Some Notes

Hey, everyone. Other than posting reviews and poems, I feel like I've been pretty out of touch with this blog. So I thought I'd send a few notes your way to reassure you that I am getting this thing under control again.

• I promise to get some more fun content back on here. I've been missing my lists, occasional passages, and random thoughts as much as I hope you have. I'm also going to do more open letters to writers, both dead and living. Since I've changed jobs, I've slacked off in the fun department, so I hope to return to more exciting posts soon.

• Next week is Fitzgerald's Birthday. Like last year, I'll be celebrating with a week-long look at all things Fitzgerald. Also, I'm tackling an enormous Fitz biography which might take me awhile to finish.

• Finally, look at this website! http://www.lettersofnote.com/ It's a blog of random letters from various people at various times. A new letter is posted every weekday, and it is awesome. I'm particularly obsessed with the literary heavyweight's letters, although I am also a fan of this sweet letter by actor/nerd Wil Wheaton. Enjoy!

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions about things I should add to this blog, I am always happy to hear them. Post in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

Continuing My Nonfiction Roll...

Book Reviewed: Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edward P. Kohn

Lately, I can't get enough of the TV show, The West Wing. Back in middle school, this was my favorite show. I was in love with half the characters, and I wanted to be friends with the other half. In my youth, I was a politics junkie, so this show fit right into my lifestyle. As I've gotten older and busier, I find myself spending less time thinking and reading about politics (I still follow the news; I just don't follow politics much, even though I'm still pretty damn opinionated about my own views). Becoming reacquainted with The West Wing has also turned me towards politics once again. The best part of the show is seeing how people who want to do good deal within a world that doesn't always allow them to do so. Sometimes, compromises have to be made and others have to suffer for them. It's a very realistic look at the way government functions.

About the same time I started rewatching this awesome show about a fake president and his fake White House staff, I saw an interview with history professor Edward P. Kohn about his new book, Hot Time in the Old Town. Right away, I knew I needed to go out and find a copy. The book combines some of my favorite history topics - Teddy Roosevelt, labor issues at the turn of the century, the shifting values of the old Democratic and Republican parties - and some of my favorite political topics - urban vs. rural attitudes, issues of poverty and class warfare, etc. The book centers on a ten-day heat wave in New York City in August 1896. During that time, the heat index was as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and poor people living in dirty, unventilated tenements suffered the worst of the spell. Overall, around 1,300 people died as a result of the heat. Babies and overworked laborers collapsed and expired in waves around the Lower East Side. Meanwhile, Teddy Roosevelt, who was at that point fairly unlucky in politics and serving as Police Commissioner, helped to combat the worst of the heat by overseeing free handouts of ice to the poorest citizens. Roosevelt was one of the only city leaders to take any kind of action during the heat wave, a fact that Kohn made a lot out of in his interviews.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure it was the strongest argument in the book. I've been a Teddy Roosevelt fan for a few years now, probably due to some of Sarah Vowell's essays about the complicated man he was. I don't agree with a good chunk of his political views, but I think he's a fascinating figure who really did try to change his country for the better and who helped the lower classes as well as he could. Plus, you know, teddy bears! And while Kohn certainly lets us see the complex figure that was Roosevelt, I didn't quite see him as the star of this book.

Rather, the main man of interest here seems to be William Jennings Bryan, a whiz-kid Democratic presidential nominee (you might know him better as the prosecutor from the Scopes "monkey" trial) who had the extreme misfortune of giving an important political speech right in the middle of the heat wave. Due to a series of blunders and an inability to see beyond his rural morality, Bryan failed spectacularly in New York City and eventually lost the election to McKinley (whose eventual assassination, I should add, is one of my favorite history topics. I'm weird like that). Kohn spends a lot of time on Bryan, and I found this story fascinating. I'm just not sure why the book wasn't subtitled "The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Fall of William Jennings Bryan" instead. To make matters worse, Roosevelt was enjoying a breezier beach climate during the worst days of the heat. Which I would have done, too. But it wasn't what I expected from the interviews.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It felt a little repetetive at times, but Kohn's obviously a talented historian. His argument at the end of the book that heat waves are a tragically overlooked natural devastation to people and places made a lot of sense to me after reading his examination of this particular case. It's a nice little piece of history that I certainly had never heard of before, and I enjoyed learning about it.

Poem of the Week: "My Parents' Dance Lessons," by Alison Townsend

This last Thursday marked my parents' 27th wedding anniversary, and on that day, I happened to stumble on this poem at the Writer's Almanac. I thought these two events fit together quite nicely. Since it's a little on the longer side, and since I really want you all to get acquainted with how awesome the Writer's Almanac is, I'm going to give you the link instead of the poem itself. Sorry. I hope you can forgive me when you see how sweetly personal this poem is. Enjoy!

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/09/07

Pop Culture Nerds Re-Unite

Book Reviewed: Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, by Chuck Klosterman

Having been so intrigued by Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs last week, I decided to try another Chuck Klosterman book. I went with Chuck Klosterman IV, which is a collection of articles and essays he's written for various magazines from 1996-2006 plus a fairly autobiographical short story. In general, I didn't like this book quite as much as Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Because these were magazine pieces that had been printed before, they weren't as long or as complex as his essays published in that book.

