Citizen Reader

Yes, yes, our power comes from our vagina, okay.

So as I was reading through Jessica Zellers's stellar Women's Nonfiction: A Guide to Reading Interests, I found her annotation for Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, and thought, hey, I've never read The Vagina Monologues, and I probably should.

This will probably come as no surprise, but I was decidedly meh about The Vagina Monologues. It was interesting enough to read, and quite short (which I always enjoy), and the edition I read was published in support of Ensler's V-Day organization (which campaigns against violence against women), so I can support that. And I know the idea was to take a closer look at, and reclaim, the vagina, and I totally enjoyed this tidbit, in Ensler's introduction:

"In the first place, it's not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman who told me she was too busy; she didn't have the time. Looking at your vagina, she said, is a full day's work. You have to get down there on your back in front of a mirror that's standing on its own, full-length preferred. You've got to get in the perfect position, with the perfect light, which then is shadowed somehow by the mirror and the angle you're at. You get all twisted up. You're arching your head up, klling your back. You're exhausted by then. She said she didn't have the time for that. She was busy."

I enjoyed that, quite a bit. But I've always felt that reducing gender to genitalia was a bit misleading, myself, so although I don't think this was a bad read and it might be interesting for all women (it only takes an hour or so to read), it wasn't really for me. If I had to put my finger on gender, actually, I've always thought it rather boils down more to a quality of practicality, or helpfulness. One of my favorite things about women is how they often wade right in without asking; when Mr. CR comes in the kitchen, he will sometimes ask what needs doing (which I do appreciate), whereas when women come into my kitchen, they'll usually assess what needs doing and start opening cupboards and drawers until they find the tools to help.* I have felt this way for a very long time; when I got my first off-the-farm job, at 16, I worked as a busperson in a nice restaurant, and my female co-worker and I heard this from our boss (a no-nonsense woman herself) on a nightly basis: "Would you help David and John in section 3? Boy busers are so clueless. Thanks."

So: I will add Eve's "vagina power" thoughts to my conception of women as helpful, and practical. It's never a bad idea to expand one's horizons, after all.

*I am, of course, stereotyping like crazy. I have in fact known both helpful men and completely helpless women.

Well, I'm with you in theory, but that's about it.

I was amused by the jacket copy on Charles Pierce's Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free:

"The culture wars are over. The idiots have won. This pisses Pierce off immensely. Like all cynics, he's secretly a romantic at heart, and his disbelieving anger is fueled by the knowledge that America doesn't have to be this way. Like an Old Testament prophet (albeit an agnostic, funny one), Pierce lets loose on the foibles of society in the secret hope that, somehow, being smart will stop being a stigma and idiots will once again be pitied and not celebrated. But don't get your hopes up."

Pierce is a journalist and appears regularly on NPR; he can write and his prose is reasonably entertaining. But I'll admit I never got past the first chapter, in which his chief evidence that idiots are taking over is a line from a New York Times article about intelligent design, in which the reporter wrote that the ID movement "have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."*

Really. That's the sentence he holds up as the shining example of the ridiculousness of the idiocy in our society.

Nothing against Pierce, but if that's the best he can do, I'm not impressed. I might suggest that a greater break with reality is evident in the phrase "keep government out of my Medicare," which I actually saw people say on the news last week. I think a bigger problem is that very few people could probably tell you what the theory of evolution actually is, or how it differs from intelligent design; and that another large chunk of the population simply hates the New York Times on principle because they think it is elitist or too smart. But that's just me.

In all, don't bother with this book. Pick up Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War instead--it's a million times more interesting and provides a nice mix of empathy and frustration, which Pierce's book totally misses.

*Authors always lose me when they start pointing out that only idiots would ever have any questions about evolution. I find the entire debate deeply uninteresting (I've never really understood why it's even a debate, frankly, since one of the major religious tenets seems to be that if you believe in God, you believe God can do anything, so why couldn't God set evolution in motion?), but I always think it's hilarious when anybody holds up a belief in evolution as the gold standard of intelligence. Richard Dawkins falls firmly into that camp too, and you know what? He's boring too. Maybe boringness and the tendency to sound like an asshole evolved along with the need to make everyone accept evolution as gospel** truth in writers of this sort.

