Closing out the year

"No people can be ignorant and free"
--anonymous

"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."
--Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

[The above quotes came from Morris Berman's, The Twilight of American Culture (W.W. Norton, 2000)]

Reading is important for several reasons. It helps develop an ability to think and analyze ideas and obviously develops part of the brain that aid us in particular types of thinking. Anecdotally, I’d say that Americans lack an ability to think critically and our current societal structure, where our leader’s intelligence is suspect, seems to be a point in my favor. I’m sure the experts can tell us why reading is important. As a nation, I would guess that we are reading less now, than we did, say 50 to 75 years ago, although I might be wrong. Television, computers and other forms of entertainment make reading an unappealing option in the face of a culture that values entertainment over intellectual attainment and growth. I know some will take issue and point out that the death of the novel has been predicted for a long time and book sales continue to grow. I would counter with the knowledge that the books that are being mass-produced, are nowhere near as “deep” and challenging as the classics.

Having said that, I’d agree with writers like the late Neil Postman, and others like Morris Berman, who contend that we are getting dumber all the time. Television and the types of books foisted upon the public—shallow, new age treatises and self-help tomes—help contribute to the “dumbing down” of our culture.

I don’t know, on average, how many books per year Americans read. I found this, which indicates that for “light” readers, the number is on to five, per year. I apparently am a “frequent” reader, as I read between 12 and 49 during 2005. Maybe it’s the people that I run across, but I continually hear others cluck with pride that they don’t read, as if that is some kind of badge of honor. For those of you who are readers, you might find this interesting, also.

I read fewer books in 2005, than I did the previous two years. Part of the reason is the release of my own book, When Towns Had Teams. From January, until early May, I was working on my manuscript. The early months of the summer were taken with prepping the manuscript for printing and then, the early part of the fall was given over to marketing, writing reviews, shipping orders, etc.

Amazingly, having read only a couple of books going into the fall, I’ve been devouring them of late, hence, a number that is respectable for most, but pales next to some.

Here are the books I read in 2005, with selected accompanying notes.

--Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, by Eric Schlosser (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)

I first got turned on to Schlosser's abilities as an investigative journalist, from reading his best-selling, Fastfood Nation.

While the sales of this one were less than FFN, Schlosser once again peels back the veneer of our capitalist culture, to reveal the underside of the American marketplace.

If you are a fan of investigative journalism, something practices less and less by our corporately-controlled press, I urge you to give Schlosser a go.

--The Long Emergency, by James Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)

I read this early in 2005 and it opened my eyes up to a future that could be radically different, as we near (or some would argue we already have and are on the downward slope) the peak of oil production in the world.

Kunstler is a bit of a “crank”, but anyone not selling the optimistic, pop-a-Prozac, sunny side-‘o-the-street snake oil of the day is characterized that way.

Should be read by anyone who cares to live in the reality-based community.

--Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay

Another book that takes America to task for its easy-motoring ways. Holtz Kay offers a well-written and readable indictment of a nation that bases its travel policy entirely upon a model that is not sustainable for the long-haul. A good compliment to Kunstler.

--A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis, by Diane Ackerman (Vintage, 1998)

If you’ve heard of creative non-fiction, but are not quite sure what it is, Ackerman is one of the best of the genre.

--As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

I tried, I truly did, to understand the genius of Faulkner. I mean if Oprah’s Book Club could read Faulkner, couldn’t I? I blogged about it prior.

--The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, by Davy Rothbart (Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 2005)

One of the great "new" writers out there. Rothbart also is the genius behind Found Magazine.

--Left Out: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, by Joshua Frank (Common Courage Press, 2004)

A concise indictment of the Anybody But Bush crowd and Democrats in general. Frank offers a fresh voice, infused with intelligence and reason, in a political world where both are found in short supply.

--Edson, by Bill Morrissey (Knopf, 1996)

Singer/songwriter Morrissey puts down the guitar and picks up the pen for the first time. An intimate look at the working class in a fictional New Hampshire mill town. The central character, 37-year-old Henry Corvine, might very well be Morrissey's nod to the autobiographical.

Comprised of believable characters, this was one of those "finds" that make reading so much fun.

--July, July, by Tim O’Brien (Penguin, 2003)

The exact opposite of Morrissey's book. I brought both Morrissey's book, and this one with me to Florida. Expecting so much more from O'Brien, as he's one of American fiction's bright lights, this book absolutely sucked! With characters you'd just as soon throw from a rooftop, than feel sorry for, this one was an insipid read and I doubt I'll go to O'Brien's inkwell any time soon.