Of course, that didn't mean this book didn't have its own gems. I was a big fan of "Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy," a 2005 feature about Val Kilmer. I've always thought Kilmer, while a little weird, seemed like a cool enough guy, so it was fun to see Klosterman interact with him. I also liked "The Karl Marx of the Hardwood" (about one of my favorite basketball players, Steve Nash), "Ghost Story" (an article on Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, which made me promptly go and put some Wilco CDs on hold at the library), "Not Guilty" (in which Klosterman rails against the idea of "guilty pleasures"), and "Television" (a hilarious piece wherein Klosterman chronicles watching VH1 Classic for 24 straight hours).

In my review of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I mentioned that I often found myself openly disagreeing with Klosterman. That happens a lot here, too. I think I'd like him if I met him, but I don't know if we could ever be great friends. And I have to admit that when I read his work, I pine for the opinions of some women (I really don't think Klosterman has a very nuanced view of women). In fact, I think I may have to tackle some Sarah Vowell as a counter-read. Overall, though, I still like Klosterman and I would say this book was decently entertaining. Even better, it made me get out my Led Zeppelin CDs, which I haven't listened to in quite some time. Man, does Robert Plant have the world's sexiest sexy voice ever or what?


Note: It's Leo Tolstoy's birthday! I love Tolstoy's books and characters; I think he's probably the most important novelist of all time. However, I've always disliked Tolstoy's opinions and lifestyle. Oh well. Happy Birthday, Leo!

Now I Kind of Want to Be an Astronaut

Book Reviewed: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach.

I think I want to be Mary Roach when I grow up. This is the second science book by Roach that I've read in the last month, and I assume that I will tackle her other two in the months to come. Her writing is so clean and easy to follow, and she manages to make science - which has never been my thing - understandable and fun. She's just so damn cool. I haven't read enough nonfiction in the last year, but due to Mary Roach, I'm finding myself unable to stop lately. She makes me yearn to be smarter and better informed. What more could you ask from a person who writes about science? There's a reason all her books end up on the bestsellers' lists.

Anyway, my newfound Mary Roach obsession propelled me to her brand new book, Packing for Mars. It's about space exploration and all the strange things that entails. Like all of Roach's books, this one is broken into chapters that are little units explaining a specific subtopic that feeds into the main topic. In this case, we get chapters about space hygeine, the necessary psychological makeup of an astronaunt, the development of astronaut food, and much more. Basically, the book boils down to this: What does it take for someone to go up to a place without gravity and be there for a given amount of time? A lot more than I ever imagined, of course.

I've never been a space person. I know lots of people who talk about how badly they wanted to be astronaunts when they grew up. I know kids who are obsessed with planets and stars. Not me. When I was a kid, I thought of space as being the opposite of cool; it was an upside-down hell where disaster lurked behind fathomless corners. After reading Packing for Mars, though, I've kind of become one of those space-loving little kids. Suddenly, I want to be an astronaut.

Not that Roach makes the lifestyle look glamorous. In fact, I didn't realize just how important gravity was until I read this book. Chapter Fourteen, lovingly titled "Separation Anxiety," about going to the bathroom in space, particularly made me want to kiss gravity on the mouth. But to see what all has come out of the space program (did you know sports bras came out of NASA research?) is quite amazing, and by the end of the book, I was in full support of Roach's argument that going to Mars would do the world some good.

So I can't quite stress enough how cool this book was. There were definitely moments I found more exciting than others; some of the chapters could be a little boring in comparison to others. But the good stuff outweighed the bad enough to make this book a definite winner for me. There are a lot hilarious and insightful anecdotes in here - about monkeys in space and astronaut motion sickness and people who get paid to not get out of bed for three months. Especially entertaining were some of the transcripts from actual NASA missions, which Roach clearly spent a ridiculous amount of time sifting through. The book even manages to be quite poignant in Chapter 13 ("Withering Heights"), which is about the dangers of re-entry into earth's atmosphere and individual free falling. I don't want to give away the moment, but Roach meets a scientist with a very personal connection to what he studies. She does it in a way that's brief and understated, but which gets at the heart of this book: that the people involved in the space industry are passionate about what they do. That's why it would be be cool to work for NASA. Whether you're the astronaut or the man who designed a screw on his helmet, you get to do what you love and see a glimpse of something so immense and outside of yourself that it can't even be earthbound. You get to work for a goal that's literally infinite. That would kick ass.


Side Note: I really enjoyed this review that the AV Club did with Roach a couple weeks ago. She seems as laidback and fun in person as her writing would suggest: http://www.avclub.com/articles/spook-and-stiff-author-mary-roach,44625/

Pop Culture Nerds Unite!

Book Reviewed: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, by Chuck Klosterman

I am a huge pop culture nerd. I spend a good chunk of my free time reading book, music, and movie reviews. I troll pop culture-related blogs and websites for at least an hour a day. I'm pretty sure I know more useless information about meaningless stuff than most people know about important stuff. It's an addiction I can't stop. Occasionally, I meet someone else who cares about meaningless things as much as I do. Relationships formed over pop culture have been known to lead to lasting friendships for me, and pop culture has formed a major building block in the bond between my younger brother and me as we've grown up. Like junkies, us pop culture nerds seek each other out and inform each other's bad habits.

