I’m working on a writeup of yesterday’s visit Jon Hyman’s 9/11 photography exhibition. Meanwhile, here’s a link to my pictures from the trip.
This week in Unrequired Reading
Stories that have been sitting in my RSS feed this week:
Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine muses on the 40th anniversary of Star Trek:
And finally, [Star Trek is] a story of a powerful belief in what the franchise represents: the right of individuals, through machinery, weaponry, or barehanded intelligence, to live, be free, and pursue happiness, no matter how horrific the results (and we can all agree that Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was as slow and agonizing as any torture devised on that evil Enterprise from the “Mirror, Mirror†episode in which Spock has a beard). Put all these ingredients together and it’s clear: Star Trek is the story of America.
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Tom Spurgeon interviews Sammy Harkham, the only “young” cartoonist whose work I’ve started to follow. I have an unfinished post from earlier this summer, about the MoCCA comics festival in NYC. The post was all about my realization that I’ve become a boring old fart, because I couldn’t think of any cartoonists whose work I discovered in the last five to eight years. Fortunately, I picked up one of Sammy’s comics then, and found a small book of his a few weeks later that impressed me.
Sammy edits an anthology called Kramer’s Ergot, and the interview discusses the process of putting the most recent edition together. As ever, I find this stuff fascinating, but you may not.
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George Will reviews a 9/11 novel that doesn’t sound very interesting to me, but that’s because the 9/11 novel I published tanked:
Messud’s Manhattan story revolves around two women and a gay man who met as classmates at Brown University and who, as they turn 30 in 2001, vaguely yearn to do something “important” and “serious.” Vagueness — lack of definition — is their defining characteristic. Which may be because — or perhaps why — all three are in the media. All are earnest auditors and aspiring improvers of the nation’s sensibility.
Uh, yeah.
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BLDGBLOG interviews author Jeff VanderMeer about the intersection of architecture and the novel.
As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating “reality” but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I’m creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don’t just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.
Of course, that kind of layering will work for some readers — and other readers will want continuity. Even if they live in a place like that — a baroque, layered, very busy, confused place — even if, say, they’re holding the novel as they walk down the street in London [laughter] — they just don’t get it.
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Times UK restaurant reviewer Giles Coren visited Croatia for a column:
The language is called Croatian these days, except in Serbia, where it is called Serbian, and it hasn’t got any easier. Chapter two of my Teach Yourself Croatian book was about counting to ten, and gently explained as follows: “The number one behaves like an adjective and its ending changes according to the word which follows. The number two has different forms when it refers to masculine and neuter nouns than when it refers to feminine nouns, and is followed always by words in the genitive singular, as are the words for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The numbers 5-20, however, are followed by words in the genitive plural. . .”
This is why you never see Croatians in groups of more than one or less than five in a bar. Because it isn’t actually possible to order the right number of beers.
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Official VM buddy Jecca reviews the second issue of Martha Stewart’s Blueprint (which, as I type it, sounds like something she came up with while she was in the joint, a la that Prison Break show).
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Gorgeous pictures of the world’s greatest libraries. There’s a book about it.
Stop Making Sense
It’s the end of the summer, so I’m taking a long weekend (off Thursday – Monday). I haven’t written much lately, but I figure most of my ‘regular’ readers are traveling and only checking in intermittently. That’s summertime for ya.
I spent yesterday taking care of errands, including my belated/extended taxes, which I’ve been procrastinating on since we filed the extensions. More errands to get done today, unless I decide to spend my time finishing a book, watching a movie, or trying to write a longer piece for the 9/11 anniversary. I have something in mind, but I’ve been kinda uninspired of late.
The week-long dreary weather is probably the biggest contributor to this malaise o’ mine. Last week, I chalked it up in part to my “wheels-within-wheel paranoia” about how world events have been unfolding. A day or so later, I realized that paranoia wasn’t an appropriate term. After all, I don’t feel like these machinations are targeting me, nor that there’s a single overarching cabal organizing events to suit its needs.
