2011: Living in the Future

The future's so bright, I gotta wear a jumpsuit. Which, according to this book published in 1972, will allow me to match everyone else in the year 2011 perfectly.

So what did Geoffrey Hoyle's vision of the world of 2011 look like?

Well, it's kind of a mish-mash of the practical and the wildly imaginative and slightly less practical.

For example, Hoyle's proposition that switching to a 3-day work week will solve many of our traffic and pollution problems is actually one of the more realistic that I've heard. Not to get too earth-y here, but if people lived in homes appropriate to their family size, the country figured out a food system, and most entertainment was free, I think we could mostly live on a 3/5 salary, and I can't imagine that making me less happy.

However, he also has some less-plausible things going on, such as all foods being prepared by what appears to be the breakfast machine from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. The time the man spends on food preparation is a little out of hand, especially considering that he's also solved, you know, the little bullshit stuff like pollution. An entire page is devoted to the machine that makes toast, which also has my favorite future-y/as seen on TV sentence: "The toast starts life as ordinary sliced bread." Yeah, no shit. What a mind-blowing future you've constructed for us here. From there, it's exactly like an ordinary toaster except that a mechanical arm picks up the bread and then puts the toast on your plate. So I guess this solves that growing concern in the 70's about picking up toast.

Another weird one is the video phone. He's actually kind of dead on with computers and whatnot, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that. But what's strange to me is how every futuristic show is all about the goddamn video phone, but in real life we have somewhat abandoned the audio component of phones in favor of texting, which is really a dumbing down, technologically. We had texting technology in the day of pagers.

Although I have to say, video phone calls don't sound appealing to me personally. Plus, if you're a busy person, aren't you generally doing other things while talking as opposed to sitting and talking and doing nothing else? Then again, flip side, if all calls were video calls maybe it would cut down on people SITTING ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER AT A RESTAURANT AND FUCKING WITH THEIR PHONES WHILE THEY'RE EATING WITH A LIVE HUMAN SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE. Sorry for all the caps, but stop doing that. No matter who you are, texting at a table when there's only one other person there makes you look like a teen girl, one of the bad ones who picks on the shy but wonderfully spirited protagonists in teen girl movies.

The book also spends a great deal of time talking about school, and it sounds like people will be doing what homeschool kids are doing now. It's so funny to me that homeschool kids are on the cutting edge in terms of linking up to a satellite to go to class, but then they wear exclusively denim skirts and I imagine they churn their own butter for some reason.

Restaurants are not that much different other than the fact that the waiters and waitresses have been cut out of the equation, which is fine by me. I've never met a waiter who said he loved his job, and even though I like to think I'm a pretty easy customer and tip nicely, I never hear anything about it from a waiter, so I'm starting to feel like they don't want anyone to be at the restaurant, themselves included.

Public transportation is clean, free, reliable, and works 24/7. It's safe enough for kids to travel alone. So I guess the future also involved liquifying the homeless somehow. He didn't really go over that so much.

Overall, the future sounds pretty awesome, and it's kind of disappointing that the closest, most accurate page is the one that shows how horrible things were twenty years previous. Oh, wait a second, that was the SECOND-most disappointing thing. The MOST disappointing thing was the picture of a teenage boy playing an acoustic guitar. I hope that in 2050 we will have found better ways to pick up girls than playing a goddamn acoustic guitar. Maybe some kind of ray...

Volt: stories by Alan Heathcock

This book has some very strong stories in it, especially "The Staying Freight" which starts the collection off with a bang and is the best short story I've read this year.

But, as is the case with a lot of collections, it feels uneven.

I think this might be why people tend to do less short story reading. With a novel, you can get involved and assume that you'll be reading one unified story throughout, so if you like the first 40 pages you'll probably like the entire thing. But with short stories, you can't ever know what the next few pages will bring.

This book also fits in with the sort of rural, prairie gothic literature you see making the rounds right now, titles such as The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and books by Daniel Woodrell.

If that's the kind of thing you're into, I can't recommend anything more than Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock. I found that book to be tight, consistent, and unified in both its narrative voice and the overall tone.

Alan Heathcock has some good stories in him, clearly. But by the end of the book I started feeling like the recurring characters and settings were restricting more than freeing.

Coop by Michael Perry

Michael Perry has a way of taking whatever's going on in his life and relating it to another, smaller event in such a way that you can understand what he's talking about without him going overboard in pointing it out.

For example, in Truck: a Love Story he talks a great deal about rebuilding an old International, but the real story is more about his impending marriage to his new wife, his brother's upcoming marriage, and the ways in which rebuilding a rusty old truck are similar to a guy who's maybe a little rusty himself trying to build a love life.

In Coop, he talks a lot about raising pigs and chickens, but more than anything it's a reflection on the life one lives while raising a family and how one's upbringing looks different when you're thinking back on it instead of living it in the moment.

