Shameless Self-Promotion: The Devious Crump

Announcing, possibly the greatest mixed-media children's book available in digital formats for people of all ages created by me, Gas Lantern's Nate Ragolia: The Devious Crump is a picture story, told in stunning words and images. Originally finished in 2009 - 2010, this beautiful little tale is available now in iTunes, Nook Bookstore and Lulu.com for only $5.99. It tells of the titular Devious Crump, a squat, pointy little monster that hypnotizes people and animals to steal from them. He's a mischievous little bugger. All seems well and good in the Crump's friendless, thieving little world until the day he tries to steal flowers from Jean Elamoo and discovers that not only is she immune to his magic, swirling eyes, disguises and tricks, but she also hides a secret that could lead the Crump to his untimely demise. Oh what will become of that Devious Crump?

Normally, I'd shy away from writing about outside creative projects, but the Crump is something that I'm quite proud of, and hope to share with readers who love original, off-kilter art, and a cute, storybook-style narrative. I submit it for your digestion and hopeful approval. Check out some pages from the book below, and consider giving it a shot. Or, maybe just passing it along to a child-ful family near you. Thank you, and I promise I will never promote in this space again... until there's something new to promote. ;)

All words and images Copyright Nate Ragolia 2009 - 2012

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Notable Text: The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman

When are we most ourselves? Chuck Klosterman's The Visible Man proposes that the sole deciding factor is whether or not we are alone. In the text, Klosterman's antagonist/protagonist/mouthpiece called only Y__, espouses a theory that boils down to say: Who we really are is who we never show to the world. It's an intriguing take on the Jean-Paul Sartre philosophy of Existentialism, specifically as demonstrated in his play No Exit. For Y__ and The Visible Man, "Hell is other people" is the utter, complete, scientific truth. Only when we are alone can we be ourselves. The complication, of course, comes because Y__ uses a sort of cloaking technology to observe people in their own homes* when they are alone and "actualized." Klosterman is careful, extremely, to avoid giving us too much insight into the way the cloaking works or even what we're supposed to take from the philosophy that Y__ pushes on counselor Victoria Vick through a series of phone and in-person therapist visits. Most of the time that careful cloaking of the truth within the text works wonderfully, but at other times it detracts from the essential pace and satisfaction-factor of the story. As a result, The Visible Man feels a lot like an essay collection by Mr. Klosterman, full of digressions that are on and off point, some completely analogous, but always elegantly worded. And there's the pop culture references, too. Natch.

The concept and its essential components make this book a quick read. I won't deny that it took less than a week to read, and I found myself in marathon sessions just foaming to find out what would happen next. Y__ spies on, "studying," a few people and each of these short stories, essentially those of watching people in their natural habitats like animals and remarking on their behaviors, were excellent. Klosterman takes his time, crafting lush, but not overly dramatic or overly mundane pictures of real lives. There's the lonely single guy who leaves work just to go home and do nothing on the internet all night. There's a girl who exercises all the time. A boy who talks philosophy with his friends. And more. In a way, it feels like a Richard Linklater film on par with Waking Life, where nothing happens, but through observation and contemplation we learn a lot. Except, in The Visible Man, a lion is occasionally set free into the scene, completely surprising the contemplative characters within, and destroying lives. It's really incredibly suspenseful and complex in a delightful way.

The wheels come off because of the direction Klosterman chooses to take the narrative. Seemingly only because the book could never end without some kind of forced change of course, Klosterman's Vick begins to fall for Y__ and vice versa. It's cliche, and we know that Klosterman knows that it is, but the cliche never becomes self-aware, beyond acknowledging itself. And rather than being a choice red herring, it drives the final pages of the book. Endings are important, and The Visible Man didn't go to a place that agreed with its initial tone. What starts as a thorough, thoughtful case study-cum-thriller becomes bogged down in half-hearted romance and rushed actions and explanations. The excellence and darkness written into the first 3/4 is definitely enough to demand reading this book, and perhaps disappointment won't strike every reader the way it did with me, but as with any mystery (and this novel is one), there's great risk in resolution, no matter what it is.

*I believe there's a section in Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live, or another of his essay collections, in which he talks about his habit of looking into other people's places, specifically when he had an apartment that looked into one of a young woman. He mentions that he's not a voyeur, but that he is just fascinated by how people live in very patterned ways. It felt, to me, to be the essence of this story.

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5 Things We Can Still Learn from Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Despite being a whopping 51 years old, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 remains an American cultural touchstone. Whether you've read it or not, you've been party to its signature Catch-22, now a philosophical concept summing up the old "damned if you do, damned if you don't" paradox. But it's more than the titular catch. Heller's novel, a cornucopia of satire, reaches into the majority of the best (I'll qualify the best as the most critically acclaimed) entertainment in pop culture. You can see Heller's satirical influence in each episode of 30 Rock or Community, as well as inside the best of Wes Anderson's films. Not to mention, of course, the long-running M*A*S*H. Big characters, confusingly chaotic scenarios and conversations that are at once hilarious and revelatory fill the pages of the book. And while Heller keeps things purposefully confusing, mirroring the chaos and nonsensical nature of war, his cartoonish, but believable characters confront stark, horrifying, delightful, and cogent facts about human life. Where The Walking Dead went wrong all over Season 2, spending time discussing the issues directly, Heller's Catch-22 features philosophical developments that come from conversations that aren't even pointed toward such ends. In short, Heller's novel is a finely tuned machine, made so much more obvious by how un-fine and un-tuned World War II is presented.

There are definitely more than 5 total life lessons in Catch-22, but if the internet has taught us anything, it's that we don't much care for long lists, unless they're episodic, include Firefly's Nathan Fillion or Buffy and Dollhouse alum Eliza Dushku, or happen to feature cute animals in cuter-than-or-equally-cute-to hats. So, here are 5 things we can still learn from Catch-22.
 

