Another blog to check now and then: Anti-Fascist Calling.
Also, Good Reads has a list of groups that share recommendations.
I gotta do a page on resources for booksellers, but for now, here's one on how to use the USPS Click-N-Ship.
Friday, May 08, 2009
With the help of my colleague Marcia, I used the Engine 2 diet last month.
You can register on their site and get access to 60 vegan no oil-recipes.
Check out the introductory video....
You can register on their site and get access to 60 vegan no oil-recipes.
Check out the introductory video....
Thursday, April 30, 2009
I'm hoping to embark on a minor self-tutorial about China. Check back in six months to see if I got anywhere. Starting with Chinese dissident and economist Minqui Li's The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (how's that for provocative?), published by Monthly Review.
It's been a while since I've used the blog, so anyone who might check it now and then must be thinking I've lost interest or stopped reading?
No, just haven't had much time. In fact, today the only reason I'm here is because I'm at home, sick. In any event I'll be updating the reading list more fully soon.
It's been a while since I've used the blog, so anyone who might check it now and then must be thinking I've lost interest or stopped reading?
No, just haven't had much time. In fact, today the only reason I'm here is because I'm at home, sick. In any event I'll be updating the reading list more fully soon.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Time to catch up on what I read in 2008. Before I forget:
First, a list of some of the best I read this year:
The Tyranny of Oil by Antonia Juhasz (the best book about the industy out there)
Wall Street by Steve Fraser (an essay on the zeitgeist of greed, drawing from the history)
The Squandering of America by Robert Kuttner (one of the two best overall explanations of why our economy is fucked up -- rooted in the failure of regulatory policy and the laissez faire doctrines that dominate the discourse...who was it said, "a little learning is a dangerous thing" ? (Alexander Pope?) ... well, when it comes to economics, he was so right, because the real world has nothing to do with what they teach us. Rather than savage the academics, however, Kuttner explains what has actually happened.
Bad Money by Kevin Phillips (the other best overall explanation...a bit less exacting on the policies, but much more soaring in its rhetoric...the capstone to the brilliant trilogy of books that he issued during the past 8 years)...
The Great Depression and the New Deal by Rauchway (are you ready for it to happen again? If not, you should be, and there's no better intro than this tight, concise history...and you can find more on his blog)
Coming of Age at the End of History by Camille de Toledo (French essayist, young activist with a sharp chip on his shoulder)
other/fun:
New Orleans, Mon Amour by Andrei Condrescu (I read that on a recent trip back down to sleeziana...nice, crisp columns by the NPR commentator)
Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life by Tom Clark (bio) I stopped halfway through - intend to finish - I like to read poets' bios before I decide if I wanna make the effort to read their work - esp. ones that are difficult like he seems to be.
Tree Smoke by Denis Johnson (They tout this as his masterpiece. I was a bit disappointed, actually. Though very well written, as are all his novels and poetry, there's not much to the plot.)
Generation of Vipers by Phillip Wylie. I keep running across copies of this snarky early 1940s social critique at used book sales. And with a title like that, how could I resist? (Esp. as a big fan of contrarian writers, like Hitchens, Mencken, Twain, etc.). This was quite entertaining and scorching, but there were times when he seemed way off-base -- esp. his views on women, which seem a bit wacky, even for those days: "The henharpy is but the Cinderella chick come home to roost: the taloned, cackling residue of burnt-out puberty in a land that has no use for mature men or women" except where they acknowledge that women are the primary targets of the new heights of commercialism: "Women as an idle class, a spending class, a candy-craving class, never existed before...The idea women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift -- an idea promulgaed by every medium and many an advertisement -- has defeated half the husbands in America. It has made at least half our homes into centers of disillusionment. ... The goal of security, seen in terms of things alone and achieved in those terms during the least secure period in human history, has predictably ruined Cinderella: she has the prince, the coach, the horses -- but her soul's a pumpkin and her mind's a rat-warren. She desperately needs help.")
That said, I loved some of this venomous vituperation:
"The doctors are condemned as a whole, again, by their infuriated defiance of a public tendency toward health insurance and toward any step that may be called the socialization of medicine. If this defiance were accompanied by a practicable plan, agreeable to all, whereby the mordant and the miserable of this republic could get themselves a fair measure of mere physical care, the emotion could be interpreted as an urge to restrain man from foolishness and guide him into wisdom..." (p. 179)
and bilious bloviation:
"The grievous gulf between medieval man's engineering skill and his ineptitude at being manlike is thus reflected in the art of the woebegone period as vividly as it is to be seen in his crammed and caterwauling psychopathic wards." (p.25)
Spitting into the spiritual facetiousness of Christianity:
"Behind the mask of these good, virtuous, scrificial and holy American people, instinct has gone on working exactly as it always worked. Men are murdered. Children are seduced. Public officials are corrupted. Thieves steal. Churchly men have invented forms of theft so subtle that the law has no means of detecting and punishing them...On and on the negative instincts led the disguised chase. The practice of law became in a large part the practice of concealed robbery. A business apprenticeship consisted in training a youth to be a Fagin. Even a doctor might be practicing medicine or he might be practicing any crime that suited him -- for profit. The scientists hired themselves out to the businessmen and searched only those corners of nature in which lesser brains thought there might be quick money gains. A tradition of integrity in the central government for a time hampered the process of irresponsible acquisition, but men soon set about to put in government persons whose identification with noble tradition would be less embarrassing. Eight graders, with hair over their ears, gangsters, perverts, thugs, bullies and scumskulls of every sort, so long as they were either purchasable or preoccupied with some personal crotchet that did not interfere with the plunder of man by man, were recommended solemnly to the halls of state by big business leaders, lawyers, doctors, soldiers and the rest of the blind and grabby retinue of people whom the church had blessed and confirmed as perfect Americans."
Whew!
And it goes on and on like this!
And now and then a nugget like that scumskulls! My copy has a list of similar neoligisms and impugnations:
yut (53)
nance (61)
prickamice (95) tetanic (95) padisha (161)
Nawab and voivode (164)
sciamachly (165)
bargrove (175)
sciolist (241)
I have no idea what put Wylie into such a scathingly mordant state of mind that he could crank this entire Jeremiad out in just a few weeks in early 1941, but you can imagine that the incipient War and the exigencies of patriotism building up to it ("War...represents an unreasoned and inarticulate attempt of a species to solve its frustrations by exploding") had a lot to do with it, despite the claims of Art that he cites in the introduction written 13 years later: "Criticism, that is to say, and the doubt out of which it arises, are the prior conditions to progress of any sort. The intent of "Vipers" was and is to provide a body of exactly that sort of criticism, that sort of doubt and self-doubt."
