Music of the Day: Craig Chaquico & Russ Freeman, Seattle Child

Today is my daughter's 29th birthday. Twenty nine years ago today, at noon, my good friend RAP and I left the hospital to catch something to eat at Burger King--the doctor's told me it would take 45 minutes to prep my wife for the unscheduled CaesarIan surgery, so RAP and I, both former medics in the military, figured we had plenty of time for some food. When we arrived back at the hospital, my daughter was already in the nursery and my wife was already in the recovery room. Ooops.

When my son was born two years later, I was actually in the OR when he was born; I was the first person, other than the nurse, to hold him after he started breathing (and yowling). No Burger King for me that day. Live and learn.

These were two of the greatest moments of my life and I am forever grateful for the lives of my children; and I am forever grateful for the lives of MLB's two wonderful sons. There were plenty of dark days, and nights, (weeks and months of them) after my divorce when I thought my life would always be empty and raw, but I was wrong. Those two special days, when those two children came into the world, changed me forever and made me a better human being. And MLB changed me and made me a better human being, too.

Remember your special days. And keep breathing--more special days may await you, still. . . .

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Marc Antoine, Samba Hood

I have mentioned in this space one of my favorite publications, the Claremont Review of Books, which is really something more than the name implies. Yes, there are reviews aplenty, but there are also important editorials and essays, some of which I have referred to in previous pieces here. Today I received my copy of the Winter 2007/2008 Claremont Review of Books and managed to read a couple of the articles before going totally bleary-eyed at the end of the day. The first was a very nice essay entitled Folk Tales by Patrick J. Deneen in which he discussed many of the works, and the philosophy of, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut got a little crazed towards the end of his life, in my view, but as Deneen rightly points out, his early works were often scathing criticisms of nut-job lefty notions about achieving perfect human societies and Deneen's essay is a gentle and favorable homage to Vonnegut's writings and ideas. The piece is worth reading. . . .

But then I cruised to the front of the issue and there was an essay by Victor Davis Hanson entitled In War: Resolution. It is a long piece and there is no way that I can encapsulate it here for you--I can only strongly encourage you to find your own copy of Claremont or search their publication on-line for this essay. In brief, Hanson writes about the many failures in American military, political, and diplomatic history that had near-disastrous, and always deadly, results for American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. And he writes about failures in leadership, both military and civilian in our wars; and he writes about the nature of the American home-front and how that has changed in some important ways, but how we have not changed all that much as Americans. He ends his essay with a quote from Winston Churchill from the 1930's, which I will include here hoping that you find the entire piece and read it, word for word, from start to finish, for yourself. Here's the quote: "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter." ADDED NOTE, 2/8/08--SEE THIS LINK FOR THE ABOVEMENTIONED ARTICLE: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1500/article_detail.asp

As always, thank you for reading my blog and please check out my photo gallery which now includes a sweet picture of Max the Wonder Dog.

AJ
TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Gary Burton and Friends, Departure

First things first: Merry Christmas.

A while back RB sent out his book "wish list" for Christmas and he included some really heavyweight stuff on the list, some of which MLB, CLG, and I have responded to with purchases. But his wish list got me to thinking that I ought to include here a list of some of my favorite books of all time. So, here's my list, in no particular order.

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
A World Lit Only by Fire, by William Manchester.
The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx.
Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey.
With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, by E.B. Sledge.
Paco's Story, by Larry Heinemann.
Goodbye Darkness, by William Manchester.
A Sense of Honor, by James Webb.
For the Sake of All Living Things, by John Del Vecchio.
Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy.
A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume.
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, by Florence King.
Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas.
Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy.
Don Quixote, by Miguel De Cervantes.
Huckelberry Finn, by Mark Twain.
The Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank.
The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek.
Nobody's Fool, by Richard Russo.
The Milagro Beanfield War, by John Nichols.
Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey.
The Last Lion, by William Manchester.
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
Freedom and Death, by Nikos Kazantzakis.
Eat the Rich, by P.J. O'Rourke.
A Mencken Chrestomathy, by H.L. Mencken.
The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Cary.
A Fine Madness, by Eliott Baker.
The Fall, by Albert Camus.
The Gift of Fire, by Richard Mitchell.
The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer.
The Testament, by Elie Wiesel.
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard.
Cowboys Are My Weakness, by Pam Houston.
Imagining Argentina, by Lawrence Thornton.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
GULAG: A History, by Anne Applebaum.
One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment, by Peter Burchard.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi.
Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War, by Evan Wright.
Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl.
The Nighwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions, by V.S. Naipaul.
My Losing Season, by Pat Conroy.
A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior, by Charles Bowden.
The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer.
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.
From Bauhaus to Our House, by Tom Wolfe.
The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers, by Larry McMurtry.
The Middle of My Tether, by Joseph Epstein.
Native Son, by Richard Wright.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson.
What Do You Care What Other People Think?, by Richard Feynman.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell.
Dancing at the Rascal Fair, by Ivan Doig.
In Pharaoh's Army, by Tobias Wolff.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Alvin Queen, Mellow Soul