The List

1. It's crazy to follow the rules all the time, but it's crazy not to follow them sometimes. Yossarian's novel-long quest to get out of the war leads him into numerous confrontations with mission-raising Colonel Cathcart and the titular catch. Our protagonist finds safe and reasonable ways to hide from an unfair war, either by checking into the hospital, running around naked, or escaping into lots of carnal activities with prostitutes and even the wife of one of his commanding officers. Yossarian fears that he's going insane, but he fears dying more, and all of his "crazy" behaviors serve to keep him sane, arguably MORE sane than the rest of his squadron. The trick is that Yossarian also knows when to abide by the rules, too. His moral compass remains finely tuned. He follows the rules of life and of love for humanity, fighting to save Nately's Whore's kid sister, and to punish the men who stand to gain most from unjust situations.
2. People, Places, and Events are always more than meets the eye. The squad camp at Pianosa isn't a well-oiled military machine. It's a summer camp for kids playing as men in uniform. Rank in Catch-22 more often than not gives reason to mistrust rather than to assume experience and clarity of vision. Major Major is promoted just because. Yossarian receives Captain for making a mistake that gets men killed. Colonels Cathcart and Korn want only to become Generals for the title, not because they wish to serve better. Milo's syndicate is a business in name only, an elaborate scheme of moving materials to make him a personal profit and get whatever he wants. Even the squadron is not a cohesive group, a team. Instead it's a random assortment of ill-fitting pieces. Of course, then there's Washington Irving, the Chaplain, the soldier in white and the soldier who saw everything twice. For Heller the world is not what it seems, capped perfectly with Orr's epic escape from war by crashing on purpose and the disguises Nately's Whore wears as she pursues Yossarian.
3. Capitalism and other institutions are often blanket excuses for free-reign corruption. Milo's syndicate runs amok, even playing both sides of the war, helping the Germans attack while coordinating a bombing on the Germans by the Americans. For Milo, it's always a matter of business. Business excuses all trespasses. The Military within the text operates the same way, built as a mechanism for high-ranking ladder-climbing, rather than as a system to keep men from harms way unless absolutely necessary. The fringes of society provide the most clarity, from the old man in the brothel, who tells Nately that Italy will outlast America in history, to the halls and wards of the hospital where men and boys at war are most free to be human.
4. Death is Life. Life is Death. The key revelation for Yossarian comes from trying to save Snowden. It's the moment Heller calls Snowden's secret. And it's a secret only because we choose so often and constantly to ignore it. When Yossarian removes Snowden's flak jacket and the boy's viscera spill onto the bomber's floor, he is confronted with the truth of life. Life is a means of conveyance toward Death. No matter what our bodies show on the outside, youth, beauty, virility, survival, we are always dying. It's that moment that flips the switch in Yossarian that he won't fly anymore. He doesn't want to speed himself toward death, knowing full well that he's already on that trajectory. Heller's work with this sub-story specifically links to Julia Kristeva's Approaching Abjection. For Kristeva, we hate the things we hate because they remind us of our own mortality, limitations and failings. We, and Yossarian, are horrified by the sight of Snowden's drizzling entrails not because they look bad, but because we realize in that moment that we have that inside us, and that there's very little holding it in. We are weak, and we will die, no matter what we tell ourselves. 
5. It's better to die running toward what you love, than live a lie. It's the key message to the book's final pages. Yossarian has the option to return to the States, a rich, honored man, but he must tell everyone how heroic his experience of war was. To be free, Cathcart and Korn force him to maintain a horrible illusion. It's really an illusion we still maintain to this day, through war films and video games. We glorify battle and the destruction of enemies that are inherently "evil." Toughness and manliness have violence as a necessary quality. But, Yossarian chooses to avoid that lie. He chooses to run away, fighting a harder battle than the one he would fight by staying in the war, but one that is moral and guided by self-preservation and basic humanity. Given the options, he makes the infinitely more difficult choice. There's a chance that he could have returned to the States and never spoken to anyone about the war ever again, but simply by being there, recognized as a hero, he would be validating all of the corruption he fights throughout the text. The message is clear, go for what you love, and don't settle for the deal that keeps you comfortable, especially when your eternal soul is the bargaining chip.

What's perhaps most sad is that the lessons we should have learned from this text and from World War II continue to go unheeded. And more so, the satire that Heller proposes throughout the text is more and more realistic every day.

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Notable Text: Eating the Dinosaur

Chuck Klosterman is a genius. I won't mince words here because it's just fact. I even wrote a comic about him. While I haven't devoured his entire literary catalog (I have previously read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story.) but there are few, if any writers I enjoy reading, and rereading more. Klosterman uniquely parallels popular culture phenomenons and always finds incredible insight within the things we overlook as mere mundane trappings of modern American existence. It's his unique eye and unique mind that combine to forge such witty, and evocative, prose. So, being a cheap, currently freelance writer, I waited and then snatched up the paperback version of Eating the Dinosaur from Denver's beautiful Tattered Cover Bookstore, and went headlong into consuming it's wordy filling. The book is good. I always write about things that I like, mostly. So, no surprises here, Chuck Klosterman did it again. But, instead of heaping praise on the worthy (mostly because he doesn't seem to believe he is worthy of praise), let's break this book down a bit.

First thing: Klosterman has appeared numerous times on Bill Simmons' BS Report podcasts for ESPN. He is generally a soundboard and an antagonist, questioning many of Simmons' established loves among the sports world, but more so, Klosterman advances his pop culture awareness into sports, not just as comparisons or metaphors, but as analysis. I suggest listening to his appearances on that podcast at your earliest convenience. It also affords the unique opportunity to hear the author's voice, which, for me, enhances the reading of his text by making it additionally conversational.

Back to the book. Eating the Dinosaur is comprised of 16 essays covering the meaning and ethos of interviewing (which also serves as the framing theme throughout the book), Nirvana as they related to the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, time travel, cars, road trips, laugh tracks, football, ABBA and generational-relation in advertising. And there's more! What would YOU pay for such a collection? Wait, don't answer yet! No, seriously, shut up and don't answer yet. Klosterman tackles such a disparate range of topics, but brings them all back to their cultural significance. The questions in here are things like: Why do we answer interview questions? Do we every answer honestly? Why do we tie artistic significance to commercial failure? Why do we judge some athletes as busts? What does a road trip movie mean to/do for us? Do we know what's funny anymore? And several more. These are big questions. Huge, in fact, because they are right there in front of us all the time, but we don't often ask them.

Klosterman stops short of saying it outright, but I see the book as a treatise on authenticity. We, as humans, and especially as fortunate, affluent Americans, seek authenticity in all things. We want our music to be artful and real, our cars to be strong, fast, and energetic, our athletes to be competitive superheroes, and our advertising to be focused on us, since we know it isn't a staple of truth. We want things to be authentic because we are so often surround by parody, pastiche and irony. We gravitate toward music that seems genuine, and we immediately despise music that seems the opposite (even when it is entirely honest and genuine--Klosterman makes some good points about why fans of Weezer hate everything the band now composes). When Klosterman talks about Kurt Cobain composing In Utero as a direct attempt at authenticity (to resist his band's huge fandom) it never seemed inauthentic to us because we wanted to like Nirvana. But to Cobain, that love and subsequent commercial success, broke his plan to be authentic on his own terms.

Klosterman discusses ABBA in similar terms, that despite their singing in a second language and miming the musical style of '70s disco, they were so far from their audience (Sweden to the U.S.) that it was possible to maintain a type of authenticity that keeps their musical legacy from being tarnished. Essentially, as Klosterman aptly establishes, we are a society so used to employing and observing irony that genuine, authentic work seems foreign to us. Yet, we still crave it, even if we don't always like what comes out of it. What makes us authentically human? Are we not, largely, composites of pop culture references and dreams we think we're supposed to have? It isn't a question asked in Eating the Dinosaur, but it's a question I have to ask.

Are we merely composites of pop culture? Yes. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. I look at it this way, I can bond with almost anyone via my knowledge of The Simpsons. It is, strangely, one of the ways I gauge the personalities of people I meet. If someone gets the reference, then I figure, almost immediately, that we will get along, at least on a cursory level. I think we all have these sorts of languages. Fans of LOST, for instance, or Heroes, or any of the litany of reality, talent competitions, all have a bond that pretty much locks things in first meetings. This is a lot like Nick Hornby's (and John Cusack's) High Fidelity, where people are, at least early on, judged based on what they like. I don't think the judgment is necessary (or correct), but we do establish an incredible amount of our personalities through our music, our movies, our cars, our sports heroes. Does that make us each inauthentic? Not in a world where the rules for establishing the "real you" leans on what you know and what you do. We aren't beings defined by sessility, instead we are defined by our interests and our actions. So, the most authentic thing seems to be doing what you want, rather than doing what may be more "authentic."

Klosterman closes the book with an essay on the Unabomber. It's an interesting choice, a very bold one, given that most people would not be able to look at such a character academically. The essay centers on the Unabomber's manifesto against technology, and deals with the authenticity, ultimately, of human beings. Technology can break us, enslave us, and bring us to believe that we are more free than we are. Klosterman agrees with some of the claims, and I can't help but agree myself. Here I am writing a blog to put on the internet among an infinite field of other similar writings. The technology allows me to share, but it also devalues this work because anyone could do something similar, and people do, and really no one cares. So is this work, this review, and this blog more authentic because I don't think anyone reads it, or cares to? Not really.

