When gambling was legalized in Atlantic City New Jersey in the late 1970s, hotels that had fallen on bad times were hastily covered over with mirrors on the walls and carpeting on the floors -- but they were still seedy low class buildings. That comparison epitomizes the book's recurring theme that, long before there were professional image makers, there were men who knew that the sensation they projected in hand-made Italian suits, a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and the best table at the dinner club covered a multitude of sins, if not crimes.
Such a man was Paul Skinny D'Amato, owner of the 500 Club and reputed matchmaker, promoter, and friend of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. The book is a Rat Pack groupie's ultimate fan magazine. There is no subtlety in discovering any six degrees of separation, as the book names names, especially in connecting the Mob to the election of JFK and the death of Monroe. Parts of the story takes place outside of New Jersey, but Atlantic City certainly is portrayed the incubator of a lot of those headlines with D'Amato often being the behind the scenes expediter.
Like Mezrich in Bringing Down the House, Van Meter wants a reflected, vicarious part in the Rat Pack and D'Amato's action. There is no distance between him and his subject: no humor like in Charlatan, no erudite history like in Sin in the Second City. Just envy. But like Brinkley in Charlatan, D'Amato created his own place, molding Atlantic City into his schizophrenic vision: a mecca for high rollers and a vacation spot for the average man to lose his money gambling.
D'Amato and Atlantic City are intrinsically bound together and Van Meter does a good job in showing it as next to impossible to separate the two. In addition, he shows that the people in this community knew and loved Skinny, even it if was only his persona or for what profits he brought to their town. Much more troubling is the account of how the place he created came back to destroy his family and friends. Everyone seems tarnished: people with sullied reputations have them confirmed; others with a vestige of respectability come across as manipulated.
I have admitted in my reviews that I have never been drawn either to Las Vegas or Atlantic City. By going there, in books rather than in person, I now realize that it is their blatant promotion of vice and the purposeful attraction of people with addictions that I find most unattractive. Panderers can never be as tragic as sinners.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Circle the Wagons: Dakota! by Dana Fuller Ross
First of all, DFR is a pseudonym, one of thirteen that James Reasoner has used to write over 200 books, primarily western "sagas." Dakota! (not the exclamation point) is one of 14 books in his Western saga.
Did I get a sense of the Dakota territory badlands and the Indian uprising against the military defending the westward expansion after the Civil War ... I guess so. Was there a sense of continuity between history and the future of the country ... I guess so.
But the characters were flat, stereotypical and did not engage the reader to particularly care about what happened next in their lives. Reasoner himself leaves unanswered what happens to his main hero/heroine, Holt and his wife Clarissa. Maybe volume 14 picks up their story, or maybe not. To spice up keeping an eye out for marauding Indians and constructing the transcontinental railroad, Reasoner throws in some sexual slavery in San Francisco and a sensational trial; extramarital sex with an Indian guide; and a precursor of Ma Baker, Ma Hastings. None of these parallel plots boosters up the main story.
I cannot decide if this is a male cowboy and Indian story, a female bodice ripper, or a western history for high school dummies book. It is too mass market for my interest and am looking forward to reading the Stephen Ambrose book for some real insight into dealing with indigenous populations.
Did I get a sense of the Dakota territory badlands and the Indian uprising against the military defending the westward expansion after the Civil War ... I guess so. Was there a sense of continuity between history and the future of the country ... I guess so.
But the characters were flat, stereotypical and did not engage the reader to particularly care about what happened next in their lives. Reasoner himself leaves unanswered what happens to his main hero/heroine, Holt and his wife Clarissa. Maybe volume 14 picks up their story, or maybe not. To spice up keeping an eye out for marauding Indians and constructing the transcontinental railroad, Reasoner throws in some sexual slavery in San Francisco and a sensational trial; extramarital sex with an Indian guide; and a precursor of Ma Baker, Ma Hastings. None of these parallel plots boosters up the main story.