Nah, my mental paralysis is caused more by my trying to understand the multiplicity of forces in action, not One Central Plot. It reminds me of something I said in the weeks after 9/11:
“Somehow, this president has to figure out how to work in concert with Pakistan but not anger India, without placating India to the point of angering China, without assuaging China so much that Japan and South Korea get nervous, and I’m pretty sure that I could beat him at tic-tac-toe.”
I don’t work in international relations or foreign policy; I’m just some schlub from New Jersey. My biggest problem is that I’m trying to make sense of things.
Fortunately, football season is coming up.
C’est Levee, or Once More Unto the Breach
It’s the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s whomping of the Gulf Coast. I’ve been down to New Orleans four times since then. I’ve tried to chronicle a little bit of the reconstruction, or at least my viewpoint on the progress.
My perspective is limited, of course. Amy’s family lives about 25 miles from the city, so the people I see the most down there talk more about the after-effects, not their own property loss. We’ve made trips into the city each visit, but mainly in the central business district and the French Quarter. I haven’t gone through the lower Ninth Ward in any of my visits, but I also don’t visit the South Bronx when I go to New York.
Or does the WTC site serve as a better analogy? Ray Nagin seemed to think so, when he contrasted NOLA’s rebuilding pace with the five-year span since the Twin Towers were knocked down: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”
It was a cheap shot, but Nagin’s a mentally unstable grandstander, so that needs to be factored in.
How does the city get rebuilt? Darned if I know. I wouldn’t exactly trust a “master plan” developed by the crooked politicos of Louisiana in concert with the ass-clowns in Washington, and the Army Corps of Engineers is already covering its ass about the possibility of the current levees being unable to handle another major storm. I’m having enough trouble just trying to settle on a color for my home office, since the official VM wife objects pretty violently to the deep green currently in place.
(Witold Rybczynski in Slate has a neat piece about how a new-urbanist project in Denver provides an example of how to start putting together neighborhoods, but it all presupposes that the neighborhoods aren’t built in a locale that’s existentially flood-prone.)
I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say that I haven’t gotten at already, so why don’t you, my dear readers, tell me what you make of New Orleans? A bunch of you came to visit in March for my wedding, but I want to hear from those of you who haven’t seen it, too. Tell me what you remember of the city, if you’ve been there before, what you thought if you’ve been there post-Katrina, and what you think of the ways and means of rebuilding a city that wasn’t in great shape before it’s cataclysm.
(Update: I know it’s hard to believe, but Ray Nagin has more to say!)
Outta touch
Sorry it’s been a quiet week, dear readers. I’ve been busy at work, but I’ve also found myself falling into one of my wheels-within-wheels paranoiac phases. It’s centered on trying to get at an understanding of the power-relations at play in the current Gulf War.
Anyway, I gotta write an article on the benefits of RFID in the pharma supply chain, so I’m gonna get to that.
I leave you with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon / sushi axis.
Smoking Grass
I wanted to write a long piece exploring the tension of Gunter Grass’ novels with his recent admission that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II, but I was stymied by the fact that I’ve never read a word he wrote, probably due to my irrational bias that all Germans from that era were Nazis.
Anyway, Grass’ “frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history,” sez the website for the Nobel Prize, which Grass won in 1999. The site also tells us, “after military service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm laborer and miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin.” Which is true-ish. As is Grass’ own comment in his Nobel lecture, “Humans have much of the rat in them and vice versa.” I probably oughtta read that whole lecture sometime.
Now, I’m actually going to cut some slack for the 17-year-old Grass. Given that my dad lied about his age to join the military when he was a 16-year-old in Israel, I can pretty easily imagine a young Grass who wanted to join up, get away from his family and “help the war effort” or something.