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Notable Text: Invisible Monsters

Invisible Monsters came out back in 1999. It's Chuck Palahniuk's third novel, and his only to be published only in paperback form. Interesting that a novel about image, escapism and recapturing individualism through extreme means would receive only the basic publication treatment; never getting a full hardcover look, but holding somehow to the adage about not judging books by their covers. So I'll start this minor academic deconstruction with that cover (or at least the cover of the copy I read) which features what I'll call a "princess-old hag" piece of artwork. When oriented one way, it's a princess, marked over mouth and chin with spattered pink (appropriately) and the other way, it's a notably unattractive older woman (with the spattered pink now in the forehead). Just with the cover, Invisible Monsters presents its internal dichotomy: shattered beauty v. shattered mentality. Which of the two images is most tragic is hard to say, but that's the underlying theme of the book. (Go ahead and do a head-stand to see the other image. I won't tell anybody.)

The novel opens in a chaotic, fast-changing scene where characters we don't know are all apparently on the brink of extinguishing each other. Our narrator, later called Daisy St. Patience (and numerous other names, one of which happens to be true, and the crux of the book) is standing over the body of her idol, the near-dead Brandy Alexander (neither the song, nor the drink), who has been shot down by the narrator's best friend Evie Cottrell. The scene of violence is juxtaposed with "Daisy's" self-absorption, and her continuing ties to her former career as a model, a career that ended when a tragic accident removed the lower third of her face. As readers, we are thrust into the action, unaware of the reasons for anything we are witnessing, and in that Palahniuk hooks us... that and a continuing question of what happened to the beautiful girl. How did she get here?

For a society that so greatly values beauty in women over much else, this commentary is apt, and a perfect place for Palahniuk to draw up various mysteries that keep us moving. We are drawn, as people, as Americans, to wonder why the beautiful girl is ugly, and to empathize with her loss or tragedy, especially because we all, to some degree or another, desire to be beautiful, to be desired and have the attention that our narrator describes. The story jumps back in time, to "Daisy's" accident that disfigured her, her first meeting with the incredible transsexual Brandy Alexander, her early days modeling with Evie, and all of her self-involvement begins to develop. We feel for her, the beautiful but stricken girl, but we also learn to hate her, for her constant jealousy at the attention given to her dead, gay brother, over her, and for her disinterested friendship with Evie (who seems genuinely to want only her love and consideration). Over time, we learn that "Daisy" isn't someone we like, but we accept her because, like us, she is not a hero(ine), but a fallible person.

The narrative takes course all across the western United States and into Canada where Daisy, Brandy and a male companion undertake petty crimes to pay their way, and stay perpetually high on pills. And throughout it, the questions raised are those of identity, reality, beauty and love. Really, Palahniuk balances his trademark gruesome descriptions and witty nonchalance with deep, meaningful heart. And in an effort not to throw spoilers all over the place for those who still wish to read the book, the resolution comes in the form of varying identity crises. The ultimate question being how can we define ourselves without defining ourselves by other people, by convention, by society? These characters, all of them (surprisingly) want to transcend--or ascend--past the way they were made. Instead of being reliant on beauty, we see people who seek refuge in difficulty. Instead of seeking definition by family we see characters defining themselves by doing exactly the opposite of what they want. And to see love we sometimes have to become the exact opposite of who we think we should be to become the person that we love ourselves, for taking a chance, or for suffering.

Invisible Monsters raises a litany of deep, philosophical questions about self, reality and individual satisfaction. How important is beauty? And I know that question seems obvious, but REALLY, how important is it? Does beauty define you more than you define it? It's silly, it seems, to pity the beautiful, but there's something to that. The attention, the lust, the expectation, and sometimes the beauty is the only thing that sustains that person's role in society. And how far do we go to be beautiful? If we never ask to be born, is it not our prerogative to alter ourselves as we see fit until we feel defined? But, beyond even that, what is love? Love can grow from strange places, but it is often restricted, choked and left when we try to pack it into the relationships we believe must exist. The conventions of society and science (gender, sexuality, genetics) are the great restrictions; terrorizing our individuality as we try so hard just to fit in.

Here, Palahniuk writes about discovering yourself, even by extreme means. But it's a treatise on the destructive capacity of modern society. We are bombarded my media and belief systems that force us to find new, creative, strange ways to combat our existential distemper, going beyond numbness in drugs to complete recreation. These characters, all complex, and more so by the end than you'd ever imagine at the beginning, are fighting for their own reality. (This is especially true for the narrator's parents, who concoct a vast conspiracy and simultaneous sense of pride from the ashes of their gay son's death... again for spoilers sake, I won't spoil.) For Invisible Monsters that reality is an endless chain of clues, hints, fears, and questions, but even all that uncertainty is preferable to being stuck in neutral, simply playing the hand you were dealt at birth.

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Notable Text: American Gods

Neil Gaiman's American Gods exists primarily as a discussion of two -ceptions: perception and deception. And those qualities of awareness and cloaking ultimately occupy sides on a single coin, a metaphor Gaiman applies liberally, and to great success, throughout the book. American Gods is also about abandonment and ego, failure and success, and above all, it is a study of the United States, and all its faith and design, reality and novelty. Gaiman excels in creating a lush world populated with colorful, lovable (and genuinely hate-able) characters as the text takes readers on a journey across the United States, from a prison cell to Chicago and Cairo (Illinois) and even the center of the continental United States. This sprawling epic is so large that error here or there would have been acceptable, and yet Gaiman doesn't misstep once. He keeps readers close by guiding the story behind the protagonist, Shadow, who tends to observe far more than react. And by avoiding a big personality in his main character, Gaiman creates mystery and an easy porthole into the action. And that attention to his audience makes the book extremely enjoyable, rather than overbearing and complex.

But, as I said, American Gods is about perception and deception, first and foremost. In the text, the world, but specifically in setting, the United States, is home to gods like Odin, Anansi, Czernobog, Loki, Easter and others. All of them in the form of humans, living among us without our knowledge. Gaiman's world posits that once belief in a god is brought to a place, that god becomes a permanent resident, regardless of waning interest from the "followers" around him. As they lose followers they lose strength, and are forced to take on the form of average people. It is our perceptions, for Gaiman that make a god real, our faith and our religious fealty. But, when we stop paying attention these beliefs do not evaporate, they just become old and worn, and driven to deceive us in hopes of one day regaining prominence. But, Gaiman does something even greater by showing us how these gods decide to get by when they are no longer feared/loved greatly. Some turn to crime, some to wanderlust, some to drinking, others to upstanding civic service. But these positions are as thrust upon them as taken up by them, because America is the type of place that requires such labels and distinctions, America is the type of place that gives birth to grifting and entitlement. And America also gives birth to its own gods, as Gaiman points to television, railroads, government agencies, internet and others as the "new gods" that grow, blossom and die in our world daily. For Gaiman, America is a place of consumption, quick, easy and ruthless use that makes it no place for any deity. America will destroy an idea as easily as it will praise it. There's no room at the inn.

Coins appear throughout American Gods, first as Shadow's hobby (coin tricks) in prison, then as gold and silver tokens that appear through magic means and have incredible powers. And like the coins, Gaiman wants readers to see that everything is 50/50. There is good and evil in all things, there is permanence and nothingness, and there is existence and nonexistence. Gaiman makes points of this with Shadow's wife Laura, with Mr. Wednesday and Lowkey, all characters who straddle a line, and are either attempting to get to one side of the "coin" or possess both at once. But it's also that coins represent wealth, and money is often the ultimate American god. Though Gaiman was careful not to spell such a sentiment out, I think it bears noting that money is the only thing we praise always and forever, and never forget. We sacrifice our time and lives to acquiring it. It's a bit melodramatic of me to say, I know, but it's on point. The coins, magical in fiction or not, hold a certain power over our consciousness.