There are three things I always love about Perry's books:

1. He has a very easy style. This is not to be confused for a book that's a quick read because it's all plot and dialogue. There's a lot in there, and Perry uses his writerly skills to bring the magic to the reader, making it seem like everything just happened when in reality it must take a tremendous amount of work to get these sorts of stories down on paper and have them read so easily.

2. He's self-deprecating. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but if you read a lot of memoirs, it really is. It's a tough skill to master in life, tougher in writing. Actually, that might be true of almost everything. It's tough to master a skill like small talk in real life, but it's even harder to make it palatable in writing.

3. He never gets too pointed about the over-arching metaphor. Even though it's clearly there, he never has to point it out, and I think you could enjoy the books without even considering them that way.

Coop, though not my favorite of his simply because it talks a great deal about two subjects that aren't really my thing, religion and family, still shows off his aw shucks skill as a writer. It's good for the world to have writers like him around, and maybe he said it best as he described the grief of farmers filing past a casket one afternoon:

...you see these sunburned old dogs approach my brother and break down weepingas they take his hand or wrap him in their bearish arms, and maybe they are wearing big belt buckles or unmodish jeans or have their sparce hair Brylcreemed in the style of a 60's trucker, but it strikes me again how much we miss if we rely wholly on poets to parse the tender center of the human heart. At times like this I am grateful I was not raised to be sleek.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

It must suck to be a funny lady putting out a memoir right after Tina Fey. It would be like me putting out a book right after Greg Vance (you probably don’t know Greg Vance unless you went to middle school with me. I’m trying to maintain the fame ratio set up by the Fey/Kaling dynamic. I am slightly less famous than Greg Vance).

But what would REALLY suck is if Greg Vance’s book got more attention, but mine was…well, better.

I laughed, and the way the book was put together helped. Instead of talking about every moment behind the scenes of the Office (for which she writes, awesomely) Mindy Kaling breaks the book up into little sections. Some of my favorites:

“Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real”
Hilarious, plus this has gotten me closer to understanding the appeal of a romantic comedy than I’ve ever been. Which is still really far, but I feel like I can grasp it in the same way that I can understand THAT some people like birds as pets, even if I’ll never understand WHY.

“Franchises I Would Like to Reboot”
I know this was a joke, but I think I would see Lady Ghostbusters, possibly on opening weekend.

“Guys Need to Do Almost Nothing to Be Great”
A list of 12 easy steps to becoming a great guy. Very doable, even for shitty guys like myself.

And because she had so many helpful tips on how guys can be great, I would like to offer a couple theories to answer the question posed by the section “Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?”

1. For some reason, I think we’ve decided that this is something that can be done in tandem with something else, like skimming a Skymall while talking on the phone. It is not. For me, it’s like brushing my teeth. Something in my brain tells me that I should be able to do something else while I brush my teeth. It should be an autopilot thing, so taking out the garbage and brushing my teeth should be easy to do simultaneously. Cut to two minutes later and I’m either standing in the bathroom with a bag of garbage or walking out to the dumpster, toothbrush dangling from my mouth like a bizarre-looking, foamy cigarette.

2. It may also be an unintentional stalling tactic held over from childhood. As a kid, when it was time to go somewhere I didn’t want to go, I’d take as long as possible to put on my shoes. I don’t know what I thought the result would be. I don’t think it ever crossed my mom’s mind to say, “You know what, you’re slow at putting on shoes, so just stay here and play Sega.” As an adult, I don’t think it’s a conscious choice, but if I’m leaving my home there’s a 50/50 chance that I’m going somewhere I actually want to go, so it might be that leftover, reptile survival part of the brain kicking in.

The big difference I’ve seen between man memoirs and lady memoirs is that lady memoirs almost all seem to have some portion devoted to coming to grips with whatever type of body the author possesses. I’ve read one man memoir where body talk was a big topic, but it was the memoir of a kid who doused a bathrobe in gasoline and set himself on fire, so it was about his body, but more about how horribly burned his body was.

Anyway, it’s always the section I’m least interested in, and the longer it is, the more I start to drift off. And it doesn’t matter the body type, either. I tried to read Jenna Jameson’s book after the 15th time the copy at our library was mutilated, and hearing about her body was no more exciting or interesting. I glaze over without fail.

I think the male equivalent of this is articles about the best way to shave. Every ten minutes there’s a new product, which is new and exciting because it’s more like an old product. And no, I don’t really care how cowboys did it. I don’t do ANYTHING to my body the way cowboys did it, with the exception of drinking weird little potions that always turn out to be just hard drugs mixed with flavors.

So if you’re burned, losing a foot to diabetes, some sort of fishman or rhino lady, or you’re Lucy Grealy, then I’m interested in hearing about your body. But that’s just me.

The book is fast, funny, and has the best photo captions ever written, such as “Rainn Wilson, violent Ogre.”

Who is More in Hell Right Now?

I came across a couple reviews of this book.

