This book is celebrated for being evenhanded; I would say that indeed it focuses on the immediate rather than the theoretical. The narrative relays many of the terrors and revulsions of war. But does that make it neutral? No. The book is, however, a valuable document of the war experience from a ground-level, engaged perspective. In With The Old Breed, Eugene Sledge gives us his experiences in the Pacific during World War II, in vicious battle and prolonged rot and anxiety. Sledge describes the horrors, the toll on one's mind, the resentments, prejudices, anxiety, and dehumanization a soldier experiences and witnesses. This book is a closeup. Sledge's disgust for the worst events comes through, but he devotes double that time to recognizing and honoring fellow soldiers. His praise is probably mythification, but for the shit they went through, Sledge's heroes deserve whatever token he can deliver.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 —
Saturday, May 09, 2015
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