**Pun intended.

The pleasures and sorrows of Alain de Botton.

I have always rather enjoyed books by Alain de Botton. I really enjoyed Status Anxiety, although I'm hard-pressed to remember anything about it, now that I think of it, and I also liked The Art of Travel. Truth be told, though, I think I enjoy his subjects and the formats of his books more than I actually enjoy his style; Status Anxiety was about how we all try to keep up with each other in what we own and the affluence we project; it also included a number of photographs which served to break up de Botton's sometimes dense text.

The same goes for his most recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. I read it over the last weekend and found it quite enjoyable, although once again the inclusion of photographs really helped it along. In the book he examines a number of different professions, but he doesn't so much investigate them as he ruminates on them, and sometimes from afar.* (In a chapter seemingly about transmission engineering, electricity, and the structure and construction of electric line pylons, he describes the work from the somewhat removed vantage point of walking along a trail of pylons across southeast England with a pylon installer and enthusiast, describing less the actual process of pylon installation than the willingness of human beings to ignore such fundamentally basic and important structures in their lives and surroundings.)

I don't know that this is an author I'd like to have a conversation with (he seems a bit prickly sometimes**) and sometimes I did get the feeling he's in love with the sound of his own voice, as when he describes his experiences at an aviation conference:

"At the stand of the world's second-largest engine manufacturer, I spent some minutes observing an unusually attractive young saleswoman with shoulder-length chestnut hair, dressed in a beige suit, who was biting the nail of her left index finger and crossing her slender legs whilst leaning against a large fan blade. She was not the first of her type I had seen that day, but something about her appearance left me thoughtful. I had until then believed that the vendors' frequent and deliberate reliance on feminine appeal was merely a vulgar stratagem intended to win over airline executives, through an implicit suggestion that a purchase might bring them closer to intimacy with a sales agent. Now I began to see the matter differently: it seemed obvious that no order, however lucrative, would actually render these women available to buyers, so their presence on the stands took on a more poignant and commercially effective dimension. Their real function was to serve as a reminder of the unavailability of beauty to an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged and harried-looking base of customers..."

I just don't know about all that. And it seemed to take a long time for de Botton to say. But overall? The subject matter and the photographs still won the day; the chapter on accountancy was a wonder to behold, and I simply love all books about work, the way only someone who really tries to avoid work at all costs can.

*Except for his chapter on tuna fishing, which is alarmingly in-depth. If you like tuna (and by this I mean, like having it in a sandwich) and you want to keep on liking tuna, I would suggest not reading the tuna chapter.

**Although I was a bit tickled that he told a reviewer who gave this book a less than sparkling review "I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make." There he was able to get something said with remarkable economy of words! Reviewers of course have the right to actually review books, and authors have the right to respond, so his prickliness doesn't really bother me here.

World enough and time.

Is it wrong that I waste prayers* on the subject of keeping my eyesight until I die, so someday when I'm really old and retired and my children don't visit me, I can at least spend all my time reading? Because I actually have a list of authors whose entire lists I'd love to read, but who I just don't have the proper time for right now?

Susan Sontag is one of those authors. I've always found her really interesting, even though I've only read snippets of her work. I tried to read On Photography once, but it was a bit over my head. Whenever I see her novels in used bookstores, I think about trying one of those, too, but I never do. I am also fascinated by her relationship with Annie Leibovitz, which was at least partially chronicled in Leibovitz's photography collection A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 (Leibovitz's photographs of Sontag after her death from cancer in 2004--she was 71 years old--are some of the most simultaneously beautiful and saddest I've ever seen). The two also collaborated on a work published in 2000 and titled simply Women.

The book I had home this week, and which I won't get enough time to read (add it to the "retirement list") was Regarding the Pain of Others. I'm not sure where I got the idea to check it out; recently I indexed a book about World War I posters and war photography, which led me to look into broader issues of the pictorial depictions of wars, and I must have stumbed across it sometime during that (I'm guessing). This is how it begins:

"In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow writers were rapt by the advancing fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as the very tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, 'How in your opinion are we to prevent war?' Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, 'the educated class,' a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is 'some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting' that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy." (p. 4.)