I can't decide what would be worse.

To be this old man:

Got this for my 81 yr. old father-in-law as a stocking stuffer for Christmas, and it was his favorite gift! He loves good (and not so good!) clean jokes, and this kept him busy for awhile. He didn't put it down during our entire holiday visit. My 7 yr. old is now asking for one of her own. Highly recommend!

who is 81 years old, getting joke books for Christmas, and is clearly insane.

Or to be the students of this teacher:

I'm a high school teacher, and I like to treat my classes to a Chuckle of the Day. It can be hard to find jokes that are just good, clean fun. I would spend a lot of time some days searching around for an appropriate joke. This book fills my needs easily. I can open up to just about any page and find a fresh, decent joke. I often get groans from the class on some of the jokes, but that is part of the fun! Good bargain...

for whom cost is an important factor when it comes to the value of JOKES.

Gift Guide

A lot of book people tend to get books for Christmas. I don't because, as my grandmother put it, "You work at a library. I'm not buying you books." Which sort of makes sense, but if I was a DJ at a strip club I think I'd be okay with friends buying me lap dances for Christmas.

Before buying a book for a book nerd, understand that you are treading on dangerous territory. Most book nerds buy the books they want, so there's a very slim margin of shit that a book nerd wants but does not already own. If it was a pie chart, the pie slice of good buys would be slimmer than my wang.

That said, here are some gift recommendations I can make with links to purchasing them online.

For the Person Who Has a Good Sense of Humor:

It's funny, it's quick, and it's barely reading. All the qualities required of a hilarious book. Plus, this may also serve as a good gift for a child as it will horrify the child and also help you confirm your suspicions that the parents are not actually reading to him.

For the Tech Nerd:

This book, while providing documentation of practical jokes perpetrated via internet (such as the famous attempt to pay bills with a drawing of a spider) also helps remind readers that this whole internet thing is kind of nonsense.

For the Simpsons Enthusiast:

John Swartzwelder, who probably had as much to do with the best (Approx. seasons 3-8) humor the Simpsons had to offer as anyone, has also written several novels about detective Frank Burly. “As my exciting story began I was being punched in the stomach.”

For the Traveler

Trust me, planning a Portland vacation around the advice in this guide will give you a trip to remember. However, do note that the mausoleum is no longer open to the public. Use findagrave.com to locate a relative and prep a story about your love for geneaology.

For the Person with Childlike Wonder

NOT A CHILD, by the way. Childlike Wonder is awesome in adults and really annoying in children.

For the Writer

Simple, quick, and it actually looks quite handsome on the shelf, which is where most of your books will spend most of their lives. It's a fast enough read that you can get back to goddamn writing already.

For the Child (if you must)

Lots of monster drawings that need finishing touches. And who can resist instruction such as "Draw an EPIC puke!"

The Call and Gimmicks

A book that's pleasant and quiet without being boring, which is a rarity as far as I can tell.

The book has a structure to it that might turn some people off from the beginning. The narrator is a large animal doctor, and each section works kind of like this:

Call: [explanation of animal ailment]

Action:

Result: [you're smart. you can figure this one out][explanation of what he did]

But then the narrator deviates from the structure a little bit.

Thoughts On The Ride Home:

What I Heard With The Window Open:

What I Checked For Out The Window:

What The Spaceman Said To Me:

and so on.

It really got me thinking about the difference between a book with structure and a book with a gimmick.

For example, I tried The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell, a book in which every sentence is a question. THAT didn't work for me. Honestly, I felt that the structure was SO rigid that it took away from the possibilities of the story. The most entertaining part was the existence of the book as an object, not the text within.

It had points where it was clever, but I don't personally value cleverness in art. Cleverness is a great attribute when it comes to problem-solving and engineering (and therefore can sometimes work in mystery novels), but in art it can be really annoying. If I enjoy a painting, it's likely that I'm getting a feeling from it or placing my own experiences on top of it, and that emotional result is never related to cleverness. Clever jokes are not my favorite, and usually the kind that result in someone SAYING "that's funny" as opposed to actually laughing. A clever poem? That's a tough sell.

So what, then, is the difference between a book with good structure and a book with a gimmick?

I thought about it a lot. Maybe it has something to do with whether the tool is something that is too rigid. If it's too rigid, the story starts conforming and contorting to fit the frame and can never go anywhere unexpected or fun. Maybe it has something to do with the tool being too repetitive. I did notice that several people who enjoyed The Interrogative Mood (of which there are many) seemed to have read it in small chunks instead of all at once.

Ultimately, though, the answer I came to is this:

Structure is a gimmick that works.

Murder on the Orient Express, Mackie Style!

*note: I am aware that cover is for the PC game. If I'd known that was an option, you be your ASS I would have played it. Why read it when you can LIVE it?

Uh, book club book.

That's the explanation for why.

