From an interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald by Michael Mok, first published in 1936:

Then the reporter asked him how he felt now about the jazz-mad, gin-mad generation whose feverish doings he chronicled in This Side of Paradise. How had they done? How did they stand up in the world?

"Why should I bother myself about them?" he asked. "Haven't I enough worries of my own? You know as well as I do what has happened to them. Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors."

His face twitched.

"Successful authors!" he cried. "Oh, my God, successful authors!"

He stumbled over to the highboy and poured himself another drink.

The Guardian is currently running a series of great interviews of the 20th Century.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr., who wrote under the pen name Robert Jordan, died on Sunday, September 16, 2007.  He was 58. 

Reading about Jordan's struggle with amyloidosis, a blood disease, seemed at times like watching someone I knew personally struggle with sickness, and his recent, unexpected death seemed like the death of an old friend. 

I remember clearly, all those years ago, buying my first copy of The Eye of the World at the little bookstore in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire and reading it in my family's condo there.  It was summer, I think, and I went into the shop just before it closed.  I had just finished another good book and was feeling that accompanying sadness and I picked up The Eye of the World, having seen it and its first few sequels in bookstores before, and wondered if I was in the mood to begin a long, multi-volume fantasy series whose individual books might be used as doorstops.  But the store was closing so I bought it and walked past the lake and under the lodge's cedar archway and took the meandering elevator up to the fifth floor.  The windows of the condo, a tower room, gave a panoramic view of the valley and I started reading after dinner as the light faded behind the mountains. 

The story started on a road in a wood in a mountainous country that didn't seem too terribly different from the one in which I was sitting.  Like any good fantasy story it started in humble, sleepy peace and slowly led its characters into danger, darkness, and hidden grandeur.  I read that night until my eyes burned.  The book is over 800 pages long and I think I read it in under three days.

Robert Jordan died before finishing the 12th and final book of the The Wheel of Time, the epic that started with The Eye of the World.  The final volume would have been titled A Memory of Light.

To some, fantasy fiction is a genre to be enjoyed only by children and questionable adults, fanboys and girls who are unlikely to have been popular before, during, or since high school.  But I pity those who never felt the thrill of adventure between the pages of a paperback, who never read under the covers with a flashlight at night, who never wished there was something more mysterious about the world, something left to be discovered. 

The New York Times obituary quotes a 1996 review by Edward Rothstein: "Even a reader with literary pretensions can be swept up in Mr. Jordan's narrative of magic, prophecy and battle."

Rest in peace, RJ.

For up to date information and to read words from his family, see Jordan's blog on Dragonmount.com.

While I was getting my hair cut on Friday I said to my barber: "Against my better judgment, I'm going to see Toby Keith tomorrow."

"What's her name?" he replied.

I admitted to him that it was my girlfriend who wanted to go and that I had offered to accompany her.

So, yesterday ,we met up with my friend Ryan (one of the very few people I know that listens to Toby Keith and country music in general) and his date in the Tweeter Center parking lot, had a few drinks, and then made our way inside.  I drank Portuguese white wine and imported beer in protest.   I recalled Sean Connery's line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "My boy, we are pilgrims in an unholy land."

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of country music, nor do I typically agree with or understand many of the things that country musicians tend to sing about.  That said, I like to think that I'm open-minded enough to try something in person before I knock it.  As CJ convinced me, it was kind of an adventure in cultural exploration: "If it was in some other country, you'd be all for it."  Plus, attending this concert means I get to drag her to something she doesn't really want to go to as recompense.  (But then, bringing her to Interpol or Radiohead or the Shins wouldn't be much of a riposte on my part, since she listens to them too.  I'm going to have to get creative.)  So I dubbed myself Ambassador to the Rednecks and cowboyed up.  I put on an old white cowboy-style shirt with faux-pearl snap buttons from American Eagle and went.  The closest thing I had to cowboy boots were brown leather slip-on loafers from Johnston and Murphy.