I cannot decide if this is a male cowboy and Indian story, a female bodice ripper, or a western history for high school dummies book. It is too mass market for my interest and am looking forward to reading the Stephen Ambrose book for some real insight into dealing with indigenous populations.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Purple (Chip) Haze: Bringing Down the House -- Nevada
Playing on stereotypes galore -- that Nevada is Vegas; that MIT students are geeks; that Orientals are inscrutable -- BDTH reads like a movie script, major network, prime time, not HBO.
Both my son and a complete stranger in the library reading room interrupted me, noticing I was reading it, saying they saw the movie, and mentioning they heard the book was better. How awful was the movie?
Allegedly a true story, Mezrich was lured into documenting it by Kevin Lewis/Jeff Ma, a modern day Sheherazade, relating the most exciting, glamorous and dangerous 1,460 nights (between June '94 and June '98) ever imagined.
I've been in a casino once, Turning Stone, with a college roommate addicted to poker and cigars (this was before anti-smoking laws). It was Las Vegas without the bettors wearing bling, just fanny packs. Despite its mortar and bricks, it seemed like a stage scenery backdrop to the real "action" going on at the tables.
As the third book in my current mini-theme of sins and crime in America, BDTH breaks no new inroads to gambling or the houses' edge. Unlike the medical quacks in Kansas and the madam sisters in Illinois, the positioning of virtue versus vice is missing. The "good" MIT team of card counters see themselves as not doing anything legally wrong. (Let's hear it for adding ethics to the curriculum.) The "bad" casino floor managers, private investigators, and IRS auditors are not out to "get them" but are personally without motive -- just following the rules and procedures as rigidly as the plus one, minus one of the blackjackers.
If Mezrich was doing this conscientiously, he had made the book move as fast as a deck of cards in a game of 21 or as the jet flying to Nevada on Friday after school lets out. Places are described with the detail found on the front of a touristy post card. Characters, since they are math nerds, need not have conversations or meaningful relationships because they are anti-social and inept to begin with. What a gift to a writer -- no need for setting or dialogue, and a plot that could have been depicted using Wily Coyote and the Road Runner. At least there, we'd know that we were in the desert.
Mezrich wants to be one of the counters, not tell their story, and he alternates chapters with his present day (while writing) interviews of sources. This not only makes the structure and effort of writing too intrusive, it also makes him a narcissistic co-star with Kevin. You can see the last chapter coming, where Ben and Jeff are at a table with purple chips piling up in front of the author.
Thankfully, Pope never wanted to operate using goat parts nor Abbott seduce corporate executives. Be interesting to see how this story compares to New Jersey.
Both my son and a complete stranger in the library reading room interrupted me, noticing I was reading it, saying they saw the movie, and mentioning they heard the book was better. How awful was the movie?
Allegedly a true story, Mezrich was lured into documenting it by Kevin Lewis/Jeff Ma, a modern day Sheherazade, relating the most exciting, glamorous and dangerous 1,460 nights (between June '94 and June '98) ever imagined.
I've been in a casino once, Turning Stone, with a college roommate addicted to poker and cigars (this was before anti-smoking laws). It was Las Vegas without the bettors wearing bling, just fanny packs. Despite its mortar and bricks, it seemed like a stage scenery backdrop to the real "action" going on at the tables.
As the third book in my current mini-theme of sins and crime in America, BDTH breaks no new inroads to gambling or the houses' edge. Unlike the medical quacks in Kansas and the madam sisters in Illinois, the positioning of virtue versus vice is missing. The "good" MIT team of card counters see themselves as not doing anything legally wrong. (Let's hear it for adding ethics to the curriculum.) The "bad" casino floor managers, private investigators, and IRS auditors are not out to "get them" but are personally without motive -- just following the rules and procedures as rigidly as the plus one, minus one of the blackjackers.
If Mezrich was doing this conscientiously, he had made the book move as fast as a deck of cards in a game of 21 or as the jet flying to Nevada on Friday after school lets out. Places are described with the detail found on the front of a touristy post card. Characters, since they are math nerds, need not have conversations or meaningful relationships because they are anti-social and inept to begin with. What a gift to a writer -- no need for setting or dialogue, and a plot that could have been depicted using Wily Coyote and the Road Runner. At least there, we'd know that we were in the desert.
