Category Archives: Books

Reading List: 2004

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Stab in the Dark, Lawrence Block (December)
Distraction, Bruce Sterling (October)
Florence of Arabia: A Novel, Christopher Buckley (October)
The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (September)
Rain Fall, Barry Eisler (September)
We the Media, Dan Gillmor (August)
R is for Ricochet, Sue Grafton (August)
Skinny Dip, Carl Hiaasen (August)
The Stone Monkey, Jeffery Deaver (July)
Live Bait, P. J. Tracy (July)
Hidden Prey, John Sandford (June)

Note: This post has been predated so that it would appear in 2004. 8/16/05

Turn the page

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I’m a long-time fan of the novels of Lawrence Block and have read most of them. From time to time I come across one that had been out of print. Spotted two Matthew Scudder novels yesterday (A Stab In The Dark, and Time To Murder And Create) and snapped them up. Matt Scudder is a New York private investigator (no license) with a serious drinking problem. He’ll go on a bender and then suffer nasty hang-overs. In later novels, Matt joins AA and, finally, gets his act together.

Time To Murder And Create was written in 1976 and Matt is still boozing. When I first read these stories, it was almost painful and certainly depressing to “watch.” Having read all of the later Scudder novels, I know that everything works out for Matt. He gets sober. Meets the perfect woman (for him). And finds some peace.

It’s nice to think that someone is re-reading our stories and knows what happens to us down the road. Our Cosmic Author simply has no way to tell us everything is going to be all right. Or that it isn’t. Or, maybe we aren’t listening. I choose to believe my author prefers happy endings.

The wisdom of Hermann Goring

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Regular readers know I’m a big fan of George Carlin (and letting other people doing my thinking) so I would have bought his new book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, even if Wal-Mart hadn’t banned it. And I couldn’t get past the acknowledgments without finding something worth writing down:

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” –Hermann Goring at the Nuremberg Trials

I think I’m gonna need a fresh highlighter.

Pattern Recognition, the movie?

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“Peter Weir wants to direct it, there’s an option deal in place, and Weir has a contract with Warner to…well, not to go ahead and shoot it, but to go forward toward that end. Toward which he’s hired a screenwriter — whose name I’ve forgotten (which is actually a good sign with regard to Weir’s choice) — and has gone to London, Tokyo and Moscow to look at locations.”

— From William Gibson’s blog

The Long Tail

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The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson (Wired) explains why you can’t find movies like Sorcerer (Roy Scheider) at the corner Blockbuster but can at Netflix. Anderson’s easy-to-follow-explanation is a tad long but an informative piece. In the (near) future, everything will be available online. While nobody cares about everything, somebody cares about every thing.

Republicans

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Regular visitors to this space have heard me flex my political cynicism in previous posts. I’ve often said it doesn’t matter who we put in the White House. They’re all lying politicians… blah, blah, blah.

But this campaign –and the prospect of four more years of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft– has given me the willies. Im fearful. This time, I think it matters a lot. So I’m talking through my fears here.

I didnt plan to watch the second debate but got hooked and couldnt turn away. At one point I recall thinking that if Kerry did too well in this debate and the next, an accident might befall him prior to the election. Shudder.

Those of you that have found your way here before also know that Im prone to let others do my thinking –or at least my talking– for me. George Carlin, Dennis Miller and others just say it/write it better. Like Garrison Keillor, who rails on Republicans in his new book, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America:

“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom, panjandrums of Ponzi marketing and the grand poo-bahs of Percodan, censors, spin dentists, Swiss bankers, hit men, body snatchers, mouth breathers and tongue thrusters, testosterone junkies, oversexed hedge-hogs, brownshirts in pinstrips, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, randy preachers, marsupial moms and chirpy news anchors, UFO scholars, johns, shroomheads, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, wizened aliens, aluminum-siding salesmen, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, braying, smirking, scratching on the national blackboard, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-a-Sketch president with a voice like a dial tone, who for almost four years has looked as if here were just about to say something smart, not much introspection going on here, no inquiring minds eager to learn about the world, not much chances of anyone picking up a book that isn’t on the official reading list and hearing a still small voice, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions in general, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk, supported by millions of good folks who do not share the anarchist dream but sleep well with this West Texas sphinx for a nightlight. Republicans: the No. 1 reason why the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.”