The scene itself was not nearly as strange as I expected, which is, to me, a somewhat scary concept.  For every idiot in a cowboy hat there were three or four people who looked like normal, blue-collar Massachusetts people.  Ryan, surprisingly, was not wearing a hat, having settled for boots and an engraved leather belt adorned in Confederate flags with a buckle the size of a compact disc.  I'm starting to think that country music is like marijuana: many more people than you'd think get high on it on a daily basis, and they don't all look like potheads.

I had a reasonably good time, mostly because give me a beer and a few good friends and I'll have a good time anywhere.  I even halfway enjoyed a couple of the songs, one being that Willie Nelson duet "Beer for My Horses" and the other a song called "Running Block."  Around here we'd say "jumping on the grenade." 

The only thing that really bothered me was the blatant corporate sponsorship, courtesy of Ford Motor Company.  The show opened with a massive projection screen being lowered in front of the stage on which they showed an extended Ford advertisement starring none other than Toby Keith as Big Dog Daddy and Larry the Cable Guy as Possum Boy.  I was a little too dazzled by the sheer audacity of the concept to really pay attention, but it seemed to mostly feature Toby Keith and Larry the Cable Guy driving recklessly around in an enormous black Ford Super Duty pickup truck.  As soon as it ended, pyrotechnics flared and the first of many confetti explosions blasted out onto the audience.  Toby Keith was front and center in his urban cowboy getup, pretending to play the acoustic guitar in the way that Bono sometimes does: the only audible guitar playing is done by the other guitarists in the band, while the lead singer goes through the motions and occasionally takes his hands off the instrument entirely in the middle of the song to wave and clap and point.  Toby Keith does a lot of pointing.  Directly behind him on the stage, for the entirety of the concert, was a massive mock-up of the chrome grille of a Ford pickup truck.  Keith literally stood in front of a Ford logo for the whole concert.

One thing I can definitely say is that I still don't get it.  I don't get the music.  I get the tailgating and the camaraderie. But I don't find the music particularly fun to listen to: as far as good songs to drink beer to, I'll take the Rolling Stones any day.

For all my sarcasm, I was happy to go, happy to do something I wouldn't normally do, happy to make CJ happy.  I was happy to see that the patriotic, pro-military extravaganza that I expected to see was not as hollow when I actually saw it.  Keith didn't bluster about supporting the troops in the way that a lot of Republicans were doing up until fairly recently, he just thanked them, sang a few songs about them, and then embarrassed the shit out of them by plastering their faces on the Jumbotron every once in a while.   Which is great; I hope they enjoyed themselves.  And I hope they got in for free and didn't have to pay eight bucks for a beer.

Toby Keith seems like he might be a fun guy to have a beer with, if you could get him to lose the hat, and despite (allegedly) being a Democrat, he's got the American military wrapped around his finger.  Every poor uniformed son of a bitch in the crowd was up on stage by the end, standing at attention in front of the Ford logo, behind the Big Dog Daddy himself as he sang about putting a boot in the ass of America's enemies.  The crowd screamed in pride.

I felt something, then, too, but I'm not sure it was pride.

Most of the local Florida news sites featuring this breaking story seem to be down at the moment, most likely overloaded by a surge in visitors, but Bostonist has some good commentary and CNN is also featuring a longer video along with what few facts are available now.

To Kerry's credit, he can be heard clearly saying: "That's alright, let me answer his question."

Update: The Independent Florida Alligator article I linked to above is back up, and it has a lot more information.  The university police are apparently claiming that Andrew Meyer, the man who started the debacle, "started a riot" and was tasered for resisting arrest.  What I saw from the video footage doesn't look like much of a riot.  It looks like university police officers engaging in an unnecessary use of force.

Back in college I wrote an op-ed article for the Suffolk Journal arguing that the Suffolk University Police Department didn't need firearms, which they had been seeking for some time.  This sort of backs up that argument, wouldn't you say?

The New York Times is officially going to stop charging for access to parts of its website effective midnight tonight.