It's pretty much what you'd expect, a whodunit with an ending that's fairly interesting, although you could probably just skip to it and get about the same amount out of it. I DO have a theory that horror movie writers are going back to Agatha Christie for their plot twists, turns, and oddly-positioned stabbings, though. However, the weird machines that drown people in pig's innards are a fairly novel creation that I'm not prepared to credit to classic literature.

Because I don't want to spoil the whole thing, I thought what might be useful is to discuss the detective abilities of the main character, Hercule Poirot. And because it is my only cultural reference at the moment, I will compare his methods of detection with that of television detective and star of the Shield, Vic Mackie.

Here are some scenarios and how I suspect each would handle them:

SCENARIO 1: A BODY IS FOUND ON A TRAIN

Poirot: Would work his way through the different passengers and narrow things down to a most likely suspect.

Mackie: Would find the conductor of the train, ask him what he was hiding, then assault him, shoving a piece of the train's coal in his mouth until he said everything he knew.

SCENARIO 2: A GOVERNESS IS SUSPECTED OF A CRIME

Poirot: Would gently question the lady so as not to put her on the defense.

Mackie: Would question the lady, then threaten to allow a sex tape of her to hit the streets if she didn't start talking, pronto.

SCENARIO 3: AN ITALIAN MAN IS ACCUSED OF STABBING ANOTHER MAN

Poirot: Would consider this possible, and does put forth the theory that "wops" (his word, I swear) DO tend to stab (this is pulled directly from the pages, I SWEAR to you).

Mackie:...actually, pretty much the same thing.

As you can see, our detection skills have come a long way, baby.

The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman has written some damn good stuff, and his last few have been awesome. Eating the Dinosaur was strong, and his novel, Downtown Owl, surprised me. Honestly, I was surprised I liked it so much, which probably means 50% that he did a great job and 50% that I shouldn't be such an asshat and go into books with such an asshat-y attitude.

As one might expect, the book is about an invisible man, but it's not really so much about him being invisible. It's more about him watching what people do when they're alone. Being invisible provides the only real opportunity to watch every move someone makes, which the character feels is the only way to really and truly KNOW a person.

It turns out that most people really and truly like to watch Law & Order and fall asleep in front of the TV, which is only slightly different from what they're telling us they do, which is watch the Wire and fall asleep in front of the TV.

The book's narrator and the invisible man are two separate characters. The invisible man is very Klosterman-esque. You can hear his voice a lot when he describes his surprising affinity for sports and his anger when people call him "invisible" as he is not actually invisible but merely far, far LESS visible, a distinction that would strike me as being very important to Chuck Klosterman, and one he has the good sense to understand would be important to almost nobody else.

The most enjoyable parts were definitely the descriptions of what people did while alone, character studies really, while the interactions between the main characters were...not completely uninteresting, but far, far LESS interesting.

It's fun as a thought experiment, but feels more like a "What would you do if..." conversation that's forgotten the next day as opposed to something you find yourself considering again days later.

Lethem Has Wood

[note: this is about James Wood, critic, not James WoodS, this guy. But hey, who couldn't use a nice Videodrome pic here and there?]

Just as a timestamp, today is November 7th, 2011.

Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude came out August 4th, 2004.

So, it's a little unclear why Lethem decided to write a super-long, super-dense criticism of a review his book received when it came out. You can read it here. If you can actually get through the damn thing, good for you. You must have a life that has time for horseshit.

To summarize:

Basically, James Wood wrote a criticism of the book that made it seem like he A) wanted a book other than the book he was presented with and B) didn't actually read the book.

I 100% agree that criticizing a book that you haven't read, or at least criticizing without admitting that you couldn't get through it because it was so godawful, is wrong. And Lethem's right to be pissed that Wood criticized him for making no references to literature because Solitude is really one long love letter to forms of literature in a lot of ways.

However, this criticism...the one by Lethem, the criticism of the criticism, I found unreadable. I'll admit that I skimmed, but it's because I was so tired of waiting for him to get to the point that I couldn't take it anymore. 2,220 words long? And the first 500+ words are quotes? The kind of quotes that lead off a book and that I skip 90% of the time because they're either irrelevant until you've read portions of the book or because they're by Lewis Carroll and I just don't care anymore?

I tried going to the source as well, the James Wood review. 4,200 words. Couldn't even begin to begin it. Besides, you could be 5% into the goddamn ACTUAL BOOK by then at which point you could make a pretty informed decision on whether or not to read it.

My best work is by no means critiquing writing or writers. It's not really my place. But in creating a dense, unreadable criticism, I feel like these things don't function.

The other day I was waiting for a sandwich and looking at one of those bulletin boards filled with tacked-up business cards. One of the cards was for a business involved in graphic design. Despite the fact that this designer has spent money and time tacking up business cards in sandwich establishments, a dynamite business plan if I ever heard one, I doubt the calls are flooding in. You know why? Because the business card itself was boring and not well done, and if a graphic designer can't graphic design his own business card, why would I trust him with designing mine?

