Suffering the Benz

March 17, 2008

Beautiful Children ...

I just finished Charles Bock's first novel, "Beautiful Children." In short, it was an amazing book. Flawed, but amazing. It's still bothering me. The characters keep rising up in my mind at strange times, especially the street kids. I'm trying to sort through it all and definitely will need to re-read the last few chapters. A lot happens there. Too much to absorb in one read.

I guess I should expect nothing less from a novel that lists the bizarre guitar virtuoso Buckethead atop the acknowledgments section.

In short, the book is about Kenny, a Las Vegas kid who disappears. It chronicles the impact of the incident on his parents' marriage. It staggers through the Las Vegas Strip following mangy runaways. It slinks through the slime and silicone of the porn industry.

I guess my main complaint is Bock's tendency to layer detail in a way reminiscent of Updike. While it can breath life and truth into a scene, it also can short circuit the narrative. It's a balancing act. At times, I just wanted to navigate around all the detail, staying with the narrative thread, that swift cool stream of words cutting through the descriptive silt Bock was accreting.

But I'd rate that a minor flaw, one born of an 11-year birthing process for the novel. That amazes me. What tenacity, to stay with it that long and finally get published with considerable fanfare.

The New York Times Magazine did a decent profile of Bock a few weeks back. Worth a look ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 5:23 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2008

The Legend of Iron Crotch

I just finished reading Matthew Polly's "American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China."

In one respect, Polly is "just another overprivileged Gen-X twit spending daddy's hard-earned money trying to find himself in some exotic locale." But he's much more. He's a humble, respectful, humorous visitor to the post-Tiananmen China of the 1990s who takes readers along for the ride, and it's a fascinating ride.

Polly, a 98-pound weakling from Topeka, gets it in his head that he wants to study kung fu at the legendary Shaolin Temple, the supposed birthplace of both the martial art and Zen Buddhism.

What Polly finds when he finally arrives in Shaolin is more akin to "Kungfu World, a low-rent version of an Epcot Center pavilion." Undaunted, he finds the monks, negotiates tuition fees with communist party officials and immerses himself in Shaolin. His observations on Chinese culture and customs are fascinating. During the course of his studies, he learns "to eat bitter" (suffer) and becomes quite proficient at kung fu and kickboxing. Great stuff ..

And Iron Crotch? He's a monk whom Polly dubs "Monk Dong," a practitioner of iron crotch kung fu. In other words, he's learned to withstand insane abuse to his genitals. Talk about eating bitter:

"The door was slightly ajar. Overcome with curiosity, I peeked through the crack.

"Monk Dong, naked from the waist down, had placed his testicles on a wooden desk. At regular intervals, he brought down the palm of his right hand hard on his sack. He smacked and grunted. I winced."

Ouch ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2008

City lights in San Francisco ...

I'm still grinning after reading random lines of Gary Snyder in the Poetry Room at City Lights last night. In a world quickly moving toward e-readers and cell phone novels, it was reassuring to drift among stacks of books and pick up volumes on impulse, graze a few graphs and move on. Wallace Stevens. Hart Crane. Denise Levertov. Lao Tzu. I could almost feel Ferlinghetti's hot, beat breath on the back of my neck as the smell of yellow pages filled the room and the floorboards creaked beneath me.

Posted by Bob Benz at 9:44 AM | Comments (1)

January 18, 2008

Never mix umlauts and heroin

I can't explain why exactly, but I recently read "The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star." Ostensibly, I did it to see what it would be like to read a book on the Kindle reader. I guess I chose it for the same reason people read stories about Britney Spears and then whine about the media being filled with such crap.

Nikki Sixx, the bassist and songwriter for Mötley Crüe, is clearly a raving asshole if you go by this autobiography. But he has an amusing side, a snide sense of humor and an awareness that he's really a bit of a wanker on many fronts. On some levels, it's the typical junkie purge, a nasty vomit of bad deeds, blackouts and burning addiction. Mommy didn't treat me right. Daddy abandoned me. It's so hard being a rock star.