The next paragraph suggests he knew exactly the kind of response he'd get: "The critical attitude, however, is mistrusted in America, for all its fundamental place in any pattern of progress. Formal criticism, as such, while allowable, is regarded as an exercise of "longhairs" or "eggheads" ... The result is to keep the American majority not just intellectually uncritical but anti-critical."
Although the book was apparently a best-seller, "To people with that orientation -- people who imagine that the "right" approach to any problem must involve optimism -- "Vipers" was a great shock. For "Vipers" suggests that downright pessimismm, in this day and age, may be a more fruitful source of national improvement (and even a surer road to mere survival) than all the compulsive optimism the public can pump up concerning its wonderful self."
We've come a long way since then. If anything, it seems we are now in the age of resignation, where each new scandal (Enron, Halliburton, Blackwater, Madoff...) is met with little surprise.
Still, I hope with I. B. Singer, who said, "The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence, but a mighty passion for the redemption of man."
Wylie suggested much the same in his 1954 intro, albeit with what now seems like far-fetched histrionics:
"I talked to one young lady for an hour while she sat on the window sill of a high floor of a Manhattan skyscraper with a copy of "Vipers" on her lap! ... It was necessary to persuade such people that a mere vista of difficulties, however huge and horrid, is not an excuse for abandoning human effort -- let alone life itself. Such reactions are extremely childish. Unfortunately, many people are just that infantile. A great many Americans have given up moral and intellectual effort in behalf of their country simply because it is hard to be moral and to reason."
Of course there's much self-justification here, since "the modern American, to express the bulk of the though in a single phrase, has rejected the critical method for himself," someone like Wylie had to come along and puncture his ballooning self-importance.
Thus, he does the rounds, like a scalpel-wielding social surgeon on a rampage.
The colleges "themselves were ponderous stone buildings, usually segregated from the populace...Great learning was attributed to pedants who were still debating points that had been without relevancy for thousands of years...The education of young people had very little to do, it may be seen, with the life for which they were being prepared, and every sort of bigotry was proselytized by one or more colleges. History was written and taught without any regard for fact, but only with the motive of nationalistic 'face-saving." Yes, indeed, "the flat hat on the pate of the American graduate is a hallmark of philosophical treason -- and there are enough of them to shingle hell."
How nice it would have been to cite that on graduation day!
It follows, of course that all of the professions, especially medicine, are overdue for a skewering: "Witch-doctoring and quackery, mummery and nonsense, robbery, withal a Niagara of nonsense, a mountain of mulcting, a swindle and a scandal, and if your grocer did a tenth as much to you you would have him in the clink, even though we will agree that grocers, as a class, are a collection of choice theives and liars too."
Religious hypocrisy and the day's attitudes about sex are easy targets, too, as already suggested: "You are every man on every rack -- every moaning and foaming gobbet of flexh in history -- every good impulse and also every evil one. By denying the existence of the evil in you, you have forced upon it an autonomous existence and it has marched clear around the globa and it is ready to consume you."
Then, of course, there is the hypocrisy of Americans at war. For while we denounce the Japs for dousing the Chinese and burning them alive in Nanking, Wylie notes in a 1954 postscript that "Since I wrote (a reference to that infamous activity), of course, we have cooked a million or so Japs in napalm, which is a form of gasoline, and left some other thousands mere man-shaped carbon stains on radioactive sidewalks. These achievements make it even harder for us Americans to acknowledge, humbly, the terribleness we share with others. Indeed, most of us seem able to declaim brightly that atomic weapons "must never be used in war," without noting the eternally attached shadow: that they have so been used and that we did it."
And in a society where "liberty is the right to compel people to produce and purchase stuff" (he doesn't mention the perversion of Free Speech in the application of First Amendment protections to advertising, but might have, had he traced some of these moral failures to a distortion of the society's ideals in the way its laws were interpeted), there is no easier target than the businessmen.
None are innocent, and "Man's destiny lies half within himself, half without. Toi advance in either half at the expense of the other is literally insane. We are almost all, of course, as mad as hatters. Our statesmen, our scientists, ourselves. You. Indeed, if you go on reading this book, unless it makes you wiser, it will very likely cause you to cork off screaming to the nut factory. You belong there anyway and, deep inside yourself, you know it."
This past year, I also re-read Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence (I think it's the only book by him that I've ever finished. I can't get into the novels and the poetry never got me too excited either.).
I have to admit that I must have missed some of the sarcasm here when I read this in college. I also don't recall catching the the way he makes use of what he said in the previous chapters. The chapter on Melville is superb, as is his chapter on Whitman who, I don't know why, I wrote about for my college thesis. (Have you read the essay Whitman wrote to introduce the first edition of Leaves of Grass? I still think that's a stunning piece of rhetoric.) Anyway, I definitely was not mature enough when I read this Lawrence the first time, becuz I totally missed a lot of his jabs and allusions. But then, I've always been slow on the draw when it comes to subtle humor.
In prepping myself to read Roberto Bolano's masterpiece, 2666, I've decided to read a few of the slimmer volumes being issued by New Directions, starting with Last Evenings on Earth, a delicious collection of short stories.
This guy Bolano is the best Latin American writer to have his works translated into English in a long time. Reading Last Evenings does a lot for me: a) reminds me of that joyous peripathetic (sic) period of my life when I lived in Cambridge, MA (6 months after graduating), working odd jobs and reading voraciously the literature I wanted to read (rather than what I was required to read), including Joyce, Pynchon, Bellow, and various poets, and ambling and rambling with various characters in the bars and streets of Cambridge, going in and out of the Grollier book store (only store in the nation that I know that's exclusively devoted to poetry, outside of the Bowery Poetry Club, which doesn't count since it makes ends meet on entertainment and whatever Shappy can rake in at the bar)...