If you want to make the point that you're a good writer, maybe the best way to do it is to write something good. Just saying.

The controversy is silly to me because I would NEVER read that insane, rambling review in the first place, nor would I read the response to it. It's just a bunch of words about a bunch of words about a bunch of words, and it feels like a couple guys angrily 69'ing all day.

Also, and this is one of those things that proves, as we all learned from the Malcom in the Middle theme song, that life is unfair: when a writer talks about a harsh review from a critic, it's almost impossible to not sound like a whiner. Yes, Wood clearly didn't read the book and yes, that's clearly wrong, and not just wrong like a mistake is wrong. Just plain wrong. A lie. But you know what? It's false to assume that a writer, who is suited to writing, is also good at accepting criticism. So if the book is done, be done with it already.

Just so you don't think this is all about me hating on J.L. (who is hit or miss for me), check out his Promiscuous Stories project. Very cool.

Equality NOW!

Check this shit out:

On the left we have the Spanish version of James Patterson's Swimsuit. On the right, the English edition.

First off, how come they get such a sexier title? For the sake of accuracy, both cover models appear to be wearing the swimwear known as the "bikini."

Swimsuit? That's what you wear to do water aerobics with the other old ladies. It has built in beige mesh. Bikini? Much more exciting.

Secondly, I find the Spanish cover model's bikini far more scandalous. Look how much thinner the straps are! And the patch covering her stuff? Teeny. I might even go so far as to call it Teeny Tiny. Plus, that patch isn't even visible on the English cover. You have to use your stupid imagination, and if people could use their imagination to successfully see naked women, wouldn't the porn industry be a complete failure?

The English version does have a more severely posed model, however. Her back is arched in such a way that suggests the insertion of a metal rod to replace her spine, and this is now the closest thing she gets to being reclined and relaxed.

As a substitute for the visible crotch area, the English model has a definite side breast thing happening.

Side breast for crotch area? Looks like someone was going for the classic Separate, But Equal thing here. And we all know how that ends up.

It begs the question, Why make s different cover if they're going to be so alike anyway? Who knows. Any excuse to make a model pose uncomfortable in 8 inches of tepid water, I suppose. And not to get too far off track, but if I were a lady posing for Maxim or some crap like that, I would demand to see where that water was coming from. I need to be sure that they freshened it up since the last time Kirsten Dunst was here.

Machine Man by Max Barry

Brief summary of the first dozen pages:

Super logical engineer dude gets his leg crushed in an industrial accident, loses it. The prosthetics he’s presented with are crap, so he builds his own new leg. He then find his flesh leg inferior and incompatible with his new leg. What’s a fella to do?

I had fun with this book. Max Barry knows how to write something that keeps moving along without being completely plot-driven.

Some would say it’s philosophy 97 (4 less than 101), but I’d say the idea of whether a person is a body or a body a person is something that warrants reexamining as technology progresses.

The most interesting theory in this book is the question of why we create mechanical and technological substitutes for things only to mimic their biological or natural counterparts. How much money did someone sink into creating e-ink when we already had ink, and why didn’t they try to come up with something altogether new an improved?

Like I’ve said, author/idol Tom Spanbauer always says writers should do three things to an audience: Make them laugh, Teach them something, and Break their hearts.

Make Them Laugh:
Main Character on Love: “I had gone seven years without kiss and now I’d had two in a week. It was the kind of data event that implied serious contamination of laboratory conditions.”

Teach Them Something:
Main Character’s Speech to Girlfriend After She Hangs Onto the Salt at the Dinner Table: “Everything is a system. Look.” I leaned forward. “What if I had your water and I suddenly decided I wanted the salt? And instead of giving you back the water I just sat here waiting for you to release the salt, which you didn’t because you were waiting for the water? It’s a deadlock, that’s what. It’s catastrophic system failure. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, I could just ask Charlie to give me the water in exchange for the salt.’ But that requires you to understand my resource needs, and violates process encapsulation. I’m not saying it’s a big deal. I’m just pointing out that locking the salt like that in incredibly inefficient and systematically dangerous.”

Break their Hearts:
[I’ll leave this one alone because I don’t want to give out all the details here]

Fun book. It sags somewhere near the end when it turns into an all-out action film and loses some of that emotional core. But it’s close enough.

Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick

The incredible story of Kevin Mitnick, hacker extraordinaire.

A truly fascinating book, both in the narrative and the technical details, Mitnick will have a lot of people rethinking what hacking is, what it means, and why people do it.

On the hacking side, there is a lot of techie stuff in here that might be tough for some to follow, although having only a cursory knowledge of information systems is more than enough to help readers understand WHAT Mitnick was doing, even if you might not understand exactly HOW he did it.

On the narrative side, I was pleasantly surprised as the story evolved from one of technical curiosity to a fugitive story complete with a helicopter chase.