One thing I did like, though, was the use of counter stories that punctuate Sixx's story. After his journal entries, he includes quotes from other folks who were there to witness his misdeeds and deviations, including this gem from the band's manager that follows a whiny Sixx entry about how evil management was running the poor Crüe boys into the ground with a grueling tour schedule:

"I always had a real problem with this line of argument of Sixx's. Sure, the tours were too long for them, but only because of the way they behaved on them! Don't forget, these were guys in their twenties who were only being asked to work two hours a day. What about all the guys who get up at 5 a.m. to lay bricks and only get two weeks a year off? If Mötley Crüe was burned out on the road, it was purely because they had stupid fucking drug habits. It's not rocket science."

Amen. But at the end of the book I did have a begrudging respect for Sixx. He's clearly a smart guy. Can't say the same about Mötley Crüe though. I still think they were charlatans and it doesn't take much work to find far better metal ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:42 PM | Comments (0)

August 7, 2007

It's in the cards ...

When I was a kid, I squandered untold dollars at the local Stop N Go buying pack after pack of baseball cards, trying to get all of the World Champion 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates. I'd buy a dozen packs or so and stand by a garbage can outside the store, throwing away everything but the Pirates while the clerk stood inside shaking his head at the idiot kid in pursuit of all the Bucs. Eventually, I got them all, and I still have them somewhere, stashed in a box that brought me live chameleons that I'd ordered from an ad in the back of Boy's Life.

That was pretty much the extent of my fascination with baseball cards. And baseball, for that matter. So I was a little dubious when I picked up a copy of "The Card: Collectors, Con Men and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card." I bought it mostly because Mike O'Keeffe, a buddy of mine whom I worked with at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, is a co-author of the book. And it turns out it's a great book, well worth checking out even if you have only nominal interest in baseball cards and baseball in general.

The story behind the T206 Honus Wagner card is fascinating, especially considering that it's now valued at well over $1 million. Mike and Teri Thompson do a great job bringing the assorted characters to life, including the myriad schemes and machinations behind the multiple deals involving the relic, a 1909 tobacco card featuring Wagner's picture. And Mike puts his chops as an investigative reporter to good use, revealing a lot of the shenanigans that surround big-time baseball card collecting.

A few interesting tidbits:

-- Details on Wayne Gretzky partner and former L.A. Kings owner Bruce McNall's dubious financial dealings, including the fact that he floated loans using bogus "game-used" jerseys and horses he didn't even own as collateral. Gretzky and McNall partnered to buy the Wagner card for $451k in 1991.

-- A great photo of the house Wagner lived in in Carnegie, just outside Pittsburgh, where a "Go Steelers" banner hangs proudly outside the house even though the current occupants have only the vaguest notion of the Pirates great whose image graces the most valuable baseball card on the planet. What a total Pittsburgh moment.

-- A tour of collector Michael Gidwitz's Chicago apartment, which is packed with memorabilia, including a lewd drawing of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky that features Alfred E. Neuman's face "superimposed on the former president's penis head." (Gidwitz apparently has quite a collection of pornographic images featuring Neuman. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:35 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2007

Rory Stewart's crusade to save Kabul

Via Instapundit, a National Geographic profile of Rory Stewart's efforts to save a neighborhood in Kabul. I've written about Stewart's incredible books on Iraq and Afghanistan before ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 8:38 PM | Comments (0)

March 4, 2007

World history is made of the same dough as bagels

I recently finished Isaac Bashevis Singer's Shosha. Singer has been on my list for a long time, and I happened upon a copy of Shosha at my favorite Knoxville used book emporium, McKay's. (If you're one of those rare Knoxvillians who hasn't discovered McKay's, do it soon. It's awesome, though I have to admit I miss their old location on Kingston Pike, cramped and claustrophobic as it often was.)

In short, Shosha blew me away. From the first page, I just kept going, pulled in by Singer's narrative expertise and this story of Tsutsik, a Polish Jew, making his way through the first half of the 20th century. Particularly effective were the descriptions of Warsaw's Jews nervously awaiting Hitler's impending Holocaust in the '30s and Tsutsik's love of the childlike Shosha. I can't speak much to Singer's style, since he wrote in Yiddish and I'm not sure about the quality of this translation, but his storytelling is superb.

