The Future of Newspapers, 1981 Edition

"With a five dollar per hour use charge, the new telepaper won't be much competition for the twenty cent street edition". Um, yeah.

Revolutionary

In one of the more bizarre gifts I've ever received, Hal gave me a hand-painted communist propaganda poster with my face in place of the original character. He took my picture on his iPhone, asking me to look slightly upward, like I was "gazing into the future." The photo above is a photoshopped mockup. The poster arrived this week and is a rather startling likeness that improves on the real me.

Now I have to sort out the political correctness of the poster before I display it in the office. With people from Beijing and all over the world coming in to my office, I'm a bit concerned that what seems like lighthearted fun from an American standpoint might be harder to explain than I want to deal with.

Books, Bookstores, and Culture

There's an interesting article in BusinessWeek called Autopsy of an Indie Bookseller. It's a play-by-play of the demise of the iconic Cody's bookstore. Cody's was to Berkeley what Kepler's is to Menlo Park or Powell's is to Portland. There was also a documentary on PBS about independent bookstores, including Kepler's (where you can buy the DVD!), called Paperback Dreams that I enjoyed a while back. Both are worth checking out.

Last weekend I read an article in the Chronicle about the new Sam Mendes movie, Revolutionary Road. I read and enjoyed the book many years ago. It sounds like Mendes followed the book as closely as possible, so maybe I can go see it without risking a replay of my reaction to There Will Be Blood. What I liked about the article was the insight on the author Richard Yates and the changing culture around reading.

Even as a National Book Award finalist in 1962, with "Revolutionary Road," Yates had the misfortune of going up against Joseph Heller ("Catch-22"), J.D. Salinger ("Franny and Zooey") and the eventual winner, Walker Percy ("The Moviegoer"). Critics loved "Revolutionary Road"; writers canonized it.

The book centers on a time when men defined themselves not only by their salary but also by the books they read and the ideas they burnished. The National Endowment for the Arts recently came out with a study that showed that after college, most men will not read another literary novel before they die.

Was this Yates' largest obstacle, that a book examining the frailties of the American man begged for a male audience, one that has long since disappeared? The notion of striving for some sort of intellectual weight "with which to impress your neighbors is largely gone," Mendes says.

I'm not sure impressing your neighbors on the local cocktail party circuit even exists any more. Certainly not in our neighborhood. Still, you're a lot better off trying to break the ice in a conversation by talking about American Idol than you are by talking about what you've read lately.

Saving Broadway

Thanks to the wonders of our DVR (sadly Comcast, not Tivo these days), we didn't have to stay awake to see this skit about Broadway characters scheming about how to save Broadway in these tough economic times. It's pretty much one long inside joke for fans of musicals. See if you can spot Taylor Swift. Don't know who Taylor Swift is? Just fergeddaboutit.

No Smoking, Anywhere

It seems that Belmont, a few towns up the peninsula from us here in Redwood City, now has the most restrictive no-smoking ordinance in the state, and the enforcement unit to back it up.

It was Friday, Jan. 9, and Kirk Buckman was working the day shift out of Belmont. "I carry a badge," Buckman said. "It's shiny and gold. Pretty neat."

The law is the first of its kind in California, going far beyond the statewide prohibition against lighting up in businesses, restaurants and bars. In Belmont, it is now illegal to smoke inside any multistory, multiunit dwelling. The City Council says enforcement should be "complaint driven," which means neighbors have to rat each other out before officer Buckman can bring evildoers to the nicotine-stained bar of justice.

The story of how an 84 year old who has "trouble maintaining a thought" got the law enacted is actually pretty interesting.

Squirrel Pate

The dachshunds have certainly been busy cutting down the squirrel population in our yard lately. So, as an update to the red-vs-gray battle reported on previously, I learned in the NYTimes now that the new approach to fixing the problem is: if you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.

These days, however, in farmers’ markets, butcher shops, village pubs and elegant restaurants, squirrel is selling as fast as gamekeepers and hunters can bring it in.

“Part of the interest is curiosity and novelty,” said Barry Shaw of Shaw Meats, who sells squirrel meat at the Wirral Farmers Market near Liverpool. “It’s a great conversation starter for dinner parties.”

And the conversation can start over the squirrel and hazelnut pâté.

Embarrassing Ski Moment

I've fallen backwards when getting off the lift, board strapped to my feet, head over heels down the nearby rocks. I've injured Dara. I've knocked Garrett down so many times he refused to go on the same chair as me for years. While trying to keep up with Kyla, I've fallen upside down under a tree near the lift, unable to get upright, while the chairs all passed over me, each person making sarcastic remarks. But, I have to admit, I've never ended up nearly falling off and having my pants ripped off in the process. Looking at the picture, I have to think: what would Garrett be saying to me sitting there in the chair as I hung upside down awaiting rescue?