Mezrich wants to be one of the counters, not tell their story, and he alternates chapters with his present day (while writing) interviews of sources. This not only makes the structure and effort of writing too intrusive, it also makes him a narcissistic co-star with Kevin. You can see the last chapter coming, where Ben and Jeff are at a table with purple chips piling up in front of the author.
Thankfully, Pope never wanted to operate using goat parts nor Abbott seduce corporate executives. Be interesting to see how this story compares to New Jersey.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Going from Bawd to Worse -- Sin in the Second City, by Karen Abbott
Following my detour from the main route of the travels through the States, I continue off the beaten track, farther into the back alleys, to Chicago at the turn of the century, to that glamorous house of ill repute, the Everleigh Club (can we all say "ever lay") operated by two reconstructed sisters, Ada and Minna Everleigh/Lester. Dedicated to catering to the richest of debauchees, these madams guaranteed the most beautiful, educated and healthy harlots, sumptuous themed rooms, ragtime music played on a gilded piano, and fine gourmet foods washed down with champagne. (The Club was reputed to be the first place where it was drunk out of a "lady's" slipper, supposedly while a Prussian prince was being royally entertained.)
Much like the depiction of the forces of good against evil in Charlatan, Abbott runs parallel story lines between the characters in the red light district and the nascent anti-white slave trafficking movement. However, neither side is as colorful or humorous as those medical quacks in Kansas and their uprooting nemesis, the AMA. SITSC is also reminescent of The Devil in the White City, by Eric Larsen, which is set a few years before the opening of the Everleigh, during the 1893 World's Fair, when naive girls coming to Chi-town were similarly susceptible to all kinds of peril, perdition and death.
As far as our pursuit of place's part in a particular story, Chicago is authentic. All the politicians are up for sale; gangsters hobnob with ward leaders; scions of the wealthiest families succumb eagerly to the temptations of the Levee. Ada and Minna chose it as the perfect spot for their brothel and it is more than a setting for their lives -- it enables and directs their adventures.
The book shows that the seeds of corrupt big business, Mafia smugglers and hitmen, and authors of great exposees and poetry, all were incubated in the Windy City long before the Roaring 20s.
Once again, the oddest connections show up. Foreshadowing another State, Abbott discusses the use of the Mann Act in the divorce proceedings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Theodore Dreisler and Edgar Lee Masters relive old times with Minna and Ada in the 40s when they are living in the Upper West Side. Joshilyn Jackson reappears in the acknowledgements as a member of Abbott's Atlanta writing group.
And so now, despite this being Lenten season, I continue to be lead into temptations and dens of iniquity, as I head to the casinos of Nevada.
Much like the depiction of the forces of good against evil in Charlatan, Abbott runs parallel story lines between the characters in the red light district and the nascent anti-white slave trafficking movement. However, neither side is as colorful or humorous as those medical quacks in Kansas and their uprooting nemesis, the AMA. SITSC is also reminescent of The Devil in the White City, by Eric Larsen, which is set a few years before the opening of the Everleigh, during the 1893 World's Fair, when naive girls coming to Chi-town were similarly susceptible to all kinds of peril, perdition and death.
As far as our pursuit of place's part in a particular story, Chicago is authentic. All the politicians are up for sale; gangsters hobnob with ward leaders; scions of the wealthiest families succumb eagerly to the temptations of the Levee. Ada and Minna chose it as the perfect spot for their brothel and it is more than a setting for their lives -- it enables and directs their adventures.
The book shows that the seeds of corrupt big business, Mafia smugglers and hitmen, and authors of great exposees and poetry, all were incubated in the Windy City long before the Roaring 20s.
Once again, the oddest connections show up. Foreshadowing another State, Abbott discusses the use of the Mann Act in the divorce proceedings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Theodore Dreisler and Edgar Lee Masters relive old times with Minna and Ada in the 40s when they are living in the Upper West Side. Joshilyn Jackson reappears in the acknowledgements as a member of Abbott's Atlanta writing group.