Anyway, the stories in Last Evenings (and the parts of the Savage Detectives, which I admit to putting down mid-way through) is chock full of "failed" characters -- second-rate writers, a diaspora of desperate exiles and poets off on their own private vision quests, etc.
The narrative feels like the someone's caffeinated divagations about other open mike habitues or the local quarterly editorial clique, without pretensions.
Bolano is Chilean, part of the diaspora of literary desperadoes who were sewing their oats just about the time when Kissinger and Pinochet pushed Salvador Allende into suicide and chopped off Victor Jara's beautiful hands. That is, he wrote like someone with nothing left to lose.
First, a list of some of the best I read this year:
The Tyranny of Oil by Antonia Juhasz (the best book about the industy out there)
Wall Street by Steve Fraser (an essay on the zeitgeist of greed, drawing from the history)
The Squandering of America by Robert Kuttner (one of the two best overall explanations of why our economy is fucked up -- rooted in the failure of regulatory policy and the laissez faire doctrines that dominate the discourse...who was it said, "a little learning is a dangerous thing" ? (Alexander Pope?) ... well, when it comes to economics, he was so right, because the real world has nothing to do with what they teach us. Rather than savage the academics, however, Kuttner explains what has actually happened.
Bad Money by Kevin Phillips (the other best overall explanation...a bit less exacting on the policies, but much more soaring in its rhetoric...the capstone to the brilliant trilogy of books that he issued during the past 8 years)...
The Great Depression and the New Deal by Rauchway (are you ready for it to happen again? If not, you should be, and there's no better intro than this tight, concise history...and you can find more on his blog)
Coming of Age at the End of History by Camille de Toledo (French essayist, young activist with a sharp chip on his shoulder)
other/fun:
New Orleans, Mon Amour by Andrei Condrescu (I read that on a recent trip back down to sleeziana...nice, crisp columns by the NPR commentator)
Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life by Tom Clark (bio) I stopped halfway through - intend to finish - I like to read poets' bios before I decide if I wanna make the effort to read their work - esp. ones that are difficult like he seems to be.
Tree Smoke by Denis Johnson (They tout this as his masterpiece. I was a bit disappointed, actually. Though very well written, as are all his novels and poetry, there's not much to the plot.)
Generation of Vipers by Phillip Wylie. I keep running across copies of this snarky early 1940s social critique at used book sales. And with a title like that, how could I resist? (Esp. as a big fan of contrarian writers, like Hitchens, Mencken, Twain, etc.). This was quite entertaining and scorching, but there were times when he seemed way off-base -- esp. his views on women, which seem a bit wacky, even for those days: "The henharpy is but the Cinderella chick come home to roost: the taloned, cackling residue of burnt-out puberty in a land that has no use for mature men or women" except where they acknowledge that women are the primary targets of the new heights of commercialism: "Women as an idle class, a spending class, a candy-craving class, never existed before...The idea women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift -- an idea promulgaed by every medium and many an advertisement -- has defeated half the husbands in America. It has made at least half our homes into centers of disillusionment. ... The goal of security, seen in terms of things alone and achieved in those terms during the least secure period in human history, has predictably ruined Cinderella: she has the prince, the coach, the horses -- but her soul's a pumpkin and her mind's a rat-warren. She desperately needs help.")
That said, I loved some of this venomous vituperation:
"The doctors are condemned as a whole, again, by their infuriated defiance of a public tendency toward health insurance and toward any step that may be called the socialization of medicine. If this defiance were accompanied by a practicable plan, agreeable to all, whereby the mordant and the miserable of this republic could get themselves a fair measure of mere physical care, the emotion could be interpreted as an urge to restrain man from foolishness and guide him into wisdom..." (p. 179)
and bilious bloviation:
"The grievous gulf between medieval man's engineering skill and his ineptitude at being manlike is thus reflected in the art of the woebegone period as vividly as it is to be seen in his crammed and caterwauling psychopathic wards." (p.25)
Spitting into the spiritual facetiousness of Christianity:
"Behind the mask of these good, virtuous, scrificial and holy American people, instinct has gone on working exactly as it always worked. Men are murdered. Children are seduced. Public officials are corrupted. Thieves steal. Churchly men have invented forms of theft so subtle that the law has no means of detecting and punishing them...On and on the negative instincts led the disguised chase. The practice of law became in a large part the practice of concealed robbery. A business apprenticeship consisted in training a youth to be a Fagin. Even a doctor might be practicing medicine or he might be practicing any crime that suited him -- for profit. The scientists hired themselves out to the businessmen and searched only those corners of nature in which lesser brains thought there might be quick money gains. A tradition of integrity in the central government for a time hampered the process of irresponsible acquisition, but men soon set about to put in government persons whose identification with noble tradition would be less embarrassing. Eight graders, with hair over their ears, gangsters, perverts, thugs, bullies and scumskulls of every sort, so long as they were either purchasable or preoccupied with some personal crotchet that did not interfere with the plunder of man by man, were recommended solemnly to the halls of state by big business leaders, lawyers, doctors, soldiers and the rest of the blind and grabby retinue of people whom the church had blessed and confirmed as perfect Americans."
Whew!
And it goes on and on like this!
And now and then a nugget like that scumskulls! My copy has a list of similar neoligisms and impugnations:
yut (53)
nance (61)
prickamice (95) tetanic (95) padisha (161)
Nawab and voivode (164)
sciamachly (165)
bargrove (175)
sciolist (241)
I have no idea what put Wylie into such a scathingly mordant state of mind that he could crank this entire Jeremiad out in just a few weeks in early 1941, but you can imagine that the incipient War and the exigencies of patriotism building up to it ("War...represents an unreasoned and inarticulate attempt of a species to solve its frustrations by exploding") had a lot to do with it, despite the claims of Art that he cites in the introduction written 13 years later: "Criticism, that is to say, and the doubt out of which it arises, are the prior conditions to progress of any sort. The intent of "Vipers" was and is to provide a body of exactly that sort of criticism, that sort of doubt and self-doubt."
The next paragraph suggests he knew exactly the kind of response he'd get: "The critical attitude, however, is mistrusted in America, for all its fundamental place in any pattern of progress. Formal criticism, as such, while allowable, is regarded as an exercise of "longhairs" or "eggheads" ... The result is to keep the American majority not just intellectually uncritical but anti-critical."