Combining the two sides is the curious fact and often humorous descriptions of Mitnick's social engineering ploys.

One of my favorites (recreated here based on my shoddy memory):

Mitnick calls a telecom office pretending to be one of their salesmen. "Yeah, I'm out here in the field and I lost my database password. I was hoping I could get that from you, I have some clients I need to meet with and I need to show them the new software."

The guy at the office says, "I can get you the password, but I can't give it out over the phone."

Mitnick says, "Hmm...I might not be in until later tonight or tomorrow. Tell you what, can you print it out for me and seal it in an envelope? Just leave it with Peggy [Peggy being the name of a secretary Mitnick got from some earlier calls] and I'll get it from her."

The worker sees no problem with that, and 20 minutes later Mitnick calls Peggy posing as the salesman, asks if she has an envelope for him, and asks her to open it and read him the contents.

The book is full of entertaining vignettes like this one. And if a good book is supposed to change your life, this one succeeded. I spent Saturday looking at shredders.

Skyjack by Geoffrey Gray

A defeat in Vietnam was imminent. He nation was also mired in recession. Labor strikes crippled the workforce. Unemployment soared. So did the crime rate. Prisons were overcrowded and taken over in riots. Communes were built. Cults formed. Otherwise normal teenagers ran away from home, and had to be “deprogrammed” after they were brainwashed.

This is a paragraph from a book, and basically explains why I don’t think I can read this one. It’s just a style issue. Despite a strong interest in the material, I got about six pages into this book before deciding I couldn’t do this to myself.

I’m not going to attempt to critique too much because hell, this guy got a book contract, so I guess the style appeals to some. But for me…I don’t know. Really choppy. And I end up re-reading sentence like this one over and over, not to appreciate them but because I keep thinking I read them wrong:

The Cooper Curse is what those who have felt it call it.

I’m not a big grammar-correction officer by any means. Grammar, in my opinion, is useful for two things. First, it helps us as a guideline to write readable material. Grammar is the basic structure behind what we think of as "flow" in a piece of writing. Second, it is something that people correct other people on because they want to look smart. In order for a self-appointed grammarian to correct someone, they first have to know what the speaker said. If I say "me and my friends" when I SHOULD have said "my friends and I" there's very little reason to correct me because you know exactly what I was saying. And I'm totally okay with that in a book because that is the way people speak in real life.

This book, however, was just plain hard to read.

From time to time the sentences have a certain Bukowski-esque appeal, such as this one:

Skipp Porteous wants to talk and says can we meet and I say fine.

But more often than not I’m just confused, like in this one:

Soon I am leaving for the airport and now I am on the plane and I can’t get the ballad out of my head.

Did we just time travel in that sentence, or is it being written at the moment the narrator zipped up his bag and writing it took so long that we are now in the airplane seven words later?

The writer has covered boxing for a number of media outlets, and that’s not too shocking. The style does seem more appropriate for a boxing match where the flow of time can feel changed depending on the action and punches mark punctuation points.

I’m not saying I won’t take another crack at it later. For now, though, it’s just not what I’m looking for.

Eat Like a Man: My Manhood Test

I had a recent run-in with this cookbook.

Cookbooks are an area of interest for me, somewhat because I cook, but more because I'm consistently boggled by the fact that they turn out so terribly.

This one did a decent job with some of the common problems.

For one, it seemed like most of the recipes had pictures, and ones that showed the food looking good. People, for the love of god and everything he has ever cooked up, put a picture with EVERY recipe. I don't know what pozole looks like. Is it liquidy? Slimy? Because mine was liquidy and slimy and I need to know that it was wrong.

The smaller written parts of this book were actually more entertaining and helpful than the recipes. For example, advice nuggets like writing down a simple pancake recipe on an index card that goes in your wallet is a pretty decent idea. You might only use it after crashing at someone's house a half a dozen times, but according to the punch-based evidence, that's twice as often as I use my Jimmy John's punch card.

My issue with this book was two-fold.

One, it had that Esquire feel where it's a little too much about saying, A real man is like this and that. For example, this book is a big proponent of the idea that experimenting in the kitchen off book is the real way to cook.

I hear this kind of thing a lot. This or that person "can only cook from a recipe." That's a silly thing to say, and cooking is one of the only fields where this applies.

At work, gearheads are always coming in to look at our Chilton manuals. It's not because they're dumb or don't know what they're doing. It's because there is a lot to know, and some adjustments and specifications on cars have to be fairly exact. But we still consider these people mechanics.

Cooking is the same deal, if you ask me. And the only people who talk a lot about how cooking off book is the only real cooking are either people who cook and want it to seem more special than it is, or people who don't cook and use it as an excuse to never learn.

I made a polenta from this book, and it was godawful. Mushy, not super flavorful. It has all the looks of something a guy should like, a goldenbrown cornbread bed covered in sausage and cheese. But it's pretty much shit, I have to say.