And so now, despite this being Lenten season, I continue to be lead into temptations and dens of iniquity, as I head to the casinos of Nevada.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
NASCAR Will Never Be the Same, Better Pole Position: Charlatan by Pope Brock
For the sake of the purpose of this blog, the book is set for the most part in Milford, Kansas but it's scope is nationwide (I'll get back to ZZ Top later). But unlike the last posting, Crazy School, where there was no sense of place and everyone was rootless, the main character in Charlatan creates his own stage, for a while being the moving force in two towns, one state, and the ether.
It tells the true story of John R. Brinkley, arch-quack, famous for transplanting goat testicles into men. What! You've never heard of him? And this was the 20's and 30's. (Like many of the biographies I read in 2008 -- specifically Lucia Joyce, Lee Miller, Helle Nice -- Brinkley was famous in our grandparents' generation and virtually ignored and unknown in contemporary culture.)
Brock is an exceptional writer, with harkenings of Mark Twain, but then again, the subject is so ripe for satire and repartee. Two quotes will suffice to illustrate the topic and the author's rendering of it:
"Only the urgency was new, not the idea. Ever since man began to walk upright, he had been obsessed when his penis would not behave likewise ..." And "Quacks have flourished in all ages and cultures, for nothing shows reason the door like cures ... for they unlike most scams which target greed, quackery fires deeper into Jungian universals, our fear of death, our craving for miracles."
Kansas is chosen by Brinkley for his clinic because he wanted to profit from naive people and flourish in a place that was off the beaten track, farther away from his nemesis in Chicago, Morris Fishbein of the AMA's Bureau of Investigations and later editor of JAMA. Brinkley eventually relocates to the Texan border, and once unsuccessfully in Arkansas, but his appeal is beyond the limits of any state (one step ahead of having his bogus medical license pulled by the medical boards).
As he expands into more and more promotion of his cures, Brinkley becomes the precursor of modern day marketing and public relations. He buys megawatt radio stations, eventually setting up the biggest station across the border in Mexico. He is one of the first to broadcast live performers, giving air time to country and western music and credited with making it a bigger part of American culture. After yet another legal setback, Brinkley decides to be a write-in candidate for Governor of Kansas and only loses through typical party election law maneuvering.
As a campaigner, he is noted for being the first candidate to fly to reach the electorate and to use the infamous loud speaker truck. Who knew?
Interwoven with the main theme of medical fraud ... and mass murder ... is the rise of the power of the AMA and regulation of the licensing of doctors and curtailing of bogus cures. Brock sets the book in its historical context, explaining the Jacksonian rise of distrust of professionals, lax laws, similar "research" and treatment in Europe, and the economic effect of the Roaring 20's and Great Depression (the first) on the populace's resort to cures and rejuvenation. At the conclusion, Brock outlines the legacy and continuation of such trends: in collagen injections, Viagra, and across the border cures for cancer.
Outside of it's medical legacy, Brock emphasizes the links of Brinkley's radio station to as diverse a pop culture spectrum as Johnny Cash, Wolfman Jack and ZZ Top ... bringing me back full circle ... closing with the lyrics of Fandango which refer directly to Brinkley and his station as their muse.
It tells the true story of John R. Brinkley, arch-quack, famous for transplanting goat testicles into men. What! You've never heard of him? And this was the 20's and 30's. (Like many of the biographies I read in 2008 -- specifically Lucia Joyce, Lee Miller, Helle Nice -- Brinkley was famous in our grandparents' generation and virtually ignored and unknown in contemporary culture.)
Brock is an exceptional writer, with harkenings of Mark Twain, but then again, the subject is so ripe for satire and repartee. Two quotes will suffice to illustrate the topic and the author's rendering of it:
"Only the urgency was new, not the idea. Ever since man began to walk upright, he had been obsessed when his penis would not behave likewise ..." And "Quacks have flourished in all ages and cultures, for nothing shows reason the door like cures ... for they unlike most scams which target greed, quackery fires deeper into Jungian universals, our fear of death, our craving for miracles."
Kansas is chosen by Brinkley for his clinic because he wanted to profit from naive people and flourish in a place that was off the beaten track, farther away from his nemesis in Chicago, Morris Fishbein of the AMA's Bureau of Investigations and later editor of JAMA. Brinkley eventually relocates to the Texan border, and once unsuccessfully in Arkansas, but his appeal is beyond the limits of any state (one step ahead of having his bogus medical license pulled by the medical boards).