Although the book was apparently a best-seller, "To people with that orientation -- people who imagine that the "right" approach to any problem must involve optimism -- "Vipers" was a great shock. For "Vipers" suggests that downright pessimismm, in this day and age, may be a more fruitful source of national improvement (and even a surer road to mere survival) than all the compulsive optimism the public can pump up concerning its wonderful self."
We've come a long way since then. If anything, it seems we are now in the age of resignation, where each new scandal (Enron, Halliburton, Blackwater, Madoff...) is met with little surprise.
Still, I hope with I. B. Singer, who said, "The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence, but a mighty passion for the redemption of man."
Wylie suggested much the same in his 1954 intro, albeit with what now seems like far-fetched histrionics:
"I talked to one young lady for an hour while she sat on the window sill of a high floor of a Manhattan skyscraper with a copy of "Vipers" on her lap! ... It was necessary to persuade such people that a mere vista of difficulties, however huge and horrid, is not an excuse for abandoning human effort -- let alone life itself. Such reactions are extremely childish. Unfortunately, many people are just that infantile. A great many Americans have given up moral and intellectual effort in behalf of their country simply because it is hard to be moral and to reason."
Of course there's much self-justification here, since "the modern American, to express the bulk of the though in a single phrase, has rejected the critical method for himself," someone like Wylie had to come along and puncture his ballooning self-importance.
Thus, he does the rounds, like a scalpel-wielding social surgeon on a rampage.
The colleges "themselves were ponderous stone buildings, usually segregated from the populace...Great learning was attributed to pedants who were still debating points that had been without relevancy for thousands of years...The education of young people had very little to do, it may be seen, with the life for which they were being prepared, and every sort of bigotry was proselytized by one or more colleges. History was written and taught without any regard for fact, but only with the motive of nationalistic 'face-saving." Yes, indeed, "the flat hat on the pate of the American graduate is a hallmark of philosophical treason -- and there are enough of them to shingle hell."
How nice it would have been to cite that on graduation day!
It follows, of course that all of the professions, especially medicine, are overdue for a skewering: "Witch-doctoring and quackery, mummery and nonsense, robbery, withal a Niagara of nonsense, a mountain of mulcting, a swindle and a scandal, and if your grocer did a tenth as much to you you would have him in the clink, even though we will agree that grocers, as a class, are a collection of choice theives and liars too."
Religious hypocrisy and the day's attitudes about sex are easy targets, too, as already suggested: "You are every man on every rack -- every moaning and foaming gobbet of flexh in history -- every good impulse and also every evil one. By denying the existence of the evil in you, you have forced upon it an autonomous existence and it has marched clear around the globa and it is ready to consume you."
Then, of course, there is the hypocrisy of Americans at war. For while we denounce the Japs for dousing the Chinese and burning them alive in Nanking, Wylie notes in a 1954 postscript that "Since I wrote (a reference to that infamous activity), of course, we have cooked a million or so Japs in napalm, which is a form of gasoline, and left some other thousands mere man-shaped carbon stains on radioactive sidewalks. These achievements make it even harder for us Americans to acknowledge, humbly, the terribleness we share with others. Indeed, most of us seem able to declaim brightly that atomic weapons "must never be used in war," without noting the eternally attached shadow: that they have so been used and that we did it."
And in a society where "liberty is the right to compel people to produce and purchase stuff" (he doesn't mention the perversion of Free Speech in the application of First Amendment protections to advertising, but might have, had he traced some of these moral failures to a distortion of the society's ideals in the way its laws were interpeted), there is no easier target than the businessmen.
None are innocent, and "Man's destiny lies half within himself, half without. Toi advance in either half at the expense of the other is literally insane. We are almost all, of course, as mad as hatters. Our statesmen, our scientists, ourselves. You. Indeed, if you go on reading this book, unless it makes you wiser, it will very likely cause you to cork off screaming to the nut factory. You belong there anyway and, deep inside yourself, you know it."
This past year, I also re-read Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence (I think it's the only book by him that I've ever finished. I can't get into the novels and the poetry never got me too excited either.).
I have to admit that I must have missed some of the sarcasm here when I read this in college. I also don't recall catching the the way he makes use of what he said in the previous chapters. The chapter on Melville is superb, as is his chapter on Whitman who, I don't know why, I wrote about for my college thesis. (Have you read the essay Whitman wrote to introduce the first edition of Leaves of Grass? I still think that's a stunning piece of rhetoric.) Anyway, I definitely was not mature enough when I read this Lawrence the first time, becuz I totally missed a lot of his jabs and allusions. But then, I've always been slow on the draw when it comes to subtle humor.
In prepping myself to read Roberto Bolano's masterpiece, 2666, I've decided to read a few of the slimmer volumes being issued by New Directions, starting with Last Evenings on Earth, a delicious collection of short stories.
This guy Bolano is the best Latin American writer to have his works translated into English in a long time. Reading Last Evenings does a lot for me: a) reminds me of that joyous peripathetic (sic) period of my life when I lived in Cambridge, MA (6 months after graduating), working odd jobs and reading voraciously the literature I wanted to read (rather than what I was required to read), including Joyce, Pynchon, Bellow, and various poets, and ambling and rambling with various characters in the bars and streets of Cambridge, going in and out of the Grollier book store (only store in the nation that I know that's exclusively devoted to poetry, outside of the Bowery Poetry Club, which doesn't count since it makes ends meet on entertainment and whatever Shappy can rake in at the bar)...
Anyway, the stories in Last Evenings (and the parts of the Savage Detectives, which I admit to putting down mid-way through) is chock full of "failed" characters -- second-rate writers, a diaspora of desperate exiles and poets off on their own private vision quests, etc.
The narrative feels like the someone's caffeinated divagations about other open mike habitues or the local quarterly editorial clique, without pretensions.
Bolano is Chilean, part of the diaspora of literary desperadoes who were sewing their oats just about the time when Kissinger and Pinochet pushed Salvador Allende into suicide and chopped off Victor Jara's beautiful hands. That is, he wrote like someone with nothing left to lose.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Wrote this poem Saturday night for an open mike...in the style of Calvin Trillin, the closest thing we have to a poet laureate on the left...
