ape shit on them and the commute home takes an ungodly time because of the rain and general stupidity of other drivers. Though, I suppose, if they were exhibiting all those traits the other drivers wouldn't be obstacles but just more folks to love.

Anyhow, the sky is now doing this ostentatious sort of pink thing that's probably influenced by the high amount of smog in our little valley. A couple of crows dart across the horizon to improve the scene. When I'm in love I tend not to see things rationally. It always arises out of a sort of misunderstanding. A Gatsby type thing. It's never the women I really know. It's always the ones I don't. You know as well as I do why that is. It allows you to fill in all the gaps where problems might otherwise be. If I see my beloved infrequently enough I'll forget that she has a gap in her teeth. The less I know about a girl the better.

A blond couple is tossing a stick to a dog on the grass in front of me. I want to tell them to take in the sunset, but I can tell that neither one of them are in love, and that the beauty would be lost on them anyway. The dog is sometimes bringing back the stick and other times just sort of running in the general vicinity of the stick and then sniffing the bushes for a while before taking a piss.

I like dogs. I like taking walks after eleven on near empty streets. I think that might be an easier way to find a woman to love. Most of the day everything is so crowded. But when you walk the streets at night, beneath the sulfurous pools of light, it's easy to imagine running in to the woman you love and just standing there, not even minding the cold, your runny nose, your crummy job, it's just you and this girl that you've now realized you've been waiting your whole life to find.

You see, I told you it's a bad idea for me to write when I'm like this. Waiting your whole life to find. Drivel, though being conscious of it does nothing to diminish the actual impact of the feeling. The couple is gone home now with their dumbish dog, and I'm still sitting on the bench, in a dim pre-storm light, waiting for that walk home in the dark where I never talk to anyone but myself.

The porch

"In the rain everything makes sense," she said to me from underneath a small white umbrellas sprinkled with black polka dots. We'd been talking for a while about sadness, or something like it. More correctly, she'd been talking about a dog of hers that had died when she was very young, and how she'd stayed up all night crying. Or what felt like all night. It seems implausible that the was up the entire night.

I was talking about what it felt like to be twenty seven in this town. About how all the women were looking for dads or lovers. I don't suppose she really heard a word I said what with the tears about that old damn dog of hers. Women are always telling me stories about things they've lost. I suppose that's because I do my best to listen.

The cars are rolling past at thirty in a thirty five. Her nose is a bit longer than I like, but I don't say anything. "That's the impossibility of it," I say. "Of what?" she asks. "Of life," I tell her. "Weren't you listening to what I've been telling you?" She wrinkled up her nose in disgust.

The problem, as I said before, is that no one listens to me. I've got a wealth of information just ready to spring its way into the world, but nobody gives a damn except about what they've been thinking of, what new coupon or haircut or online dating site they've recently discovered. "The world has no time for philosophy," I tell her. She rolls her eyes.

"The world has no time for one of your monologues," she says, hailing a cab and stepping out into the rain.

"Whether tis nobler in mind..." I start, but she doesn't even crack a smile. Nobody knows their Shakespeare anymore. She's gone just like that, and I'm now standing in the rain with a monologue trailing on through my head. Nothing much makes sense in the rain. It's a degenerate sort of weather that would bring out the worst in even the best of us, and I am so far short of the best that it hardly seems worth the effort to continue.

I got home and took a hot bath. I know that men aren't supposed to take baths anymore, that as soon as we lost the ability to have the butler draw one it was time to stand in the damn shower like a fool. But I'm old fashioned, and I enjoy taking a long bath, drinking a cold beer, and thinking about all the ways that people disappoint me.

My brother was a world class screw up who'd managed to hide it all behind a good job at the hospital, a nice wife, and two happy kids. I hated him for a while, but it's sort of dropped off now into a drizzly type of pity. The Cubs are down four in the seventh because the Cubs are always down even when they're up. I think about calling Bernice and asking her some more questions about her dog, stretching an old phone cord into the bathtub and just listening to her remember. To hell with it.

