• Yesterday’s chat transcript.
• I won’t say the name of the Project Runway winner, for those of you who DVR’d it but haven’t watched it, but it looked to me like the judges chose probability over upside – and I’m a firm believer in going for upside. You have a chance to get an all-world talent, whether it’s a #1 starter or a fashion genius or a revolutionary chef, that’s who you go for. This wasn’t an example of the upside designer flopping in the finals; my wife, the real PR fan in the house, was mad because she thought the upside designer did exactly what the judges praised the designer for all season.
• Had breakfast this morning at the Hillside Spot in Ahwautukee, at Warner and 48th just west of I-10. To borrow a term from a certain AFL super-fan, it was “out-STAN-ding.” I’ve been hoping to find a funky, progressive kind of breakfast/lunch spot like that since we moved here, and I’m glad Phoenix magazine highlighted them last month. The food took a little while to get to us, even though the place wasn’t busy, but everything was made to order and that is the best reason in the world to wait for food.
• This NPR story on how the private prison industry pushed through Arizona’s immigration law is a model for modern journalism, a type of investigative reporting I don’t see as often as I did ten or fifteen years ago. I wish NPR did more of it, and given how many candidates campaigning here are using their position on the law as a major part of their platforms, it should be mailed to every voter in Arizona before Tuesday. (I’m not advocating a vote either way on any candidate or ballot question – merely that voters should be informed before making any voting decisions.)
• One of my favorite restaurants in Vegas, Lotus of Siam, is opening a second location Greenwich Village.
• I’m still under the weather, so I didn’t head to any AFL games and won’t today, but the forced rest meant that I finished Richard Russo’s tremendous novel Bridge of Sighs
Seriously – do you sleep? I get exhausted just *reading* you!
Read your chat.
Come on, you are being blatantly unfair to “Moby Dick”, and I think you know it. You have never even read the complete book, and you are calling it the, “most overrated novel in American literature.” I am not a member of the literary elite, and I have no reputation to protect by saying it’s great. I just liked it when I read it a couple years ago after high school. I used to hold similar prejudices about about “Ulysses,” but then I decided actually to finish the book a few months ago and liked it. Obviously, I can’t make you read “Moby Dick” or stop trashing it, but I really wish you’d choose one of the two.
Apparently, according to this (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/251391/big-prison-call-me-mark-krikorian), ALEC is not some secretive shadowy group. Also , there is nothing illegal about what went on, as the NPR article even states. I wonder how many pieces of legislation are drafted without any help from interest groups (corporate, unions, etc.).
There was a follow up story today on NPR about the “he said she said” aspect of this whole prison fiasco.
http://kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/201010/hn_1070prisons
James: I sincerely hope for your sake that that was a poor attempt at parody, rather than an accusation that I am falsely claiming to have read “Moby Dick.”
Stephen: My question about this is whether it is likely that the interests of the private prison industry are sufficiently aligned with those of the American public that I would want them to have a heavy hand in crafting legislation that potentially increases their profits. If our interests are aligned, that’s great – I’m hardly anti-profit, anti-capitalist, or anti-privatization. But I’m not even remotely convinced that that’s the case.
I am not sure what exactly you are saying, so I will respond with two statements conditional upon your meaning:
Meaning A): I am not arguing that you are falsely claiming to have read it. If that was the way that my writing came across, then I apologize for poorly expressing myself. What I am arguing is that, if you have not read it, which I do not believe you have, considering most of the comments on this blog have been about not wasting your time reading a 600 page whaling manual (admittedly it can get that way at times).
Meaning B): If what you are trying to say is that you have read it, and I am wrong to argue that you have not, I wonder when was the last time you have read it. I know it is not in the few years that I have been following your blog at least, most of which have consisted of a perfunctory shot at “Moby Dick” once every few months. If it was in your distant past, I would urge you to take another look at it. I know that I have improved as a reader just in the last year or two, and I do not read nearly as much as you do.
“Moby Dick,” we no doubt can agree, is not a page-turner. Yes, it often stalls to talk about whaling practices that would seem obsolete to us, and maybe never should have been included even at the time. I know that being a page-turner is not necessarily a requirement for you as a reader, and that is why I am always surprised at your dismissal of this book. Neither will I argue that the fact that a bunch of people in academia profess to like it is a reason that, “it must be good!” The reason it is good is because of the characters, particularly Captain Ahab. The book may be dated, but the message is universal. While we may not be able to kill a whale, even after reading the hundred tips that Melville gives us in the book, I think that we all have obsessions/fascinations that are not good for us, and so I think we can all relate to the grizzled old man in some way. This is what the book communicates, and I think it does it effectively. Sure it’s not the greatest book of all-time, and it may be overrated, but if you think it’s the most overrated book in the history of American literature, I have a book by Dan Brown I’d like to sell you.
First paragraph:
*if you have not read it… then I think you should read it or stop making light of it all the time.
I have, in fact, read Moby Dick, in June of 2002, while traveling with my wife to visit the Grand Canyon and see the Jays play at Arizona. On that same trip, I read The Sound and the Fury, which is on the Klaw 100, so it’s not as if I read Moby as a kid, or during a period when I did not appreciate great literature.