Brandenberg
Jack spoke there freely, like a saintly sinner --
(Jelly donuts for breakfast, and brats for dinner)
Announcing to the world: "Ich bin ein Berliner."
Now Obama's running, and he's looking like a winner
Except that, if he wasn't such a heavy spinner
He'd be forced to admit, "Ich bin ein beginner."
Brandenberg
Jack spoke there freely, like a saintly sinner --
(Jelly donuts for breakfast, and brats for dinner)
Announcing to the world: "Ich bin ein Berliner."
Now Obama's running, and he's looking like a winner
Except that, if he wasn't such a heavy spinner
He'd be forced to admit, "Ich bin ein beginner."
Monday, March 03, 2008
"There are reasons for using words even when they are unfamiliar. It can be a matter of rhythm, it can be a matter of the exact fit--and it can be something by way of obeisance to the people whose honed verbal appetites created the need for such a word, which therefore came into being. Call it supply-side linguistics; but whatever you call it, pray be thankful that someone invented the word 'velleity' and that a few refuse to permit it to die, even as others would die to preserve the lousewort." - William F. Buckley, On the Right, May 15, 1984.
Indeed.
Indeed.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Some useful links for book sellers and/or buyers:
Is it really signed by the author? Check out these author signatures and compare.
Protection from scams: basestealer.
USPS and UPS Rate Calculator.
International postage rate calculator.
Is it a First?
Compare prices
Cheri's page
Book buyers guide
Is it really signed by the author? Check out these author signatures and compare.
Protection from scams: basestealer.
USPS and UPS Rate Calculator.
International postage rate calculator.
Is it a First?
Compare prices
Cheri's page
Book buyers guide
Monday, February 18, 2008
Search links:
Corporate History:
Charles Abbott: Rise of the Business Corporation (1936)
Joseph Stancliffe Davis: Essays in the earlier history of American Corporations
Grandy: New Jersey and the Fiscal Origins of the Modern American Corporation ($ 33.50)
Roger Shiner: Freedom of Commercial Expression (corporate speech rights - expensive at 80.00)
Gary Slapper, Blood in the bank: social and legal aspects of death at work (intro by Chomsky) ($58+)
Tedlow: Rise of the American Business Corporation (usually $30)
Other non-fiction:
Philip Agee: CIA Diary: Inside the Company
Fletcher Prouty: The Secret Team (original hardback)
Peter Dale Scott: The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (later reissued under a different title - about oil factor)
Essays and Memoirs
Stuart Hall: Policing the Crisis (UK only - usually about $50)
Charles Olson: Projective Verse
Fiction
Wm. S. Burroughs: The Third Mind (normally $100 +)
Corporate History:
Charles Abbott: Rise of the Business Corporation (1936)
Joseph Stancliffe Davis: Essays in the earlier history of American Corporations
Grandy: New Jersey and the Fiscal Origins of the Modern American Corporation ($ 33.50)
Roger Shiner: Freedom of Commercial Expression (corporate speech rights - expensive at 80.00)
Gary Slapper, Blood in the bank: social and legal aspects of death at work (intro by Chomsky) ($58+)
Tedlow: Rise of the American Business Corporation (usually $30)
Other non-fiction:
Philip Agee: CIA Diary: Inside the Company
Fletcher Prouty: The Secret Team (original hardback)
Peter Dale Scott: The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (later reissued under a different title - about oil factor)
Essays and Memoirs
Stuart Hall: Policing the Crisis (UK only - usually about $50)
Charles Olson: Projective Verse
Fiction
Wm. S. Burroughs: The Third Mind (normally $100 +)
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Two books that could be read hand-in-hand are The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics by Jonathan Chait, and The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity by Robert Kuttner (one of the founding editors of the American Prospect).
For those who want a useful explanation of what caused the current economic dilemmas in America, Kuttner's book is the more masterful. A former staffer for the Senate Banking Committee, his is the weighter analysis of how both parties have failed to address the causes of virtually every major economic crisis of the past few decades -- financial deregulation.
Chait's book struck me as an attempt to mix the serious with the satirical. As if he were trying to be the next Thomas Frank. It's a good take on the ludicrous triumph of right-wing economists -- despite the ability of their policies to fail, time and again. (Remember AEI's James Glassmann -- the guy who wrote Dow 36,000? Now he's the guy the Bush league chose to replace Karen Hughes as the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. And there's talk that McCain would want to nominate Phil Gramm -- the former Senator from Texas who pushed through the repeal of Glass-Stegall before moving on to join HSBC).
Chait gets a few things right. He points out that when it comes to economic policy the Republican Party cannot be understood solely as an ideological phenomenon: "One of the paradoxes of the Bush years is that, while the president and his allies are staunch conservatives, their economics is not pure conservatism. The policy mix is nothing that a Friedrich Hayek or a Milton Friedman would recognize as his own. Nor is it the kind of moderate Republicanism of an Eisenhower or a Nixon. The new brand of conservatism reflects not just the advent of the supply-siders but also the rise and ideological transformation of the business lobby. Over the last thirty-five years -- the same period of time that has seen the ascent of the supply-siders -- American business has grown both vastly more politically powerful and vastly more rapacious in the way it wields that power. The rise of the business lobby has distorted -- and, finally, corrupted -- the Republican Party and the conservative movement."
Agreed.
(to be cont.)
For those who want a useful explanation of what caused the current economic dilemmas in America, Kuttner's book is the more masterful. A former staffer for the Senate Banking Committee, his is the weighter analysis of how both parties have failed to address the causes of virtually every major economic crisis of the past few decades -- financial deregulation.
Chait's book struck me as an attempt to mix the serious with the satirical. As if he were trying to be the next Thomas Frank. It's a good take on the ludicrous triumph of right-wing economists -- despite the ability of their policies to fail, time and again. (Remember AEI's James Glassmann -- the guy who wrote Dow 36,000? Now he's the guy the Bush league chose to replace Karen Hughes as the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. And there's talk that McCain would want to nominate Phil Gramm -- the former Senator from Texas who pushed through the repeal of Glass-Stegall before moving on to join HSBC).
