Hotel Zero

Many Bothans Have Died to Bring You This Post

OK, I now have about thirty tabs open in Firefox for possible blog entries...

Here's the thing: I really feel torn about this blogging thing—is it an enemy of promise? Or a better way to fill the interstices of the day than MLB08-The Show (which is about all the baseball enjoyment I stand to gain this year, as the Twins look fit to lose 100 games)? I can't go on. I'll go on.

So, tortured as it is, I clear the tabs....

1) Two cents on the "bookshelves" debate: I'm an admitted junkie, but I think McLemee is more-or-less right: book junkies don't really care who sees a book on their shelves, so long as the book is there and is not silently conspiring against its owner. But they do conspire, guerillas against our ignorance, our sloth, and worse: our desire to know more than we experience. Now, a note to the world: will you please conspire to find a way to afford Scott McLemee, say, two fully-funded years to write a book? There are few people from whom I'd rather see a big, fat book.

2) "Where are all the Iraq War novels?" asks Greg Cowles at the New York Times. I answer (one among a number of good ones) in the comments section, but you might also check out the talk I had last fall with Matthew Eck.

3) I'm a fair-weather fan of Dave Eggers (or, more accurately, "Dave Eggers"), but the 826 Valencia project is great. If you're up for a very highly caffeinated talk by Dave on that project, his TED speech is really motivational. If anyone starts a project like this in Minneapolis & happens upon this note, definitely drop me a line.

4) The Valve discovers Alan Shapiro. I met him at Bread Loaf way back in 1996—in addition to being a wonderful poet, he tells really great jokes (though it must be said, not nearly as many or with as much gusto as Richard Bausch). The VQR essay referenced by Amardeep is a must-read: a great essay. Plus: the "form is ideology" thing is not only wrong, but tired (see, too: "Plot as Teleology"): there are just too many things "at work" in a poem (or narrative) for this kind of essentialism to be more than a kind of cheap crib.

5) Litblog Co-op is no more. Sad to hear—but I think it's safe to say that the blogosphere thrives anyway. I do wish that more bloggers would coalesce around group blogs (me, too, frankly, if I could find one that suited me—and vice-versa: we need more blogs as hootenanies, group jams, basement tapes).

6) The Internet: a big group hug. A nice talk by Clay Shirky, but one that should be footnoted with... "Uh, Clay: AT&T is now—and again—the largest phone company in the United States."

7) V.S. Naipaul: because every long list of links should have at least one really CRANKY one. This one in two parts!

8) I have a long list of adds to the NBCC Crit Pix, but John Freeman noticed that Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age was noted with surprising frequency. Honestly? It's a great book! I can take or leave his defense of Robert Frost, but his essays on Lowell and W.C. Williams—plus the set-pieces "The Obscurity of the Poet" and "The Age of Criticism"--are worth the price of admission. Here's Jarrell on Williams' poetics:

"So far as organization and metre and rhyme are concerned, he is a sort of homeopath or chiropractor impatient of anything but his own fragment of the truth. Yet it is such a wonderful and individual fragment, an eighth- or quarter-truth so magnificently suited to a special case, that we cannot help feeling that his illusion about form is one of those 'necessary heuristic fictions' of the scientist. If you have gone to the moon in a Fourth of July rocket you built yourself, you can be forgiven for looking askance at Pegasus."

PS: Another collection that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet is Richard Howard's Alone with America.

9) Lynndie England interviewed in Die Stern: just when you had forgotten that for too many of our fine military personnel the "Enlightenment Project" was that weekend the SeeBees strung wire and hooked up a generator for the Conex boxes. From my early reading of excerpts/interviews from Errol Morris's forthcoming effort on Abu Ghraib, it seems like England was played the fool (too bad she couldn't have been Bottom in this—but then: Bottom didn't play in a tragedy).

10) You know how people are always recommending books to you as a classic? Twice in as many weeks, I've actually followed up on this & been pleased to find the books in question really were classics. First, a pal got me to take James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime off the shelves and read it: a masterpiece. Second, Jim Lewis plugged Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo in Slate. I'd never heard of this little gem—but Lewis is right: a brilliant disaster of a book, a wreck that will leave you haunted.

OK, go read now... I must go write. But will post again soon.

Spring Awakenings

So, it's spring. In the shadier parts of the yard in which a foot or so of snow still lies it doesn't look like it (and snow again tonight, from the sounds of it), but a brief walk through the yard tells me it's here:

Creeping Charlie can evidently grow beneath snow, as it seems to have overgrown everything it can between our early snowfall last year and the quick melt over the past week.

Daffodils are peeping 1" green shoots up out of the leaves and mulch.

The strawberry patches are already green beneath the snow and showing new signs of growth.

The oregano and tarragon and thyme are already busy sending up new growth--not to mention the mint, which also seems to have thrived beneath our four month blanket of snow. I even noticed, amidst the dead plants I didn't bother to pluck from the early snow last year that some fallen coriander seeds have begun their second lives as cilantro.

All of which is to say: yes, I'll start blogging again.

Briefly...

They preserved one of Galileo's fingers in Florence, Italy, where it is still on display at the History of Science Museum. Guess which one? Yup: the middle one.

Today's viral blog meme is "Best Blog Post Ever." Started by Jim Henley, picked up by Yglesias and last I saw Crooked Timber members held bragging rights to 50% of nominees. Won't last—but they are a smart bunch.

Finally, am at half-way mark of my guest-blogging week at kottke.org. This is the permanent link for this week's interviews. Various interviews have been noticed by bookslut, largehearted boy, the valve, matthew yglesias, and others.

Equation-Filter

(via MetaFilter)

The Edge-Serpentine Gallery has a show displaying various scientists' and thinkers' "equations." Some are just banal or silly (like John Brockman's: "New Technologies = New Perceptions"--which could just as well be reversed & most often should be), but a couple are pretty good. Danny Kahneman's is actually funny & very close to an equation Bruce Duffy put in his Wittgenstein novel, The World as I Found It:

W/F = S [W=Will, F=Fear, S=Scope]

When I first came across that one I revised it to:

(W * T)/F = S [adding T=Talent]

Then, on further reflection, added the relevant exponent (and it does matter that much), Luck:

((W*T)/F)^L = S

It's a fun little game--but none of these entries compares to my all-time favorite (and completely insane) literary equation, Karl Kraus's formula for the female soul in his Aphorismen:

I've never actually plugged that formula into Excel to see what its graph looks like. Should I?

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).

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.