This rambling madness of this review is really meant to highlight the incredible strength of Gaiman's storytelling, and to point out that American Gods has its pulse not merely on fantasy and mythology, but also on philosophy of life. Fans of the Sandman series will surely enjoy this book, but anyone who has ever considered the nature of myth and religion, or the complexity of our systems of belief will surely dig right in. American Gods is as much a mirror on humanity as it is a fictional account of bygone divine creatures. And we sometimes need to glimpse our failings to learn more about ourselves.

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Notable Text: Blindness

Portuguese genius-author Jose Saramago published Blindness way back in 1995 (1997 for the English translation) and just about immediately won a Nobel Prize in Literature. That award is both slightly surprising and completely warranted. At its heart Blindness is a triumphant work of complexly composed fiction designed to gather together all of the boundless fears of the modern human (at least those of us in the cultivated security of Western society), but its also a bit of a gruesome torture porn given context in reality with anecdotal asides. It is a complicated read, one that has its own disorienting, and blinding style. Saramago takes care to keep text full on every page. The reader's eyes never get a break, not for dialogue, not for parenthetical statements. Instead, every page, with the exception of the blank spaces where chapters begin and end, is text-laden, like a mule carrying as much weight as its back can bear up a tall mountain. In this way, the novel is interactive. You will, in a sense, go blind attempting to read it. And the manner in which all of those words are delivered, undaunted, almost torturous, gives the book a mind of its own.

The characters, all protagonists held a minor distance, but still very intimate, are unnamed. They are distinguished only by a characteristic such as the Man with the black eye patch, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with the dark glasses. Saramago wants them to be "every-people" and in a way they are, but in another way they are safely distanced from the reader, a reminder that the occurrences within the text are fictional, but that they could happen and these are the types of people who would be there, as we all ultimately recognize people first by looks, then by other aspects of their character. Because Blindness follows these people through the most horrible possible imaginable situations, the characters become our traveling companions, and to some extent our friends. We, as readers, can understand their reactions, their inner workings because they are left defined only so much as to make us think they could easily be each of us, in a different time and place. So, with that attachment, and through it, we are thrust powerfully into a world that falls apart when suddenly everyone, it seems, can no longer see.

The blindness in Blindness is a white one, which is as is confirmed in the books conclusion, something of a holy blindness. The loss of sight reduces the people in the unnamed city and state to animals. First, they are contained in an abandoned mental hospital, frightened and made less secure by decaying conditions and the fear that those who were not yet blind would catch blindness by helping any of the "ill." This is the fear that causes prejudice and violence, and Saramago embraces the metaphor broadly. But, even when the people are no longer at ill ease due to their protector/captors, Saramago points out that humanity is inherently evil. Rape, robbery, extortion and murder all take place as average people in an un-average situation are forced to cope and struggle for survival. Slowly, the blindness causes all the morality to seep from everyone and in a variety of asides Saramago flippantly, but also judgingly comments of his disastrous menagerie. In a way, Saramago's narrator is God. Commenting and observing the collapse of his creation when forced into a difficult situation.

But, "God" has a chosen savior too. The doctor's wife is the only one who never succumbs to the blindness. There is nothing notable about her, virginal or anything like that, but she is ceaselessly helpful and strong (enduring the view of decaying human beings wallowing in their own defecation and urine). She is the "Jesus" of the tale. She is meant to lead, and she does, but for the most part like a scientist performing a study: distanced and only intervening when necessary. Eventually, when she reveals to her companions that she can and always could see, she becomes their guardian in full, finding them food and shelter, but also cursed to see the world around her. In this way she is as endowed with glory and doomed to suffer as the biblical Jesus. While her job is to save mankind, in a small dose, she is also tortured by the destruction, violence and sadness around her. And after everything the doctor's wife guides her unnamed internees through she receives no reward. She, like many women throughout film and literature, is forced to suffer to a questionable and unclear end. But, Saramago doesn't stop his biblical parable merely with implication. He drives the concept home when the doctor's wife visits a cathedral to find all of the saints and statues with covered eyes. The religious implication is unavoidable then, as God has truly and vividly forsaken his people, left even his representatives in their world sightless. It's a staggering image, sad and weighty, but also apt because it clarifies the point of this white blindness, which seems to have been in a way a trial of the doctor's wife and a test of humanity.

When the blindness evaporates to close the book, there is relief from all those inflicted, but reflection doesn't take as great a forefront. Instead, only the doctor's wife, whose eyes never betrayed her, is the only one to consider the implications and to wish for a moment that she too had lost her vision. In all of its violence, horror and complexity, Blindness doesn't force a point so much as throw the weight of a societies suffering onto the shoulders of one woman. Does that mean that Saramago hates women? Or the doctor's wife specifically? I don't think so. Any tale of suffering requires a neutral party, someone who can and must step up to save those (s)he loves. In this case, Saramago uses the doctor's wife as a device, both to generate a strong a perspective in the story and to give the reader the eyes we need to really understand any of it, but also to demonstrate the way that heroes/heroines aren't always magical or safe or sure. Sometimes perseverance is all we have. And beyond that there's doubt.

When the film adaptation came out in 2008, I was traveling down 16th Street in Denver and saw a mass protest by blind persons from around the state objecting to the idea that blindness is a sickness or a disease. It is clear, that having read the book, that those protesters did not. While Saramago often falls into a lot of foolish asides about blindness being an ailment that makes fools and brutes of people, Blindness is not about accentuating loss of sight as the reason why people turn to their most animal, instead that darkness is inside all of us, and this (blindness) is one of the ways in which a single alteration to our experience can completely our humanity for the worse. So on that uplifting note, take solace in the way that our perceptions of our world keep us in line because if they suddenly change everything about us and all we know can change too.

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Book; Counter-book(s) 4: Love in a Dystopia - Livin' it up while I'm attempting to free myself from a fascist future-state

In previous editions of my critically-acclaimed (not a guarantee) Book; Counter-book series I've looked in depth at two specific texts seeking to draw parallels in style, mood or underlying theme. This time, I want to look at dystopian novels somewhat generally, but with a specific focus. That focus being the way that human sexuality is more often than not shown as the prime example of limited freedom or resistance to totalitarian ideology. I don't have all the texts at my disposal, but hopefully I can still do a serviceable job of discussing a few key texts and a couple of outside ones as I explore this intriguing aspect in this realm of literature.

Sexuality is, and ask anyone, an incredibly important part of individual development. We've all known people who identify themselves through sex, through these connections, or even just wanton hook-ups. Intimacy is one of the few things we hold great control over. It is something that defines us, and tangibly verifies our existence. While having thought and the ability to consider and make choices are valuable human traits, they do not cement us firmly in reality as sex does. We just don't possess intellectual property in the same way that we possess our bodies. Sex is the root action in some of the most enlightening moments in our lives, as well as some of the most terrifying. Whether used for good or evil, sex holds a substantial power over us. Look at the industries built entirely around it, all of which will thrive and manifest in new ways for the foreseeable future. And all of these things are obvious, I know, but often they are paved over by the puritanical ways we are taught to interact with sex in youth. It's worth noting that the most heinous of crimes are sex-based.