Chait gets a few things right. He points out that when it comes to economic policy the Republican Party cannot be understood solely as an ideological phenomenon: "One of the paradoxes of the Bush years is that, while the president and his allies are staunch conservatives, their economics is not pure conservatism. The policy mix is nothing that a Friedrich Hayek or a Milton Friedman would recognize as his own. Nor is it the kind of moderate Republicanism of an Eisenhower or a Nixon. The new brand of conservatism reflects not just the advent of the supply-siders but also the rise and ideological transformation of the business lobby. Over the last thirty-five years -- the same period of time that has seen the ascent of the supply-siders -- American business has grown both vastly more politically powerful and vastly more rapacious in the way it wields that power. The rise of the business lobby has distorted -- and, finally, corrupted -- the Republican Party and the conservative movement."
Agreed.
(to be cont.)
"Road trips are a very happy monument to the ego."
The as-ever prolific William Vollmann has a new book out about riding the rails, hobo-style. The book, Riding Towards Everywhere, is his "attempt to fall in love with America again."
He came to Politics and Prose this week. My friend Steve (an obsessed reader and good poet) and I decided to check it out. I, of course, brought most of my Vollmann books to get them signed. (I didn't feel so bad, being in line behind THE Patch Adams, who had some 20 Vollmann books in a big bag ready to get signed).
Riding the rails also provided a "constant reminder of my own ridiculousness."
It's interesting to imagine someone riding the rails post-9/11 -- with all the paranoia and railroad security. He mentioned at one point that while working on a new book (about the Mexico/California border) he was stopped and detained by border security for 7 hours, and told "You Travel Too Much" by a guard after reviewing his passport.
Besides the border book, Vollmann is also starting to research/write a book about perceptions of feminine beauty -- interviewing Japanese Kabukis and San Francisco trannies. Should be interesting. (He always had a fascination with females on the edge -- particularly prostitutes -- hence the early "Butterfly Stories," and "Whores for Gloria.").
He started his talk by announcing that his publisher wanted him to make it clear that he does not endorse rail-hopping or any other illegal activities.
At some point he mentioned the fact that both of his grandfathers were machinists. That in their day, the tools were solid, durable. Not like today's electronic, plasticized versions. He talked about the "beauty of a welding flame" in the book. I think of the parallels to his writing. He writes on the road (I learned by asking) -- like a journeyman writer?
"I think it's important as a writer to try new things -- and fail. Discomfort is a great teacher. It's a very, very good feeling... Obviously if you fail too much you're dead. I try to be cautious when I fail."
I asked him (in reference to Poor People -- his last book) if he could describe how Americans are poor. Instead of answering as I sort of led him to -- by explaining how we are poor spiritually and in community bonds compared to other people -- he said, "Americans explain their own reason for being poor by blaming themselves." An astute observation.
I also asked him if he got much academic or other reaction from his masterpiece on the legitimate (or not) uses of violence -- Rising Up, Rising Down. (I have the "short" version -- some 500 pages -- a guy in front of me in the signing line had all ten volumes, which are hard to find.) He said he did get an opportunity to teach it at Athens (Emory?).
The new book --
The as-ever prolific William Vollmann has a new book out about riding the rails, hobo-style. The book, Riding Towards Everywhere, is his "attempt to fall in love with America again."
He came to Politics and Prose this week. My friend Steve (an obsessed reader and good poet) and I decided to check it out. I, of course, brought most of my Vollmann books to get them signed. (I didn't feel so bad, being in line behind THE Patch Adams, who had some 20 Vollmann books in a big bag ready to get signed).
Riding the rails also provided a "constant reminder of my own ridiculousness."
It's interesting to imagine someone riding the rails post-9/11 -- with all the paranoia and railroad security. He mentioned at one point that while working on a new book (about the Mexico/California border) he was stopped and detained by border security for 7 hours, and told "You Travel Too Much" by a guard after reviewing his passport.
Besides the border book, Vollmann is also starting to research/write a book about perceptions of feminine beauty -- interviewing Japanese Kabukis and San Francisco trannies. Should be interesting. (He always had a fascination with females on the edge -- particularly prostitutes -- hence the early "Butterfly Stories," and "Whores for Gloria.").
He started his talk by announcing that his publisher wanted him to make it clear that he does not endorse rail-hopping or any other illegal activities.
At some point he mentioned the fact that both of his grandfathers were machinists. That in their day, the tools were solid, durable. Not like today's electronic, plasticized versions. He talked about the "beauty of a welding flame" in the book. I think of the parallels to his writing. He writes on the road (I learned by asking) -- like a journeyman writer?
"I think it's important as a writer to try new things -- and fail. Discomfort is a great teacher. It's a very, very good feeling... Obviously if you fail too much you're dead. I try to be cautious when I fail."
I asked him (in reference to Poor People -- his last book) if he could describe how Americans are poor. Instead of answering as I sort of led him to -- by explaining how we are poor spiritually and in community bonds compared to other people -- he said, "Americans explain their own reason for being poor by blaming themselves." An astute observation.
I also asked him if he got much academic or other reaction from his masterpiece on the legitimate (or not) uses of violence -- Rising Up, Rising Down. (I have the "short" version -- some 500 pages -- a guy in front of me in the signing line had all ten volumes, which are hard to find.) He said he did get an opportunity to teach it at Athens (Emory?).
The new book --
Saturday, December 22, 2007
As I've mentioned before, Empire is a popular topic these days in Amerikkka.
At some point I will review some of the seminal books on this important topic. A few that I would highly recommend now are:
Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy.
John Hobson's Imperialism is regarded as a classic on the topic, even though it is now over a century old. If you go to that link, you'll find the entire book archived online, which is great, since it's hard to find, and expensive if you do.
Speaking of centennials. I have it on good word that Multinational Monitor is about to serialize excerpts from the great forgotten classic, Sin and Society by the great sociological historian, Edward Alsworth Ross. (The tip for doing this came from Morton Mintz, the former Washington Post reporter/editor who wrote America, Inc.)
Having read some excerpts, I must say, I am thoroughly entertained by Ross' book. There has to be a name (genre) for this type of essay. Social criticism doesn't quite cut it. It's much more biting, and it's too serious to be satire.
Reminds me of Mencken, Philip Wylie (Generation of Vipers). Closest we have now, I suppose are some bloggers. Don't ask me who.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that we've helped launch a new web site called CROCODYL (short for "Collaborative Research on Corporations") -- a kind of activist wiki of dirt on your favorite corporate targets. If it grows, that site will be the go-to repository of basic information on any company. Pretty cool.
