Best of 2007 (in a sense)

As 2007 lurches towards its end, I've decided to post a list of some of the books and DVDs that sustained me in the penultimate year of the Bush-Cheney terror. But first the obligatory consumer advisory: if you are expecting something along the lines of a 'greatest hits of the year' list you will be disappointed. Some of these titles were published in 2007, others not. The list below is subjective, eclectic and compiled with a complete indifference to bestseller's lists, current releases and the whole damn zeitgeist.

Nonfiction:

Bookless in Baghdad by Shashi Tharoor.

This slim collection of essays by the senior UN official and author of Nehru: The Invention of India includes discussions of John le Carré and Pablo Neruda, musings on why Americans can't make a proper cup of tea and an exploration of the eternal question, Why are Indians such P. G. Wodehouse fanatics?

The Boys from Dolores by Patrick Symmes.

An un-putdownable account of the lives of a class of students at a prestigious Latin American prep school and how their whole world was up-ended by their most famous classmate: Fidel Castro.

The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin.

One of the most searing critics of twentieth-century America goes to the movies. His take on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is delightfully scathing.

Easter Everywhere by Darcy Steinke.

A painfully beautiful memoir of growing up and a raw, honest account of struggles with religious belief.

The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections, Germany 1938-2001. by Getta Sereny.

A must-read for anyone who grew up in the twentieth century. This collection by the Austrian-born journalist represents a life-long effort to understand how Nazism could have happened and provides an account of its repercussions up to the present. The Healing Wound includes recollections of the author's work shortly after the war tracking down Aryan-looking children who had been taken from their Jewish or Slavic parents and placed with Nazi families, a look into the mind of former SS guard Fritz Stangl, an account of the 'Hitler Diaries' affair, and portraits of the children of ex-Nazis trying to come to terms with their parents' crimes.

The Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler.

The New Yorker's Beijing correspondent, Hessler has written both a fascinating account of an American's struggles to live in China and a compelling portrait of a vast, varied, endlessly surprising country and some of the people who live there.

Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond by Pankaj Mishra.

I am still amazed at the author's achievement. He chose for his subject a region of the world bigger than Canada and with more people than both North and South America and leaves you feeling as if he didn't leave out anything. Bollywood, the Indian Army, the Dalai Lama, the Nepalese civil war, political corruption, unfathomable poverty--any topic you can think of, Mishra covers it.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Ross Acocella.

A collection of profiles that originally appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. My favorites are the essays on M.F.K. Fisher, Penelope Fitzgerald and H. L. Mencken.

Writing Home by Alan Bennett.

This collection of Bennett's diary entries, speeches, articles, and play prefaces is one of the best bedtimes books ever. His precise writing, unassuming sensibility and keen intelligence are an unfailing joy. If you were to read only one piece in this collection, choose "The Woman in the Van."

Fiction:

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.

If you've only seen the movie you've been had. I read the novella one night in November. The next night I read it again.

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland.

My review of this novel for the Globe says it better than anything I could write here.

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby.

I re-read it again last spring. Hornby's technical accomplishment of successfully creating and sustaining four different narrative voices (a working-class female Londoner, a twenty-something American rock musician, a washed-up talk-show host, and a teenage girl f**ked up in too many ways to count) is nothing less than stunning, but A Long Way Down is far more than the sum of its wonderful parts: this novel about deciding not to kill yourself is a clear-eyed, unsentimental look at how to go on living.

Sick Puppy by Carl Hiassen.

How do I start to describe this book? Should I tell you about the main character (an eco-terrorist with a trust fund)? The hooker who accepts only Republicans as customers? The geriatric rhinoceros? Or the real estate developer who sums up his career path this way: "What Robert Clapley missed most about being a drug dealer was the respect."


DVDs:

Seasons 2 and 3 of House.

Wonderful writing and use of music. And I don't want to press this comparison too far, but in some ways House reminds me of my father.

Seasons 1-3 of Slings and Arrows.

Dark Canadian comedy about a dysfunctional Shakespearean theatrical troop. As Celia says in As You Like It: "O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful."

The Man Who Copied.

Excellent Brazilian thriller about a bright young man (and sometime stalker) who works for a photocopying service. (seriously).

Untergang (Downfall).