Last Reading List of 2008

Wrapping up the year...

A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz. Offbeat fiction following a father and son in Australia, and their bizarre journey through life. To call the father eccentric would be doing him a favor, since he's basically nuts, and the son spends his life trying to compensate. Their lives inevitably revolve around bad uncle Terry, as famous a folk-hero criminal as Ned Kelley. The story was unpredictable in a John Irving kind of way. I swung multiple times between stages of being entertained and wanting to throw the book across the room because it was too silly. In the end, worth sticking through, though.

The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt. I picked this historical fiction up thinking it would focus on the famous out-of-nowhere Indian mathematician, Ramanujan, who came to Cambridge to publish and (literally) perish. Instead it centers more around fellow mathematician G.H. Hardy and his complex relationship with Ramanujan. Altogether an engaging story fleshing out many real-life characters at Cambridge around the time of World War I, including John Maynard Keynes (you might have heard of him in the midst of our global economic meltdown). There are just enough mathematical nuggets to keep the story glued together, since it's hard to appreciate the motivations without understanding why proving Reimann's hypothesis is compelling to someone. Good book.

The Risk Pool, by Richard Russo. I'd read Empire Falls and enjoyed it, but Mom recommended this one. I have to admit, it was better than Empire Falls and will likely end up higher in my list than Bridge of Sighs, which I'm reading now. The book is the story of a loser but loving father (always in the high-risk pool for insurance, thus the title), his likeable son, and an unstable but loving mother. They cope with life in a small town in upstate New York as the son has to rely more on the hapless father to raise him while his mother suffers a breakdown. One wonders what Russo's upbringing was like. He seems like a slightly more upbeat version of Pat Conroy, but from upstate New York.

The Song Before It Is Sung, by Justin Cartwright. This historical fiction revolves around a conspirator in the attempted assassination of Hitler, Axel von Gottberg. The main character is a modern-day grad student of von Gottberg's closest friend, an Oxford professor who dies and leaves his papers to the student. He relentlessly tracks down the details of their relationship, pretty much wrecking his own relationships in the process. As you might expect, the whole thing is a bit ambiguous in its judgements, leaving judgement as an exercise for the reader as you uncover the motivations and conflicts of the characters.

Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier. A timid Swiss teacher has an epiphany when he briefly meets a Portugese woman attempting to commit suicide while he's on his way to work. The encounter leads him to pick up a Portugese book of essays in a used book store, and he connects so strongly with the author's words that it launches him into a voyage of self-discovery in the author's home town of Lisbon. He traces down the friends of the author and their roles in his life and in the Portugese resistance under Salazar. Even he seems mystified by his obsession, but he discovers the limitations he's placed on his own life along the way. A bit too overly introspective for my taste, but overall I enjoyed the book.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. A fictional biographical story of the journey of a poor Indian boy from lowest servant to cynical entrepreneur. There's no Horatio Alger story here, though, as we walk through every corruption and prejudice in modern day India to discover that the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em. Still, you can't help but root for the main character, whose attitude and sense of humor is engaging as he climbs the ladder and claws his way to the top.

Slam, by Nick Hornby. This is the worst book of Hornby's I've read, and it feels like the later ones are on a downward path. The main character is a teenage Tony Hawk fan who gets his girlfriend pregnant and then has flash-forward type of out-of-body experiences (seemingly powered by his Tony Hawk poster) of the future life that results from it. Sadly, after reading so many good things by him, it will take me a while to recover enough from this book to pick up another one by Nick Hornby.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin. I think this was the most interesting book of the set I reviewed this time around. It's the fascinating non-fiction inside story of the Supreme Court, primarily concentrated on the Rhenquist court. I was thinking it would have more history in it, but the personal stories and the view into how these nine individuals get their work done and relate to one another while deciding issues that affect all of us was terrific. Highly recommended.

Crashing Through, by Robert Kurson. After the terrific Shadow Divers, how could I resist another non-fiction book by Robert Kurson. This book tells the story of Mike May, who was blinded at age 3 in a backyard chemical explosion, and how he discovered after more than forty years he could recover his sight through surgery. What seems like a no-brainer of a decision was fraught with medical risk, and (although he did not know at the time) a very poor track record when it comes to how a blind person reacts to and deals with sight. It was a very interesting journey and worth reading. As in Shadow Divers, Kurson mixes in some education with the people-story, although I felt I was reading a powerpoint presentation converted to text at times.