As for Dan Brown, that’s not literature to me. I’m talking about books taught in literature classes, or found on the Novel 100 or other greatest-books lists. And since Moby Dick is frequently found in “great American novel” discussions, I feel justified in stating my opinion that it’s wildly overrated.
Fair enough. I was somehow under the impression you had read it in high school, which a lot of people have and hate it forever after.
I’m not going to argue with you on “The Sound and the Fury” being much better, but they are very different books. “The Sound and the Fury” is 4 short accounts of the same story, while “Moby Dick” is one (very) protracted story. In short, “The Sound and the Fury” moves a lot faster. I’m not going to say that you don’t appreciate great literature, because you’ve read many more classics than I have, but it’s hardly a fair comparison.
I don’t think we are going to agree on the merits of this book, but I’d like to hear if you have any ideas on why the people compiling these lists over-rate it so much. It is an odd situation because Melville died thinking that it was a failure, so it’s hard to argue that it was popular at the time and has just stuck around as a misguided myth.
Anyway, sorry for incorrectly accusing you of not having read it. I still disagree (and I’d love for you to give it another shot), but you at least are informed, unlike many of the people I find that disparage one of my favorite books.
I don’t think I’ve The da Vinci Code ever rated as a literary masterpiece.
Obo: Who said I wasn’t referring to “Angels and Demons?” 🙂
But actually I was arguing it’s clearly overrated by the fact that it was a top seller for so long. KLaw’s claim that it was the, “most overrated novel in American literature,” does not necessarily only apply to lists of great books, although he later clarified. There’s more than one way to be overrated.
Keith,
I’ll be attending a conference in San Francisco in a few weeks. Any restaurant recommendations.
Thanks
Also, any book recommendations for my 7 hours of travel? For reference, I don’t read regularly. I did read most of Vonnegut’s work and enjoyed his books.
The prison issue is SOP. In America, big corporations pour in dollars and then write legislation. The energy industry wrote the Bush energy bill. Big Pharma wrote Medicare Part-D. Both have profited enormously, even during recession.
The prison bill is on a small scale, though with much national commotion, but it’s sadly the normal corruption that’s part of our republic.
This corruption just doesn’t seem to move voters or centrist politicians, alas.
Thanks for spreading the word, anyway.
Daniel: Catch-22? Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? Or are you a non-fiction guy? It’s hard to recommend something on just the fact that you like(d) Vonnegut. Give me a little more – fiction/non-fiction, a style, a subject, something that holds your interest.
“I am not arguing that you are falsely claiming to have read it. If that was the way that my writing came across, then I apologize for poorly expressing myself. What I am arguing is that, if you have not read it, which I do not believe you have…”
Wow. I normally do not comment on comments, but this is really epic. James, you are talking out of both sides of your mouth, my friend. How can you say that you did not intend to say Keith didn’t read the novel and yet in the very same comment state “I do not believe you have”?
Again…wow.
Oh yeah, that’s certainly possible- that the interests of the public don’t match up with the interests of the prison industry, but my quibble was with characterizing ALEC as some secretive group, and a question as to how often ‘special interests’ help develop legislation.
I know you’re not anti-profit, anti-capitalist, or anti-privatization, so I wasn’t worried about you taking that angle on this position.
Keith,
I prefer non-fiction. Generally sci-fi or action/adventure type. Also, any restaurant recommendations for San Francisco? Looking for places for all 3 meals.
Bob:
Not out of both sides of my mouth. The question was whether he was, “falsely claiming,” to have read it. I never argued that he was, “falsely claiming to have read it.” I did not think he had read it, and I never saw him, “claim,” that he had read it until that point, so therefore I wasn’t arguing about him making a false claim. I guess I can see how someone could become confused and think that these arguments are in contradiction with one another, but they aren’t.. Quite frankly, I was confused myself when I wrote it, as I explained rather clearly in the post.
Turns out that I was mistaken that he hadn’t read it, and I apologized for my incorrect assumption. But there’s nothing illogical about what I was saying, just mistaken. Sorry if I confused you.
Daniel: I’m still confused – you say non-fiction, then sci-fi.
If it’s non-fiction, check out my old non-fiction rankings, but I’d probably send you right to The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber.
I’m not a sci-fi reader any more, but I did enjoy Asimov’s Foundation (that link goes right to amazon) trilogy when I was a teenager, and if you’re a little flexible on genre and don’t mind a long book, check out Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Sorry Keith, I mistyped, meant fiction. Thanks.
Sorry to ask again, I am looking for restaurant recommendations for San Francisco as well.
Every restaurant/city writeup on this site is tagged, so
http://meadowparty.com/blog/?tag=san-francisco
takes you to anything I’ve written on SF.
One of the points that I think is important about the NPR article is that many people have no idea how these things work. So many people think the immigration law was some sort of grass roots effort or the result of folks fed up with illegal immigrants.
Obviously, we could point to hundreds of other laws or statutes with exactly the same ignorance surrounding them. Which simply points out how much more educated we need the public to be.
To wade into the issue itself…
“The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars in PROFIT means hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in revenue, all of which I have to assume would be coming from the public. Wasn’t much of the argument in favor of this legislation that it will curb the financial costs of illegal immigration? Hard to see how that will be the case.