In one of my favorite passages, the professorial Feitelzohn holds court: "World history is made of the same dough as bagels. It must be fresh. This is why democracy and capitalism are going down the drain. They have become stale. This is the reason idolatry was so exciting. You could buy a new god every year. We Jews burdened the nations with an eternal God, and therefore they hate us.”

Singer's portrayal of the Warsaw ghetto's Krochmalna Street is particularly vivid. The mix of Hassidic rabbis, prostitutes, scammers and the destitute leaps of the page. And the beauty of the book is that hope and innocence prevail, even in the shadow of horrendous events. Shosha keeps Tsutsik rooted.

Posted by Bob Benz at 8:17 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2007

What the dormouse said

I just finished John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." It's been on my list for a while. Overall, it was a great read.

Some of it is a rather dry account of the rise of the personal computer in Silicon Valley. And at times Markoff seems to generalize about the connection between the computer innovators and the counterculture. But there are strong ties in many spots, especially in the way LSD and the counterculture affected the worldview of these folks and their attitudes. It goes a long way to explain the open source movement and some of the collaborative approaches to development that have characterized the rise of the personal computer.

A few interesting notes:

• In the intro, Markoff details an interview he had with a somewhat peevish Steve Jobs, who "explained that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in life, and he said he felt that because people he knew had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn't understand. He also said that his countercultural roots often led left him feeling like an outsider in the corporate world of which he is now a leader." Amen.
• He talks about the first real "online" newspaper, when a bunch of folks at the SAIL lab streamed AP and New York Times content into their system and made it highly searchable. Before Google. Before Alta Vista.
• Before Ebay and other Internet commerce plays emerged, these geeks used their computer network to transact a marijuana deal between the SAIL folks in California and people at MIT's labs in New England. Necessity is the mother of invention, I guess.
• "It's the next thing after acid." Ken Kesey, after spending several hours seeing the text editing and information retrieval capabilities of Augment oNLine System in 1969. This was a major breakthrough in computing, where Doug Engelbart envisioned and demonstrated computer capabilities that went well beyond straight numerical computing. Kesey's observation was, to my mind, prescient.
• I find it stunning how much I take the current state of computing for granted. These folks were struggling to send 30 characters per second through modems. Today, 40 years later, I'm downloading entire episodes of Dragnet. It seems so long ago that I was driving an Amstrad word processor with 256k of memory and a flittering amber screen, and now I'm sitting in front of a Macintosh with gigabytes of storage and hundreds of megabytes of memory. There are times during the book when I was thinking this is so obvious. Why wouldn't someone use a computer for word processing and graphics? Why would folks cling stubbornly to mainframes? It's really hard to keep in mind the framework they were operating within, and it makes you appreciate that much more the visionaries who pushed the boundaries.

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:25 PM | Comments (0)

February 4, 2007

Black Books

Here's something to have your Tivo fetch for you: I've become addicted to Black Books on BBC America, the tale of a prickly Irish bookstore owner and his crapulous antics with friends, customers and unsuspecting bottles of wine in London. The humor is hateful and biting but never too dark. Dylan Moran is great as Bernard Black, and Bill Bailey does a massively amusing job as Bernard's hapless sidekick, Manny.

BBC America is cycling through series one now, which is helping me fill in the blanks from the second and third series, which I've already seen. This is one of the funniest BBC America series I've stumbled across since Canada's Trailer Park Boys.

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:06 PM | Comments (0)

February 2, 2007

Joyce's Dublin

Gridskipper highlights a 10-stop tour of Dublin focusing on key places in James Joyce's writing. Makes me want to book a trip to Ireland ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 4:05 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2007

What the dormouse said

I just finished John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." It's been on my list for a while. Overall, it was a great read.

A few interesting notes:

Posted by Bob Benz at 8:25 PM | Comments (0)

January 7, 2007

Anatomy of a Nightmare

I just finished Philip Short's Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, an excellent biography of the crazed Khmer Rouge leader.

I've been fascinated by Cambodia's nightmare since the mid-'80s, when the first survivor accounts started trickling out. I read several, including To Destroy You Is No Loss. I also read Elizabeth Becker's very good When the War Was Over. I watched the Killing Fields and Swimming to Cambodia. I read extensively about Angkor Watt and ancient Khmer civilization. One of my travel goals is to one day visit Angkor Watt. And then I moved on to other things ....