At some point I will review some of the seminal books on this important topic. A few that I would highly recommend now are:
Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy.
John Hobson's Imperialism is regarded as a classic on the topic, even though it is now over a century old. If you go to that link, you'll find the entire book archived online, which is great, since it's hard to find, and expensive if you do.
Speaking of centennials. I have it on good word that Multinational Monitor is about to serialize excerpts from the great forgotten classic, Sin and Society by the great sociological historian, Edward Alsworth Ross. (The tip for doing this came from Morton Mintz, the former Washington Post reporter/editor who wrote America, Inc.)
Having read some excerpts, I must say, I am thoroughly entertained by Ross' book. There has to be a name (genre) for this type of essay. Social criticism doesn't quite cut it. It's much more biting, and it's too serious to be satire.
Reminds me of Mencken, Philip Wylie (Generation of Vipers). Closest we have now, I suppose are some bloggers. Don't ask me who.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that we've helped launch a new web site called CROCODYL (short for "Collaborative Research on Corporations") -- a kind of activist wiki of dirt on your favorite corporate targets. If it grows, that site will be the go-to repository of basic information on any company. Pretty cool.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
These days, fiction rarely gets ahead of reality, but R.J. Hillhouse's Outsourced has stirred up enough controversy that she was also invited to write a related op-ed for the Washington Post.
Hillhouse (who also runs the spy who billed me blog) was interviewed by Democracy Now, where she explained:
"I found that there were things that could only be written about in fiction. It’s amazing for someone who has lived in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to find that in this country we’re in a similar place. In the repressive regimes, literature has often played the role of bringing things to light that could not otherwise be discussed. And I found that there are some things that are going on in the intelligence community or things that are going on with our government with relationships between corporate and government that it was only safe to discuss under the guise of fiction. So it’s an unusual transformation that a novelist would actually be ahead of media in this. I mean, it is the norm for me to be contacted each week by people from New York Times, Washington Post and others to try to learn about what’s going on in outsourcing. So it’s very strange as a novelist that I actually have moved ahead of that.
And I’ve not only been at the center of controversy in the intelligence community, I’ve also been in the center of controversy in the literary world, because I believe that and I’ve been very public about it, that thriller writers, that novelists, have failed us today. They haven't helped us understand the darker truths of what’s going on in the war on terror, the ambiguities, the changes that have occurred in how we’re fighting the war on terror and what that shows us about ourselves. Unfortunately, thriller writers have failed us. As you know, it’s mainly -- and I’ll call it for what it is -- beach reach that we see, that we don't see literature playing this larger role in society, but rather, the novels become a race of, we have to stop the terrorists from, what would be in a jargon, a, b, or c weapons -- atomic, biological or [chemical] weapons -- and it just -- it underscores the narrative of our time, which is, be afraid, be very afraid, and only a hero who will violate the Geneva Conventions, only a hero who will violate the Constitution will save us. So I tried to do something very different with Outsourced."
Look for a non-fiction book on this topic by Tim Shorrock, who wrote this piece for The Nation and this piece for Salon.
Hillhouse (who also runs the spy who billed me blog) was interviewed by Democracy Now, where she explained:
"I found that there were things that could only be written about in fiction. It’s amazing for someone who has lived in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to find that in this country we’re in a similar place. In the repressive regimes, literature has often played the role of bringing things to light that could not otherwise be discussed. And I found that there are some things that are going on in the intelligence community or things that are going on with our government with relationships between corporate and government that it was only safe to discuss under the guise of fiction. So it’s an unusual transformation that a novelist would actually be ahead of media in this. I mean, it is the norm for me to be contacted each week by people from New York Times, Washington Post and others to try to learn about what’s going on in outsourcing. So it’s very strange as a novelist that I actually have moved ahead of that.
And I’ve not only been at the center of controversy in the intelligence community, I’ve also been in the center of controversy in the literary world, because I believe that and I’ve been very public about it, that thriller writers, that novelists, have failed us today. They haven't helped us understand the darker truths of what’s going on in the war on terror, the ambiguities, the changes that have occurred in how we’re fighting the war on terror and what that shows us about ourselves. Unfortunately, thriller writers have failed us. As you know, it’s mainly -- and I’ll call it for what it is -- beach reach that we see, that we don't see literature playing this larger role in society, but rather, the novels become a race of, we have to stop the terrorists from, what would be in a jargon, a, b, or c weapons -- atomic, biological or [chemical] weapons -- and it just -- it underscores the narrative of our time, which is, be afraid, be very afraid, and only a hero who will violate the Geneva Conventions, only a hero who will violate the Constitution will save us. So I tried to do something very different with Outsourced."
Look for a non-fiction book on this topic by Tim Shorrock, who wrote this piece for The Nation and this piece for Salon.
Some great speeches and interviews with activists and investigators:
First, be sure to check out the various presentations at Ralph Nader's recent conference,
Taming the Giant Corporation
Other Activist Presentations:
Lectures from the Democracy Schools:
Thomas Linzey (of CELDF)
Richard Grossman
The Carnegie Institute's (DC) mission is to promote popular education in science. They sponsor a series of lectures each year. Check out the archives (one I recommend is David Goodstein's lecture on the End of the Age of Oil from 4/2006.
If all of this gets too grim, then go to this interview with Bill Hicks
or this speech by "President Bush" for a change of pace.
Also, for intelligent diversion, try Doug Henwood's radio show,
the archives of which are here.
First, be sure to check out the various presentations at Ralph Nader's recent conference,
Taming the Giant Corporation
Other Activist Presentations:
Lectures from the Democracy Schools:
Thomas Linzey (of CELDF)
Richard Grossman
The Carnegie Institute's (DC) mission is to promote popular education in science. They sponsor a series of lectures each year. Check out the archives (one I recommend is David Goodstein's lecture on the End of the Age of Oil from 4/2006.
If all of this gets too grim, then go to this interview with Bill Hicks
or this speech by "President Bush" for a change of pace.
Also, for intelligent diversion, try Doug Henwood's radio show,
the archives of which are here.
Some interesting links that I've come across in the past few months:
This UK site, the Dossier, has a ton of videos, interviews, documentaries, news, etc.
