something about "The Great Debate" by Yuval Levin

Politics makes for especially caustic conversation in America these days. We discuss political polarization because we wonder if honest bipartisanship is dead and if we are headed for a point of no return. We sometimes seem violently rabid in our views; then we wonder if we have always been like this.

Whatever the case, Yuval Levin lays down some historical context for today's American Left-Right binary. Representing the founder of conservatism, Levin shows us Edmund Burke (1729-1797), widely credited as the founding philosophical Conservative. Levin briefly introduces the Dublin-born author, politician, and philosopher, then paraphrases Burke's political ideology, drawing largely from Burke's writings on the American and French Revolutions.

Representing the modern American Left is Thomas Paine (1737-1736). Steeped in both the American and French revolutions, the English-born Paine authored the (in)famous pamphlet "Common Sense," which, to many, inspired the rebels' declaration of independence from Britain in 1776. Levin paraphrases Paine, drawing from his American Revolution writings and his defense of the bloody French Revolution.

In The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Levin devotes more time to Burke, largely using Paine to further refine an explanation of Burke's views. But Levin does not misrepresent Paine, exactly, so no real harm done. And Pain's shortchange comes as no suprise--Yuval Levin is a conservative intellectual born in Israel who founded National Affairs.

By the end of The Great Debate, Burke's and Paine's stances were so qualified, excepted, and nuanced as to be ripe for accusations of inconsistency and flip-flopping. Same old, same old.

something about Yngwie Malmsteen's "Relentless: The Memoir"

Yngwie Malmsteen rips up the fretboard, exacting from his guitars a patented metallic neo-classical dazzle. And he is versatile, being more than capable of playing blues, composing classical scores, writing lyrics, arrangements, anything. But shredding classical-style is his bread and butter.

The guy's seemingly limitless ability is matched only by his unlimited ego. And in Relentless, Malmsteen plays us briskly through his life's song, tooting his own horn all along way.

Malmsteen starts with his childhood in Sweden, where at a young age he zeroed-in on guitar and practiced and played his way into the local music scene. After entering his recordings in a guitar magazine contest, he was recruited to play in an American band. Not one to stand stageside, Malmsteen quickly established himself as a musical entity unto himself. His is not a fascinating history, really, but he is a unique-enough guy to make it worthwhile to listen to his version of it. That is, it is worthwhile if you like rock autobiographies and are not bothered by the company of an elitist prick.


Note:

• While Malmsteen's playing is universally acknowledged for its technical brilliance, the sound is often dismissed as "souless."
• He spends a good chunk of time late in the book admiring his custom equipment. He shamelessly endorses anything and everything with his name on it.

 

About self

We spoke first in terms of the soul and the vessel, then the spirit and the flesh, and then the mind and body. Now we speak in terms of identity and biology.

the lyrics to "Custom Concern"

Their custom concern for the people
Build up the monuments and steeples
To wear out our eyes
I get up just about noon
My head sends a message for me
to reach for my shoes then walk
Gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job
Goes through the parking lot fields
Doesn't see no signs that they will yield
And then thought, this'll never end
This'll never end, this'll never stop
Message read on the bathroom wall
Says, "I don't feel at all like I fall."
And we're losing all touch, losing all touch
Building a desert

Children

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

something about Urban Waite's "The Terror of Living"

Urban Waite debuts with The Terror of Living: A Novel, a story of a chase sparked by greed, desperation, cruelty, and chance. The Terror of Living resembles Cormac McCarthy's 1997 hit, No Country for Old Men. So much so that I found Waite's rendition a little tedious. Waite's dialect-saturated narrative relies on a calculated use of demonstrative pronouns to achieve rural down-home authenticity; it all rang false for me. Waite has been recognized for this novel and another titled The Carrion Birds. Here he just simulates the McCarthy experience badly.

a paste: "Something and Not"

 "Something and Not"
  - By Ellie Tipton

We kept walking that day, further than the last.
Somehow the pond was here.

The dense monochromatic heatwave
hovering on the path

so that it bent the air with weight
or atomic gnats.

We left our lovers.
We left ourselves.

How we looked as children –
how we looked as children filling in the silence.

We felt such great emphasis
when the cat-tails furred and shed seed.

When the rains came for days and days –
a skein of sewer run-off iridesced on the surface.

We wanted all this. And the tree-root
became the place where we asked for more.