In dystopian literature, we see sex as an instrument of control by the state and as a form of non-violent protest. In 1984, the Junior Anti-Sex League is a government instrument renouncing intercourse. But, Winston, the protagonist, with Julia, take up a secret love-affair that is central to the rebellion against Big Brother. It is even in their most intimate time, in an antique shop, where everything in the book falls apart. Winston takes essentially no other action against the Party. He passively observes dissenting video and texts, and the majority of the book is spent inside his head as he considers the values and impacts of resistance. He does, though, take control of his world through his relationship with Julia (however short-lived and doomed) and finds his brief moments of happiness and strength in them. Battling sexual oppression through love is his only course of action, and even then, it is an individual one, one that redefines him to himself.

Similarly, in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, D-503 comes to new awareness only after being seduced by I-330, the woman leading a small group against the mandates of the One State. For D-503, sex is an awakening to his humanity, and a sort of spell-breaking occurrence leading to his conflict with the world around him. And in the world of We sex is regulated by a Foucault-ian panoptic world of glass apartments. Physical connections can only be made by submitting a coupon that allows for the shades to be dropped and privacy to exist. Sadly, sex is both a liberator and a destroyer for D-503. It creates the potential in him to be human, rather than a logical robot, but it also creates such great conflict that he cannot recover and ultimately guides himself and the small group of rebels to their downfall.

The classic Vonnegut story "Welcome to the Monkey House," from the short story collection of same name, tells of a society with government-enforced euthanasia to prevent overpopulation, and controlled procreation. The "ethical suicide parlors" are staffed by beautiful, young virgin women, whose job it is to administer death (and make death seem more attractive). In a typically sardonic Vonnegut plot, Billy the Poet is the anti-hero who takes it upon himself to take the virginity of each of the young girls working for the government. While Billy considers his work to be the ultimate form of resistance against the government, circumventing their sexually oppressive laws, it is also very clearly an act of repeated rape. Vonnegut stops short of making anyone appear to be right or wrong, and just lets the story unfold. And when Billy leaves a bottle of birth control pills with Nancy after raping her we are left to the idea that sexuality may continue despite its oppression, though at a disturbing cost. What is clear, though, is that as I-330 and Julia used sex as a way to tap potential humanity within D-503 and Winston, respectively, Billy is attempting to do the same. There is a huge difference between seduction and rape, and clearly Vonnegut has that contrast in mind. What is clear, though, is that another dystopian society was conceived as one without sex. And sex itself, again, became a primary device in undermining that society.

But there are two interesting and notable contrasting examples. One comes from the well-known Brave New World, in which the World State encourages sexual activity from a young age, and it is no longer a means of reproduction, but simply a social pleasure. Aldous Huxley seems to be circumventing the standard dystopian meme, but it's notable that by encouraging and making unlimited the sexual act, it loses its value too. No one attains any sort of feeling of individualism from sex, or anything else for that matter. Huxley's pseudo-protagonist, John, comes from a world where sexuality is directly-related to individualism. John ties love and sex together, humanity and sex are one-to-one. And when (spoiler alert!) John commits suicide while in the society of the World State it is because his person-hood has been stolen from him. It is not merely his sexuality that is stolen, but the value of sex (relationship, love, and family, too) has been reduced to zero, and he is the only person who sees existence differently. Again, sex plays an instrumental role in the text, though instead of a resistance against oppression it is one of the principle instruments of oppression. When sex is reduced to mere animal action, it no longer confirms existence and becomes intangible.

Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles is not entirely a dystopian novel. It is primarily the story of the struggles of two half-brothers against the troubles of modern society. One brother Michel feels infinitely detached from humanity, and cannot know love or even pleasure, while Bruno is plagued by his sexuality to the point of obsession. All of these struggles highlight the importance of sex as a defining aspect in humanity. Both men are wrought by it in different ways, but it is the central hub to an enjoyable life. Houellebecq's strange denouement, which turns fully dystopian, shows how Michel's genetic research has been twisted to create world where natural procreation is no longer necessary, and sex is merely action. The created people of the future even lose interest in sex entirely and are presented (in retrospective journalistic style) to be the highest form of the human animal. The irony, of course, is that despite Michel's detachment, he seems to genuinely wish he could love and lust. And Bruno, for whom sex is a plague of mind, finds true love through it, and loses his mind when that love is taken from him. Here again, sex is the key to humanity as we know it, and the disturbing society presented in the novel's final pages present a robotic society that is "free" only from passion.

Sex is clearly a surrogate for human passion, the drive that motivates us to create and want and desire and live fully. For any dystopian fascist regime to take hold, we must first let go of our passions completely. Even though passion can haunt us and cause us terrible pain, it is also where all art comes from, and the wellspring from which love rises. Each of the examples above utilized the control of human sexuality as a greater control of the population. Taking sex away takes away our most pure and intimate form of expression, regardless of the numerous problems it can create in an ordered world. And that it would arise as a common theme in this genre of political-philosophical texts is telling. The greatest form of oppression is the oppression of the body, which is in turn the oppression of desire, love and creativity. Living in our bodies is one of the simplest and purest pleasures we have the luxury to easily access, and the mandated-withholding of that pleasure is a step toward a frightening future.

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Notable Text: The Book of Basketball

I'll admit that I'm an utter and complete sports junkie. I love my Nuggets, my Rockies, my Broncos and my Avs, and I also love sports history. Just consider how many players we can watch in person today who will go forgotten in the annals of history. There is only one Michael Jordan. Someone like Craig Ehlo wouldn't even be a footnote without the iconic Jordan over Ehlo shot in the Eastern Finals. A lot of admiration is thrust upon Brett Favre, who did have an exceptional season, but he's really, barely a cut above Dan Marino (with a 1-0 split on Super Bowl rings). And Marino never had half, maybe even a third, of the talent Favre had around him every season. The point of this rambling, that I'm getting to, is that sports is like history is like fiction is like music. There are a lot of brief moments of excellence as with Daunte Culpepper and A-ha, where a mark is made that is forgotten with archivists (and in the case of A-ha: Family Guy, etc.). Documentation is paramount. So, with an eye on that goal of documentation, I just finished Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball; a 700-page behemoth that considers the history of the NBA, asks prized "What if" questions, and ranks the top players throughout the history and present in the league. It is, for a sports fan to read, a monumental achievement.

Simmons is a crass, often pompous-sounding sports writer for ESPN (He also podcasts two - three times per week) who balances his encyclopedic knowledge of the NBA with some solid humor, and a reliance on the occasional sexist analogies that function well as allegories, but also show his hand. Reading Simmons, in his column on ESPN.com, or in this book, is like hanging out with a buddy at the sports bar. He knows his shit. He will tell some dirty jokes, and pop culture comparisons drop in whenever applicable. Ultimately, he's a guy's guy sports writer, rather than a traditional journalist. The Book of Basketball functions in this traditional Simmons style, to great effect. Simmons uses footnotes as the primary stage for his injected witticisms. There are hundreds of footnotes in the book, nearly one a page. Simmons maintains his usual self-awareness, too, either via self-referential footnotes or parenthetical statements, so there's always a heart there (making anything that's borderline sexist or racist a little less so). Reading Simmons is like knowing Simmons, and in the same way that we excuse the questionable phrasings of our friends and family because there's a deeper person there, so do we readers with this author. Especially given the final chapter of The Book of Basketball, following a somewhat masturbatory section called "The Wine Cellar," where Simmons briefly interviews Bill Walton and shows a lot of heart. It is the best writing in the book. It's the closer chapter, or as Simmons would call it "the cooler" and it easily sinks the go-ahead free throws.