E.g. I just watched this doc on the Iraq oil law.
Oil Phreak: Radical Polytics
History is a Weapon
Guerrilla News Network: links page has tons of interesting stuff
The Armchair Subversive
I've been reading (I admit it, for the first time) The Man in the High Castle. P.K. Dick fans might like this Wikipedia page: Ideas in Science Fiction
Chomsky on audio and video
Mark Crispin Miller's blog
Rikesh tunes.
This UK site, the Dossier, has a ton of videos, interviews, documentaries, news, etc.
E.g. I just watched this doc on the Iraq oil law.
Oil Phreak: Radical Polytics
History is a Weapon
Guerrilla News Network: links page has tons of interesting stuff
The Armchair Subversive
I've been reading (I admit it, for the first time) The Man in the High Castle. P.K. Dick fans might like this Wikipedia page: Ideas in Science Fiction
Chomsky on audio and video
Mark Crispin Miller's blog
Rikesh tunes.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland byLewis Lapham (Verso, 75 pages)
The annual World Economic Forum was just held again at an exclusive ski resort in Switzerland. If you've ever wanted a short peek at what these meetings are like, I highly recommend this book, by the Harper's editor who Molly Ivins once called the "most incisive essayist of our time." A mantle that few could challenge him for. The essay is written in a very high-minded style that conveys just the right kind of satiric regard for a gathering of the elite, without distancing you from its participants. As a Boston Brahmin Lapham is a practiced appreciator of the good things in life who sees through all the flash and glitter (without getting too distracted by all the business buzzwigs and pseudosophs) to all the economic buncom that lies beneath, without having to relay a kind of combative resentfullness that a populist like, say Jim Hightower or Michael Moore might resort to at this resort. (Molly Ivins, I'm guessing would have much more tact, even if her rapier wit would eviscerate the plutogogues and castrate the beau sabreurs much later.)
But don't deduce from all this wordplay that Lapham himself resorts to sesquipedalianism to make his point. He's too fluid and certain in his observations to have to resort to that. It's a fine read, and now that it's a few years old, quite cheap if you look it up on ABE books.
(As for me, well you can probably tell that I've also been dipping into David Grambs' wonderful book, Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams: Words to Describe Life's Indescribable People to find some of those wonderful words.)
The annual World Economic Forum was just held again at an exclusive ski resort in Switzerland. If you've ever wanted a short peek at what these meetings are like, I highly recommend this book, by the Harper's editor who Molly Ivins once called the "most incisive essayist of our time." A mantle that few could challenge him for. The essay is written in a very high-minded style that conveys just the right kind of satiric regard for a gathering of the elite, without distancing you from its participants. As a Boston Brahmin Lapham is a practiced appreciator of the good things in life who sees through all the flash and glitter (without getting too distracted by all the business buzzwigs and pseudosophs) to all the economic buncom that lies beneath, without having to relay a kind of combative resentfullness that a populist like, say Jim Hightower or Michael Moore might resort to at this resort. (Molly Ivins, I'm guessing would have much more tact, even if her rapier wit would eviscerate the plutogogues and castrate the beau sabreurs much later.)
But don't deduce from all this wordplay that Lapham himself resorts to sesquipedalianism to make his point. He's too fluid and certain in his observations to have to resort to that. It's a fine read, and now that it's a few years old, quite cheap if you look it up on ABE books.
(As for me, well you can probably tell that I've also been dipping into David Grambs' wonderful book, Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams: Words to Describe Life's Indescribable People to find some of those wonderful words.)
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Just re-read The Great Gatsby for the first time in -- what, 25 years? Obious conclusion: The great American tragedy is the vain attempt to attain the unreachable, a theme that is so deeply rooted in many of the great American novels (e.g. Moby Dick, On the Road?), as much as the tragic aspirations toward Empire (another story) are in our history.
At the risk of launching into a disposition that might be cribbed from Cliff Notes (I confess that back when I first read the book, my sloppy reading habits led me to consult those yellow and black pamphlets far too often for my own good, once even getting me into trouble with Mrs. Todd, our Freshman English teacher, who confronted me after class to ask who wrote my paper on -- what was it, A Tale of Two Cities? -- too ebarrassed to admit I'd used the Cliff notes, I said my brother had helped me), now the novel seems less a novel than a long short story (a la Chekov) with a lot of florid writing wrapping that essential, very simple motif, expertly woven together in the plot, the characters, just about everything (the novel ending as summer ends, the violence peaking on the hottest day of summer). Gatsby asserting to Nick Carraway that he could turn the clock back five years (i.e. to before Daisy's marriage to Tom), Tom's vain (in the real sense) need to hang onto his athletic prowess in affair after affair, even Myrtle's desperate attempt to stop the car that ran her over under the imposing gaze of Dr. Eckleburg's all-knowing gaze. Lord what fools these mortals be. The impossibility of escaping from the Valley of Ashes. The unattainable green light on the edge of the pier across the Sound. (Money as elusive happiness?) The book lends itself to easy speculation. No wonder it's on all the high school reading lists.
At the risk of launching into a disposition that might be cribbed from Cliff Notes (I confess that back when I first read the book, my sloppy reading habits led me to consult those yellow and black pamphlets far too often for my own good, once even getting me into trouble with Mrs. Todd, our Freshman English teacher, who confronted me after class to ask who wrote my paper on -- what was it, A Tale of Two Cities? -- too ebarrassed to admit I'd used the Cliff notes, I said my brother had helped me), now the novel seems less a novel than a long short story (a la Chekov) with a lot of florid writing wrapping that essential, very simple motif, expertly woven together in the plot, the characters, just about everything (the novel ending as summer ends, the violence peaking on the hottest day of summer). Gatsby asserting to Nick Carraway that he could turn the clock back five years (i.e. to before Daisy's marriage to Tom), Tom's vain (in the real sense) need to hang onto his athletic prowess in affair after affair, even Myrtle's desperate attempt to stop the car that ran her over under the imposing gaze of Dr. Eckleburg's all-knowing gaze. Lord what fools these mortals be. The impossibility of escaping from the Valley of Ashes. The unattainable green light on the edge of the pier across the Sound. (Money as elusive happiness?) The book lends itself to easy speculation. No wonder it's on all the high school reading lists.
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