Second, the recipes seemed a little complicated to me. I wouldn't call myself a total amateur. I've made lots of different shit, and my percentage of good foods is improving. But a lot of these involved marinades and prep work that takes goddamn forever, or ingredients that you're not likely to have laying around.

Which brings us to Coca-Cola Fried Chicken.

Things seemed to be going well. The shit had been marinading, the batter looked good, and I had the oil going strong.

Then, as I was pulling the last piece of chicken out of the fryer, I saw that the thermometer I was using had broken sometime during the cooking process.

Fuck.

So not only was there potentially broken glass in the chicken, but almost certainly mercury.

It's always struck me as hilarious, by the way, that mercury thermometers go in our mouths. Glass and mercury. Go ahead and just stick that in your mouth. Couldn't they have come up with some kind of thermometer made of mace and a cactus?

Anyway, this was the test of whether I was a man, as I saw it. Could a man resist, after standing in a kitchen for an hour or so, frying chicken, at least sampling the meat, despite the potential for horrific internal injury and poisoning that has really, really fucked up a bunch of Asian people?

Of course not.

I took a bite.

Now here's the thing: It was only a bite.

The coke marinade, the big difference between this and other fried chicken? Tasted pretty much the same to me. It was darker, and that was about it. But not irresistable. Not so delicious that it was worth a second bite, and the rest went in the trash.

Two epic failures from one book were enough to have me move on. They may have both been my fault, but I decided to take it like a relationship that starts off with two pretty bad dates. Maybe we could have made many years of beautiful meals together, but hey, I'm a man. Man enough to break the streak before it becomes a pattern, anyway.

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

A good book, one of my favorites of 2011.

I didn’t give it a perfect rating, but only because I liked Wilson’s previous book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, so much that it’s a tough act to follow.

A lot of what came through again, however, is a lot of what made Tunneling so great. There’s a main course of dark sweetness in the characters, and oddity is a side dish.

The thing that really works for me about Wilson’s books is that he has a good handle on the bizarre, but he also has the good sense to use it sparingly, just enough that you don’t feel like a book is all about creating these insane situations. There are plenty of books out there that are all about the bizarre, and if a book is balls-out insane (see Satan Burger) I can deal. Then there are books that are bizarre, but in a more hip way that’s harder to understand. A lot of your beat generation falls into that category. That’s great for people who are into that, people who I would say are welcome to enjoy their Clove cigarettes, thin bicycles, and silly facial hair, and I will not encroach on their freedom to do so just so long as they don’t mind the fact that I can’t always stop my lips from forming a derisive sneer.

Kevin Wilson is a really talented writer because he can incorporate the bizarre, but it never feels like that’s the focal point of the story. The characters are engaged in these offbeat scenarios, but you get the feeling that the characters themselves are not super comfortable with the level of strangeness either. The characters feel so real, and you get to see a real-seeming person go through something very strange, which is the appeal of something strange in the first place, in my opinion. Using an example from one of his stories, reading about a fairly ordinary man whose parents spontaneously combusted is interesting and engaging. Spellbinding, to use movie critic terms. But if the book were about a Cyclops whose parents exploded and his only fried was a lady with three eyes, the strangeness becomes mundane, and then the story has no life.

To put it more concisely, he uses the appeal of the strange just enough to make the work interesting, but not so much that the strange becomes the norm, thereby diluting its power. It makes for good, literary fiction that can be enjoyed on a level of being just plain fun at the same time.

I love it, and I’ll be first in line for whatever he comes out with next.

Robopocalypse by Daniel Wilson

Loved it. World War Z with robots.

I don’t use this word a lot, but it was very creative. You might think, Screw this, I’ve seen Terminator. Well, this is better. Trust me. It takes the concept to a far more interesting place from start to finish, and there’s no complicated nude time travel involved.

It also adheres to what I think of an important rule of fiction, the Rule of Witness. Basically, how does the narrator know what he’s telling me, and why is he telling me? Robopocalypse has a really well-thought-out way of not only working around this problem that’s so common in fiction, but of integrating it into the story.

Read it. One of Pete’s Top of 2011, fo sho.

That said, there is one thing that bothers me about these robot uprisings.

In general, the scenario goes something like this:

It’s the near future, we’re very reliant on our mechano-men, and all of a sudden some bad shit goes down and they all turn against us.

Okay, I’m down with that.

But the one thing I never understand is Why Are Domestic, Helpful Robots Given the Strength of Ten Men? That part, to me, never really makes sense.

Yes, I understand that it would be helpful to have a very strong robot who could, I don’t know, haul a huge load of bricks on his back. But why not give him a human amount of strength and pair it with increased endurance? That way, the robot could easily unload the car. It just takes a minute longer, but he wouldn’t be able to punch down your house if something went wrong.

Or take for example, the problem of grip strength. Every robot has a vice-like grip that lets him crush a skull like it was nothing. For what? What scenario would require a grip strong enough to powder human bone? I would pose this theory: Giving a robot super grip strength would only be harmful.

