I’m still rebuilding the site, so bear with me.
→ January 12, 2009
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→ December 5, 2008
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Blog trouble.
So you may have noticed some problems on the site today – a corrupted database was at fault, and right now, the last five weeks of posts and comments are gone, and I can see that a good chunk of comments from before that are toast as well because the backup file was partly corrupted too. I can restore some, if not all, of the posts, but the comments are probably gone. C’est la Web 2.0, I guess.
If there’s something you know I posted since 10/30 that you want to see restored, leave a comment on this thread. You may also want to ignore some of what shows up in your RSS reader for the next day or so.
→ October 29, 2008
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J.P. Howell.
If anyone can explain to me why you don’t pinch-hit for J.P. Howell there in the 7th inning, I’m all ears, because the mere sight of it made my brains start to leak out my nose.
→ October 21, 2008
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The Moviegoer.
Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
The book’s real subject, title and dust-jacket description notwithstanding, is depression. Both the main character, Jack “Binx” Bolling, and his cousin-by-marriage Kate are struggling with what would now be called depression, although Kate’s affliction is described by her family as a nervous disorder. Binx is aimless; he’s thirty years old, a World War II veteran with a good white-collar job that holds no interest for him, no immediate family to anchor him, and only a love of the movies as anything that animates him. He mentions a search for something – he’s looking for religion, but talks himself out of looking too hard – and instead he … goes to the movies. But again, the movies are an off-page character in this book.
Percy spends most of the book inside of Binx’s mind, but our windows into Kate’s illness are foggy and often closed, even though she’s the more intriguing character. She was about to get married several years before the time period covered by the book when her fiancé was killed in a car wreck that she survived. She’s about to get married again to a cipher of a man who is obviously not equipped to help her deal with her depression. Yet all we get of Kate are her occasional tangents to Binx, which employ a lot of rationalization to cover the emptiness she’s feeling inside (an emptiness that only becomes apparent in the book’s final 20 pages).
Books about alienation are all over most of the greatest book lists I have mined for reading material, but in general, I haven’t enjoyed them because the alienated characters were dull or annoying or both. Here, we have two alienated characters, but the author focused on the dull one rather than giving us more of the interesting one … who may simply be interesting because we don’t know enough about her to call her dull. At the same time, the book’s treatment of depression is just dated, perhaps a reflection of the time period in which it was written; it’s more a description of ennui than a psychological novel that looks into the abyss.
→ October 19, 2008
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Decline and Fall.
I read lots of novels, mostly ones that are considered by someone to have great literary merit. I find that I enjoy a significant number of these novels, and have discovered many that ended up on the Klaw 100 because I stepped out of my comfort zone and read a book I didn’t expect to like, or had never heard of, or thought too long. But there is no doubt that I’d be perfectly happy spending all of my time reading books like Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall
Decline and Fall is a nonsense novel along the lines of Scoop, with a faint underpinning of seriousness, as opposed to a more overtly serious work like Brideshead Revisited
The serious underpinning is a sort of latent nihilism and futile search for meaning (one character says he walked away from a career in the ministry not because he couldn’t believe in God, but because “he couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all”) and, along the way, a dissatisfaction with the answers one finds. Waugh was a misanthrope’s misanthrope, and it’s not clear what he hated more: the world around him, or himself. Pennyfeather accepts the seeming randomness in his life, although much of what appears to be “random” is actually due to the machinations and screw-ups of the people around him; one might argue he should choose better company, but either way, his reluctant acceptance of whatever comes his way, without ire or desire for revenge, is one way to cope.
For a little more on Decline and Fall, The Guardian’s books blog has a note from March of this year bemoaning the lack of appreciation of the novel today, 80 years after its publication.
→ October 15, 2008
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In case you weren’t clear what’s at stake on Election Day.
It’s always helpful to have an expert help with the big questions. When the subject is politics, we should turn to our indie-rock musicians for answers:
“We are living through a seriously oppressive time when basic needs like health care and freedom of speech are up for consideration as though they were extravagant options and not necessities.”
Personally, now that I know that this is a binary matter, I’m voting for no health care and no freedom of speech. Doctors are so 2007 anyway. I’m glad this musician I’ve never heard of framed this so neatly for me.
→ September 2, 2008
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Chrome, chat, radio.
KlawChat returns this week, but on Wednesday at 1 pm EDT. I’ll also be on ESPN 890 in Boston at 5:20 pm on Wednesday.
I just read about Google’s new open-source browser, Chrome. Have any of you tried it yet? I’ve got Firefox pretty well tricked-out the way I like it, and it’s pretty stable aside from a few disagreements with Shockwave, so I’m not sure I’m looking to jump to another browser … but it seems nice and new shiny and all.