As I said before, I am a sports junkie. This book was right in my wheelhouse, and I was fully willing to commit more than a month to reading about the history of basketball. Knowing that Wilt Chamberlain was statistically better than Bill Russell, but never put together enough of a team-game to win nearly as many championships is valuable to me. Understanding how rough life was for NBA players in the '50s and '60s, how they took buses and trains and flew coach, how they smoked and drank, how early black players like Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson were discriminated against constantly, despite being professional athletes (unthinkable now, right?); this matters to me. For someone interested in the historical aspects, this book will perform a function, but unless you love basketball and need to know why Karl Malone's MVP win was suspect, you won't enjoy this book. It's a long, rewarding read, that is sometimes self-involved, but often time funny. If you like Bill Simmons, read it. If you love basketball, read it.

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The Decade in Books (La Décennie dans les Livres)

I've been fielding requests for how to fill this space lately. First came the request that I run down the decade in music, rather than just a year-end list. Then, upon completion of Part III of that personal history, my coworker requested that I do something similar for the decade's load of books. Here's the tough thing: most of the books I've read over the last ten years were published long before the 21st century. The assignment of finding those books that came out from 2000 - 2009, books that I read, that weren't reissues or reprints of books I purchased during the decade posed a complex little challenge. So, instead of attempting to rank these for quality, I'm going to throw the list out there first and then talk about the books, some at length, some not, in hopes that we can all share in the literary genius that continues even as we advance ceaselessly toward a digital, sound-bite, commercial break-filled age. Good writing never stopped with the "Classics" and has only grown stronger, more honest, more challenging, and impressive over time. Now, the list:


A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001)
The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition by James Howard Kunstler (2001)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
after the quake by Haruki Murakami (2002)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
JPod by Douglas Copeland (2006)
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (2006)
Adverbs by Daniel Handler (2006)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens (2007)
The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy by Bill Simmons (2009)


Let's get this out of the way; I didn't read most of these during the year they were released, a couple I don't intend to (or haven't yet) finish(ed) and I am brimming with bias. I don't plan on being impartial where these books are concerned. I picked them because I've enjoyed each of them immensely, some have impacted my mind, philosophy and spirit, and some where just fun to read. None are snacks, though, they're all involved texts that demand affection as much as attention.

I read Dave Eggers' frenetic memoir during the summer, somewhere between 2006 and 2007, usually in the cafe at the Borders on Pearl Street (now long gone). I can remember the glare of sunlight blazing through the storefront window as I sipped coffee from one of those WAY oversize mugs that resembles the child of a gravy boat/mixing bowl marriage. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is just what the title promises (though I'd not necessarily call its genius "staggering"). It's a story about growing up too fast through circumstance, taking responsibility and sacrificing options. At its soul the book seeks to show how far we can travel even while carrying an incredible burden, but Eggers refuses to limit his work to a simple memoir. Through self-aware, meta narration, the reader sees Eggers confront himself, questioning the way he remembers certain facts and details and how he (necessarily to advance the story) blends people and memories. So, while it is a book about personal sacrifice, it's also deeply concerned with the function of the mind, memory and how we construct our histories to save people, fix mistakes, and re-envision ourselves.

What can I say about The Blind Assassin that I haven't already in this space? Beyond the deep, thick and puzzling frame-narrative design, is about just the kinds of sacrifice and questions that Eggers' book also explores. Centering on the eldest of two sisters, born to a wealthy manufacturing family in Canada, whose wants are incredibly disparate to what they are allowed (both by circumstance and by society) the story explores the great questions about what love is, should be, can be, and what our requirements are as people in a world that holds expectations of each of us. Margaret Atwood's writing is a showcase of incredible metaphor, imagery and character. She is as much a sociologist as she is an author, delving deep into the ways people behave and think and come to take on burdens. She address how we are sometimes trapped by love, both because we feel it intensely and because we do not, but novel is so much deeper than that simple assessment. It's the kind of book that promotes an author's entire catalog, and when I selected this for our Book Club in 2008 it was met with wholly positive reviews and discussion.

Life of Pi came to me via my girlfriend-at-the-time. Initially I didn't think much of it. The book opens very slowly, following the life of young Pi Patel as the son of a family of traveling circus owners in India. When they set out to sea with all their animals and a terrible storm hits, the exposition ends and the story takes full-direction. Author Yann Martel focuses the final two sections of the book on the disparity between fantasy and reality and how we deal with trauma. Characters and animals interweave to the extent that nothing remains clear, but everything remains visceral and emotionally powerful. The Eggers concept returns such that, as readers we are left with a question about what story of events we choose to believe, and the power of selective, manipulative memory. People are, to Life of Pi, capable of completely altering our universe just through the power of imagination, whether that is to benefit our sanity or to just keep us distracted from the devastation around us to survive.

I only read The City in Mind this last year, but it completely altered the way I look at cities, buildings, networks and communities. I wrote a substantial amount, though largely summary, in this space. The way we live, and the way our neighborhoods are constructed effect not only our productivity, but also our happiness. Imagine not driving anywhere. Having the opportunity, instead, to fulfill all of your needs within 10 blocks of you, and failing that, having the intricate public transportation available to make longer distances enjoyable. Kunstler spends a lot of time railing against the ills of highways and suburbs, both requiring cars as a ticket for entry, rather than enabling humans to use motor vehicles as a luxury. Now, we are stuck with cars and a world built for them, and not for people. This book, both historically compelling and philosophically challenging, asks us to consider what kind of world we prefer. And attempts to put society back in the hands of the individual human beings that populate it, instead of the hulking machines to which our lifestyles are essentially yoked.

Atonement is nothing short of devastating. If you don't, at very least, nearly cry when reading its final pages, I'm comfortable considering you an inhuman monster. Ian McEwan establishes an idyllic family and a pair of young lovers. And then, through a volley of misunderstandings and awful historical circumstances, tears them apart. The language is beautiful and deliberate, and McEwan excels with stream-of-consciousness writing that jumps from character to character in a way reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The 2007 film is a very good adaptation, but just doesn't do complete justice to the delicacy and subtle destruction built throughout the novel. Another book about responsibility, burden, and attempts to make things right in a complex and embattled world, but an impressively graceful take on those concepts that is a must-read for any one who fancies literature.

Haruki Murakami is one of the greatest writers of the 20th/21st century, hands down. I first read his heartbreaking Norwegian Wood during 2005, and then last year his inventive, psychological fairy-tale, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Murakami can engage a reader in just about any situation, no matter how outlandish, and his tendency toward the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and others) imbues his writing with tenderness and honesty, even when attempting to explain memory as a mathematical/mental switch, or a locked-down town full of glowing skulls and mythic beasts. In after the quake, Murakami presents a set of short stories written just after the 1995 Kobe earthquake that respond to the disaster with loss, hopelessness, passion and redemption. These stories lack the supernatural quality found in some of his other works, but each is honest, solemn and bewildering. It's a quick, and fulfilling read, and each story leaves you with questions about the lessons you were meant to learn, and what may ultimately happen to the protagonists. In that way, it's like a disaster, when viewed from a medium-distance. We only know so much about people, we don't know how they'll end up, and we wonder what we're to learn from devastation.

As the first of two books by David Mitchell to make this list, Cloud Atlas is both the most complex and most impacting (at least upon me), but also the most unconventional. The story takes place over thousands of years, through several short stories, broken at each one's middle. So, the first half of the book episodically presents only the first halves of each story, then at the center, comes the only complete, single-piece narrative, and then the end halves of each tale. Beyond this structural excellence, Mitchell creates a story about the evil of man, the decay of civilization and the taxing fallout of colonialism and technological advance, and the slow devaluation of humanity that could take place over time. And Mitchell links each story together, plausibly and satisfyingly to show the continuation of time within the book's space. Cloud Atlas presents so many tales of confusion, fulfillment lost, heartbreak, pain, suffering and connivance, but remains fun, and at times hilarious, to read. A true page-turner of a story, it goes by much faster than its 544 pages and odds are high that you'll read it again, and again.