The bath has gone cold and a light rain is tapping at the window. The neighbor, some vaguely Eastern European woman is watching a game show at decibels that reach through the floorboards. I think about going upstairs and just watching it with her, but I sit down on my couch instead and use my imagination. Towards the end, I yell out, "Don't open the effing case," because the guy is making a huge probability mistake on the show, if my math and hearing are serving me correct, though, to be fair, my math is circumspect at best. My neighbor's dog starts barking, and I think of poor old Bernice only nine years old, and that old mutt of hers dead as a door nail that day.

"I'd have backed over him too," I told her, and perhaps that wasn't the best way to start the conversation. Bernice was not kind, and neither was I. We were good company for each other because neither one of us expected much from one another. It was like marriage without all the fanfare. "You're a terrible person," she says, and I agree. "One of the worst."

I tell her that in the morning we'll go down to the pound and pick out a dog. We'll take him to the park and play fetch, rub his belly, say to strangers, "Don't worry, he's good with children" even if we don't know a damn thing about him. We'll make out of our lives what we've already lost. "Can he be a retriever?" she asks, and I tell her yes because I'm feeling magnanimous. "What will we do with him at the end of the day?" she asks. "Neither one of us can take him?" And it's that sort of question that people have been asking me all of my life? Sure, sure, we like your dream old boy, but how are you going to put it all together? "I don't know," I tell her, and hang up the phone in an instant, and walk out into the rain, barefoot, and thread my toes through the rivulets on the back porch. This is what I'll be doing tonight.

A shout out to single parents

So S is out of town for a brief stint, and I'm responsible for taking care of the little urchin on my own for a while. And even though that's not entirely unusual as I take care of lil s a couple days a week, for some reason, it being a weekend or something, I was struck by just how much work it is to take care of a child. Naturally she refused to take a nap, insisting that it was perfectly fine to just stay up all day creating a tornado in the living room. This new toddler phase seems to include more swaths of destruction than the earlier and less mobile phases. I'd have taken a picture of the room as she left it, but I was afraid I'd give up on parenting for good. Why get down one book when you can get down seven?

So yeah, I lasted about six hours. And, the thing that's tough, is that you don't get any time for yourself, particularly with the no napping thing. No watching football or curling up to read a book. I could check scores on the computer, but it's not exactly kosher to just read a book while she chews on lamp cords or read a book while she sneaks up the stairs, smiling the entire way. Anyhow, I'm glad I usually have a second on the weekends, enough so that I can squeeze in maybe twenty pages of a book or half of a game, you know, those little things that keep you sane. This is not to say that lil s is no fun. She was a little bundle of joy wandering around the house smiling and carrying her winter hat, occasionally passing the cute pink thing off to me, so I could put it on my head, which she found endlessly amusing. Or stealing my hat and wearing it for a second with her dimpled smile, two bottom teeth protruding. The point is, she's wonderful. However, you lose any semblance of time that is your own. So, I just wanted to raise a glass, or two, I definitely drank some wine after she went to bed, to all the single parents, or just parents in general out there, keep on keepin on.



I used to be afraid of the dark. No, afraid is probably an understatement. I was terrified. I would lie in bed and imagine the extravagant ways that people might access my bedroom, what exactly I'd do if they approached. Debated the merits of pretending to sleep vs. hiding under the bed. I used to choose to sleep on the farthest side of the bed from the door when I slept in a new place. The theory being, murders are likely to take the first person they come to, and I'd prefer that I was the second.

You'd think that the years of watching G.I. Joe, Transformers, and HeMan would have made me into a person built of sterner stuff. It seems now, in hindsight, that I should have armed myself with a plastic sword, slept with it on my back, and known full well that if trouble arose I'd deal with it instantly. Unfortunately, my imagination was too acute for that. It understood that if worse came to worse there would be no hope.

The first night I feel asleep without the light on was an accident. I don't remember how old I was, but I imagine that I was ten or so. I woke up in the morning, shocked to find myself not whisked away by Dracula in the middle of the night. For years I'd turn the light on in my bedroom and then sleep in the hallway between the bedrooms of my mother and brother. Surely one of them would protect me if something ever went wrong.