Which is why I knew I needed to read some Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman is a major presence in pop culture writing. Over the last fifteen years, he's been a music and film columnist, a sportswriter, and a pretty famous essayist. His books are basically required reading for everyone who believes that stupid stuff means more than we realize. People like me. Really, it's amazing that I haven't read Klosterman before. With all his books at my disposal in the library, I now feel it's my duty as a pop nerd to read all of them.

I decided to start with the most logical choice: Klosterman's most famous book of essays, 2003's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. I read the book in only two days, as I find nonfiction to read really fast for me. At first, I was surprised by how many disagreements I found myself having with Klosterman. I didn't really agree with half his opinions and ideas. But I still liked the book a lot. Compulsively readable and almost always fun, the essays took on such a variety of topics that I found it hard to be bored. Despite not always getting along with Klosterman, I respected his thoughts quite a bit, and I knew I found a literary soulmate in all his ruminations about useless things. As I mentioned earlier, us pop culture nerds need each other.

When I read the book's second essay, "Billy Sim," I felt like Klosterman could read my thoughts. Here it was, an essay about the video game The Sims that basically spoke about all my complicated feelings regarding this supremely weird pasttime. By the time he kills his own character by ignoring him, I was laughing pretty hard. The same goes for "Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth" (about how the Star Wars movies are both extremely overhyped and yet capture the angst of an entire generation) and "The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise's Shattered, Troll-like Face" (about Klosterman's inability to understand why film critics are so obsessed with depictions of reality in film, which is particularly interesting to me since I've become obsessed with Inception). As a fellow Midwesterner from a ridiculously small town, I "get" Klosterman quite often. In "Toby over Moby," Klosterman argues that popular, overly-sentimental country music is actually more genuine than the kind of gritty, indie-type country music that critics and hipsters love, an argument with which I wholeheartedly agree.

For me, though, the best essay in this collection is "Being Zach Morris," which is about Saved by the Bell. I've actually never watched that particular show, but his thoughts on the subject of a certain kind of Saturday-morning-esque show for adolescents is surprisingly astute. The end of the essay argues that the show's later episodes - in which two of the lead girls left the show for awhile, got replaced, then came back while the replacement disappeared - are more lifelike than most television programs. Klosterman argues that that's how actual high school and college memories work. We think of a particular group of people and imagine they were with us all the time. It's only if we dissect our memories that we realize certain people disappear for long stretches or that people we hardly remembered we actually hung out with quite a bit. I found myself surprisingly moved by Klosterman's funny opinions on a show I don't even care about.

And in the end, that is all you can ask from good pop culture writing. So, even if I wasn't always in love with this book or its writer, that hasn't stopped me from wanting to read more of Chuck Klosterman's work. In fact, I have another one of his books on my desk right now....

Flower Power

Book Reviewed: Selected Poems, by Amy Lowell (edited with introduction by Honor Moore)

Despite being a pretty popular poet and a Pulitzer Prize winner in her own time, Amy Lowell is probably more famous for being related to Robert Lowell, one of the biggest poets of the 20th century. I always thought this was kind of annoying (not to mention sexist), so I decided to try Amy's poems myself.

To be honest, I think I might be more of a Robert Lowell person. His poetry is so hyper-intelligent and obsessed with history and the bizarre aspects of life that I can't help but like it. Amy Lowell's work is more personal and internal, which made for some great reading. But in the end, only a handful of her poems stood out to me.

Why is this? Well, I blame it on the flowers.

There are a lot of flowers in these poems. Everytime I opened to a page, I was choked with their scents. Granted, in many of Lowell's poems - particularly her later work - the flowers stood for other things: emotions, sexuality, life and death. Poem to poem, this would not have bothered me. But because I read an entire book of these poems from end to end, it made it a little hard to take after awhile. If it hadn't been for all the flowers and gardens, I probably would have liked Amy Lowell's Selected Poems quite a bit more.

This isn't to say that Amy Lowell isn't a great poet. She is. Despite all these poems being from the first two decades of the 20th century, they are among some of the more erotically-charged poetry I've ever read. Feminine power and sexuality is on full display here, although it's hidden inside the language and subject choice. Reading this book, I was consistently impressed by how "out there" Lowell managed to be at times. Her translations of Chinese poetry and the her own poems that that poetry inspired were my favorites in the collection. Lowell knows how to turn a phrase. And holy crap, does she know how to rock verbs. I am always amazed by how good some writers are at using particular aspects of language to their advantage, and Lowell is a great example of this. Her work can be violent, erotic, or emotional just based on her verb choices or her graphic turns of phrase.

Over all, I am glad I read Amy Lowell. She's an important poet who should never be overlooked in exchange for her more famous relative. Plus, she had fightin' words with Ezra Pound, for which I am always a fan (if I could go back and punch any famous writer in the face, Pound is pretty high on my list). It's too bad she had me - a non-flower person - as a reader.