That, to me, is an opening that promises a very interesting book. And I love Sontag's prose; it's crisp. She's got a way with description (I love the image of Woolf observing "tartly"), and even when her sentences require a bit of deciphering on my part**, she's expressing complex thoughts as succinctly as really is possible.

*I know it's wrong. I try to throw a few prayers at the problem of world peace at the same time to make up for my selfish personal needs.

**Think on this one a while: "The destructiveness of war--short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide--is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong--wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, 'The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,' violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing." (p. 12.) That's a sentence I need a few days with.

Trying too hard.

I thought the book Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, by Dalton Conley, sounded rather interesting.

A mere twenty-five pages in, however, I decided that it wasn't as interesting as it sounded and that I'd be taking the book elsewhere, all right: right back to the library. It's one of those nonfiction titles that's very much in vogue these days: the "big idea" book, like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point or Outliers or Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, and What It Says about Us. Conley's big idea is that our daily lives are changing because "boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable" (from the front jacket copy). Throughout the first chapter he points out that many of the people working all the time, from home and at the office, are actually high in socioeconomic status, and should have enough money, but have extreme anxiety because they think they're not doing as well as their very well-off neighbors.

As I said, it's not a bad question to consider. I actually rather enjoyed Robert Putnam's sociological classic in this area, Bowling Alone. But Conley, like Thomas Friedman, strikes me as trying too hard to make his writing catchy, throwing out phrases and words like "the elsewhere society," "intravidualism," "weisure" (work and leisure combined), and "convestment" (consumption and investment). I don't think it's a bad book. I think it's probably got a lot of very interesting things to say about modern society, technological changes, buying habits, our "service" work which doesn't give us the fulfillment of production work (wherein people actually make things), and family life.

But when he starts describing scenarios of rushed and harried family members, all of whom bring their own laptops to the dinner table? My patience starts to wear thin. That starts to seem less like a societal problem than an individual one: stop buying your kids laptops. Or make them turn them off over dinner. Doesn't seem like you'd need a whole book to figure that out, does it?

I went out walking...

Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism is a very strange little book.

I liked it a lot.

I'd never heard of Nicholson but I did pick the book up based simply on its title. I love to walk. It's the only exercise I've truly ever enjoyed, probably because it's not very strident exercise. Nicholson loves walking too; the entire book is nothing but a collection of ruminations onwalks that he's taken, walks that other people have taken, how walking has been portrayed in writing and music, and a variety of other topics. He opens his narrative with an account of how he fell when walking in Los Angeles and managed to break his arm in three places, which made further walking surprisingly difficult. He describes the sick sensation of falling perfectly:

"The older you get, the bigger a deal it is to fall down. When you're age five you can hit the deck, skin your knees, bleed profusely, and be up playing again in five minutes. The older falling man is so much more vulnerable...

Even as I was falling I thought, Oh crap, I'm not really going to go all the way to the ground, am I? I'll stop myself somehow. I'll kepp my footing. I'll regain my balance. And then I knew I was wrong about that. I was going all the way. I'd passed the tipping point. Oh crap, indeed."

The narrative drags a bit in some points, but that seems only appropriate in a book about walking. (Sometimes, midpoint on a walk, it feels like you've been slogging for a while.) But overall it's a great read, and describes such great cities as New York, London, and L.A. from the sidewalk. (I'm particularly grateful to Nicholson for finally helping me understand the British phrase "council estates": "An English council estate is similar to, but culturally very different from, an American housing project, and I think the name says a great deal. Both are places where the poor, underprivileged, and undereducated live, but Britain likes it to sound as though its poor people are on some grand country manor, while America prefers to think they're part of a science fair experiment," p. 218.) And he includes a wonderful bibliography of walking books.

Hm, in looking over the book I see that Nicholson is also the author of some interesting-sounding titles: Sex Collectors, Female Ruins, Bleeding London, Everything and More. Further bulletins on those books as events warrant.

Chick flick update.

I have now progressed in my chick flick habit from watching them to reading about them. I actually found myself combining obsessions when I read some chapters in I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes of Great Romantic Comedies while I was watching the movie Definitely, Maybe, starring Ryan Reynolds.