I suppose now I should connect dots, figure out exactly what went wrong that made a little boy so afraid to sleep in his own room. But I'm alone tonight, and I don't want my mind to wander too far. This house is old. It creaks. And this mind, at times, can still be young and imaginative.

More quoting of Thomas Lynch:

"My friend, the poet, Matthew Sweeney, is certain he is dying. This is a conviction he had held, without remission, since 1952 when he first saw the light, in its gray Irish version, in Ballyliffin, in northernmost Donegal. He knew even then, though he was some years from the articulation of this intelligence, that something was very, very wrong."

"We had buried my mother that morning. We stood in the gray midmorning at Holy Sepulchre watching the casket go into its vault, a company of the brokenhearted at the death of a good woman...I was trying to remember my mother's voice. The tumor had taken it from her in doses. I was beginning to panic because I'd never hear her voice again, the soft contralto full of wisdom and the acoustics of safety."

"And the life on either side of that moment was nothing but heartache and affection, romance and hurt, laughter and waking, wakes and leavetakings, lovemaking and joys--the horizontal mysteries."

"As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. Here is how the moment instructs me: clouds float in front of the moon's face, lights flicker in the carved heads of pumpkins, leaves rise in the wind at random, saints go nameless, love comforts, souls sing beyond the reach of bodies."

Jack Handy Deep Thoughts

"Instead of having answers on a math test, they should just call them impressions, and if you got a different impression, so what, can't we all be brothers?"

Back to Lynch:

"At one end of life the community declares Is alive, it stinks, we'd better do something. At the other end we echo, Its dead, it stinks, we'd better do something."

And the last essay entitled Tract is one of the best culmination essays I've come across in my days of reading essays, which is about, appropriately, his own funeral.

The opening section is as follows. The rest is worth reading as well:

I'd rather it be February. Not that it will matter much to me. Not that I'm a stickler for details. But since you're asking -- February. The month I first became a father, the month my father died. Yes. Better even than November.

I want it cold. I want the gray to inhabit the air like wood does trees: as an essence not a coincidence. And the hope for springtime, gardens, romance, dulled to a stump by the winter in Michigan.

Yes, February. With the cold behind and the cold before you and the darkness stubborn at the edges of the day. And a wind to make the cold more bitter. So that ever after it might be said, "It was a sad old day we did it after all."

And a good frosthold on the ground so that, for nights before it is dug, the sexton will have had to go up and put a fire down, under the hood that fits the space, to soften the topsoil for the backhoe's toothy bucket.

Wake me. Let those who want to come and look. They have their reasons. You'll have yours. And if someone says, "Doesn't he look natural!" take no offense. They've got it right. For this was always in my nature. It's in yours.

And have the clergy take their part in it. Let them take their best shot. If they're ever going to make sense to you, now's the time. They're looking, same as the rest of us. The questions are more instructive than the answers. Be wary of anyone who knows what to say.

As for music, suit yourselves. I'll be out of earshot, stone deaf. A lot can be said for pipers and tinwhistlers. But consider the difference between a funeral with a few tunes and a concert with a corpse down front. Avoid, for your own sakes, anything you've heard in the dentist's office or the roller rink.

Poems might be said. I've had friends who were poets. Mind you, they tend to go on a bit. Especially around horizontal bodies. Sex and death are their principle studies. It is here where the services of an experienced undertaker are most appreciated. Accustomed to being personae non grata, they'll act the worthy editor and tell the bards when it's time to put a sock in it.

More on politics (insert mild depression)

It's nice to hear from some folks to the right of my own particular views, particularly when it's well thought out as opposed to just crazy mob stuff. Anyhow, my first proposal for killing off bloated programs...the military. Guess what. It's inefficient to try and control the entire world under your thumb. It's expensive. Hell, let's cut through the crap. We still spend way more than China, our new perceived rival on the military. And, guess what? If we go to war w/ China we're all effed anyway, so we might as well cool it. The future for humanity is probably not best figured out on the other end of a rifle butt. That said, I'm find with the U.S. maintaining a strong military, but I don't know that we need to far outstrip everyone else in the known world because we're AMERICA.