This had everything to do with us becoming perfect.
And much later, the world —

Think of someone you love. Someone who is so essential that you forget they live. Whose presence looms so large in your life that you take them for granted. Someone who, it's only when they're gone, that you really understand what they mean to you.

Imagine that person far away. Imagine that person being told to wear an orange jumpsuit. Imagine that person positioned before a high-definition camera in the desert. Then imagine that person forced to their knees. Imagine, dressed head to toe in black, a zealot with a bright knife. The zealot, with a hand on your loved one's shoulder, speaks to the camera and says he has no choice. Your loved one will die and no one will be responsible and no one could have done anything differently.

Imagine the zealot puts the knife to the throat of your beloved and cuts through the skin, tears into the muscles, saws through the tendons, and hits bone. Imagine your loved one gurgling, blood urging out. That's how they die.

"Smashed"

I can't be sober and be with you-

about an interplanetary low

This is a test. In a few minutes the siren will trail off and the bullhorn will thank us for participating. Tests, drills: these occur every other day now. Strap on the oxygen mask, help mask others, duck, preferably under something sturdy.

What good will it do? None. Life here will end. Hard to imagine a time not so long ago when we rocketed ourselves to this place in hopes of making a life together.

about Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations"

Properly titled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, this fundamental economic opus is the work of brilliant Scottish polymath, Adam Smith. Published in 1776 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, The Wealth of Nations describes the classical liberal, capitalist economy as a largely self-maintaining economic model built on free enterprise and individual pursuits of self-interest.

Smith's work is canonical, but a surprise nevertheless. This encyclopedic monster often reads like an in-depth high-school economics text book. But the dry writing (or dry translation of the writing) masks lots of fascinating bites, like Smith's views on colonialism and slavery, for example. He kicks off by crediting the development of the division of labor as the greatest single factor in nations' increasing productivity.

That one man could organize his thoughts and lay them out like this is a marvel. Nothing short of incredible.

The Wealth of Nations is the cornerstone of modern conservative free-market philosophy. I read a two-volume set produced by a private foundation called Liberty Fund, which, according to their website, seeks "to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. The Foundation (sic) develops, supervises, and finances its own educational activities to foster thought and encourage discourse on enduring issues pertaining to liberty."

a young George H. W. Bush

bloody roots

Some people talk a lot about their humble beginnings so that when you see how they act now, you won't despise them; you'll admire them.

will she ever stop talking?

There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time,
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more: it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.

"The Lost Boys"

 
You'll never grow old, Michael. And you'll never die.

about "A Land More Kind Than Home" by Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash might know the kinds of people he writes about in his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, but the voices of his first-person narrators sound affected. To channel small-town North Carolina folk, Wiley carpet bombs the narration's sixth grade-level speech with double negatives and other idiomatic devices. This impression, omnipresent from the outset, hampered my enjoying the read. Beyond that, the action is largely predictable and the characters flat. Three voices narrate the plot: a young boy, an old woman, and a late middle-aged sheriff.

A fundamentalist, snake-handling minister is the villain; the protagonists are individually overmatched against him. But together the confluence of choices people make leave the villain dead and the fallen redeemed. A Land More Kind Than Home isn't a bad book, necessarily. It's just immature.

about the airport Christmas Eve

from "I Never sang For My Father"

Death ends a life. But it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some resolution which it may never find.

about how every song is a ballad

 
"Punk rock should mean freedom: liking and excepting anything that you like, playing whatever you want, as sloppy as you want, as long as it's good and it has passion."
  -Kurt Cobain

about "[sic]" by Joshua Cody

 
When he was about to receive his doctorate, doctors diagnosed noted young composer Joshua Cody with an aggressive cancer. The memoir-ish [sic] documents without form Cody's life and death struggle; hold the book in your hands, open to just about any page, and be treated to some trivia or personal revelation or philosophical reflection. This nonlinear form was well received by a lot of critics. Not all readers will agree.

I recognize the stakes were profound and, for that, a reader can indulge his author; but Cody really challenged my limits. I got bored and lost interest in Cody's scrapbook of a memoir. The value of this book, for me, anyway, is that, if you're not into "reading" lately, you can keep this book around for a week or so and poke around in it as you wait for sleep.

How can I write this about a memoir written by a dying man? I wait for sleep. Not everyone else does.