I can even imagine a situation where he didn’t really understand that this could lead him into the SS. I don’t know the facts of military allocation during the war, so I can’t say that he’s lying about how he was assigned to the Waffen SS. And it certainly sounds like that unit was more devoted to combat operations than to the running of concentration camps and mass executions that other parts of the SS were engaged in.
War sweeps a lot of people up into decisions that they couldn’t imagine making in other circumstances. For a 17-year-old in a duty-bound society like that . . . well, I’m just saying that I don’t hold that piece of his history against him.
However, I am stuck trying to figure out what’s more unconscionable: not revealing till he was 78 the fact that he was in the Waffen SS, or only revealing it so he could have a sales peg for his new book.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve tried marketing literary books before and “I served in the SS” isn’t much worse than some of the angles I’ve seen.
(Oh, and to that writer at Time who argues that Grass wouldn’t have been such a good/important writer had he not kept this deep, dark secret all along: you’re a moral imbecile.)
When Norwegians attack!
Jostein Gaarder’s new book: Sophie’s World Without Jews.
Hey, Raj, What’s Happ’nin’?
It’s long-ass essay day here at VM! Here’s a piece from the new ish of Foreign Affairs about the economic dynamo in India. I think India’s in a far better position to succeed than China in the long-term. If you read Mr. Das’ article, you’ll see that there are some major reforms India still needs to implement (in order to get itself out of the way), but I think the Indian version of entrepreneurialism trumps the totalitarianism that still lurks over the Chinese model.
I used to think that the main advantage of India was the bureaucracy installed by the British, but Das’ interpretation is that the bureaucracy is a major problem for the country. It’s possible that we’re both right, insofar as the bureaucracy and its focus on education were necessary for India’s development, but have now grown out of control:
Today, Indians believe that their bureaucracy has become a prime obstacle to development, blocking instead of shepherding economic reforms. They think of bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive, and corrupt, protected by labor laws and lifetime contracts that render them completely unaccountable. To be sure, there are examples of good performance — the building of the Delhi Metro or the expansion of the national highway system — but these only underscore how often most of the bureaucracy fails. To make matters worse, the term of any one civil servant in a particular job is getting shorter, thanks to an increase in capricious transfers. Prime Minister Singh has instituted a new appraisal system for the top bureaucracy, but it has not done much.
The Indian bureaucracy is a haven of mental power. It still attracts many of the brightest students in the country, who are admitted on the basis of a difficult exam. But despite their very high IQs, most bureaucrats fail as managers. One of the reasons is the bureaucracy’s perverse incentive system; another is poor training in implementation. Indians tend to blame ideology or democracy for their failures, but the real problem is that they value ideas over accomplishment. Great strides are being made on the Delhi Metro not because the project was brilliantly conceived but because its leader sets clear, measurable goals, monitors day-to-day progress, and persistently removes obstacles. Most Indian politicians and civil servants, in contrast, fail to plan their projects well, monitor them, or follow through on them: their performance failures mostly have to do with poor execution.
Anyway, Das makes some neat points about India’s development, most notably the fact that it jumped from essentially an agrarian society to a service-based one, without spending much time as a manufacturing/industrial power.
Just another example of stuff I find fascinating, but probably bore the crap out of you.
So here’s Tom Spurgeon’s writeup about the just-concluded San Diego Comic-Con. Enjoy.
Suh-mokin’!
Evidently, it is okay for us to spread our values throughout the world, and tell people what to think and do.
But “we know what’s good for you” begins at home.
Between the lines
In case you’re sitting around bored this weekend, here’s an interview with a book designer who isn’t Chip Kidd.
Here’s a blog post by Dylan Horrocks (a.k.a. one of the finest cartoonists alive and an all-around swell guy who let me crash at his home in New Zealand a few years ago) on science and art.
And here’s the introduction to a new book on Leo Strauss. I found it pretty interesting, especially when it went into the east coast vs. west coast Straussians’ rivalry. It really heated up when they popped Biggie, that’s for sure.
I hope your weekend is exciting enough that you don’t read all this stuff.