A film about the last week of Hitler's life based on his secretary's memoirs. Not exactly the feel-good movie of the year, but if you hate what Bush has done to this country as much as I do, it's nice to have a reminder that things can be worse.


Other diversions:

Cooking out of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and The Best Recipes in the World (as you may infer from those titles, self-doubt about his culinary prowess is not one of Bittman's issues).

The bits of Fry and Laurie that have been put on YouTube.

Reading the Bible as it would be if it had been written by cats with a tenuous grasp of English grammar.


Fun facts I learned in 2007:

If I had lived at my current address in 1898, my next-door neighbors would have been a "metaphysician" and a "tree protector."

In Spanish, Much Ado About Nothing is Mucho ruido y pocas nueces ('much noise and few walnuts').

In France, Scrooge McDuck is called Dagobert.

It turns out my ancestors weren't just wasting their time writing poetry about stealing livestock and arranging rocks in circles for no apparent reason. They were also brewing beer.

When your can of surströmming is bulging at the sides, it's ready to eat.

Words Fail Me

From an article in the current Scientific American on the next generation of U.S. nuclear warheads:

The RRW1 (Reliable Replacement Warhead) would elminate the need for some of the toxic substances often used in weapons, such as beryllium..."Because of the release of the weight requirement, we are able to use substances that are heavier but more environmentally benign," [Livermore Laboratories scientist Bruce] Goodwin says. "We will be able to eliminate an entire [manufacturing] process that produces 96 percent radiological toxic waste that has to be buried and replace it with nontoxic waste that is 100 percent recyclable."

"You replace beryllium with something that quite honestly you could eat and be healthy," he adds...

Oh no! Gay Penguins!

Banned Books Week has come to a close, and I've spent the past few days reading about books that have been challenged (i.e., it's been demanded they be removed from libraries or bookstores) during the previous year.

As as all twelve of my readers are probably are, the most challenged book of 2007 was And Tango Makes Three, a book about two male penguins that adopt a chick. The book is based on the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo that tried to fertilize a rock and get it to hatch (penguins aren't too bright, apparently).


Zookeepers took pity on the dim-witted pair and gave them a real egg, which they were able to get to hatch, and thus young Tango was born.

Tango--written for the 4 to 8-year-old-crowd, has troubled quite a few parents. In Shiloh, Illinois, some parents requested that the book be put in a "restricted" section of the school library (it's news to me that elementary school libraries have restricted sections). Mother of two Christine Farmer expressed the feelings of many parents when she said "Kids have to be kids at this age...I don't know why sexuality of any type is appropriate for kids that age." Sexuality? Now I'm not sure what she's getting at, but if she knew anything about what birds do to procreate...well let's just say that to mammals it's barely recognizable as sex.

But I digress. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the book's existence alarmed Republican County Commissioner Bill James, who has been quoted as saying, "I am opposed to any book that promotes a homosexual lifestyle to elementary school students as normal." (Tango was removed from Charlotte-Mecklenburg school libraries).

Perhaps, I'm naive, but I seriously doubt that a five-year-old is going to look at a few pages of drawings of penguins and ask mommy, "When's the next Pride march?" She'll probably just be thinking about...penguins. Or maybe drawing. Or--and I'm going out on a limb here, I realize--drawing penguins.

Maybe parents are afraid the book carries some kind of subliminal message. Twelve years from now young Chad or Tripp might be watching Animal Planet, hear the word "PENGUINS" and immediately dump Courtney so he can slake his newfound lust for the high school quarterback.

This is the possibly the most ridiculous uproar the family values crowd has raised since 1994, when a North Carolina preacher named Joseph Chambers tried to use the state's anti-sodomy laws to ban Ernie and Bert.

The American Library Association has provided a list of other books frequently challenged in 2006 here. Sexual content of any sort is invariably the leading reason for objections to a book. Any sympathetic treatment of homosexuality is a close second. And objections to sexual content--especially gay sexual content, invariably come from conservative Christians.

It's unsurprising that conservative Christians would object to books that conflict with their moral teachings. But please, people, show some consistency. If you want to object to books that contradict Biblical teachings, you're only scratching the surface.

