Breaking News! Frustrated men live vicariously through James Bond. Saturday, Sep 22 2007

I adore old James Bond movies, I think for simple reasons like the set design and pretty clothes and cars and how it is sort of relaxing because you know he will always do exactly the right thing for the context and he will never embarrass either one of you. And there are no heartwarming moments, which is also kind of relaxing.

The British have much more complicated reasons for loving James Bond, reasons having to do with the End of Empire and social anxiety. This is not surprising, but Mr. Winder’s synopsis here is very thorough, often funny, and the author’s devotion to James Bonds’ social, artistic, and political importance is rather touching.

I have read a couple of the Bond books, but according to Winder not the good ones. He adores “From Russia with Love,” which I have never read. He despises “The Spy Who Loved Me,” a “shameful disaster which [Fleming] himself later disowned,” which I sort of enjoyed. (I must admit, however, that Winder’s criticisms of it — small-time gangster villains are unworthy of Bond, weird that it’s written from the point of view of the Bond girl, sex scenes convey this creepy sense of Fleming making sweet love to his cooler alter ego — are all true.) He likes “Dr. No” and “Goldfinger,” and has this theory that the books were actually Important because they helped England keep her chin up through the loss of her colonial imperialism and other indignities.

Anyway, reading this book was entertaining and made me want to watch some more James Bond movies, even the ones which are apparently beneath notice. And isn’t the cover awesome? I love early James Bond-era Connery.

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Hunter S. Thompson: Fear & Loathing On the Campaign Trail ‘72 Sunday, May 6 2007

This is one of Aura’s old books and has been sitting on my shelf ever since I inherited it. It’s a collection of Thompson’s dispatches to Rolling Stone magazine during the presidential campaign of 1972: strangely riveting. If, like me, you were not even born in 1972, I recommend keeping a copy of All the President’s Men nearby because that book has a whole index of the cast of 70s political characters, with photos, in the front.

My beloved magazine writing professor in college was Hunter S. Thompson’s editor at RS back in the day, and he was pretty vitriolic on the subject of HST. I kind of empathized with him while reading this book. HST’s prose is so good when it’s good, but sometimes devolves into total incoherence when he is close to a deadline (this happens to me too) and there are places where it is his handwritten notes or transcriptions of his tapes because he just did not finish on time. One chapter, and you really feel the editor’s pain here, is just a transcribed interview between HST and some poor editor, because HST must not have handed anything in.

Highlights: a limo ride with Nixon because Nixon would only let a journalist who knew about football ride with him and HST was the only one who did; HST interrogating McGovern at a urinal; HST letting some random drunk guy steal his press pass and the guy comes to a Muskie press conference and drunkenly claws at Muskie’s feet, demanding that Muskie fetch him more gin, everyone thinks it’s HST because of the press pass, everyone attributes Muskie’s implosion to the failure to control this press conference, and a footnote points out that this event was later widely attributed to Nixon’s sinister CRP sabatoges of rival presidential campaigns.

Why do I have so many books about politics of the 1970s? I have no idea. I am looking for some fiction to read but I keep missing library hours. I tried to read the chief’s Proust and it is too boring even for me. Ideas? Because I really don’t want to start in on the computer books. Or the philosophy books.

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The Economist Saturday, Apr 7 2007

OK, nothing competes with the quote from the Brazilian president in last week’s issue (“We haven’t managed it yet, but I know if we keep trying George Bush and I will find the g-spot of fair trade agreements.” Dear God! I will never be able to think of the FTAA without imagining those two great leaders fumbling around in the dark to please poor, unsatisfied fair trade.) Highlights from this week include coverage of San Francisco’s plastic bag ban, which the Economist actually supports with only the requisite snarkiness (“Karma is with us,” one of our supervisors declares at the beginning of the article).

Lexington discusses the Colbert Report and the Onion and gets in a dig at U.S. media (the Onion’s headlines “would not be so funny if those in the New York Times were not so ponderous” and “Mr. Colbert’s show would make no sense if cable-news blowhards such as Mr. O’Reilly did not exist.”) Ok, now I want to write a news magazine satirizing the Economist because they are just a little too smug about American media. I was just telling the chief and Jake about one time the beginning of the magazine mentioned a Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson was reading a copy of the Economist with the headline “Indonesia: at a crossroads.” Then, 40 pages into the magazine, the Economist had an article called “Indonesia: at a crossroads.” Ah, the wacky English.

This week’s jauntiest pair of headlines: “Funky monkeys” and “double trouble” about some weird s*#& scientists’ve discovered about human and monkey twins who wind up swapping stem cells in utero so that they have two different kinds of DNA in their bodies. The chief is obsessed with this, possibly because of the potential for a new kind of comic book superhero. I don’t knew enough science to really get excited about these sorts of things.

When you read the Economist, are there entire sections you skip out of bigotry? I, for example, always read the United States section and Latin America and the Middle East and some of Asia and Europe, but I routinely skip 1. Canada and Australia, 2. most of England and 3. the loathsome tech quarterly, which I suspect is too technical for muffinheads like me and too muffinheaded for people who actually know about technology. But does this mean I am a big racist against Canada? For some reason, I can’t bring myself to even approach that section even though some of their politics are admittedly entertaining and, you know, they are nearby and everything. Maybe if they elect someone really colorful with a toupee and mob connections who yells “beam me up scotty”from the floor of their parliament or whatever they have, like the erstwhile congressman Traficant, I can get excited about them.