As he expands into more and more promotion of his cures, Brinkley becomes the precursor of modern day marketing and public relations. He buys megawatt radio stations, eventually setting up the biggest station across the border in Mexico. He is one of the first to broadcast live performers, giving air time to country and western music and credited with making it a bigger part of American culture. After yet another legal setback, Brinkley decides to be a write-in candidate for Governor of Kansas and only loses through typical party election law maneuvering.
As a campaigner, he is noted for being the first candidate to fly to reach the electorate and to use the infamous loud speaker truck. Who knew?
Interwoven with the main theme of medical fraud ... and mass murder ... is the rise of the power of the AMA and regulation of the licensing of doctors and curtailing of bogus cures. Brock sets the book in its historical context, explaining the Jacksonian rise of distrust of professionals, lax laws, similar "research" and treatment in Europe, and the economic effect of the Roaring 20's and Great Depression (the first) on the populace's resort to cures and rejuvenation. At the conclusion, Brock outlines the legacy and continuation of such trends: in collagen injections, Viagra, and across the border cures for cancer.
Outside of it's medical legacy, Brock emphasizes the links of Brinkley's radio station to as diverse a pop culture spectrum as Johnny Cash, Wolfman Jack and ZZ Top ... bringing me back full circle ... closing with the lyrics of Fandango which refer directly to Brinkley and his station as their muse.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Displaced: Crazy School by Cornelia Read
This is the second time I've read this book in a year. One of our blog members is big on this book, having recommended it to me twice -- when I was recuperating last year as an "easy read," and then again for our Massachusetts selection. I don't like it any better this time than I did last winter.
I've been reading the Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch and thought I could use it as an instrument to fillet Crazy School, evidencing that Madeline Dare, Read's alter ego (check the anagram last name), is narcissistic and that Read herself writes only to be adulated. But the book is a novel, not an autobiography ... as if you can't do web research to find the commonality between author and character. Read likes to be "rough," to swear and smoke and rage with the best of them, all the while trying her darnedest to turn the phrase "just so" to seem with it and witty. Sounds too contrived and effected to me.
Madeline is a theatrical teacher who can regale her naive students with tales of hippies, hitch hikers, and felons on the run, who all visit her parents house where drugs, manufactured and herbal, are there for the asking, as are the joys to be garnered from the latest Californian self-realization craze.
Read makes the point that the teachers are equally if not more disturbed than the kids: addicts themselves with shady, criminal pasts. The owner of the school is portrayed as being completely theatrical and foppish, self-centered, money grubbing, you name it. So I guess her point is we're all crazy. Let's love it, hug our best friend, and move on.
The book is set in western Massachusetts where the school for terribly troubled children is located, evoking the real life Berkshire School. But Madeline comes from Long Island blue blood diluted by too much acid, etc, from California dreamin'. The school could be in Oregon for all it matters to the author, given her need to bask in her psychedelic, "we have money" upbringing. (OK, Read does have throw away references to the Stockbridge police and Arlo.)
I find the book not especially contributing to our search for the meaning and relevance of location and the story lacking a reflective history and hopeful future. Only at the very end of the book is one character's motivation for working at the school fully articulated by what had happened previously to him and his family. None of the "crazy" kids are explored in terms of the causes of their acting out or on how the school or Madeline, as it's most dedicated teacher, intends to get them ready for their future lives. Hence, the author dismisses them be having them die, get transferred to another institution, or runaway, without so much as a picture on a milk box.
The more I thought about it, there is a strong theme of displacement throughout the story: the teachers have been recruited from far and wide and the teenagers come from other special schools across the nation. Parents, some at least, fly in for visiting day and then jet off to vacation meccas. No one has local roots. The "community" that is forced onto the students discourages bonding and fellowship. All conversations are games people play, laced with venom or therapeutic echoes. So maybe there is something for the Slackers to garner from Crazy School: potential is not fully realized and relationships found lacking when people are compelled to be where they don't want to be, doing futile work for others with whom they choose not to meaningfully engage.