I'm not a Western fan.  Like any other kid, there was a point when I wanted to be a cowboy, when the ultimate freedom meant a horse and a pair of sixguns.  But generally speaking I tended more towards Indiana Jones and Zorro than to Clint Eastwood and Henry Fonda.  I've never even seen Unforgiven.  My favorite Western up until yesterday was Tombstone, because it was more accessible than the old black-and-whites and because Val Kilmer's performance as Doc Holliday actually managed to make it seem badass to have tuberculosis.

But 3:10 to Yuma got me.  A.O. Scott calls it a lesser film than the original 1957 movie of the same name, both based on an Elmore Leonard short story.  In his New York Times review, he praises the acting but predictably favors older films, lauding (perhaps too generously) their complexities: "The best of the old westerns were dense with psychosexual implication and political subtext."  He also calls the character of Ben Wade, played by Russell Crowe, a sociopath, which is at best a somewhat useless label.  Certainly, by modern standards, the outlaw Ben Wade would fit neatly into the current definition of sociopathy, but is it appropriate to apply this concept to such a different era?  In the absence of true law and order, in a situation where even a law-abiding citizen might be gunned down over the price of a pocketwatch, can we really call violence sociopathy?  Yes, Crowe's character is a criminal, a man who does whatever he pleases and kills with a smile, who chose exile over poverty and a good living over an honest one.  Yes, he's violent and often ruthless.  But the point of the film seemed to me to be that he wasn't evil.  He does end up empathizing, putting someone else before himself, even if only for a few moments. 

Scott also calls the film "revisionist," in the sense that, like many other modern films, it replaces the myth of the American West with realism.  But the realism of this film is what makes it special.  The realism is the best part. 

The myth of the lone, heroic, utterly self-reliant cowboy isn't terribly interesting to me, nor is black-and-white morality.  The truer vision of the West is one that involves an uncivilized territory ripe for plunder, filled with what were not truly evil men but rather downtrodden, friendless veterans of the Civil War who were ignored by the government they fought for and forced to do what they had to do to survive.  Sometimes this led to nobility and a frontiering spirit and sometimes it led to psychological derangement and senseless violence. 

The look and feel of the film were classic and the acting, as you might expect, was exquisite across the board.  I was particularly taken in by Ben Foster's performance as Charlie Prince, Ben Wade's second-in-command, who absolutely nailed that creepy, post-Confederate gunslinger swagger.  The shot at the end, when his back's to Wade, and he's absolutely covered in dirt and dust and blood and the look on his face is pure murder?  Awesome.  I think what Mr. Scott's review for the Times got right was that the filmmakers did nail the look and feel of the classic Western, and the acting brought it to another level.  What we disagree on, and what remains for the viewer to decide, is if there's anything new underneath.  Is this just something we've seen before, or does 3:10 to Yuma have substance?  Either way, I was entertained as hell, and I can't wait to see it again.

A retired construction worker from Michigan is singlehandedly re-creating Stonehenge in his backyard.

Whether or not this was the actual method used in Britain 4,000 years ago, this guy regularly maneuvers multi-ton blocks of stone all by himself in his backyard using nothing but stones, boards, and gravity.

(Via William Gibson)

To: Mos Def
From: Boston Confidential
Re: Real Time with Bill Maher, September 7, 2007

Dear My Man Def:

When you're invited to discuss race relations in a public forum alongside Cornel West, try to give Prof. West more than 30 seconds of speaking time before launching into a tirade about not believing in the Apollo moon landing.  Cornell West has held professorships at Harvard and Princeton.  You were in The Italian Job.
Thank you.

Sincerely,

Boston Confidential

P.S.: That t-shirt-hat-watch combo?  It just works, man.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/09/what_renaissance/

For those who don't know, I moved back to my hometown of Lowell, MA when I began law school; I've been living there since.  Much has been made in recent years of the supposed revitalization of a city that for a long time was nothing but the crime-ridden dregs of the textile industry, which began, thrived, and made history in the city over hundreds of years.  For a few decades Lowell was most widely known for the high level of gang activity that took place within its borders and the large influx of Southeast Asian immigrants that made homes here over the last 50 years.  Basically, the crime rates have dropped, more restaurants have appeared downtown, and condo developers have descended upon the city to sink their greedy teeth into its weary throat.  The result is that Lowell appears on the surface to be experiencing something of a gentrification.  In reality, however, all is not as it seems.

