Chat today.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

IBAF rankings.

The International Baseball Federation has released its first-ever baseball rankings, by country.

I can’t believe they put Thailand 26th – that’s an outrage – and there will be rioting in Lahore when word gets out that Pakistan ranked last.

Technical difficulties.

I’m still rebuilding the site, so bear with me.

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.

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.

The Moviegoer.

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (on the TIME 100 and #60 on the Modern Library 100) was a big yawn. Most disappointing of all is that for a book titled “The Moviegoer,” the protagonist doesn’t really go to many movies at all. I sort of expected a heavy list of allusions to classic films of the 1940s and ’50s, but got next to none.

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.

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. Of course, the problem is that even the entire catalogues of Waugh and Wodehouse and Fforde and Amis wouldn’t get me past a year, so I’ve got to spread them out a bit – usually saving them for bad travel days where I need the distraction.

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 story follows Paul Pennyfeather, the bland quasi-hero who serves more as a prop than as a character, serving both as a window on to the lives of the slightly insane people around him and as the unwitting victim to the schemes of those characters. He’s sent down from university after a fraternity prank, derailing his hopes of a career in the ministry, leading him to a teaching job at a small and poorly-run public school in Wales (which is depicted as the backwater of England), where everyone he meets is a little bit dotty. Waugh savages everyone along the way – academics, hypocritical clerics, upper-class snobs, etc. – scoring points both with sarcastic putdowns and comical situations (not least of which are the pair of nine-lived con artists who keep reappearing in Paul’s life). The satire is a little dated, of course, but the dry wit is still fresh.

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.

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.

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.

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 on its final page, number 809 in the edition I read. The book appears at #24 on the Novel 100 and #19 on the Guardian 100.

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, a story about immigrant life in the U.S. prior to World War I. It’s also on the Novel 100.