But when I saw a review of Short's book, I couldn't resist. It's fantastic and gets a lot closer to why this happened. How the fuck does a smiling, amiable guy named Saloth Sar go from getting handjobs from old King Monivong's concubines to laying waste to an entire nation? It just seems inconceivable that something like this could happen.

Piece by piece, Short shows the roots of this horror, from the seething violence the simmers beneath the friendly face of Cambodian culture to the Theravada Buddhist rejection of the individual to the world politics that were playing out in Southeast Asia.

Pol Pot's wfe, Ponnary, dissolves into a paranoid schizophrenic haze, fearing Vietnamese conspiracies in every corner. Odd the way her affliction serves as metaphor for the Cambodian-Vietnamese relationship.

Other interesting points in the Short biography:

He argues, compellingly, I think, that this wasn't genocide. The goal wasn't to wipe out the Cambodian people. It really was more a program of systematic slavery.
The complexities of Cold War politics are brought startlingly to light. Even after the Khmer Rouge have been run off, the United States backs them, working in league with China to keep Soviet expansionism (via Vietnam) in check.
Cool quote: "Pol Pot has died like a ripe papaya (falling from a tree). No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he's Wnished. He has no power, he has no rights, he is no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertilizer." Mok, another worthless piece of cow shit who was one of Pol Pot's two main military supporters.
I took particular interest in Laurence Picq, one of two non-Asians to live though Pol's reign of terror. She was a Frenchwoman married to one of the Khmer Rouge officials. Strange. Very strange. I've already Googled her and intend to read her book about the experience. Apparently, she came into it a believer. I wonder what she's thinking now ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 1, 2007

The Last Kingdom

Returning to work tomorrow after 10 days of blocking work out. It's been great, providing lots of time to read and post inane crap on this blog.

The latest reading is The Last Kingdom, an historical novel by Bernard Corwell. Overall, it was a great read, set in the 9th century when the Danes were running amok through Britain and conquering damn near all of England. It has a Little Big Man thing going on, with the main character, Uhtred, being from England but ending up with the Danes. He moves back and forth between the two camps, providing insight into each group and rubbing shoulders with the famous.

The think I found most amusing is the portrayal of Alfred and the rest of the English as a bunch of effete bozos who are enslaved by priests and Christianity. The Danes view of all this is pretty amusing, and they seem perplexed by these strange, largely ineffective warriors. But of course, the tables turn as Alfred makes his stand and begins turning back the Danish tide. Worth a read if you're interested in this period. I'm assuming it's pretty historically accurate. Cornwell provides detail on the history behind the novel and license he took in writing the book.

It moves quickly and is action packed. My one quibble is Cornwell's reluctance to delve into the sexual situations behind a lot of the plot. I'm finding myself agreeing with Marlon James' recent post on Space Break Sex, that phenomenon in literary fiction where two characters embrace and clearly are heading toward a sexual encounter. But all the reader gets is a space break and the after effect. I'd like to know more about Uhtred's relationship with Brida and there are several other relationships that could do with more detail. Overall, the novel gets lost in all the action and the relationships get very little explication. Not a deal breaker here, but a bit of a disappointment.

Damn, I'm dreading that return to work ... I already have travel scheduled through most of January. Back to the grind and the hell that is Delta Airlines. Happy New Year, I guess.

Posted by Bob Benz at 8:07 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2006

John Crow's Devil

During my travels to Jamaica, it didn't take me long to become fascinated by the John Crows that drift lazily on the beach breezes looking for an easy meal of carrion below. They inspired a haiku during one trip there, when they were circling the pool eyeing me hungrily.

So when I saw a review of John Crow's Devil, I decided to pick up a copy. I've had a hard time finding contemporary Jamaican fiction. I know it's out there. I'm just not finding it. This is Marlon James' first novel, and overall, it's a good one.

It's set in a village in Jamaica and conjures a classic good vs. evil showdown. But it's tough to tell who is on which side. The Apostle comes to town and drives the useless Rum Preacher out of his pulpit. Initially, it seems clear the good guys have come to rescue the village. But the book really isn't that black and white. This isn't Stephen King sending the good people to Salt Lake City and the evil ones to Vegas. There's lots of gray area, and a fair amount of magic realism, too. James uses birds as a motif throughout, particularly doves and john crows.

