Hotel Zero

Joe Sacco at The Walker

Joe Sacco, author of the amazing Palestine (out in a new special edition) and Safe Area Gorazde, is giving a talk at The Walker Art Center tomorrow night. The event is co-hosted by Rain Taxi and starts at 7:00 PM. I'll be going & the event is also being webcast live.

I'll give a report here after the event. In the meantime, there's a good interview with Sacco at the Walker website:

There is a moment in Safe Area Gorazde where Riki continues to sing after he eats breakfast with you and Edin; he’s leaving to join the battle lines. You wrote, “at that moment I came as close as I ever had to bursting into tears in Bosnia”. What was it about that moment that got to you, when you have heard so many brutal stories about the war?

I think the answer to that question should lie in the pages you mentioned and not in any exposition I can make now. Like many other writers or artists, I've fallen into the bad habit of explaining myself in interviews and at talks. I am beginning to understand that the work needs to speak for itself, and that the reader's imagination has to be allowed to put things together. I realize that will be an unsatisfactory answer for people who are unfamiliar with the work, but...

Bonus Army and the G.I. Bill

Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel wrote an op-ed for the New York Times yesterday calling for a new, expanded G.I. Bill as comprehensive as that passed at the end of World War Two (and which lasted until the end of Vietnam).

Here's 2:38 on how we got the first one:

Brother Can You Spare a Comment?

OK, quick thread-rescue/reminder/bleg.

1) I'll be closing comments on the kottke.org interviews on The State We're In at the end of this week. If you've got something to say (or, in this guy's case, mock) this is your last chance.

2) Only one person in running for the Hotel Zero Godard/Breathless give-away: comment for your chance to win.

3) Really: one of the 5,000 or so of you who've been here in the past couple weeks must have at least one favorite political book not on my list. Would be great if there were, oh, I don't know: two of you?

IDP Voices

There are some 24.5 million internally displaced persons worldwide. Now, thanks to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, a small number of them have been given a voice, thanks to the IDP Voices project. Their first publication is Book of Life Stories: Let It Be Known, chronicling the experience of 19 internally displaced Columbians. Each individual story is also posted to the IDP Voices site, presented in both English and Spanish, as both audio and text—and all accompanied by maps showing the paths of each narrator's displacement. It's a bold and beautiful project. You might start with the narratives of Blanca, a 64 year-old former government official, or Juan, a 20 year-old peasant.

Yglesias at Free Darko

Combine one of my favorite political bloggers (Matthew Yglesias @ The Atlantic Monthly) and one of my favorite sports blogs (Free Darko), along with my favorite spectator sport (Hoops) and you get... uneasy satire? I don't know what to make of this piece:

... an alternative does exist: liberal internationalism or, as they say in the sports world, basketball (hockey, of course, represents a dystopian vision of Canadian global hegemony, I don't know anything about soccer, and cricket is the rotting corpse of British imperialism) . Basketball, like baseball, is a global sport but it rejects baseball's domineering imperial mien. Instead of spreading through conquest and invasion, basketball spreads through Joseph Nye's soft power, gaining adherents through the inherent appeal of this American cultural product, marking out of sphere of influence wider than the American military into the heart of rival great powers like the Soviet Union and Communist China.

Some would see mere coincidence here, but internationalism is in the game's very bones -- invented as it was by a Canadian living and working in the United States, basketball has always been a sport capable of looking across national boundaries and doing so in a spirit of cooperation.

I do, however, know of one movie scene that serves as a kind of complicating counter-example to much of Matt's (only possibly serious) piece. It's from Srdjan Dragojevic's exceptionally-twisted (and possibly brilliant) Pretty Village, Pretty Flame:

Within minutes of this shot, Halil on the left and Milan on the right are going to find themselves on opposite sites of the Bosnian conflict, ca. 1992.

Meantime, in the spirit of "the sport that really is the world's sport," I was going to post some highlights from Arsenal's AMAZING games these past two weeks (1-1 v. Liverpool and 2-2 v. Man U), but seems as though every single one that's not a bunch of drunken Gunner fans has been replaced with this message: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NetResult." It's been a few years now that NetResult has been doing this and I wonder: Is this really helping the Premier League?

Your Campaign Contribution to Hotel Zero

I am going to do some actual reporting next year, especially with Iowa so close and the Republican Convention coming to the Twin Cities (and really: how fun would it be to hang out with the anarchists outside and the Republicans inside?), but also blogging heavily about some bigger-picture political themes as the 2008 race progresses. As a result, I'll be doing lots of reading this winter/next spring.