While the Bible is a long, rambling hodge podge of a book--a welter of creation stories, national myths, royal chronicles and often contradictory religious teachings--it's remarkably consistent on certain topics, like how one should treat the poor.

Deut. 15:7. If there is a poor man among you, one of your brothers, in any of the towns of the land which the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand to your poor brother; but you shall freely open your hand to him, and generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he lacks.

Prov. 31:8ff. [Commandment to kings.] Open your mouth for the dumb, for the rights of all the unfortunate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.

Luke 3:11. And [John the Baptist] would answer and say to them, "Let the man with two tunics share with him who has none, and let him who has food do likewise."

Mt. 5:42. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.

Now contrast this with a remark by a certain bestselling author. On June 11, 2004 Bill O'Reilly treated his listeners to his opinion of the poor:

...you gotta look people in the eye and tell 'em they're irresponsible and lazy... Because that's what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen.

So where are the mobs of Christians demanding that The No Spin Zone be pulled from library shelves? Let's face it, Bill O'Reilly is basically urging people to reject Biblical teaching. Where are the concerned parents worried their child might read O'Reilly's books and end up in Hell like the rich man in the parable of the beggar Lazarus?

But no, it's the books about sex that get all the attentiion.

And while we're on the subject of conservative darlings, let's discuss one who's made a career out of violating the Book of Common Prayer's injunction to live in love and charity with one's neighbor: Ann Coulter. She's spent much of this year on the war path against John Edwards, most notoriously accusing him of exploiting his son's death. In its nastiness, it's vintage Coulter.

But I'm most intrigued by Coulter calling John Edwards a "faggot." Of all the things she could have called John Edwards--"vain," "inexperienced," "Doogie Howser, Presidential Candidate"--she chooses an insult preferred by fifteen-year-old boys, one that she had to have known would draw a firestorm of criticism. Maybe she couldn't help herself.

It's obvious social conservatives are obsessed with sex. Especially gay sex. Please, people: get help. See a therapist. Spend time in airport bathrooms and see if you can work this out of your systems. Do something. Because this fixation of yours on gay sex--it's just not healthy.

America's Finest at Work

As of ten days ago, the nation has weathered six years without another major terrorist attack. We owe those years of safety to the work of law enforcement on every level, whether it's local police, Homeland Security or the TSA.

And in recognition of their fine work, let's review what the nation's men and women working in law enforcement and national security have accomplished lately:

A) Men who use the restrooms at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport can now relieve themselves without fear of foot tappers. This is important, people. After all, it's not like there could be anything else to worry about in an airport with a 100,000 passengers moving through it every day.

On a personal note, I don't feel that threatened by foot tapping. It kind of pales compared to the time I was one of the first people seated on a flight and the aisle filled up with a slow moving line of passengers, one of whom pressed his erect penis against my shoulder (and his pants were polyester. Ewww.) But if you haven't had that happen to you, I can understand how foot tapping might be traumatic.

Yes, Virginia, if Americans can ask each other for sex, the terrorists win.

B) We all know that the September 11 attack could have been prevented if only we had known what Mohamed Atta was reading. When he first tried to enter the US, he probably never would have made it out of the airport if baggage screeners had known he was carrying the pamphlet So, You Want to Destroy the World Trade Center. Now when you enter the United States--whether you're citizen, tourist or resident alien--airport screeners are collecting data on what reading material you're carrying. Don't you feel safer knowing that Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Ron Gilmore has been reading Drugs and Your Rights? I do.

I can think of dozens of ways this information can be used to improve the quality of American life. As a start, I've written to the Department of Homeland Security asking them to keep track of the people who read Nicholas Sparks and keep them the Hell away from me (I haven't heard back yet).


C) This is the Homeland Security coup of the year: British musicologists can no longer enter the U.S. with impunity. The residency visa of Nalini Ghuman has been revoked. It's obvious: the undergrad years studying music at Oxford, the Ph.D. at Berkeley, the scholarly articles on Elgar--all cover. She was just lying low and keeping dark until the day she could walk into a seminar on harmony and counterpoint with bombs strapped to her chest and take out a roomful of music majors.

Keep it up guys, I'm feeling safer every day.

A New Renaissance is Upon Us!