The above Boston Sunday Globe feature article, published in their Ideas section this past Sunday, discusses Lowell and its alleged "renaissance."  Studies apparently show that the actual figures do not represent the image the city is trying so desperately to portray.  City government has understandably focused in recent years on emphasizing the city's good aspects and selling it as a growing, revitalized community full of artists and interesting folks.

Admittedly, the city has many attractive assets: it is home to a growing artistic community, a National Historical Park, one of the largest outdoor annual folk festivals in the country, and was the birthplace of people such as Jack Kerouac and James McNeill Whistler.  The imposing brick mills that dot the downtown area have largely been renovated and turned into homes and museums.  The cobbles and lampposts of Middle Street and Parker are a quaint place to spend an evening, walking from one watering hole to another.

But the city is also largely bereft of retail shopping and other than restaurants, holds little attraction for those thinking about buying a condo here.  Lowell stands on the brink of becoming a bedroom community; economic development has not kept up with the overdevelopment of real estate.  Nobody seems to realize that no matter how many refurbished artist lofts you build in the bones of abandoned mill buildings, no one will rush to live here when the closest decent grocery store is across the city and the nearest place to buy a pair of jeans is in Nashua, New Hampshire.  It makes one yearn for a Trader Joe's and a Starbucks.

As much as the Baby Boomer glitterati that lounges at (the highly overrated) Cafe Paradiso on Friday nights would like to believe that Lowell has become a glowing beacon of progress, the city has a long way to go.

 

 

I've been wanting to talk about William Gibson's Spook Country since I finished reading it.  I found a recent post over at Snarkmarket linking to an interview with Gibson in The Onion A.V. Club, where Snarkmarket's Robin Sloan commented on the usefulness of the term "baroque" in describing today's music and literature.  The original interview is here. 

"Baroque" to me is a nebulous word: it has specific artistic definitions and derivative colloquial ones.  Its modern definition is, as Wikipedia says, usually a pejorative one, meaning overly elaborate.  But as applied to Gibson (who uses it himself to define the genre noir as being "a kind of baroque pop version of literary naturalism"), I think it can be used in a more appreciative way.

Baroqueness seems to imply a penchant for wallowing in decadence, and Gibson's novel, if it has a theme, focuses on how our world has become simultaneously very complex and also very simple.  How to new generations who have grown up with it, technology has ceased to be in any way elaborate or amazing and has instead simply become the way things are:

"Cyberspace" as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix "-electro" to make things cool, because everything was electrical. "Electro" was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think "cyber" is sort of the same way. The things that aren't cyberspace seem to comprise a smaller set than things that are.  (Link)

I can't say that Spook Country spoke to me personally in the way that Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition did, but maybe that's because Pattern Recognition dealt with a post-9/11 period of flux and disillusionment, whereas Spook Country, though only three years later, finds us more comfortable in our instability, adjusted and at ease.  This book deals with the secret, scary things that are going on behind the scenes, and seems to say that our relative comfort is inadvisable.

On another note, I did like what Gibson had to say about his writing style:

AVC: There's a sense in Spook Country that your three protagonists are living through a fragment of a much larger story. There's a lot going on, and they're part of it, but they're not the main part of it. That seems to be a trend in contemporary fiction: stories that take place on just the outside fingernail of something much larger. Did that occur to you at all while you were writing?

WG: I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.

Gibson calls it a new realism.  Instead of writing the big picture, authors are writing the little one, the "real" one.  How anti-baroque.

So I got frustrated.  I upgraded to Movable Type 4 and began redesigning and found the new modular templating system so intimidating to customize that I gave up and chose one of the stock themes.  This way everything works and I can just start writing, which is what this whole thing is supposed to be about anyway, isn't it?

It's ironic how much time I spend worrying over design and detail, and how little actual writing gets done.  It's also ironic that many of the most popular blogs on the internet are published on stock designs like this one.

So starting now I'm just going to start writing and not worry about what it looks like; I'll hold the OCD at bay, as it were.