The writing is solid and it's a great effort for a first novel. I think the main theme that fascinated me was an exploration of how cults leach up out of the ground, slowly at first, only to erupt in passion and bloodshed. I hope James has more books on the horizon. (I just Googled him and realized he has a blog ...)

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2006

The Dead

Inspired by a Wall Street Journal article on John Huston's 1987 adaptation of Joyce's The Dead, I decided to see if Tivo could snag a copy for me. No luck, and since the WSJ article really was a lament that the Huston film isn't available on DVD, that wasn't an option, either.

So I did it one better and dug out my copy of Dubliners. With all the Christmas sitcom's I've been consuming, I needed something more nourishing. Otherwise, I risked a bad case of intellectual scurvy.

And damn. The Dead is brilliant. Each time I read it, I I take away more. There are so many layers, and that aching feeling of mortality the story evokes is the perfect antidote to too much Christmas cheer. Joyce's conflicted feelings about Ireland. His complicated relationship with Nora. The wonderful view into an Irish Christmas. It all wells up into something so much larger and universal than that one incident early in the 20th Century. This is literature at its greatest.

And the close might be the most incredible string of sentences in the English language. I know it's quoted too much, but here it is again. Just because:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Posted by Bob Benz at 12:43 PM | Comments (1)

December 9, 2006

The Prince of Marshes

I just finished Rory Stewart's "The Prince of Marshes And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." It's a sobering account of the year he spent in Amara and Nasiriyah in 2003. Even then, it was clear things were going badly. Stewart isn't someone who opposes the Coalition's work in Iraq. He's an optimist who is working in the Coalition to try to bring democracy to the country. But his account makes it clear what a long-shot that effort was (and is).

Particularly damning is his description of the Italian troops in Iraq. He portrays them as ineffective and even cowardly, more concerned with politics and self-preservation than getting the job done. The coalition of the willing definitely looks like the coalition of the coerced here.

In a strange encounter, one that harkens back to a scene from The Places in Between, he talks to one of the Iraqis who was among the Sadrists that laid siege to his compound five weeks earlier.

"We will miss you. ... You are our hero," the Iraqi tells him as Stewart prepares to leave the country.

"What are you talking about, Asad -- why were you firing mortars and trying to kill me five weeks ago?"

"Ah, Seyyed Rory," he replied with a grin. "that was nothing personal."

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:19 PM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2006

The Road

I finished Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The Road, last week. This was one of those books that stayed with me. Its post-apocalyptic imagery haunted my dreams and thoughts while I was reading it, and I kept returning to it when I was in the midst of other things. Very distrubing, but unlike most of McCarthy's work, it ends with something that can only be described as optimism, though that word is a stretch in a tale of a man and a boy making their way south through a withered husk of civilization that's fraught with cannibals, ash and sunless vistas.

I've also become addicted to HBO's The Wire, a bleak chronicle of inner city Baltimore. There's a character named Bubbles who pushes a shopping cart packed with junk through the bleak streets. I couldn't help but make the comparison to McCarthy's novel, where the nameless protagonist and his son also push a shopping cart through a landscape that is frighteningly similar ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 5:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 8, 2006

Steel City, Silicon Valley ...

I stumbled across this great description of Pittsburgh in Richard Parker's review of new biographies on Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon in the New York Times Book review:

"... the violent, exploitative and dankly polluted world of coal-and-steel Pittsburgh, the Silicon Valley of its day."

Never thought of it that way, but Pittsburgh was in many ways the cutting edge of the Industrial Age in much the same way Silicon Valley has blazed the path into the technical age.

Posted by Bob Benz at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 8, 2006

The places in between ...

I was in the Atlanta airport not too long ago when I saw a woman wearing a hijab herding several children onto the train at the A gates. She had definitely drawn attention, with looks ranging from hostile to curious. I caught myself staring, too, grappling with stereotypes and conflicting emotions.

So when I got home, I ordered a copy of Rory Stewart's "The Places In Between." It had been on my list since I saw a review in the New York Times in June. It's a remarkable book. Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan, and he did this only months after 9/11. He takes in a decrepit old fighting dog along the way that he names Babur.