My last post here concerning Richard Russo has been rattling around in my lil' ol' brain for the last day or so, which means that it was time for a little elucidation, in part because I wasn't entirely happy with how the post turned out. So, here we go.

Russo is a creative man, no question about it; he creates, out of nothing but his thoughts, whole towns and the lives of characters, events, circumstances, points of view, and everything else that goes into writing a novel. And that's a marvelous thing and it goes well beyond any of my meagre creative powers. As the creator of his works, he gets to choose who says what, who holds what beliefs and why, and how the fictional lives turn out--and he gets to choose the moral, or morals, of his story. All of this is his prerogative and I do not for a moment begrudge him that prerogative. As noted in my previous posting, I have found his works to be interesting, compelling, satisfying, funny, thought-provoking, and heart-felt. What took me aback about the Bush-bashing in Bridge of Sighs is that it's such a cheap shot, it's so easy to do (because of its place as "accepted wisdom") that it seems to me it's so far below Russo's normally much-higher standards. I can't think of a single cheap shot in any of his previous works and that is, in part, what makes this book for me so much less interestsing.

Any 15 year old devotee of MTV can proclaim the president to be an "idiot," or that the man just looks "stupid." That same 15 year old can likely also tell you that the rich are "insulated against failure" and that in American the "luckless" will "remain thwarted"--these ideas will likely not have been tested by objective observation or rational inquiry, but will likely spring from simply mouthing what he or she has heard on television, or at the movies, or worse in his or her "civics" classroom. Russo including these pearls of accepted wisdom in his novel cheapens the entire book; he could have achieved the same result (that is, bolstering Tessa's pessimism and cynicism, political and personal) by making reference to a fictional "idiot" politician instead of the current president of the United States, who history may someday judge as anything but idiotic. The point would have been the same, but it would have been made without being cheap.

As for the notion that it's possible for people to lose their economic status, that point IS made in the story; Nan Beverly's family has to move out of town as a result of bad financial decisions, a failing business, family strife, and the possibility that Nan has gotten pregnant before finishing her senior year of high school. It's not as if I missed that while reading the book; but Tessa Lynch, Lucy's mother, is the woman who always wins the arguments in her family and her point of view, the pessimistic, cyncial point of view, is the one that carries the most weight in the novel. She's the character who expressed the notion that the rich are "insulated against failure" even while Russo is writing failure into the lives of the richest family in town--but Tessa wins the argument with both her fictional husband and with her creator, Russo, because her voice is the strongest, and most strident, in the story--so much so that I think her voice over-rides that of the author. And just maybe her voice IS the voice of the author. . .

What I wanted from this book is what I've always gotten from Russo; if this was his attempt to move on, to demonstrate some new-found hipness or quasi-sophistication, he's left me behind. Again, his other works, the ones without the political bitterness and sophomoric name-calling, were better books and I think there is a connection between their overall better quality and the absence of the desire to score cheap political points.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Eric Alexander, Where or When

MLB and I have a membership in the discount program at our local chain bookstore; the discount entitles us to a 10% reduction in the cost of all our purchases there--books, CD's, coffee, cheesecake, greeting cards, etc. We spend too much money there, but we're bookish people; periodically they send us a 25% discount coupon, which means we buy more books, both for ourselves, each other, and family and friends. The other day, while MLB was off buying Christmas stuff, I found a book that I thought we both might enjoy reading, the new novel by Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs. We've both read every book the man has written (to wit: Mohawk; The Risk Pool; Nobody's Fool; Straight Man; Empire Falls; and The Whore's Child) and we've enjoyed them all, although in my opinion The Whore's Child wasn't quite as good as all the other stuff he's written. Anyway, we made the purchase, brought the book home, and while MLB was in the throes of decorating every square inch of available space in the house with Christmas ornaments, trinkets, baubles, do-dads, Santas, angels, miniature housing scenes, reindeer, candles, nativity scenes, music boxes, trees of various sizes, Magi, the individual decorative wooden letters that spell out NOEL (that I occasionally re-arrange to spell LEON) and similar items, I began reading Russo.