--Florida: A Short History, by Michael Gannon (University Press of Florida, 2003-reprint)

Picked this one up in Florida, while there in November. Read most of it on the flight home; nice treatment of the state's interesting and colorful history.

--Out of Their League, by Dave Meggyyesy (Warner paperback, 1971)

Former pro football player's indictment of the dehumanizing nature of pro football. Meggysey, who played in the late 60s, retired from the game after the 1969 season. Through a series of meetings and events, Meggyesy becomes radicalized in his personal beliefs and politics and when he can no longer go along with being treated like a child and merely an item to be exposed, he walks away from the money, and also the abuse that was and still is the NFL.

I picked this book up for 50 cents at a library book fair. Obviously dated, it offers an interesting glimpse back at a time when America seemed to be striding in the right direction, but has since disavowed and returned to being comfortable with the status quo.

--The Way Life Should Be: Stories by Contemporary Maine Writers (Warren Machine Company, 2005)

Friend and fellow publisher Ari Meil's fine Maine fiction compilation. 17 writers, 17 stories, and one great state. Support your local independent press!

--Maine & Me: Ten Years of Downeast Adventures, by Liz Peavey (Downeast Books, ?)

--Outta’ My Way: An Odd Life, Lived Loudly, by Liz Peavey (Warren Machine Company, 2005)

The latest offering by Warren Maching Company. This gathers Peavey's always funny and often pointed columns from the late, great Casco Bay Weekly, a muckraking rag in the truest sense. The Downeast offering, was a compilation of her articles from the popular Maine magazine's archives.

--Among Schoolchildren, by Tracy Kidder (Harper Perennial, 1990)

Kidder is one of America's best non-fiction writers. This one, along with Lewis' Moneyball, were my favorite non-fiction reads of the year.

--Moneyball, by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton, 2003)

I recently lauded this one, by Lewis. Whether you love baseball, or not, this is great writing and recommended reading.

Happy New Years!! May 2006 spur you to read more books.

Moneyball and the art of living outside the box

I’ve been aware of Michael Lewis’ runaway best seller, Moneyball (W.W. Norton), for over a year. Since the book was released in early 2004, it’s been the talk of the sports world, as well as being a buzzword in other circles.

Several friends and acquaintances have mentioned the book and it’s been on my ever-lengthening list of books to read, at some point. Tuesday evening, it jumped to the top of the pile. My college-age son had picked up a copy while doing his holiday shopping. He read it in two days and tossed it at me with a, “Here, I’m finished—you need to read this” while I was indulging my semi-regular habit of watching South Park.

I stayed up until 1 am, early Wednesday morning reading until I couldn’t keep my eyes open and finished the book last night around 11 pm, after returning from the Greely High School/Alumni hockey game.

I don’t purport to have anything unique or earth-shattering to say about the book, other than it was a tremendously enjoyable read. Lewis is a wonderful writer, who is able to transport his readers into the world of his subject matter and make you forget that you are reading a book. Rather than sitting in your recliner, or lying in bed, reading, you are in the batter’s box, facing a major league pitcher, or sitting in the room on draft day, at the Oakland Coliseum. Another writer that comes to mind who possesses this ability is Tracy Kidder.

I’m not sure if you have to be a baseball fan to enjoy Lewis’ book. Obviously, a talented writer can interest a reader in a subject they know little or nothing about. While I certainly consider myself a fan of the game, I’ve recently cooled in my ardor for the professional variation of the grand ole’ game. Maybe Moneyball will be my invitation back into that world of interest that I’ve maintained a connection with since I was old enough to read my first box score.

For the uninitiated, the central character of Moneyball is one Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team. The A’s are a small market team, with a very miniscule payroll, compared to the likes of the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and Texas Rangers. To give you an idea, in 2002, the season that Moneyball zeroes in on, Oakland’s payroll was $40 million, while the Yankees’ payroll was over three times that, at $125 million. The Red Sox that year had a payroll of $108 million and the hapless Texas Rangers, thanks to the $50 million dollars being paid to one Alex Rodriguez, was $105 million. Only the Montreal Expos (now Washington Nationals), major league baseball’s equivalent to being sent to Siberia and the perennial basement dwellers, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays had lower payrolls, of $38 and $34 million respectively.

Beane, a former cant-miss prospect who did miss, has taken the unprecedented route to the general manager’s seat and is now running the show in Oakland. When he realized that his unsuccessful major league career was over, he asked his employer at the time, which happened to be the A’s, to allow him to become an advance scout. This person travels ahead of the big league team and analyzes future opponents’ strengths and weaknesses. At a time in his life that he should have been entering his prime as a player, Beane was asking for a desk job. As Lewis writes, “It was as unlikely as some successful politician quitting a campaign and saying he wanted to be a staffer, or a movie actor walking off the set and taking a job as a key grip.”

