Hotel Zero

Lifestyles of the Poor and Shabby

Had brunch yesterday at The Loft with Jane Hamilton and the winners of this year's Loft-McKnight Fellowship, for which Hamilton was the judge. I was invited because I'd won "Honorable Mention." It would be easy enough to be surly at this near-miss, but I was happy to go. The Loft has been good to me (they gave me my first writing award, way back when, and now invite me to teach/speak) & really: it's such a treasure that it always cheers me a little to walk their halls.

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.

Hooray for Shay: 2007 MacArthur Winner

Just got back from MacArthur announcement site and was thrilled to see that Jonathan Shay received a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. If you haven't read it yet, stop what you're doing and go pick it up: Achilles in Vietnam is one of the best books about war you'll ever read. It is also, along with a small handful of others that combine science and literature and hard thinking about interesting problems  (I'm thinking Hofstadter's Göedel, Escher, Bach and Steven Johnson's Emergence, and just about anything by John McPhee or Michael Pollan) to form a narrative that's as fascinating as it is a joy to read. Of course, there's no joy in Shay's subject matter: but his book is so effortless in its presentation that even as you are wiping a tear from your eye with one hand over the powerful stories of war that Shay is telling, you're reaching to wipe a tear from the other eye over how beautifully, how profoundly, he's told them.

Bravo!

Ken Burns' Blurred Focus

Since I'm more or less going to slag on Ken Burns for the duration of this series--and once more again, in summary, when the DVD set comes out--I suppose I should express a few thoughts on what I admire about The War...

First, let's face it: very few, if any, other documentary filmmakers could have gotten something of this scope made. Period. It's true, the Hanks-Spielberg team are making another $100M blockbuster miniseries for HBO, this time on the Pacific Campaign, but that's a feature film, not a documentary. For all the faults in Burns' project, it's bested only by the monumental BBC series, World at War.

Akbar Ganji's Plea to U.N.

To His Excellency Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations,

The people of Iran are experiencing difficult times both internationally and domestically. Internationally, they face the threat of a military attack from the US and the imposition of extensive sanctions by the UN Security Council. Domestically, a despotic state has – through constant and organized repression – imprisoned them in a life and death situation.

Ken Burns Makes Ken Burns Film

Ken Burns gets a huge budget from PBS to make epic 14-hour World War Two documentary and he makes... a Ken Burns film. No surprise, I suppose--but a terrific disappointment so far. In fact, the best half hour of tonight's first 2 1/2 hours of the film was the "tacked-on" bit about the two Latino Marines in Carlson's Raiders and their experience at Guadalcanal. The worst agony was realizing, about 2/3 of the way through, that Midway was going to be relegated to about 30 seconds of voice-over.

To keep this short: Burns' predisposition to tell personal stories while panning-and-scanning over photos just isn't a very effective way to tell stories--at least, to tell stories that convey both the information and  the experience one would like to have about such a monumental event. As I talked over tonight's episode with my history buff neighbor (we were both disappointed), an example I used to point up one aspect of my dislike for Burns' method was Errol Morris' Fog of War. In particular, the section in which Robert McNamara discusses his role in WWII, as a statistician on Curtis LeMay's staff. The various intersections/disjunctions between McNamara's facial expressions, tone of voice, actual words, and the visuals used by Morris to convey the points McNamara was making were extraordinary--perhaps the best part of that entire film.

There's good stuff in The War (I'm thrilled to see Sam Hynes take such a huge role, as he's fantastic), but it seems fated to be drowned out by Ken Burns' clumsy hand.

But I have 11 and a half more hours to watch, which means: I have two weeks, or so, to further develop my thoughts on The War. Stay tuned...

A Really BAD Idea

This month's Esquire contains (just is?) their annual "Esquire 100": "The Ideas, Trends, Products, People, and Obscene Gestures You Should Know About Before Everyone Else." Well, Thomas Barnett's idea (five, actually, No. 5-9 on the list) must be counted as one of the "obscene gestures." Barnett's premise is that "in the lives of men and nations, either you are growing or you're dying" and that we should be asking the question, "...What will our next five states be?"

What?!

With the possible exception of Puerto Rico (which probably should become a state, or independent--the latter prospect of which would probably be great for the U.S., but horseshit for the Puerto Ricans), all of Barnett's ideas are historically-challenged in their basis, of questionable benefit, and, frankly, bat-shit stupid crazy. Barnett's list? British Columbia, Cuba, Mexico's northern states, Panama, and Puerto Rico.

Barnett starts his piece with the folksy premise that he's the first member of his family in seven generations to miss out on getting a new state. Well, that's sort of true. But not really. Let's work backwards from this idea first, before we even get to the new states.

0 mgs Tar; 0 mgs Nicotine = Totally Addictive

Available in the UK since the July 1 smoking ban, these bad boys are evidently going to be available in the U.S. next year (waiting to hear back from the fine folks at Tank Magazine). I mean, really, wouldn't these look insanely cool on your writing desk?

Krugman Grabs the Mic

Birds do it, bees do it, economists who write with ease do it, let's all go blog: Krugman's started blogging at The New York Times.

Grey Lady Drops Her Moneyed Veil

A few weeks ago a friend of mine called me from Philadelphia. "Did you read the paper yet?"

"Yeah, but I'm only about half way through it. Why?"

Her answer is not as important as "the paper" in question: The New York Times. I have subscribed to the Sunday edition for about 7 of the past 10 years (I drop it when they start piling up on the living room coffee table and I notice that by the time the paper paper comes out, I've already bookmarked, e-mailed, and/or printed half the articles printed there--then pick it up again when I miss the lovely smell of ink and paper and the layouts and the raunchy excess of the advertisements in the Magazine). But I read the online edition without fail, every day. It just is "the paper."

You could even say that The NY Times is my "madeleine"... I spent three summers on parole from my midwestern youth in Hamden, CT, with my grandparents. Unlike my usual mornings in Duluth, or Appleton, or Bloomington, or wherever the parent I lived with at the time happened to be living at the time, mornings which largely consisted of a lonely bowl of cereal and the urge to get as far away as fast as I could, mornings in Hamden were a kind of "Theater of The New York Times." My grandmother, with her paper china cup half-filled with cold instant coffee and a slow-burning Pall Mall straight in one hand, would edit one section of the paper for grammar and style with her blue pencil in the other, while my grandfather cooked up a couple of hot pepper and cheese omelets, then offered pedantic corrections to the political, economic, and other news, as he would say, "so-called," between bites. Then they would start to argue with each other over some little or big thing from The Times, and the day would be off to a rollicking good start. Their's was a bitter romance, often, but it lasted longer than I've been alive (and to his death), and few things make me remember it--including my slender share of it--more than the gothic letters "T", "H", and "E" at the head of the paper.

And now it's all free again, online: Good-bye paywall.