It quickly becomes apparent that Afghanistan -- and Islam -- are far more complex than most Westerners fathom. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise after the way we completely misunderstood Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The Afghanistan Stewart encounters is by turns exceedingly cruel, primitive and hospitable. Where else could you have someone taking pot shots at you one minute and be welcomed into a complete stranger's house the next? This book definitely is worth picking up.

After I finished it, I bought a copy of his next book, "The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." But before I had a chance to start that, I stumbled across Karen Armstrong's "Islam: A Short History." It's a clear, concise history of Islam that really has helped me get my head around the topic. Or at least scratch the surface. It's frightening to think we live in a country that is at war against Islamic extremism and most of us don't know the difference between a Sunni and Shiite Muslim.

Posted by Bob Benz at 6:23 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2006

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Several pieces in The New York Times yesterday noting the 100th anniversary of Samuel Beckett's birth. One about his American publisher, the other about a 2,000 page, 4-volume collection of Beckett's work that I'm thinking about ordering.

It's interesting that on the same day, a co-worker sent me a Beckett quote that almost perfectly describes the stuff I'm working on these days ...

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." � Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Posted by Bob Benz at 6:48 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2006

Drinking the Kool-Aid

Via Bookslut, this reassessment of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in Columbia Journalism Review is an interesting read. Jack Shafer's thoughts are on target in most respects, but I have to wonder about his conclusions.

"Forty years from now, when Wolfe�s book, I predict, will still be in print, our grandchildren will be celebrating his role in resuscitating the narrative form," he writes.

Well, maybe.

I'm guessing the book will still be in print, but whether future generations will be turning to it is another question. I'm guessing this book fades quickly once the generation that first read and even lived it are dead and gone. I'm betting the vast majority of young people today have no idea that it exists. And whether future generations will look to it as having anything in common with the narrative form they're using seems really unlikely. There are definite similarities between some of the tenets of New Journalism and what we're seeing on the web now, but I'm not sure many people would make the connection to Wolfe. And I'm not sure he deserves much of the credit.

I re-read Acid Test not too long ago, and I also re-read On The Road around the same time. The thing that struck me was how the books lost a lot of their impact with age. I'm not sure now if it was with my age, the book's age, or both. But they didn't have nearly the impact in my 40s as they did in my teens, and Shafer's assessment of Acid Test -- that it "carries a wad of fat around its midriff" -- seems dead-on.

Posted by Bob Benz at 6:27 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2006

More Proust ...

Dave (a k a Captain LBJ) saw that I was plowing through Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." And despite the LBJ hostage situation, he sent me an out-of-print guide to Proust that's proving invaluable: "A Reader's Guide to Proust," by Milton Hindus.

It's a great companion to "In Search of Lost Time" and I'm getting a lot more out of the book as a result. Highly recommended. And it appears there is a reprint of the 1962 book available.

Posted by Bob Benz at 8:11 PM | Comments (0)

February 4, 2006

In Search of Lost Time

I made a run a Proust about 20 years ago, when I was doing my grad work. I sorta bounced off him. Just didn't get it. But during a conversation a few years ago with Dave (LBJ's father), he urged me to get a new translation and give it another shot.

So I'm finally getting around to it. I'm reading "Swann's Way," the first part of what is now translated as "In Search of Lost Time." Much better. Lydia Davis' translation is fantastic. I only wish I could read French to see if the original is as beautiful. I'm sure it's even better. But this translation is pretty damn good.

I started it while I was in Jamaica, and the whole time/memory motif really hit home. This was our third trip to Treasure Beach, and it's odd how certain smells, sights, sounds evoke memories of past trips and experiences. I'm really getting my arms around what Proust was after in "Lost Time."

At first, the book was annoying me. The narrator's obsession with his mother, which borders on pathological, the tea-soaked madeleine that sets memories spinning, a Proustian cliche at this point, were a little off-putting. But as it moved forward, I was drawn in. Two passages really have resonated with me. The former lays out Proust's obsession with time and memory; the latter shows the immense beauty of his prose:

1. "I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us. It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it. ... The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it."