The book first. I really enjoyed the book. It is exactly what it says it is: a series of chapters about various romantic comedies, from early classics like It Happened One Night and Some Like It Hot to later movies like When Harry Met Sally... and Love Actually, and how they came to be, as well as numerous tidbits of trivia. It's well-written and even the chapters about movies I hadn't yet seen made me want to see the movies immediately (Clark Gable in It Happened One Night? I'm going to hook that up.). And the chapters about movies I had seen made me want to re-watch them: Did you know that Rob Reiner, Nora Ephron, and Andrew Scheinman wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally... over the course of years, during which Ephron "essentially interviewed the two men about their relationships and their feelings about love, sex, and women in general. Some of it was hilarious, some of it was appalling, and all of it was grist for the mill"? And that the woman in the diner who said "I'll have what she's having" after Meg Ryan's mock-orgasm was Reiner's mother? Good stuff. I'm seeing the book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood popping up on a lot of "Best of 2008" lists, and I don't think that book was half as readable as this one. But serious trumps humorous on the "Best" lists every time.

And this week's chick flick nutshell review? Definitely, Maybe was okay. I don't mind Ryan Reynolds (I actually think he was kind of hilarious in the strange and underrated movie Just Friends) and, with the exception of Rachel Weisz, whom I CAN'T STAND, the women leads were also quite likable. But, at an hour and 52 minutes, it was 22 minutes longer than any romantic comedy really needs to be, unless it is superlative. So if you're jonesing for a chick flick, any chick flick, it'll do, but I wouldn't run right out and rent it or anything.

This is why I could never read philosophy.

I think that the book Violence, by Slavoj Zizek, is probably a very good book. I'm not going to be able to tell for sure, because I can't actually read it. It is beyond me.

I like the idea of the book; "Violence, Zizek states, takes three forms--subjective (crime, terror), objective (racism, hate-speech, discrimination), and systemic (the catastrophic effects of economic and political systems)--and often one form of violence blunts our ability to see the others, raising complicated questions." I like that there's a series of books out there (of which this title is a part) called Big Ideas, Small Books, published by Profile Books and Picador. But the actual text itself? Try it out:

"The notion of objective violence needs to be thoroughly historicised: it took on a new shape with capitalism. Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures." (p. 12.)

If I had unlimited time to figure that paragraph out, and if I'd paid more attention in college, I might have a shot at it. But I didn't, so I'll return this book to the library where it can await a more schooled reader.

Oh, Generation X.

If we're all as long-winded and as boring as Jeff Gordinier's book X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking, I can see why we don't have time left over to save the world.

I'm 90 pages in already and I can't for the life of me think of one thing to say about this book, or what Gordinier's point is. It's not that it's poorly written, it's just kind of, well, underwhelming. I think the basic point is that X is a generation stuck between the narcissistic Boomers and the hyper-connected Millennials, and it's a generation that can "do the old stuff really well--maybe as well as anybody ever could--but nobody seems to give a shit about the old stuff anymore. And this new stuff? You could do it well, too--you're flexible--if you could only figure out what it is. Because sometimes it looks like selling air." (p. xxx.)

Well, okay. That makes sense. But then Gordinier is off on a first-person tangent (his phrase) and pop culture references*, and I didn't pay much attention again until I got to the chapter where he picks on the Millennials, which I'll admit, I really enjoyed:

"These new kids cared about belonging, they cared about the group. They did everything in groups, they even dated in groups. They moved in noisy little packs, they only read books if there was a book club with which to share them, they networked, they sought out mentors, they kept each other in line. The wanted to connect with everyone; they wanted the world to cuddle up with them on Friendster and Facebook. They were unfamiliar with the notion of privacy. Solitude made them...uncomfortable." (p. 70.)

Well, I think he's honed in on why Millennials make me vaguely uncomfortable.

So I did what any slacker Gen Xer would do: I skipped to the end. Gordinier suggests that all Xers try to keep things from sucking by getting out there and...daring.

See? Underwhelming.

*At one point he compares the music videos for Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and Britney Spears's Hit Me Baby One More Time. Never having had MTV, I went and checked them out on YouTube--I'm flexible--and must admit I'm old enough to have been a bit shocked by the Spears video. Frankly, I even like the song,** but holy cow, that's quite the four-minute walking, talking definition of "jail bait."

**I mainly like the song because of this cover version by Scottish band Travis.

Human Smoke: Let's talk about it.