I've been out of the loop on upcoming movies, so I am indebted to the ever-delightful Carl Pyrdum for news that Beowulf (the movie!) will hit the silver screen in November. Unfortunately, it won't be directed by Mel Gibson. Which is too bad: I was so looking forward to a film with a script entirely in Old English. I had even pictured how it would absolutely have to begin: Charlton Heston, all bearded and grizzly, his face illuminated by firelight, shouting Hwaet!. (Hwaet, the first word of the poem, essentially means "pay attention, losers.")

Well, as the Anglo-Saxons would have said, wá lá wá! (to translate, insert expression of disappointment of your choice). The script is in modern English, and Charlton Heston is not in the cast. Instead we have Ray Winstone (as Beowulf), Crispin Glover (as Grendel), Angelina Jolie (as Grendel's mother), Angelina Jolie's breasts (as Angelina Jolie's breasts), and Anthony Hopkins (as Hrothgar).

I'm a little taken aback that Grendel's mom appears human in the film. I've always pictured Grendel as looking a little like Chewbacca. Since there weren't any female wookies in any of the Star Wars movies I saw, my mental image of Grendel's mother has always been much vaguer. I did, however, assume some kind of family resemblance.

But on to larger issues: in the past three years we've had a major movie based on the Trojan War, another on the Battle of Thermopylae, another on Alexander the Great, an HBO series on the civil wars that finished off the Roman Republic, and now a major movie on the only surviving Old English epic poem. Is it possible that the entertainment-industrial complex is so alarmed at what they've done to the nation's intellectual life that they are now trying to reconnect us to the wellsprings of our cultural heritage, the history and literature of the classical and medieval worlds?

What's next? I would be surprised if there weren't several movies based on Greek mythology in the works. If you've read any Greek myths, you know that people are always a) having sex and b) turning into plants. Ready-made plots with lots of nudity and opportunities for cool special effects. What studio would walk away from that?

The Song of Roland would make a great movie too: lots of violence, fighting between Westerners and Muslims. Everything an American audience could want. No sex as I recall, but I'm sure Hollywood will find a way.

The possibilities for television are endless. Every episode of the L-Word could end with a televised reading of one of Sappho's poems. Jerry Springer could invite mother-son couples onto his show to talk about what the Oedipus myth means to them.

I'm really excited. Ten years ago when I pitched my idea of a musical based on the life of the Emperor Caligula, directors acted like I was some kind of nut. But now....

What a great time to be alive. The American public will get a classical education just by watching movies. Kevin Sorbo might get regular work again. And studio executives will start returning my calls.

Camus, Melville, Beowulf and Vietnam?

It's kind of unsettling, actually, but every now and then Bush and his associates show signs of something resembling cultural literacy. Roughly a year ago, there were rumors that Bush was reading Camus' The Stranger and discussing it with Tony Snow. Then, last weekend on television, Karl Rove seemed to be groping for literary analogies to explain the Democrats' relentless pursuit of him. First he compared the Democrats and their subpoenas and hearings to crazed Ahabs pursuing Moby Dick. But then he felt the need to go back earlier in literary history: "I'm a myth...You know, I'm Beowulf, you know, I'm Grendel." But then (no doubt mentally straining to come up with the names of other characters from Medieval epics) he added, "I don't know who I am. But they're after me."

A friend of mine who used to teach literature at Western Reserve Academy was actually impressed that Rove could name both Beowulf and Grendel, even if he seemed kind of vague on other details. And I guess I should be impressed too: outing undercover intelligence agents and conducting Stalinesque purges of U.S. attorneys probably doesn't leave you a lot of time for catching up on the books you blew off in high school. On the other hand, now that Rove doesn't have a job anymore, he's got a lot more time to read. Maybe his literary analogies will get more impressive: "I'm Orestes, and the Democrats, you know, are like the Eumenidies."


But let's go back to Bush and The Stranger. I have to confess to being a little skeptical that he has actually read any Camus. I think it's much more likely that the press have (as usual) gotten their French Existentialists mixed up and the POTUS was actually reading some Sartre. Seriously--take a look at the official Presidential Advance Manual, with its instructions on how to keep demonstrators away from the press and even out of sight of the President. Clearly, this is a man for whom Hell is other people--at least people with opinions.