Douglas Copeland's satirical office-dramedy JPod is essentially a pleasure read. There's nothing too challenging or even deep about the story, but it is a string of laughs. Copeland also effectively inserts himself, as a dark, dangerous figure, into the story for a sort of self-deprecating effect. I wouldn't say that this book changed my life, but I remember it well, and would recommend it. It's like The Office on acid.

The second David Mitchell work on this list, Black Swan Green, is an unpretentious account of a boy growing up, gathering himself, accepting his weaknesses and grabbing hold of his strengths. Taking place over the course of one year, it ties in the surreal stories of imagination that children experience with the difficulties of divorce and finding one's place within the community. It is heartfelt and direct, and captures being a 12 - 13 year-old boy as well as any story I've ever read. Everything seems so important and infinite during childhood, and we don't have the foresight to understand how small those things we experience are until adulthood. And yet, those are the moments that form us and design our worldview. It's a simple story, but an enjoyable one, that presents youth realistically and without any empty metaphor or hollow cuteness.

Daniel Handler, known commonly to the younger set as "Lemony Snicket," gave us Adverbs in 2006. It is a book about love, and the way we love. As the title implies, "love" is the verb, and each story is a lucid dream of an adverb for that verb. Whether we love fiercely or obligatorily, or completely, Handler deals out a series of short stories, linked tenuously with same-named characters who are not always exactly the same from tale to tale. While this isn't the most cohesive or easy to read book; Handler's prose occasionally diverts to places so fantastic that it is difficult to keep track of real and unreal, it's incredibly rewarding and paints an honest, full image of what love is and can be. As both a philosophical exploration, and a joyful narrative, Adverbs will tug at your heart and put you in numerous situations that are universal. And, for some reason it's lack of popularity means you can still get it on the cheap. And you should because Handler needs to write another adult text.

Every one knows that Cormac McCarthy's tale of post-apocalyptic devastation, horror, cannibalism, sacrifice and love is excellent. The Road is oppressively dark and disordered, as McCarthy's tone never lightens up and even his format (lacking quotation marks and some regular paragraph breaks) leaves the reader disoriented. Each page fills you with an undeniable dread, but also just enough of a tinge of hope to keep plodding along (just like the protagonists). It is an allegory for suffering, and a demonstration of the destructive evil of the human species when pushed to its survivalist limits. I would never say this book was fun, but it's incredibly valuable and easily the most complete study/mood/genre fiction of 2006. Reading this in the dark, alone, during the winter intensifies the already dominating tone, and I'd recommend being prepared to cry and ask yourself questions about how you'd handle such times.

I explored God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything within this space in a Book: Counter-book feature in March of 2008. Christopher Hitchens, though quite pretentious in his arguments and writing style is also a purveyor of important points about the way religion impacts and destroys the equality and peace in our world. Just today, the New York Times reported an article about American evangelicals' influencing the Ugandan government to compose a bill requiring the execution of homosexuals. It's impossible to argue that America's freedoms of sexuality, religion, speech (the very things the country was established upon) would not promote the execution of anyone based solely on who they are. Religion, as Hitchens show through an example of the Pope telling African believers that condoms cause AIDS, strikes again by taking advantage of people in the worst of positions. The book is well-written and makes compelling points, and while parts are unsettling, it is something that anyone with an interest in religious-philosophy should check out. Knowledge is power, so why limit oneself?

On a light note, to finish [or for the win (FTW)] is Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy. There is no more complete compendium of basketball anecdotes, stories about the beginning of the league and where it has gone wrong (and right). Simmons' methodically constructs his reasons why we cannot judge players on their statistics alone in a sport where individual success is predicated on those stats. It's a book that argues for the power of teamwork and individual contribution to mutual success. I haven't finished it yet, but at only 150 pages into this 700+ page monster of sports knowledge, I have barely found time to put it down to eat. Given that basketball is one of my favorite sports, I can recommend The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy to any other steadfast fans, but it's also just an enjoyable comedic read loaded with apt/hilarious footnotes.

So, there's a decade of books (that I've read). I hope to have new concerts and music to discuss soon. Feel free to comment on any of these texts, or any of the other recent year-end/decade-end columns.

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Percy Gloom

Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom is a treatise on existentialism in the guise of a quick-read graphic novella. Published way back in 2007 (Oh, we were young then...) the story follows an immediately dour little worrywart of a man seeking to start a new life in a strange world abroad at an office for safety writing. (He's the type to enjoy determining how common household objects may hurt, maim or kill a person... it is his childhood dream.) But for such a sad character Percy Gloom, who subsists on only bran muffins and the juice of 30 lemons, he is remarkably adventurous. Malkasian first hands us a little sad sack and then shows us a redemptive tale about his growing into a positive risk-taker... who smiles. Through out the 160+ pages, text is meager, but perfectly expressive and well-characterized. Percy Gloom tackles cultist behavior and conflicting human desires to transcend life and hold onto it forever with a delicate, charming hand.

In these things, these graphic novellas, art is paramount. Malkasian creates a unique world of caricature melded to reality. Forms are exaggerated, but never to the detriment of the narrative. And many of her creations have a Seussian design that makes them almost familiar enough to be old friends. Percy Gloom, the man, is small, large-headed and big-eared (which turns out to be incredibly relevant) and his expressions demand the reader's love and admiration. Malkasian has created him for us to want him to succeed and not because he's Disney attractive... Beyond Percy, there are no two characters who look alike, from a kind doctor, to an inventive mother, to an ominous overweight child. Malkasian's little world is just the right size with just the right dose of weird to keep you feeling surprised, but never fully lost.

The inner beauty lies in creative and heartfelt story telling. There's lost love, and fear of death, and the fear of the tedium of living, and fear of exploring new places. Each utterly visceral topic weaves into the narrative unpretentiously and nothing feels extraneous. Even a side story about two children seeking to avoid school by finding a special stone taps into basic human desires for freedom and choice. Are we meant to seek the afterlife, forgoing the world we have before us? Should we escape the world we live in forcibly to remove ourselves from the tedium? Or should we cling to life and youth, shunning age and wisdom? Maybe we should take life as it is and love living it while we can... Malkasian presents something that is as much as philosophical debate/treatise as it is a classic story, and that is perhaps the greatest success of the whole project.

Available on Amazon cheap, and through local libraries, it's worth the 2 hours you may need to plow through it. Take the time to look deeply into the art, and keep an eye on the elements of the story that are downplayed purposefully. Percy Gloom is a classic that deserves a fresh look two years later and will remain timeless long after.

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Notable Text: The City in Mind

The preface of James Howard Kunstler's The City in Mind begins: "This book doesn't pretend to be the last word on cities." And throughout Kunstler's breadth of knowledge on architecture, history, sociology, psychology and anthropology he keeps this initial promise. Kunstler's topic, surveying the functionality and representative value of eight world cities, though explored in his previous works (Geography of Nowhere [1993], Home from Nowhere [1996]) delves deeply into proponent arguments for New Urbanism while maintaining a vocabulary and style that is entertaining and accessible. I am neither a city planner, nor an architect in training and I was, save for a paragraph here and there, riveted by the historical contexts and philosophical arguments Kunstler poses. So riveted that for the last three weeks--as I've read the text on bus commutes--that I analyze the architecture and city structure in downtown Denver, and will plan on following up this review with thoughts on San Francisco in a couple of weeks. Anytime a text can get inside the head of a reader with such finesse it deserves applause. The City in Mind is an invaluably interactive text because it drives the reader to approach his space, his environment, with a philosophical microscope.