What made Moneyball so powerful a read, other than Lewis’ talent as a writer, was the story of how Beane, and his band of renegades, turned the major league scouting process on its head. If you want to see what thinking outside the box really is about, then Moneyball is a book you ought to read.

I found myself touched by the honesty of the writing, the willingness of Beane and the others to have their lives and imperfections laid bare for the reader. At the end of the book, Lewis, in his afterword, which he titles, Inside Baseball’s Religious War, mentions how much of baseball’s inner circle—the GM’s, scouts, along with writers and commentators (Lewis calls them the “Women’s Auxiliary”) basically “flipped out.” Beane, along with his assistant, Paul DePodesta, had no idea that exactly what form Moneyball would take until the book actually came out. Beane, according to Lewis, reacted in “horror.” Some of what Lewis wrote about him, particularly his fits of anger and violent outbursts, didn’t portray him in the best kind of way, yet, I think it was an honest and accurate representation of a complex human being, who had been bred from an early age to be a baseball star. As Lewis wrote, “I wanted to capture Beane doing what he did so well and interestingly: value, acquire, and manage baseball players. And when he did this, in his most intense moments, he was a bit of a maniac.”

To the credit of Bean, DePodesta and the Oakland A’s organization, which easily could have denied and distanced themselves from Lewis’ stories and claimed they were misrepresented, instead showed they were standup people and didn’t do that.

The real idiots of the book are many well-known and not so well-known members of the media. The pompous Joe Morgan, in his typical arrogant fashion, commented on the book that he so obviously hadn’t read—he didn’t even know that Lewis wrote it and not Beane. Because Beane and Company so totally deflated the ideas and conventional wisdom of the “old boys club” of scouts, general managers and other “lifers” of major league baseball, showing much of their thinking was a crock of shit, they had nothing left but to lash out at Beane. He showed the fallacy of drafting bodies, paying high school pitchers huge bonuses and an exposed an entire list of myths that had been perpetuated for decades.

While its possible to find fault with some of Beane’s conclusions, it’s hard to argue with the success that the A’s have achieved while maintaining one of baseball’s lowest payrolls. Year after year, since 2002, they’ve won in excess of 90 games a season, with players that were veritable castoffs from other baseball organizations. They’ve proven that getting on base is the most important thing in baseball and that you can find players who are capable of doing that without breaking the bank.

As I finished reading the book, I found myself wishing for another book like this one that I wouldn’t want to put down and would read at every opportunity and spare moment I could squire away. I also wondered about the application of these ideas in other areas; think about how life is so much about accepting the status quo in politics, economics, business and other areas. We are fed a line of BS and we are taught never to question it. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from Billy Beane and realize that our greatest opportunities may come when we decide it’s time to jump in and begin swimming upstream against the current, with the flotsam and jetsam of narrow-mindedness passing by at our elbow.

Running Kites

For many Americans, perceptions of other societies and cultures usually involve arrogance, ignorance and even, condescension. While our nation is a baby compared to many others around the world, we are socialized to believe that everything in and around America is superior to other "backward" cultures. Consumerism and military might trump the preservation of history and culture every time.

Accidentally, I happened to tune in C-Span 2 and catch author Khaled Hosseini, speaking about his book, The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003) and his life growing up and then leaving Afghanistan. Raised the oldest of five siblings by educated parents—his mother was a teacher of Farsi and History at a high school for girls and his father, a diplomat—Hosseini went to live in Paris at the age of 11, as his father was assigned to a diplomatic post in the French city.

Following a bloody communist coup and the invasion of his former homeland by the Soviets, Hosseini’s family settled in the U.S in 1980., finding a home in San Jose, California, where the young Hosseini grew up and has lived for the past 25 years.

I was transfixed, listening to Hosseini talk about his book, his life as a young Afghan male, and his family. He told about a country and his home city of Kabul, then a teeming, cosmopolitan environment, where he regularly read novels and other literature from the west, after it was translated into his native Farsi. Like any other young man fascinated by books and ideas, this Afghan young man fell in love with reading and his life was forever enriched by it.

Like most Americans, I know little or nothing about Hosseini’s native country. Afghanistan occupies a unique place in the world, geographically, historically and culturally, as it exists at the crossroads of the Asian continent. Historian Alfred Toynbee called the country, "the roundabout of the ancient world." It has been a place where the migrating peoples of Asia passed through, leaving behind a rich mosaic of the continent.