In order to begin this book I had to put down, for the time being, the book I started the previous Wednesday, something MLB picked up at an academic conference she attended the week before--First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, by Loung Ung. It was good to shift gears for a bit, get into something that would take my mind off the insane murderous thugs known as the Khmer Rouge and their killing fields.

As noted above, I have enjoyed every book that Russo has written; he's funny and his characters are interesting and multi-faceted and cantankerous and shy and oh-so-human. But in the first few pages of Bridge of Sighs, one of his characters, a homosexual art dealer, avers to his expatriate artist friend Bobby Noonan (one of the major charcters in the novel) that after September 11, 2001, Americans are "afraid to fly, but not to live in a nation governed by an idiot." Gee, that didn't take long, only 43 pages, to call the current president of the United States an idiot. What, I wondered, other standard-fuzzy-lefty notions might be found thereafter?

Only a few pages later, on page 55, the main character and narrator, Louis Charles (Lucy) Lynch describes his mother's world view in the following way (and I apologize, in advance, for the length of the quotation, but it needs to be here in its entirety): "At the economic extremes of Thomaston [the fictional town of Lucy Lynch's life] she gave me to understand, there was little fluidity. If you were a Negro, of course, you'd remain in the two square blocks of the Hill, and if you lived in the Borough that's where you'd probably stay. In America, my mother claimed, the very luckiest were INSULATED AGAINST FAILURE, just as it was THE UNAVOIDABLE DESTINY OF THE LUCKLESS TO REMAIN THWARTED. When I asked if we'd ever get to the point where we'd be one of the lucky ones, she said we alredy were. The middle, she said, was the real America, the America that mattered, the America that was worth fighting wars to defend. There was just the one problem with being in the fluid middle. You could move up, as we had done, but you could also move down." (Emphasis added)

All of this, of course, is just more of the standard-fuzzy-lefty accepted "wisdom" about a number of things--Blacks were ruthlessly, relentlessly, held down, with no chance, ever, of improving their economic lives, which is demonstrably not true, although this same canard is repeated even to this day, and the rich were "insulated against failure." Add to this the not so surprising notion, to any person of a realist bent, that having achieved material success one could also "move down." Only a fuzzy-headed lefty could conceive a world in which economic movement only happened in one direction, the "progressive" direction, of course. Conservatives know that the pursuit of happiness that we read about in the first few lines of the Declaration of Independence is only just a PURSUIT--there is no guarantee of achieving happiness, there is no guarantee that once happiness is achieved that it is irrevocable, and there is no guarantee that one's definition of happiness might be the same as someone else's definition, or that one's own definition might not change significantly over time. Conservatives also know that there is no such thing as being "insulated against failure" by being rich, but no such uncomfortable brush with reality could intrude on the standard-fuzzy-lefty notion that the rich get richer and always do so at the expense of the poor, despite the purely economic and financial illogic of that idea.

On page 177 of this lengthy book (528 pages) , referring again to the main character's mother, a woman characterized by a life-long pessimism and cynicism, the following appears: "Even more personal is her claim that our president's stupidity is apparent in his physical appearance, particularly his facial expressions. All you have to do is look at him, she claims." I guess amongst a certain class of people, this qualifies as nuance and sophistication. . . .

I have now finished the book, but I'm sorely disappointed with Russo, who has finally apparently succumbed to the temptation to reflexively repeat some of the standard-fuzzy-lefty mantras now that he's a certified literary honcho (the Pulitzer Prize) and the darling of the New York Times Book Review. I hope this isn't a harbinger of things to come in all his subsequent books, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this was just the beginning. And that just means that he'll lose me as a reader--no big deal, really--because I can get a full measure of the standard-fuzzy-lefty line anytime I want on NPR or CBS or ABC or NBC. Frankly, this book isn't nearly up to his previous standards for humor or wisdom, nor is it, as most of his other books have been, just good fun to read--it is flat and uninspired and uninspiring and the characters lack. . .real. . .character. The book is hackneyed and bland and it is overlong--I told MLB this evening, after reading the last page, that I felt as if I had just eaten a huge meal of cardboard--no protein, no calories, and no nutritional value--I was full but totally unsatisfied. And I think it's interesting that his previous works were entirely devoid of any political rants or name-calling, and they were, by light-years, far better books. Might there be a connection?

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.