Filed into eight chapters, Kunstler's book looks at the successes, shortfalls and disasters of city design and urban organization of Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston and London. Each section incorporates important historical information, but Kunstler takes a special interest in each for specific reasons noted in their respective peoples' philosophies. Anecdotes peppered throughout, too, keep things personal and accessible, as if one could sit with Kunstler in a cafe in any of those locales listed above and receive a similar treatise on the city's virtues and sins. Being a believer of New Urbanism, Kunstler rails against cities designed as numerous pods connected only by highways and interstates. And he applauds the value of unity within a city's transit and its architectural design. Briefly, he breaks the eight chapters down thusly:

Paris: Kunstler applauds the work of Napolean III and his prefect of the Seine (essentially a mayor/city planner) Georges Eugene Haussmann for their efforts to turn the city from rat infested slum to unified, human-sized municipality. Specific building guidelines were placed so that buildings in Paris resemble one another and knit a complete tapestry, rather than being a madly assembled mesh of different styles. Paris is this way, united physically, and by an excellent system of trains.

Atlanta: Kunstler calls out the suburban expansion that has left the downtown area nearly deserted of residents, but requires hour long commutes by thousands each day for work, using exorbitant amounts of gasoline. It's a car culture created during times of inexpensive oil that cannot sustain itself forever, meaning eventually lots of those suburban homes will be uselessly isolated from places of work, restaurants and other necessary amenities. All of it started after the civil war. And, for a book published in 1999, an amazingly prophetic quote from the final section of this chapter titled 'The Repo Economy:'

"The next economy will be the Repo economy when, for example, amazing numbers of 'DiTech 125 percent Dream Loans' will be labeled nonperforming and seedy-looking men armed with repossession notices show up in the circular driveways of the defaulted-upon chipboard-and-vinyl McMansions in places like Cherokee County, Georgia, to change the locks on the putative collateral."

Mexico City: A history lesson from the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish all the way to the present day crime-driven, collapsing, under-watered plateau city at the center of Mexico.

Berlin: How can a city be rebuilt, ignoring its history with fascism and socialism, and knit itself back together from two halves that spent 40 years growing apart?

Las Vegas: Ten-lane roadways, half-mile long city blocks, absurdly cheap casino hotels that are built to last only as long as their own novelty to the public and then torn down. Kunstler argues that a city predicated on getting something for nothing will never be built for real people, only for their boundless curiosity in vices. And some really amazing history on Howard Hughes great buy-up of much of the original downtown.

Rome: This was a city, built massively, by hand! and without the aid of any machinery that still stands in great ruin, but nearly serviceable today. The buildings we make as humans today are never intended to remain for as long as those of Rome, where humans first pioneered the use of cement and concrete. Every inch was built with care and consideration, a detail that would impact architecture hundreds of years later, but would never fully sink in.

Boston: Kunstler presents evidence that this one city has shown the capability to re-urbanize itself bit by bit (though not yet complete) to become functional for a society of human beings, not a society of cars. Gentrification, and massive transit projects heal not only the appearance of the city, but also mobilize the many populations to keep the urban organism alive.

London: Parks! Big ones! The impact of our (borrowed from the English) American obsession with open space, and our fear that urbanization means only the dirty implications of the Industrial Revolution when times have long since changed. And of course, our "god-given right" to a large parcel of land to use without any concern for the public good or the greater value it adds to our community.

Just snippets here, but what's amazing about The City in Mind is that Kunstler places convincing emphasis on the need for mixed-use footprints in building. Instead of having an office park, which goes from bustling to ghost town each and every day, a well designed group of commercial, residential, industrial and park space makes it livable for humans who would no longer need long commutes, unnecessary personal transportation and the like. Imagine, really, waking up, wherever you are, and being able to walk to a cafe, go to work, shop for groceries and anything else and then walk home, without ever considering stepping foot inside a car. If streets, city blocks, transit, and buildings are assembled so that people can use everything around them with ease, life could be less stressful, simpler and altogether more fulfilling. Instead, America now is established with all of the wealthiest people out far away from the city in a place where they MUST drive to the grocery store, MUST drive to shop, MUST drive to work and could walk for miles along endlessly winding suburban streets without finding anything but more people who have to do the same thing.

And all of this, the driving, the cost of living, all of it, are increased by the establishment of distance. A well-run city, one with a diverse society of people of all classes can grow and mutate and shift as time demands without ever losing its essential value: a place for people to live. The City in Mind may not find mass appeal, but it has piqued a passion in me and is allowing me to see the city I live in, the quality of the buildings around me, and the way each city block is used much differently. Now, not only do I see something ugly in a dead, pay-for-parking lot, I also see a spot where something beautiful could go, an apartment building with basement parking, retail on the ground level, three floors of office space and 4 more floors of living space. Instead of leaving an ugly, empty husk every night, this would see service and value to its community all day long. And that's something. A world where no building had to be empty half of its standing life.

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Notable Text: Eleven Kinds of Awesomeness.

There are spoilers coming for any of you who participate in the Puma Book Club, but not the "Nate's-gonna-ruin-the-story-like-a-big-jerk" kind, just the "Nate's-gonna-give-away-some-thoughts-on-the-book-in-advance" kind.

Richard Yates is famous to this recent generation as the old gent who wrote the book Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate "Perpetual Hotness" Winslet. See, but before they made it into a movie, it was a book, which is like a Kindle, but with tree parts. And after writing Revolutionary Road in 1961, Yates followed with a collection of short stories in 1962 called Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. As math, and planning would have it, there are 11 stories in the collection, and each addresses loneliness in a unique way. Consider that "loneliness" conceptually is usually something we consider individual. Being lonely is about being alone. About me being alone. But really, there are ways to be lonely even with other people around; surrounded with friends, and even with everything in life ostensibly successful. Loneliness, Yates shows, can be as simple as feeling a lack of control over a decent life.

Yates taps into his patented 1950s failing American Dream concept with the same brilliant richness as his first novel, but in this case addresses his protagonists (sometimes each their own antagonist) as if they are photographs beneath a microscope. Each vignette comes to craft carefully, with vivid description and lively, never wasteful dialogue. The characters, as sometimes plain as they are, breathe and move with a vivacious accessibility that makes them impossible to ignore. And Yates succeeds greatly in allowing/showing us how to love secondary characters while his protagonists and narrators deride and ridicule them. He commands a reader's emotions like the colors on his palette as each venture into a new character's world brings us reflections on our own successes, failures, hopes and dreams. Very often the writing is naive, cute, or simple, but never without proper effect or by accident. It's always delicate.

And it's often heartbreaking. Entirely. Tangibly.

In a time in writing where the emotional is dedicated to romance novels, "chick-lit," and young adult stories about Mormon vampires, reading Yates' straightforward take on life (even if it was life in the '50s, written in the '60s) is refreshing. Being a character driven collection means it never feels dated or stuck in a time space. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness brings out the best and the worst in each character. Which is exactly what makes them so real, and so easy to embrace. While we love reading about morally absolute characters, those great heroes and villains battling over concepts of freedom, love and justice, we're never quite so taken in by them as we are by our friends and loved ones. Yates greatest success is that he creates people, real people, and lets his readers follow them through some of their darkest moments. And through being by his characters' sides, we can empathize and assuage some of that loneliness, just as Yates does for us.

Favorite story: "No Pain Whatsoever" for the power it imparts to silences, and the sadness in necessary things left unsaid.

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