Roger –who is too smart and too kind to be the Republican he believes himself to be– said he was bothered less by the things Keillor is wrong about than by the things he is right about.

The Rule of Four

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This novel by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is not a gripping story but I like the characters and the way the speak.

  • A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him. [Prologue]
  • To count a hundred million stars, at the rate of one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possisbly complete in a lifetime. In reality, it would take only three years. The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. [Pg 7]
  • We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the the heart of what we shared. [Pg 48]
  • The generational clock ground out another revolution, and time turned friends to strangers. [Pg 71]
  • The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see. [Pg 97]
  • My mind is a flock of pigeons, fluttering away. All my thoughts are shit and feathers. [Pg 130]

We the Media

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“The Internet is the most important medium since the printing press. It subsumes all that has come before and is, in the most fundamental way, transformative. When anyone can be a writer, in the largest sense and for a global audience, many of us will be. The Net is overturning so many of the things we’ve assumed about media and business models that we can scarcely keep up with the changes; it’s difficult to maintain perspective amid the shift from a top-down hierarchy to something vastly more democratic and, yes, messy. But we have to try, and nowhere is that more essential than in that oldest form of information: the news. We will be blessed with new kinds of perspective in this emergent system, and we will learn how to make it work for everyone.

Blogs and other modern media are feedback systems. They work in something close to real time and capture — in the best sense of the word– the multitude of ideas and realities each of us can offer. On the Internet, we are defined by what we know and share. Now, for the first time in history, the feedback system can be global and nearly instantaneous.”  – Dan Gillmor’s We the Media (pg 236)

Who should read this book? Newsmakers, the reporters that cover them and anyone that reads, watches or listens to those reports.

Bloggers and journalists

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I’m a couple of hundred pages into to Dan Gillmor’s We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Gillmor is technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, and his column runs in many other U.S. newspapers. He has been consistently listed by industry publications as among the most influential journalists in his field.

Our company owns and operates several state and regional radio news networks and I thought they might find the book interesting so I forwarded the Amazon review, which made reference to blogging. One of our news directors quickly responded:

“I don’t quite buy the idea that bloggers are journalists. They might be journal-writers or journal-keepers, but a blogger is a talk show host who usually thinks somebody should be interested in what he or she has to say, whether it’s correct, accurate, based on facts… or not. Blogging has some major integrity issues that make it more entertainment than trustworthy information. I still need sources I can trust, and blogs don’t reach that level yet.”

First of all, nobody has suggested –certainly not Dan Gillmor– that all bloggers are journalists. As it happens, Mr. Gillmor writes a blog and is a highly respected journalist. Does he have “integrity issues?” Speaking of which…

A few year back we had a reporter working in one of our newsrooms that was doing a lot of anti-gun stories. When I asked him about it, he said he felt he had to do these to “balance out” the (paid) NRA ads that were currently airing on our network. Then there was the report (same newsroom) that left us become the PR flack for the state Republican party. In his first public statement he said he could no long remain silent in the face of the threat posed by the liberal Democrats in our state. Talk about integrity issues.

My colleague’s reaction reminds me of the Pharisees’ outrage that this Jesus guy would muscle in on their turf (I’m not a religious guy but I saw Jesus Christ Superstar a couple of times). I should probably disclose that I am not a journalist. At least I don’t think I am. I didn’t go to J-School (I smoked some J’s while in school but…) but I did work at a small town radio station covered the news. I went to city council meetings and hospital board meetings and wrote stories and cut up some tape and did my best to tell people what happened. If we had had the Internet and blogs back then, I might have used that tool as well.

This whole blogger vs. journalist thing has been going on for a while and smarter folks than I have written about it. I have to say the Real Journalists come across a little shrill on the subject. There are thousands (millions?) of blogs out there and very few rise to the level of anything that might be called “journalism.” But the same might be said about what passes for news on a lot of radio stations. So let’s not be too quick to slam the temple doors. We might miss something good.

We the Media

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We the Media. Grassroots Journalism. By the People, for the People. I’ve been reading Dan Gillmor’s blog for a couple of years and his new book is one of those rare examples of non-fiction-I-can’t-put-down. Nuggets so far:

“If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that something will know it soon enough.” — pg. 47

“Nanopublishing — small sites, run by one or very few people, focusing on a relatively narrow niche topic.” — pg. 83