Has anyone else heard about this book Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker? I'd been on hold for it forever at the library, and it finally came in. I hadn't heard much about it, just that it was going to be controversial. And so it has been:

Anne Applebaum called it a "profoundly bad book about World War II."

William Grimes, for The New York Times, called it a "self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book."

And, holy cow, in this roundtable discussion at Ed Rants, they say lots of things about the book, most of which I don't understand, but all of which prove they a) read this book much more carefully than I did, b) know Nicholson Baker better than I do, particularly as a novelist, and are just c) way, way smarter than I am.

So, WHAT is it? Well, that I can nutshell for you. It is a history book about World War II, told entirely in disparate anecdotes, culled from newspapers, diaries, and other sources of the time, and which ends on December 31, 1941. I don't think there is any big secret that Baker means to skew it in the direction of stating "maybe World War II wasn't the best idea" (in his brief afterword, after all, he dedicates the book to American and British pacifists: "they tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."),

And HOW is it? Well, I'd be lying if I said I think Baker's on the wrong track with his pacifist bent. I also must say that I found the first forty pages of the book very, very interesting. But I will not be able to read the whole thing, and this was a surprise, because I've never thought of myself as a particularly story-driven reader. But to read 475 pages of something that has absolutely no narrative and few comprehensively drawn characters? That's tough.

That said, this would be a book I might actually buy, because Baker cites all his sources, and it does give you a lot of food for thought. When I read something like this:

"Franklin Roosevelt, now a lawyer in New York City, noticed that Jews made up one-third of the freshman class at Harvard. He talked the problem over with Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and he went to the Harvard Board of Overseers, of which he was a member. 'It was decided,' Roosevelt later explained, 'that over a period of years the number of Jews should be reduced one or two per cent a year until it was down to 15%.' It was about 1922." (p. 9.)

I don't immediately believe FDR was a huge anti-semite. But it makes me want to learn a little bit more about him. The whole book, in fact, made me want to learn a little bit more about World War II, which is more than I can say for any of those crap-pandering Greatest Generation books or Stephen Ambrose's cottage industry tomes. Can that really be so wrong?

No, Baker is not a historian, which Applebaum points out so aggressively that it makes you wonder if she thinks her own career is secure (it should be; she won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag: A History). Nor is he an expert. I think the New York Sun review had it right: "No one who knows about World War II will take 'Human Smoke' at all seriously." And maybe that's why I think it's got merit, and it's unique, and it deserves at least a look. Perhaps people who don't know very much about World War II need to start getting educated--so we have a leg to stand on when we converse with people who know (or think they know) everything about World War II. I think that has value.

Forgot to add: There's an interesting post about this book over at Books Are My Only Friends. Also, the blurbs on the back of it are very interesting as well, from Daniel Ellsberg (author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers), historian Simon Winchester, Gar Alperovitz, and Chalmers Johnson. Johnson is the author of the superlative titles Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire; I will look at anything he puts his name on.

Title of the Year Award.

And I'm giving it to: Men Are Not Cost-Effective, by June Stephenson.

Now that's an eye-grabbing title, admit it.  Sometimes when I'm searching for other titles in my library catalog, I scan the other titles that come up in the alphabetical list, which is how I found this title.  So I just had to order it.

I know.  I have the nerdiest bad habits EVER.  I also spend a lot of time on the Internet, watching videos I shouldn't...of Jane Austen adaptations.  That's right.  It's porn for girls, and I'm addicted.

But, I digress.  Now, from Men Are Not Cost-Effective.  Check this out:

"Of the first-timers in state prisons, 73 percent of the males are charged with committing violent crimes, compared with 7 percent of the females.  Of those who had prior violent crime convictions, 98 percent of the males are returned to jail for committing another violent crime after being released, compared with 2 percent of the females." (p. 8.)

"The best case for making the point that men are not cost-effective is found in the group of almost entirely male criminals who are now costing US taxpayers an anticipated half trillion dollars.  These men are involved in the worst financial scandal* in the history of the United States.  Men fraudulently and premeditatively, or at the very least greedily, siphoned off savings and loan depositors' money to their own advantage, knowing that the government, or more precisely the American taxpayers, would make good on their crimes." (p. 126.)