I've been reading the Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch and thought I could use it as an instrument to fillet Crazy School, evidencing that Madeline Dare, Read's alter ego (check the anagram last name), is narcissistic and that Read herself writes only to be adulated. But the book is a novel, not an autobiography ... as if you can't do web research to find the commonality between author and character. Read likes to be "rough," to swear and smoke and rage with the best of them, all the while trying her darnedest to turn the phrase "just so" to seem with it and witty. Sounds too contrived and effected to me.
Madeline is a theatrical teacher who can regale her naive students with tales of hippies, hitch hikers, and felons on the run, who all visit her parents house where drugs, manufactured and herbal, are there for the asking, as are the joys to be garnered from the latest Californian self-realization craze.
Read makes the point that the teachers are equally if not more disturbed than the kids: addicts themselves with shady, criminal pasts. The owner of the school is portrayed as being completely theatrical and foppish, self-centered, money grubbing, you name it. So I guess her point is we're all crazy. Let's love it, hug our best friend, and move on.
The book is set in western Massachusetts where the school for terribly troubled children is located, evoking the real life Berkshire School. But Madeline comes from Long Island blue blood diluted by too much acid, etc, from California dreamin'. The school could be in Oregon for all it matters to the author, given her need to bask in her psychedelic, "we have money" upbringing. (OK, Read does have throw away references to the Stockbridge police and Arlo.)
I find the book not especially contributing to our search for the meaning and relevance of location and the story lacking a reflective history and hopeful future. Only at the very end of the book is one character's motivation for working at the school fully articulated by what had happened previously to him and his family. None of the "crazy" kids are explored in terms of the causes of their acting out or on how the school or Madeline, as it's most dedicated teacher, intends to get them ready for their future lives. Hence, the author dismisses them be having them die, get transferred to another institution, or runaway, without so much as a picture on a milk box.
The more I thought about it, there is a strong theme of displacement throughout the story: the teachers have been recruited from far and wide and the teenagers come from other special schools across the nation. Parents, some at least, fly in for visiting day and then jet off to vacation meccas. No one has local roots. The "community" that is forced onto the students discourages bonding and fellowship. All conversations are games people play, laced with venom or therapeutic echoes. So maybe there is something for the Slackers to garner from Crazy School: potential is not fully realized and relationships found lacking when people are compelled to be where they don't want to be, doing futile work for others with whom they choose not to meaningfully engage.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Little Black Sheep Who Have Gone Astray: God and Man at Yale, by William F. Buckley
There is a lot more economics in this book than I expected. What a juxtaposition after reading, A New Era of Responsibility, the federal budget for 2010, itself the arch-Keynesian encyclical.
As a newly minted Yale graduate of 24 (after spending two years in the military), Buckley, who had been editor of the Yalie Daily, challenged the board of his Alma Mater for reneging its founding principles: to instill a moral, Christian ethic in its students and to foster a dedication to the principles of personal, democratic freedom, especially with regard to self-determination through work and its financial rewards. He names names of professors who as agnostics taught in the religion department and of socialists who advocated the demise of capitalism, all with the tacit approval of the President, alumni and governing trustees. He extensively quotes from textbooks where authors "talk about desirable government action, appropriate social policies, just economic goals ... the obsolescence of individualism and the waning of free enterprise and capitalism." And this was written in 1950 and not last week? GAMAY even quotes sections of textbooks that advocate huge national deficits, as long as the debt is not held by other countries. Uh oh.
Okay, before I go any further, I assume I have to talk about this book in terms of the blog's resolution to read about "place." GAMAY is the Connecticut book and Buckley scarcely writes about New Haven. (At least when we get to the essay on Ct in State by State, Rick Moody writes about why he loves the Merritt Parkway). Buckley does not reminisce about the Yale Bowl, carillons or promenades. He is not concerned about dining halls or the tables down at Morey's (which has declared bankruptcy, by the way, possibly causing the Whiffenpoofs to lose their way even more).
But the book surely depicts an intellectual domain, an ivory tower with no strong, true underpinnings. It is populated with villains: skillful, smart lecturers who stand before hundreds of young men pitching their personal biases and beliefs interspersed with curriculum, under the winking eye of an institutional administration that believes in laissez faire education. Buckley points out that many of these students are overly impressionable, unable yet to discern and assess professorial opinions which are conveyed in classrooms as authoritative tenets.