The budget problem. As my cousin aptly pointed out, budgets are a problem. You should not need to spend your whole budget in order to maintain funding. I get that that's how we do things, but some kind of reform is necessary. It's dumb. Hell, my office at American University does it. It is not in fact wise to spend all your money if you don't have to. It's wasteful and asinine. Would it take some figuring out to allocate budgets more effectively? Yes. But dammit, I'd rather spend the extra time/money on that than on a bunch of initiatives/unnecessary work hours to justify the budget for the following year.

The firing problem. Listen, while I've heard that the Fed has issues firing people, perhaps more than most. In general, at almost every job I've been at, many private, it's hard to get fired. I hope that answer is giving more incentives to high achieving employees and leaving the folks who don't give a damn lower on the totem poll. Why? Because it's awkward to fire people. Doesn't mean it can't be done. However, I get that it's tough for anyone.

Are private companies more efficient than the government. Sometimes. And sometimes they are actually the greedy SOB's they're portrayed to be. The best model is the non-profit model, find funding, do great stuff to help people/ spread the gospel of arts and culture. The only problem is that non-profits are always groveling for cash from wealthy private citizens and the government, so I guess that doesn't work. The tough part for me is figuring out how we can find some sort of melding of the ethical and the profitable. There are some good models out there but also a hell of a lot of bad ones. The government provides services, probably not with hyper efficiency, and for profit companies like big pharm or oil and gas, provide services and attempt to rape the environment/your general consumer in the process. I don't know much about Wall Street, so I won't step in that pile of s. However, I suppose I will, I have literally been shocked at many of the conversations I've overheard/remotely been a part of while I was working at the U of Michigan B school that were so directly about acquiring wealth as a good way to live your life that I found it morally repulsive. So yeah, not so much a big fan of that as your raison de etre. So yeah, some sort of melding of ethics, profitability, etc. but corporations and government always involve individuals who are sometimes good and sometimes shitty. The ideal model is probably a corporation with some ethical people running it who can make the finances work along with the service provided. Service here, meaning literal service, ie production etc.

What to do with big projects? Are we capable of getting them done w/o the government just mandating it? We have a shitty train system. Europe pretty much kicks our ass on this one. Guess what? It's cheaper to ship freight by rail than it is by truck? It's more environmentally/just good for the soul, and I do think stuff like that is important, than driving by car, and we don't have good options right now. So, we need to have a massive project to restore our rail and make it a better option. Can any single company take this on? Probably not. I've got no problem w/ the government taking a bunch of unemployed folks and putting them up to useful stuff like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I read an interesting article complaining about the stimulus package that basically intimated that it would have been better to just put people to work on infrastructure projects, improving national parks etc. rather than allocating money, which, as we all know, bogs shi- down in bureaucracy.

Subtending this whole thing is the idea that we need a growth economy and that things will always be getting better. This may be patently untrue. We may not be able to continue "growing" (hate that usage) our economy indefinitely. I mean, it's obvious, even if you don't give a crap about the environment, which, we're practically the last civilized country who disputes the science, you're better than that America, that we're going to use up all of our natural resources in a fairly short period of time if we continue down a path of 70 percent consumption economy. ((We're wrapping Christmas presents as I write this)) (((I'm making an assumption that humanity will be around for a bit longer and that we have some sort of responsibility to folks who come after us. It's been two thousand years for religious folks, and even longer that we've avoided asteroids, volcanoes etc. for the non-believers. Either way I'm making a dangerous assumption that we're capable of thinking long term))). So yeah, we might not/okay are not capable of continuing in this manner forever, which calls into question the whole idea of productivity. ((((A recent trip to visit a friend of ours in Michigan who is running a small farm and who said, "I don't know why there is so much talk about jobs. People can find work," was a sort of wake up call about other options for productivity than conventional knowledge based ones we're operating with now)))).