→ August 22, 2008
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Vanity Fair.
Ah! Vanitus Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?
That would have to make the list of famous penultimate lines, as it summarizes Vanity Fair
Thackeray’s magnum opus is a sort of anti-picaresque satire of pre-Victorian society – anti-picaresque because most of the “action” is decidedly dull and because the book lacks a hero, a satire for Thackeray’s unflinching looks at the hypocrisy and self-importance of both old- and new-money aristocrats. The novel’s twin centers are the kind, witless, and occasionally simpering Amelia Sedley, born to moderate affluence but with a father who is absolutely reckless with money, and her boarding-school friend Becky Sharp, an orphan with borderline personality disorder who views every person she meets as a potential stepping stone or obstacle to her rise to fortune and status. Both make questionable marriages, bear sons, and follow their husbands to Belgium where both men participate briefly in the war against Napoleon’s forces. From there, the storylines split, only to reunite towards the book’s neither-happy-nor-unhappy ending.
Thackeray’s characterizations are the book’s strength. He sets Becky up as the underdog, only to reveal her as a Machiavellian home-wrecking bitch over the course of a few hundred pages. Amelia might emerge as the heroine until you realize that she’s ineffectual and weak. Even Major Dobbin, probably the one clearly “good” character among the primaries, reveals his own character flaw with his childlike devotion to Amelia, even as she takes him for granted and marries another man.
On the other hand, the satire may have been rapier-sharp in the mid-19th century, but it’s hard to fully appreciate it with little knowledge of the society he’s lampooning. I got more humor from the wordplay (with some help from the footnotes), his knack for absurdly named characters (foreshadowing Wodehouse and Powell?), and his snarky narration. If you think lines like “And the worthy civilian being haunted by a dim consciousness that the lad thought him an ass…” are funny, you’ll enjoy the humor in Vanity Fair, which is much more of that sardonic variety than of a slapstick or other laugh-out-loud style.
Next up: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep
→ August 18, 2008
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Wait, what?
I’m not sure who’s doing gymnastics announcing for NBC – Al Trautwig? – but he just dropped this doozy:
Chen Yibing doing one of the most difficult things in sports: Winning when everyone thought you would.
This would be true, if everyone was high on LSD and started picking extreme longshots to win. But usually if everyone thinks you’re going to win, it’s because you’re really likely to win.
→ August 13, 2008
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Whole Foods’ troubles.
Two articles from the NY Times this month on Whole Foods. One, “Whole Foods Looks for a Fresh Image in Lean Times,” covers the chain’s troubles trying to expand beyond the right-tail portion of the pool of grocery shoppers. There’s an underlying implication that this is due to the stagnating economy this year, but really, this was inevitable. Nearly every high-end brand eventually tries to move downmarket because the high-end market isn’t large enough to sustain the growth rates the company and its shareholders want to see. Whole Foods has been slowly moving left on the income curve through two efforts: one, becoming more competitive on packaged goods that are also available in other chains (like Kashi products, including their TLC Crunchy granola bars, a staple scouting snack for me because they’re delicious and high in fiber); and two, educating more consumers on the benefits of natural and organic foods. The media has helped on the latter front – a case of left-wing media bias of which I actually approve – but Trader Joes, also rapidly expanding, is a serious thorn in Whole Foods’ side on the former front. Indeed, we split our shopping among several stores, and we buy a lot of staple packaged foods at Trader Joes, including olive oil, balsamic vinegar, organic sugar, nuts, dried fruits, jarred artichokes and roasted red peppers, vanilla extract, eating and baking chocolate, and even specialty items like pizza dough and Parmiggiano-Reggiano ($5/pound cheaper than Whole Foods).
The second article, of course, covers Whole Foods’ response to their recent recall of ground beef. I can say with certainty that I bought and consumed ground beef from Whole Foods within the recall time frame, and did not end up in the hospital or with a minor case of food poisoning; I do cook my burgers at least to medium, which helps. More importantly, however, I was unaware that Whole Foods sold any beef that wasn’t ground in the store. The one I frequent most often has little clocks up that indicate when each type of beef (85%, 90%, and 93%) was last ground. Why would I assume that they were buying ground beef made elsewhere? And, as the Times article points out, why on earth are they doing business with a processor with a history of safety issues? I switched all of my beef purchasing to Whole Foods years ago when I learned more about how cows are fed; Whole Foods “guarantees” that all its beef is made from cows fed vegetarian diets. Do I need to question that now as well?