Acquisitions, September 5-11

• Gary Alan Fine, With the Boys: Little League Baseball and Preadolescent Culture (University of Chicago pb) -- I'll use this superb book in my sociology class, as I have before. (Amazon, used)
• Peter Rabe, Stop This Man! (Hard Case Crime pb) (Hard Case Crime Book Club)
• Joshua Kaplan, Political Theory: The Classic Texts and Their Continuing Relevance -- Course Guide (Recorded Books LLC) (Recorded Books)
  

Acquisitions, August 29-September 4

I only bought a couple of items for use in class, this week. I can't buy much for myself until I see a paycheck from the new job -- and probably well beyond that; the cross-country move wiped me out financially. I fear that in the New America, you have to pay dearly simply to have a job at all. I don't know what I would have done this year if I hadn't had savings and hadn't gotten a generous severance package: I might have found a new job but been unable to take it. Even simply looking for a job cost me in the thousands of dollars, and the relocation cost many thousands more, all of it unreimbursed. There is a tax benefit due to me next year because of the job search and relocation adjustments the IRS permits (thank heaven), but future tax benefit is not a substitute for needed cash-in-hand. On that front, I just squeaked by.

• Georges Perec, A Void (tr. Gilbert Adair) (Harvill hc) (Amazon)
  
• Don Chaffey, Jason and the Argonauts (Columbia DVD) (Barnes & Noble)
  

"Plush"

I'm starting my English classes on rock song lyrics, since they offer a certain accessibility. We began with Oasis's "Wonderwall," which has a nuanced but not overly difficult lyric. I think I will try Stone Temple Pilot's "Plush" next with my advanced English class, since it does have a challenging lyric. This acoustic version, with Scott Weiland in excellent voice, shows off the words very well:

Acquisitions, August 22-28

I checked out the location of Mom's Books & Gifts in Carson City. It was apparently a real used bookstore, but it closed in May. There appears to be a concentration of used bookstores in South Lake Tahoe, California, a half-hour trip which I will undertake one of these weekends once I've started to receive paychecks.

• Neil Kagan, National Geographic Concise History of the World: An Illustrated Timeline (National Geographic hc) -- This will help me in planning my World History class. (Amazon, used)
• Oasis, Stop the Clocks (Reprise, 2 CDs)
  

Acquisitions, August 15-21

Just a couple of items this week:

• Russell Atwood, Losers Live Longer (Hard Case Crime pb) (Hard Case Crime Book Club)
• William Shakespeare, Richard III (London, 4 LPs) (Ebay)
  

Mission Accomplished

Former Majority Leader Tom DeLay to Join 'Dancing With the Stars' -- Fox News headline, August 17, 2009

The fusion of the celebrity culture, the political culture, and the media complex, long worked toward, is now complete. There is no point in debating the "public option," the war in Afghanistan, etc., because none of it means anything anymore; it's all bread and circuses from here on out.

My brother has commented shrewdly on the emergence of a "new genre" of person, exemplified by Rod and Patty Blagojevich, Nadya Suleman, Glenn Beck, Jon and Kate Gosselin, and Sarah Palin: whackos who "act out" in public with absolutely no sense of shame, and who get paid big sums to do it, because our appetite for the outrageous is insatiable. We just buried their forerunner and patron saint, Michael Jackson; the only key difference being that he actually had some talent to begin with. Now we have reached the point when those who, for better or for worse, are known for other, more important accomplishments -- the DeLays of the world -- want to join this cadre of nutjobs.

It is just sad that the dreams of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton should have come to grief on the shoal of reality television. But the wreckage is visible for all to see.

Acquisitions, August 8-14

Very light week. Book-buying -- and blogging -- have taken a back seat to getting acclimated to my new surroundings and preparing for my new teaching job.

• Marianne Moore, Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (Viking Press hc) -- This appears to be a first edition of one of the last collections by the great American poet published in her lifetime. The book and the dust jacket are in very nice condition. A lovely find for $2.00! (Carson City Public Library)
• Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Fifth Edition (Oxford pb) (CCPL)
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (Simon & Schuster pb) (CCPL)
• Paula Rutherford, Why Didn't I Learn This in College?, Second Edition (Just ASK pb w/CD) -- Educational tricks of the trade, provided by the Douglas County NV School District.
  