I suppose the last caveat in this whole thing is whether the capital W work we're doing right now is necessary or not. I'm beginning to think that it might be from a Biblical perspective. But the secular part of me keeps thinking that perhaps we overrate work in general. Perhaps we can scale back on the economy, and the hours at work, and find other important outlets like family, our own damn backyard, etc. that aren't all about work. However, I have a job, so it's sort of unfair of me to talk about other options. Anyhow, everyone go read Then We Came to the End and ask yourself if that doesn't mimic the curiously ambivalent world of work.

Writing for the sake of writing

I'm full of ideas, however, these ideas often crap out before they get too far. I once had an idea that I was going to be an NBA basketball player. This dream was fueled by my dominance of other kids on the blacktops of Northern CA. The essential mistake here is not of ambition but of scale. It's hard to understand when you are nine that the pond you are swimming in is considerably smaller than the ocean that you'll be shortly entering. Of course, the other mistake is one of something along the lines of user bias. Ie, if the rest of the world was indeed comprised of a couple billion people who were just as talented, or not talented, as the people at my elementary school, then I would have in fact become an NBA basketball player. I suppose the mistake is then both understandable and twofold. But how to predict the greatness of others that you can never possibly know?

Luckily for literature fans some books have been passed down for generations or centuries, and thus, unlike something like greatest fisherman or boxer, we can actually compare the writing of Tolstoy and Henry James to Stephen King and Philip Roth and make an informed decision about who knows their shit. In this case shit is meant to connote something along the lines of humanity with a capitalized h. James and Tolstoy mop the floor with those two random contemporaries, though, to be fair, James and Tolstoy sort of mop the floor with almost any other prose writers that have been around. The same can be said confidently of Shakespeare, of Dostoevsky, and of the author of Ecclesiastes.

This wasn't really supposed to devolve into a literature discussion, though that's a thing I put a great deal of stock in. It probably ties back in to my love of sport and competition. I can read War and Peace and then watch it, metaphorically speaking, beat the shi- out of paltry modern offerings like Peter Carey's latest book or Kiran Desai's clap trap book disguised as poetry or J.M. Coetzee's particularly abhorrent novel, Disgrace. I keep the other books on shelves upstairs, so they don't get too bloodied from the beating.

Anyhow, this was supposed to be a list of failed ideas, not failed novels. I forget what my next dream was. Things were nebulous for a number of years. Teacher's often told me that I was intelligent and could "do anything." I'm now inclined to say that the advice, "reach for the stars" is best given with a telescope and a compendium of all the known astronomical objects in the galaxy. Not to put too fine a point it, but hard work tends to beget more useful results than catchy slogans. It doesn't hurt to define the stars.

Large step away from what I've been writing about.

Do millionaires create jobs? I mean, I don't actually know the answer to this question. Is there any way to get some hard data on whether these people are creating massive amounts of jobs due to tax breaks? I haven't seen anything compelling from either side at this point in time, just finger pointing. Listen, I love Robin Hood, mainly because the Errol Flynn version was filmed in my small Northern CA city, but I'd like to see some hard data to support the theory that higher taxes actually help us all out. I sincerely mean this, figure this shi- out and give me some compelling data. I've run out of interest in listening to both sides debate about the middle class vs. the wealthy. Caveats apply, I know data can be skewed et al, it just seems like it might be a good idea to come up with something a bit more concrete than we've got.

Secondarily, obviously I'm biased because I live in a big city and my wife works for the federal government. However, why exactly is the fed being demonized? I can tell you that for a number of people, S included, a job in the private sector would net more money per year. The added benefits might make the two a bit closer in true salary, but hell, we don't want people unemployed do we? In my, admittedly limited experience, people working in the government are normal people with normal jobs like the rest of us. Why exactly are they now deemed evil? Because of the debt. Well, private corporations and individual households still harbor a great percentage of debt than the government. I'm all for creative solutions, some changes need to be made. But why the fu-- does it have to be so one-sided. GD we have to be smarter than that. Right? Aren't we?

I'd take Tolstoy over Flaubert in a second, but I don't know what he'd do against Dostoevsky. It seems like it would be a twelve rounder.