I actually listened to this on audiobook, and I listened to part of it on the way home from the grocery store. I was carrying an overloaded plastic bag, and I just barely made it in the door before the bag shredded itself to pieces. Now, an increased grip strength would not have helped me get the bag home intact. The tensile strength of the bag allowed it to only hold so much weight, and that weight is way lower than what I’m able to carry.

In short, the objects of our world are not strong enough to test the limits of human strength, so what would be the purpose of a robot with ten times the strength of a human?

I suppose you could say that it might be useful for a robot to grip a lugnut and twist it off when you need a quick tire change. But if that’s your plan, why create humanoid robots at all? Wouldn’t the purpose of a humanoid robot be that we wouldn’t have to create an entirely different set of tools and environments for the robots? The elegance of them is that they could do what we do, the way that we do it. So it’s either lugnut-changing robot with built-in torque, or it’s humanoid robot who can use a tire iron.

I just don’t understand the conversation between scientists who are building these robots. Is there one mad scientist who just wanted to make the strongest robot possible? Does his assistant not forsee any possible problem with this?

Even a simple machine, a nailgun, has a safety measure on it that supposedly only allows a nail to be fired when the gun is pressed against the wall. It’s not perfect, but it’s SOMETHING. Why wouldn’t robots have something similar?

I think the answer is simple, and somewhat the point of these robot uprising books and movies, which is that humans can be very lazy and quickly get used to machines doing things for them. There’s really nothing wrong with that until we lose the ability to understand the principles behind the machines, at which point we lose control. I get that, and it’s a valid point.

So I guess this is my plea to scientists: If you’re working on robot projects, please consider not making the robots a hundred times stronger than yourself. Just consider it. I know you think it would be really cool to make an indestructible robot that looks like a horrific skeleton with glowing red eyes, but I would ask that you refrain. Just don’t.

Your Wildest Dreams Within Reason by Mike Sacks

Mike Sacks is a funny guy, and if you’re into stuff like McSweeney’s online whatever-the-hell-they-call-it, you’ll enjoy this book.

The book does suffer a bit from a couple of comedy diseases that are really prevalent.

The first, Onion Fatigue Syndrome, a disease commonly found within the pages of joke newspaper the Onion, is all about how you read comedy. The Onion, like this book, is absolutely hilarious in small-to-medium doses. But if you read the entirety of the Onion front-to-back, you don’t even give a shit about the last couple articles, no matter how hilarious the headlines may be. So if you’re interested in this book, pace yourself.

The second, SSNL (Syndrome Saturday Night Live) is all about taking a hilarious premise and running with it long enough that it’s just not funny anymore. Schweddy Balls is a funny thing to hear Alec Baldwin say, but after a couple go-arounds of “your balls are so sweet” and “your balls would really please my toddler” you get the joke. Then you get it again. And then you start yelling at the TV that you get it in the vain hope that someone will hear you and move on to the next sketch. This book can go down that road in places too. Good premises all around, but occasionally you’re ready to skip to the next piece quite a bit before the end.

But hey, for one guy to have a collection this funny is pretty rare.

Good Poems for Hard Times Ed. Garrison Keillor

Hey, what are you going to do?

It’s an anthology. The problem with every anthology is that it’s not going to please everybody all the time, which means it kind of ultimately pleases nobody, right?

Garrison Keillor, for all his lake business, does a decent job of selecting poetry. Really. This book and its precursor, Good Poems, are both filled with some really excellent material. The biggest downfall, for me personally, is the inclusion of super-traditional stuff, Bible verses, for example. And I'm not a fan of reading portions of something. I know Leaves of Grass is impossibly long, but...I don't know. I'm not an excerpt guy. But hey, it's all about balance, and if the world has to read, say, Robert Frost yet again in order to be tricked into reading Denver Butson, then so be it.

I figure the most useful thing would be to list some of the poems I liked best. This isn't a list of what I consider every good poem in the book, because a very large number are very good. They're just poems that held my attention for whatever reason. I tend to enjoy poems with concrete, real details and story as opposed to language poetry. It’s all pretty accessible stuff, stuff you could probably read without being left with that all-too-familiar poetry feeling of “Well what the hell does that mean?” If that’s you, consider taking a look at some of these.

“For My Daughter in Reply to a Question” –David Ignatow (13)

“Starting the Subaru at Five Below” by Stewart Kestenbaum (15)

“The State of the Economy” by Louis Jenkins (27)

“Calling him back from layoff” by Bob Hicok (43)

“Working in the Rain” by Robert Morgan (45)

“Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh” by Gary Snyder (79)

“Mother, In Love at Sixty” by Susanna Styve (166)

“My Husband Discovers Poetry” by Diane Lockward (182)

“Soda Crackers” by Raymond Carver (232)

“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” by Robert Bly (253)

“My Brother” by Denver Butson (255)