Buckley is an Our Town narrator, or better yet, a Dickensian narrator, describing horrors that no one wants to acknowledge and no one believes will ripple back in unintended consequences, deleterious to Yale and the country as a whole.
I want my 23 year old son to read the book, or at least the sections I've underlined. Nearing the end of his second year in college, he is considering majoring in psychology and minoring in philosophy and transferring to a larger university. I have told him that things have only gotten worse since 1950 ... that it is almost impossible to find educators who are not glaring, broadly liberal. I mention that a school with a strong religious affiliation would be less likely to divorce philosophy from morals and extol situational ethics. I reread Buckley's introduction that he wrote for the 25th anniversary of GAMAY's publication to see if he was even more discouraged by the state of higher education.
I am predisposed to liking this book. I "religiously" watched Firing Line on PBS and sat enrapt when he came to speak at my college. Those tics that annoyed so many I found endearing -- his smile and uplifted eyebrow that facially challenged his guest/opponent to come back with a strong rebuttal to his erudite argument. (This wasn't a hormonal reaction; no one less than George Will in his tribute to Buckley when he died last year mentioned his grin as being right up there with Jack Nicholson's.)
So forgive me Slackers, from taking you off our Route 66 and into the paths around ivy-covered buildings. Maybe it's fitting that the book I have teed up next is Crazy School.
As a newly minted Yale graduate of 24 (after spending two years in the military), Buckley, who had been editor of the Yalie Daily, challenged the board of his Alma Mater for reneging its founding principles: to instill a moral, Christian ethic in its students and to foster a dedication to the principles of personal, democratic freedom, especially with regard to self-determination through work and its financial rewards. He names names of professors who as agnostics taught in the religion department and of socialists who advocated the demise of capitalism, all with the tacit approval of the President, alumni and governing trustees. He extensively quotes from textbooks where authors "talk about desirable government action, appropriate social policies, just economic goals ... the obsolescence of individualism and the waning of free enterprise and capitalism." And this was written in 1950 and not last week? GAMAY even quotes sections of textbooks that advocate huge national deficits, as long as the debt is not held by other countries. Uh oh.
Okay, before I go any further, I assume I have to talk about this book in terms of the blog's resolution to read about "place." GAMAY is the Connecticut book and Buckley scarcely writes about New Haven. (At least when we get to the essay on Ct in State by State, Rick Moody writes about why he loves the Merritt Parkway). Buckley does not reminisce about the Yale Bowl, carillons or promenades. He is not concerned about dining halls or the tables down at Morey's (which has declared bankruptcy, by the way, possibly causing the Whiffenpoofs to lose their way even more).
But the book surely depicts an intellectual domain, an ivory tower with no strong, true underpinnings. It is populated with villains: skillful, smart lecturers who stand before hundreds of young men pitching their personal biases and beliefs interspersed with curriculum, under the winking eye of an institutional administration that believes in laissez faire education. Buckley points out that many of these students are overly impressionable, unable yet to discern and assess professorial opinions which are conveyed in classrooms as authoritative tenets.
Buckley is an Our Town narrator, or better yet, a Dickensian narrator, describing horrors that no one wants to acknowledge and no one believes will ripple back in unintended consequences, deleterious to Yale and the country as a whole.
I want my 23 year old son to read the book, or at least the sections I've underlined. Nearing the end of his second year in college, he is considering majoring in psychology and minoring in philosophy and transferring to a larger university. I have told him that things have only gotten worse since 1950 ... that it is almost impossible to find educators who are not glaring, broadly liberal. I mention that a school with a strong religious affiliation would be less likely to divorce philosophy from morals and extol situational ethics. I reread Buckley's introduction that he wrote for the 25th anniversary of GAMAY's publication to see if he was even more discouraged by the state of higher education.