Its most recent history has been characterized by coups, and civil unrest. For much of the past 30 years, the country became a pawn of the Cold War, with a Soviet occupation and the U.S. covertly funding the Mujahideen opposition. Prior to that, however, it had been a place, not unlike much of the western world, with an educated and prosperous middle class Because of its prior history and simmering tribal rivalries that had been kept dormant for decades, the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 caused destabilization and warlordism. With the U.S. no longer interested in the country after the Soviet withdrawal, the country experienced a vacuum of leadership that made it ripe for the rise of the Taliban movement.

As I listened to Hosseini speak, I thought about the Kabul of his youth and the contrast of a bombed out and gutted city that I had witnessed via a CNN documentary on the Taliban, about a year ago. It made me think of another former cradle of civilization and culture that had been destroyed by political factions and imperialistic tendencies of the world’s last superpower—that being the nation of Iraq.

Both countries had experienced the loss of an educated, middle class culture and way of life, with the possibility that it will never to return. Hosseini, who speaks at least three languages, is an internist, as well as having written a best selling book, puts most arrogant Americans to shame with his intellectual attainment.

I found myself wondering what other civilizations we’ll have a hand in destroying in our quest for world domination. I also found my thoughts invaded by self-doubt about writing down my observations about Hosseini, his former homeland and the role that America plays in making the world a place that is becoming more homogenized by the day. There are certainly people who care about the destruction and loss of other societies and civilizations, but I’m concerned that we are in the minority and lack the power to counter the ideology of moral superiority that grows larger and seeks to devour the rest of our planet.

Seasons Greetings

Happy Holidays!!

Thanks for taking time this past year to stop by and read my musings here at Words Matter. I wish each and every one of you the merriest and most festive of holidays, in whatever way that you celebrate them.

May peace prevail in 2006.

Gettin' smacked down

The best analysis of most new events come from those who write the heart--basically non-professionals, merely taking it in, thinking a bit, and then laying it down for others.

Steve Gilliard, over at The News Blog understands this, and posts some rather incisive comments from someone from lower Manhatten, pertaining to the NYC transit strike.
----------
I had some time to think about this walking home last night, so here goes:

Well…I screwed up last night. I made the grievous mistake of making day three of the transit strike the day I panicked and shopped a bit too heavily for the kids’ gifts. A little Daffy’s, a touch of Old Navy and Modell’s, capped off with a whisper of Steve Madden for the daughter (poor baby’s a bit of a Bigfoot at 11) and before I knew it, I’d loaded myself down with three shopping bags of ersatz Santa leavings in addition to the slim valise I’d been carrying during the strike in lieu of my heavy computer bag.

The delicate balance had been lost. The not too bad walk to Brooklyn became a f*cking ordeal. The top of my right foot began throbbing as I neared the Manhattan Bridge. Midway, it was a hot icepick stabbing through the foot. By bridge’s end, I envied Kunta Kinté, who’d had his foot chopped off by an angry massa.

I rested just after the walkway in front of some high school or other, marshaling strength for the trudge ahead. The traffic was scream-worthy. A call to the wife to drive down to downtown Brooklyn to get me was out of the question—it was inaccessible.

So I walked some more.

Slowly though, as the pain returned. I found myself at Grand Army Plaza. I stopped to gather myself and let out a huge exhale when a car pulled up next to me, honking. It wasn’t a cab, or livery car—just a small black Honda with a mid late 20’s/early 30’s Black woman in the front seat and one in back. Did I know them?

“Goin’ to Rochester Avenue…you headin’ that way?, the squat woman in front asked.

“F*ck yes!”, I screamed in my head—which came out of my mouth as “Yup! Utica and Eastern, thanks so much!”

I loaded my bags in the back next to the other woman and fell into the front seat as we pulled off for the final 2 miles or so home.

After a long, pregnant pause (and making sure I wasn’t gonna be mugged by the cast of “Set It Off II—The Reckoning”) I piped up, “I really appreciate this—you heading home from work?”

“Nah.”, she replied. “Just tryin’ to make a little extra paper goin’ between here and the bridge. You’re my last one.”

After a pause, she continued, “I know I confused you with this little car an’ all, but I got m’ girl ridin’ with me—one woman in a car is kind of a target, soooo…I’m rollin’ like this. Made about two-hundred dollars tonight.” The butchy friend in the back seat gave a half-nod as if to say “We cleaned up…big time.”

“How much for my ride?”, I asked, figuring I could maybe live without the pint of blood I’d be charged along with fifty bucks.

“Eight dollars.”, she said.

You can read the rest at the blog, under the heading, "What the Daily News Didn't Tell You."