"A consistent element in most rape is the lack of concern for the victim. As a consequence, the most difficult task in rape counseling treatment centers is to get rapists to develop a sense of empathy.  This is almost impossible for men who are devoid of emotions other than anger or frustration." (p. 209.)

June, God love her, goes on to suggest adding a "user's fee" of $100 on men's tax returns (since men are using the criminal justice system almost exclusively).  She also points out, succinctly, that "if guns made us safer, the US would be the safest country in the world."

The pub date on the book is 1995, so I would take all those statistics with a grain of salt.  But I like June's spirit.  How's 'bout it, boys?  Anyone up for putting $100 in the kitty voluntarily?  Mr. Citizen Reader probably wouldn't be in to it, but I could just start taking the money out of his wallet if it's all for the greater good.

*In our current era of government and financial scandal, doesn't the Savings and Loan scandal seem almost quaint?

Memoir Madness: Made in Detroit

For a long time, I wasn't up to reading memoirs.  They're almost like fiction for me in that there's so many of them available, I'm bound not to like the majority of them.  But when I find a good one?  Ooh, baby.

Okay, many people would argue memoirs are like fiction in a good many other ways, but I've never had the energy to join that particular fight.  You only have to try and recall any conversation you had yesterday to be able to put two and two together and figure that memoirs (many of which include events which took place years, not days, ago) are largely creations.  Doesn't mean they're not true.  They are one person's true viewpoint.  And I can happily deal with that. 

That's a topic for a different day.  What we have in captivity today is that rarest of wild animals: the memoir I loved and couldn't stop reading.  Paul Clemens's Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir should be required reading in any college class with the word "diversity" in the title.  Clemens grew up in Detroit and makes it a point throughout the book to stress that he and his family lived in Detroit proper, not the suburbs.  In other words, Clemens lived the life described in the book's blurb: "white in a predominately black city, Catholic in an area where churches were closing at a rapid rate, and blue-collar in a steadily declining Rust Belt." 

It's awesome.  I didn't really know much about Detroit before starting this book, although I'd started to get an inkling about the city from reading Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism.  (I'd also seen pictures showing numerous abandoned buildings in the city's downtown on another website, which was informative.)  But in addition to all that, this is also a fantastic story of growing up boy, growing up Catholic, growing up in a largely segregated city, growing up in what sounds like a beautifully no-nonense family, growing up in college, growing up through marriage and family, and living one's life fully while also trying to give it some thought.  There's only one small chapter where it drags a bit, but the whole makes up for it so beautifully I'm not going to split hairs. 

I also love that Clemens doesn't pull any punches.  He tells you how the city was for him then, and how he thinks about it now.  He doesn't waste any time, even in his very first chapter, dropping you right into the middle of the action (his mother wakes him up to follow and retrieve his father, who himself was rudely awakened by someone shooting out the windows in their truck; he chased after them in one car, and Paul chased after his father in another car) and finishing up with a perfectly detailed and surreal thought about "a city where, when your car was stolen and a black Detroit cop happened, several hours later, to arrive on the scene, the quizzical look you were given said, 'What are you doing here?'--as if, at seventeen, I were a doddering British farmer, stubbornly tending land in a country I insisted on calling Rhodesia."  (p. 7.)

Not to be too demanding, but I want all of you to read it immediately and then come back so we can talk about it; it's got a lot of things to say about race and society that I'd desperately love to talk over with someone. 

Whatever I do end up reading, it won't be this.

Writing like this just doesn't do anything for me:

"The American dream might be a nightmare.  What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins.  Our passion for felicity hints at an ominous hatred for all that grows and thrives and then dies--for all those curious thrushes moving among autumn's brownish indolence, for those blue dahlias seemingly hollowed with sorrow, for all those gloomy souls who long for clouds above high windows." (p. 9.)

Now there's nothing I really disagree with there, and it's from a book titled Against Happiness (by Eric Wilson), which is an interesting title.  But could you actually finish reading the paragraph above?  (I only could because I was typing it, although I nodded off a bit at "brownish indolence.")  I couldn't, and the whole book seems to be like that.

Thanks, but no thanks.  I'm hoping for bigger things from Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World.

Have a good cantankerous weekend, everyone.