Specifically, I'll be going back over my short-list of classics of political reportage/defining books in American political life—while hoping I find a few new ones, too. Just got, today, my two-volume Library of America Debate on the Constitution (and really, where have Publius and Brutus and Cato and Agrippa and Centinel gone? A-blogging!), and am putting together my short-list (in no particular order):

Stuart Chase's A New Deal
A.M. Schlesinger's The Vital Center
Kevin Phillips The Emerging Republican Majority
Garry Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment and Nixon Agonistes
Robert Caro's "LBJ-a-thon"
Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm
Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus
Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Richard Ben Cramer's What it Takes

... that kind of stuff.

Question is: "What's missing?" I'm looking to generate a list of about 15-20 must-read classics to blog over the course of a month or so next spring/summer (and help me frame the thoughts behind my reporting). I'm looking for post-1896 books that are not specifically political theory or political philosophy (so: no Gramsci, no Rawls, etc.—but I suppose a book like Scott's Seeing Like a State might qualify, so what the hell: suggest what you will), but which have as their legacy either a) a defining importance in a U.S. election (we get the name of FDR's policies from Chase's book, which was a run-away best-seller during the 1932 election) or b) look back on a particular campaign or election and suss out its lasting impact (the outstanding example of which is Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus).

Hitchens in Hell

They are going to have to cut him into many slimy pieces to spread him around the Malbolge, but extensive preparations are no doubt underway for Christopher Hitchens in the Eighth Circle of Hell. His hysterical support of the war in Iraq has been bad, but for this self-serving, sanctimonious piece of shit in the November Vanity Fair alone he's earned his wretched place.

The piece reads, on its surface, as a mea culpa of sorts on Hitchens' behalf following the death of a young man who reversed his anti-war stance after reading Hitch's many op-eds about the need to fight, joined the Army as a second-lieutenant, and then died in Iraq on January 15th, 2007. His name was Mark Daily. Hitchens learned about Daily's death after a friend forwarded Teresa Watanabe's moving L.A. Times piece on Daily, written on February 16, 2007. There is very little factual difference between Watanabe's piece and Hitchens' piece concerning the life and death of Mark Daily--but a moral gulf that may just be large enough to fit Hitchens' enormous ego lies between them.

Makiya's Regrets.

I see from this weekend's NYT Magazine that Kanan Makiya now has regrets. One of the weaknesses of George Packer's Assassin's Gate was when, toward the end, he just couldn't bring himself to say: "My pal, Kanan Makiya--the man who convinced me more than anyone else that we should go to Iraq--was just flat-out wrong." Dexter Filkins seems to have a much milder case of the same disease in his profile, one symptom of which is this little nonsense, with which he ends (he's quoting Makiya) the first section:

“You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong.”

Tuesday Afternoon Cornerback, Wednesday Edition

Is it Time to Shoot the TV?

The Fighting Elvii are evidently in their barbituates and booze season, having thus far failed even to fight to an 0-4 record. With LaDanian Tomlinson traded and Marvin Harrison and Calvin Johnson out for next week, it looks like their only hope will be... that there is no hope. The only team more pathetic in the GCFFFL is Grendel's Mother: the mitochondrial monster's team has thus far only scored one touchdown the entire season.

But really, what a strange season it's been: Who would have guessed that Ronnie Brown would outscore LaDanian Tomlinson by six points a game? Or that Tony Romo would be the best player in the NFL this year? Guess his psyche has recovered from that fumbled snap against Seattle last winter.

Quick Hits: Reviewery Edition

Yellow Ribbons and Flag Waving

Nathaniel Fick, author of the first-rate memoir One Bullet Away, has a nice piece up at the Poetry website:  a review of recent war poetry. A highlight is Nate's personal use of poetry while commanding Marines in Afghanistan--and his appreciation for Brian Turner's Here, Bullet. I gave Here, Bullet a rave review last year in Rain Taxi.

The Savage Critic

I don't think Heidi Julavits got the credit her essay against snark deserved (it wasn't as namby-pamby as people said it was), but you know: I don't think I could live without snark. I love a good negative review. Especially of over-hyped books or books by famous authors who aren't living up to their talent. They can go overboard, as Michiko Kakutani did with her Caulfield-eque review of Benjamin Kunkel's worthwhile freshman effort, Indecision, a couple years ago. But still: keeping up our USRDA of schadenfreude requires negative reviews, and no one does a negative review better--more accurately, with more humor and understanding--than William Logan. His piercing of Pynchon's Against the Day in this summer's Virginia Quarterly Review is a must-read.