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Jesse James: The Last Rebel of the Civil War Saturday, Mar 17 2007

The New York Times calls this a “fascinating revisionist biography,” but I am not familiar enough with the traditional biography of Jesse James to know what the new angle is — perhaps, all of the brutal killing when he was a pro-slavery militant during the Civil War.  I reviewed the first half of this a few weeks ago, and those comments stand.

As I got further in Jesse James’ life, it was interesting to read about his public relations efforts; for example, he used to issue press releases and leave them on the trains that he robbed.  Also, I liked reading about how monetary policy was affected by politics before, during, and after the Civil War … it reminded me that there is this other pop history book about the history of money that I have been meaning to read for a while.

This book has some very interesting bits, but like many histories it suffers from big gaps in time where there is not any direct evidence of what was going on with Jesse James’ life.  (Now, as I  mentioned earlier, I prefer gaps to long, clearly made-up sequences about a historical figure’s inner life, but that is just me.)  Stiles tried to fill in the gaps with analysis of the historical and social context of outlaws in the Sourth before, during, and after the Civil War.  Those parts were really boring, in part because he mainly seemed to be having an argument with other history writers instead of presenting us with a compelling story or theory.  And there is no reason for that stuff to be boring.  It has OUTLAWS, the old west, the war, money, trains, probably hobos for gods sake — basically a lot of things that make for good reading and there is no excuse for making me feel like I was in a boring high school class during those parts of the book.

I think I am going to see if the library has that money history book, though.

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Jesse James, so far Sunday, Mar 4 2007

Law school totally ruined me for the type of biography where they say: “On that foggy morning, Caesar woke up in a tizzy because he had a nightmare that he never told anybody about,” with no attribution and no way they could possibly could have obtained that insight.  I tried to read one of the chief’s pop history tomes after my first year of law school and almost clawed out my eyes screaming about the lack of citations.  Therefore, I appreciate the heavily annotated nature of this biography, which has a footnote at the end of every sentence just like a law review article.  The thesis of this book is that Jesse James was not the fun-loving Robin Hood character of western movies, but rather a psychopathic pro-slavery terrorist.  (The author makes a point of using the word “terrorist” every few sentences, in case we did not get it the first time.)

I have always been sort of interested in the connection between pulpy novels, the mythology of the western, and the civil war — perhaps because my atrocious education is limited to what I have learned from spaghetti westerns, Ken Burns documentaries, and children’s books.   Also, like Trane, I am descended from Missourians so it is interesting to read about Missouri history and the role of Missouri in the civil war.

So far, I have two criticisms.  First, there are not nearly enough pictures!  Wasn’t Jesse James a celebrity during his lifetime?  And yet they can only come up with two pictures of him, and there is only one Wanted poster?  Ridiculous.  I also get a little bored of the tactical war discussions, but I understand that this type of thing is very alluring to the civil war re-enactors, who outnumber me.

I have learned lots of good slang, like “bushwacker” and “redleg.”  I am starting to feel vaguely guilty about liking southern bourbon so much because it seems like the drug of choice for bushwackers.  And did you know there used to be a political faction called the “Know-nothings?”  So refreshingly honest.  Did you know Lawrence, Kansas was founded by abolitionists and was a crazy hotbed of social liberalism (redleggism, in other words)?  I have learned all of this, and Jesse James is only about 18.  Will keep you posted.

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Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent Saturday, Feb 10 2007

So few guests acquit themselves well on the Colbert Report, but I was laughing with not at Norah Vincent when I saw her interviewed on the show. (This was totally inappropriate because I was at the gym on the treadmill and it was five in the morning and the other people at the gym thought I was crazy. It was fun going to the gym back when I had both of my legs, but I digress.)

The conceit of this book is just like Black Like Me or that James Bond book where James Bond self-tans himself into a Japanese guy, except that in this case a woman goes under cover as a man for a year. The chapters are divided up by a set of male experiences she designs for herself: joining a bowling league, going to strip clubs, dating (men and women it says on the back but I only remember her dating women), living in a monastary, going on a men’s movement retreat — you know, the usual stuff that every man does all the time.

My favorite part of the book was the beginning where she talks about the logistical and practical aspects of passing as a man — gluing one’s beard on and so forth. She learned that women lean forward when speaking and men lean back; women tend to talk so fast that they run out of breath and men use fewer words. It was interesting how her innate feminine mannerisms would always betray her as effeminate or gay-seeming as a man even though she said she was always considered kind of a butch woman. It made me think about how I phrase everything like a question and apologize for everything and maybe I should be more macho.

The parts of the book I didn’t like were the sociological expositions at the end of every chapter. I felt like responding to these platitudes with the one they always beat you over the head with in journalism school: show, don’t tell. I feel certain, however, that it was some cheeseball editor or marketing person who was to blame for this aspect of the book, not Norah Vincent.

In sum, the book was good, sometimes tawdry, fun. It made me appreciate the power of a good suit and not talking too much or apologizing for everything. I don’t think it taught me any good lessons to apply to the serialist, though, except that I shouldn’t have a male narrator because the male mind is such a big brawny mystery to me.

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