I am predisposed to liking this book. I "religiously" watched Firing Line on PBS and sat enrapt when he came to speak at my college. Those tics that annoyed so many I found endearing -- his smile and uplifted eyebrow that facially challenged his guest/opponent to come back with a strong rebuttal to his erudite argument. (This wasn't a hormonal reaction; no one less than George Will in his tribute to Buckley when he died last year mentioned his grin as being right up there with Jack Nicholson's.)
So forgive me Slackers, from taking you off our Route 66 and into the paths around ivy-covered buildings. Maybe it's fitting that the book I have teed up next is Crazy School.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Potomac River Rats: River, Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke
Sorry, Hamagrael, I did not like the book. Love the scenes of G'town. Made me think of the times you and I walked everywhere peeking into everyone's windows. I can still see you walking and riding your bike along theses streets daily, dodging cars that seem determined to knock you down. As I wrote you already, it is disheartening to know that the great great etc etc grandparents of the rats that get into your house where there during the Coolidge administration. It's Georgetown, but is it Georgetown of 1925?
I couldn't get into the characters. As we discussed in book club Tuesday, the people in Song Yet Sung drew the readers into their lives. The author strung together multiple conflicts across the Eastern shore; Clarke's story is extremely simple. In the Maryland book, we were all concerned about what was going to happen to them next. One member even went to far as to look ahead 40 or so pages to see if a character's name was still showing up. In DC book, new characters show up randomly as the story moves along, the beautician, the visiting post-partum nurse, without them becoming important or integral.
I was recently thinking about novel structure and trying to tease out in our books what is the critical incident in the plot as opposed to things that happen to move the story along or to parallel that key action. Because, I think, that critical incident, informs the decision of why the author wrote the book in the first place. I believe Clarke would say her actionable event is Rat's drowning and what it means to Johnnie May. However, everything that ensues from the drowning is passive. Confrontations are muted if not averted: her parents never ask for details; no one of authority follows up when she breaks into the all-White swimming pool; when her stepfather takes her to Union Station to send JM back to North Carolina, Alice's stance is contained, even though Clarke describes it as breaking social norms. When JM runs away after her sister's haint in the station, the readers do not know where she went or what happened as a result of her vision.
I'm reminded of my son's friends in college tossing all the books they had to read for their required English course into the fireplace because the professor selected nothing but books from Oprah's book recommendations. I guess that is the kiss of death and seeing that highlighted on the cover of the book should have warned me. I think O wants her audience to get more sympathy for African American roots. Yes, I did learn about early black history in G'town and its draw for Southerners who wanted to be self-sufficient. I already had a sense of place and know I like it there and want to return so I did not even garner a new "must-go-to" spot from reading this book.
I couldn't get into the characters. As we discussed in book club Tuesday, the people in Song Yet Sung drew the readers into their lives. The author strung together multiple conflicts across the Eastern shore; Clarke's story is extremely simple. In the Maryland book, we were all concerned about what was going to happen to them next. One member even went to far as to look ahead 40 or so pages to see if a character's name was still showing up. In DC book, new characters show up randomly as the story moves along, the beautician, the visiting post-partum nurse, without them becoming important or integral.
I was recently thinking about novel structure and trying to tease out in our books what is the critical incident in the plot as opposed to things that happen to move the story along or to parallel that key action. Because, I think, that critical incident, informs the decision of why the author wrote the book in the first place. I believe Clarke would say her actionable event is Rat's drowning and what it means to Johnnie May. However, everything that ensues from the drowning is passive. Confrontations are muted if not averted: her parents never ask for details; no one of authority follows up when she breaks into the all-White swimming pool; when her stepfather takes her to Union Station to send JM back to North Carolina, Alice's stance is contained, even though Clarke describes it as breaking social norms. When JM runs away after her sister's haint in the station, the readers do not know where she went or what happened as a result of her vision.
I'm reminded of my son's friends in college tossing all the books they had to read for their required English course into the fireplace because the professor selected nothing but books from Oprah's book recommendations. I guess that is the kiss of death and seeing that highlighted on the cover of the book should have warned me. I think O wants her audience to get more sympathy for African American roots. Yes, I did learn about early black history in G'town and its draw for Southerners who wanted to be self-sufficient. I already had a sense of place and know I like it there and want to return so I did not even garner a new "must-go-to" spot from reading this book.
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