And there are clues that the President is branching out a bit intellectually. He might actually be reading history as well as fiction. At least, that's my inference from a speech he gave today comparing the war in Iraq to the one in Vietnam. He warned of regional chaos if U.S. troops withdraw, such as engulfed Cambodia and Laos after Vietnam. Now I'm finding this historical comparison a little weak. If you're looking for the cause of the Cambodian bloodbath, you're more likely to find it in the country being bombed for 14 months by the U.S. Air Force and then its occupation by U.S. ground troops. As for Laos, we armed a proxy army to fight the North Vietnamese and Laotian communists.

So either the President's a little shaky at drawing historical analogies, or he's got plans for Syria and Iran we don't know about yet. But cheer up: this is progress. George W. Bush is, after all, the man who supposedly told Joe Biden, "Brief me on Europe." I wonder how he started? "Well, Mr. President, it's a continent..." And now he can name individual countries--ones that aren't even in Europe. He's still rusty on more advanced reasoning, but our President mastering basic facts and showing an awareness of historical events is something to cheer. Because rarely is the question asked, is our politicians learning?

Seinfeld and the Military-Industrial Complex

I was poking around on the website of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the other day (don't ask), and found myself reading about a project called Intestinal Fortitude. While naturally every word of a DARPA project summary is gripping, this passage in particular caught my eye:

To increase the amount of energy available to the soldier from either food rations or nontraditional foodstuffs, the program explores the use of cellulose-degrading beneficial bacteria in the gut. These novel “fibr-biotics” are able to break down non-digestible fiber (cellulose and hemicellulose) into glucose, which can be directly absorbed for energy. When added to the diet of deployed soldiers, these novel fibr-biotics will be able convert non-digestible fiber into usable energy.

Cellulose is one of the primary components of grass and leaves. In other words, when the soldier of the future runs out of field rations, he's going to be able to graze. The DARPA summary says little about the current state of this project. But then a friend suggested I search the incomparable Danger Room, Wired's military and national security blog, where I discover that I am, as usual, behind the times. Intestinal Fortitude was not the entire project, merely the name of phase one, which was wrapped up in March 2007. Under a DARPA contract, scientists at the Agricultural Research Service sorted through pig manure, isolating 'degrading bacteria' to figure out why our porcine brethren can digest things we can't. In phase 2, scientists are examining human feces, isolating potential fibr-biotics.

In other words, they want to make the human digestive tract (or at least some human digestive tracts) more like a pig's. Now this is far from full-blown hybridization, but the project inevitably brings to mind the Seinfeld episode, "The Bris," in which Kramer thinks he's seen a human-pig hybrid in a hospital:

Kramer: I'm tellin' ya! The pigman is alive. The government's been experimenting with pigmen since the fifties.

Jerry: Will you stop it. Just because a hospital gets a grant to study DNA doesn't mean they are creating a race of mutant pigmen.

Kramer: Oh, Jerry. Would you wake up to reality! It's a military thing. They're probably creating a whole army of pig warriors.

The question of the hour, ladies and gentleman: is DARPA so desperate for ideas they're stealing them from Seinfeld? While I am one of those who has long held that Seinfeld was one of the best American television shows of all time, I'm not sure that qualifies it to play an even marginal role in national security efforts. I re-read the script of the episode "The Masseuse," (which deals with Jerry's 13-year no-vomiting streak), to see if it could possibly have provided any inspiration for the Navy's vomit beam.* No dice (it was a long shot, I realize).

I won't say rest easy. But perhaps we should rest a little less uneasily with my modest evidence that military scientific research isn't solely inspired by Larry David. Still, American military and political affairs have an air of unreality, to say the least. The great war news this month was that U.S. casualties were down in July, so the 'surge' must be working. However, casualties have dropped during July since the war began--nobody wants to fight when it's 120 degrees. Back home, the Supreme Court spent its time this summer debating whether "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" is constitutionally protected speech. And currently the campaign of a half-African presidential candidate is dogged by the question "Is he black enough?"

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld may not be the minds behind the latest military research, but somewhere along the way our national life really did get to be a show about nothing.



*Thanks to my friend KT for alerting me to the existence of the vomit beam. Or as she put it, "I'll see your grazing soldier and raise you one puke gun."