The Failures of President Obama

This brilliant essay by Yale English professor David Bromwich astutely sums up the problems a lot of us are having with President Obama lately:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/character-of-barack-obama_b_251186.html

Money quotations:

His instinct is to have all the establishments on his side: Wall Street, the military, the mainstream media; the most profitable corporations in all but the most signally failing industries; and that movable establishment (which disappears and reconstitutes itself), the quick-take pulse of popular opinion on any given issue...The president tries to line up all of his forces, all together -- and do it with so finely tuned an understanding he can't possibly be wrongly portrayed. But while he is working in the background in foreign policy, or leaving things to Congress in domestic affairs, those who are angry, Cheney, Limbaugh, Netanyahu, the big insurers, say what they please. They don't much care whether it is true. The errors "take," as errors will.

Pragmatic justifications have been offered to explain his aversion to any contest that implies a clash of opposing interests. Thus Rahm Emanuel said of the disastrously time-wasting courtship of Republican support for the stimulus package: "The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don't have to succeed." But try every time and you will waste your life...Taken to the circuitous lengths Obama allows, pragmatism is another word for the compulsive propitiation of unnecessary partners. It expands the work and blunts the achievement of reform.

Several months into the president's call for health care reform, [the public's] level of ignorance is his responsibility...Somewhere at the bottom of the missteps of the last few months is a failure to recognize the depth of the popular ignorance a president of the United States confronts on any issue.

The strange thing about Obama is that he seems to suppose a community can pass directly from the sense of real injustice to a full reconciliation between the powerful and the powerless, without any of the unpleasant intervening collisions. This is a choice of emphasis that suits his temperament.

To take control of his presidency, [Obama] must give up the ambition to serve as the national moderator, the pronouncer on everything...If the public option in health care reform is finally defeated, Obama will not soon recover his credit as a national, a party, or a general-issue leader. To avoid that fate, he will have to grant to politics, mere politics, an importance he has not allowed it thus far.

Acquisitions, August 1-7

I arrived in Carson City last Friday, and although I'm loving it so far, I can't say as the local bookstore scene looks especially promising. Maybe Reno is a smidge better; and I know there are Half Price Books locations in northern California.

Carson City has a Borders that I haven't been to yet; a small bookstore inside the public library; and at least one "paperback trader" type store, Dog-Eared Books. A more promising-looking second-hand store, Comstock Books, hasn't been open on the occasions when I've walked by it, but I'm hopeful that it will be choice. "Mom's Books & Gifts" doesn't sound so promising. The thrift stores could be worth exploring.

• W.H. Auden/Norman Holmes Pearson, Victorian & Edwardian Poets: Tennyson to Yeats (Viking Press pb) (Carson City Public Library)
• Paul Engle/Joseph Langland, Poet's Choice (Time Reading Program pb) -- More than a hundred modern English-language poets choose their favorite specimens of their own work, and explain their preference. (CCPL)
• Philp Sidney, The Old Arcadia (Oxford pb) -- An English prose romance of the late 16th century. (Dog-Eared Books)
  
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Penguin pb) -- The proprietor of Dog-Eared Books sold me these ;ast two volumes for $1.25 apiece, for which I'm most grateful. These were the highlights of the stock, which is thinner than the similar paperback trader stores in Appleton and Green Bay. But I'll stop by again.
  

Intersection: Lemony Snicket / George Romero

They'll eat my feet,
they'll eat my head,
I'm just a meal
for the walking dead.

Song from screenplay for Zombies in the Snow
Featured in Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Biography, Chapter Four

Commonplace Book: Self-Appraisal

[George] Bellows was not a stern critic of his own work; he thought it was fine. What's the good of saying you're worse than you are? Leave that to other people. Maybe it's not the greatest in the world, but compared to the fellow next door, it's pretty good, which is all you have to worry about.

Mahonri Sharp Young, The Paintings of George Bellows

Acquisitions, July 25-31

A final little haul of classic novels from Appleton's Half Price Books.

• Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (tr. Rosemary Edmonds) (Penguin pb) (Half Price Books)
• Madame de Lafayette, The Princesse de Cleves (tr. Nancy Mitford/Leonard Tancock) (Penguin pb) (HPB)
• Andre Gide, The Immoralist (tr. Richard Howard) (Vintage pb) (HPB)
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Penguin pb) (HPB)
• Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (Oxford pb) (HPB)
  

Fun with Mad Men

The folks at AMC have come up with a nifty "create your own Mad Men avatar" utility. Here is mine -- a very fair likeness, I think. I own that exact hat.

Pampering

You can, generally, pamper a dog, a cat, or a cockatiel with pleasure, although your vet would warn you against over-feeding them.

To a certain extent and with a degree of care, you can pamper a small child -- but don't overdo it, because that will create problems later on.

Never pamper an adolescent or adult.

If you know an adolescent who demands pampering, re-train them to the extent you are able. You don't want to have a My Super Sweet Sixteen type on your hands.

If you know an adult who demands pampering, run for the high hills; you cannot get far enough away from that person.

If the adult who demands pampering is your spouse or significant other, what were you thinking? You had to know this going in. Take the advice of Paul Simon: "Drop off the key, Lee,/And get yourself free."

If the adult who demands pampering is your boss, as it often unfortunately is, you've really got a problem.

Failure and Discontent

Our era is perverse in passing off the exception as the rule...The likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not … cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (thanks to John Self of the blog Asylum, in whose review I spotted this quotation)

In America, not least because our media enables it, anything less than spectacular success is accounted as failure -- and, of course, spectacular success itself can be and often is redefined as failure in another way (see: Michael Jackson, Jeffrey Skilling; see even: poor Jennifer Aniston, unlucky in love). As a society we are completely obsessed by failure, and constantly looking for signs for it. Everyone is continually being reviewed and assessed, formally or informally, on their educational, financial, professional, even emotional and sexual attainments (or lack thereof). There is no escape from this for a moment, except to the extent that one can find the "peace within" -- and the general thrust of the outer world we all have to inhabit makes that peace frustratingly difficult to achieve, although definitely worth the pursuit. Take it as axiomatic that no force in society -- marketers are an especially egregious example -- wants you to be happy or content; you would be no use to them that way. Only because you feel yourself a failure will you continue to try to purchase success.

Domestic Migration, Ctd.

Using some U.S. Census data from 2007 that I found online, I've been extrapolating a "rootedness" figure for each state. The two base numbers I use are the percentage of the state's population that is foreign born; and the percentage of the state's population who are native-born Americans who were born in that state. I subtract the first number from 100%, then multiply the result by the second number to get the overall percentage of residents who have roots in the state.

Many states that have a high rate of native-born Americans who were born in the state, and a low rate of domestic in-migration, also have a low rate of foreign in-migration, but not all. New York, Illinois, and California qualify in the first two categories (which may surprise some people), but have very substantial foreign in-migration, especially into their major cities (from which American-born residents are fleeing in droves because of their high cost).

The most rooted state currently is the special case Louisiana, which had an unquestionably odd decade. 79.49% of its residents were born there. But domestic in-migration is picking up there again.

The other most rooted states are in the rust and farm belts: Michigan (75.97%), Pennsylvania (75.11%), Ohio (74.92%), Iowa (72.27%), and my current home state of Wisconsin (71.82%). These states are not popular destinations for native-born Americans or for new immigrants. In the long run, they have little to offer, and they will not develop economically. It is a bizarre but true fact that both North Dakota and South Dakota have lower percentages of residents born in their states than Wisconsin! Over my seven years in this state, I came to realize that no one would want to live here, unless it was the only world they knew. Some of these states would die altogether but for inertia.

On the other end of the spectrum is the state I am moving to this Friday for my new job, Nevada, the least rooted state in America -- only 22.97% (you read correctly) of its residents were born there. Close behind are Florida, as you would expect (33.98%), and Arizona (35.62%). Naturally, these states are works-in-progress, but they have an economic vitality that the Midwest will never challenge again.