2. "From the windows of (the church's) tower, placed two by two one above the other, with the exact and original proportion in their spacing that gives beauty and dignity not just to human faces, it loosed, dropped at regular intervals, volleys of crows which, for a moment, circled about shrieking, as if the old stones that allowed them to hop and flutter about without appearing to see them had suddenly become uninhabitable and emitted some principle of infinite agitation, struck them and driven them out. Then, after striping in every direction the violet velvet of the evening air, they would return suddenly calm to be reabsorbed into the tower, which was no longer baneful by once again benign, a few of them sitting here and there, apparently motionless, but perhaps snapping up some insect, on the tip of a turret, like a seagull as still as a fisherman on the crest of a wave."

Just as I was pulled back into Joyce's Ulysses a few years ago, I'm bouncing back to Proust this year. As I did with Ulysses, I'm chipping way at it, a few dozen pages at a time. Odd that I found myself reading each great work while listening to the sound of the waves in coastal Jamaica.

Thanks, Dave ...

Now Playing: Catching On from the album "Trace" by Son Volt

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2006

Brave men ...

I'm a bit ashamed to admit it, but I've never read anything by Scripps' famed war correspondent, Ernie Pyle. Until I picked up a copy of "Brave Men," a collection of his columns.

It's fascinating stuff, though at times it bogs down a bit in detail. But it's really easy to skim through those parts, and it's really the details that bring the book to life. His focus on the run-of-the-mill soldier is great. In simple, declarative style, he takes you right into the trenches with them, their fears, their corny humor, their longing for home. In several instances, he talks about the dogs and children they adopt along the way. Some of it's heartbreaking.

When Pyle tries to write about a general (Omar Bradley), he becomes almost apologetic for rubbing shoulders with a bigwig and quickly turns his focus to the general's aide and support personnel.

Particularly cool is the way he lists each soldier's home town and in most cases, street address. My one complaint is that he doesn't have much bad to say about anyone. I guess some of that is the effect of wartime censorship and some of it is living shoulder to shoulder with these guys at the front. That would make it tough to really nail someone, I guess.

All in all, a great read. I'd definitely recommend it.

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:14 PM | Comments (1)

October 2, 2005

Meet You in Hell

I just finished Les Standiford's "Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and the Bitter Partnership that Transformed America." Great book, particularly in it's detailed description of the Homestead strike. It was a defining moment in the relationship between the two men.

For several years, I've been toying with the plot for a novel that hinges on that strike. Haven't really gotten much further than a lot of notes. Standiford's book inspired me. The strike really is an incredible tale, especially when viewed through the lens of the Carnegie-Frick relationship. Each was a rags to riches story. Each amassed wealth that was unfathomable at the time. And raw greed drove each to hate the other with a passion.

To the end, Carnegie blamed Frick for Homestead, though he was clearly as much to blame as the pitbull he turned loose there. Lots of great details here, especially for anyone who has an interest in Pittsburgh history.

I particularly liked the excerpts from Hamlin Garland's essay in McClure's Magazine on the aftermath of Homestead. So much so that I Googled it and found a copy of the entire piece.

Posted by Bob Benz at 5:39 PM | Comments (1)

September 11, 2005

Poetry and fried eggs

"Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances. The best way to deal with it is to fry eggs for refugees."

-- Andrei Codrescu, Romanian refugee and Baton Rouge resident, who has a house full of evacuees from New Orleans ("The entire poetry cadre of the French Quarter is in my house," he says.). Quoted in today's New York Times Magazine

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:25 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2005

Sad news on the literary front ...

Playwright August Wilson has announced he has terminal liver cancer. I've seen a few of the plays in his Pittsburgh Cycle. Would love to see all 10 produced somewhere in tribute to him. His work is astounding.

"It's not like poker. You can't throw your hand in. I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready," he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

May 4, 2005

�This gig�s nae for bairns�

When I read Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting," I was instantly hooked. I immediately went on a Welsh binge, reading everything I could get my hands on. That's why this literary tour caught my eye.

Apparently, a guy in Scotland is taking Welsh fans to some of the key Edinburgh sites featured in "Trainspotting" and "Porno."

I'd love to check this out, but I think I'd take a pass on the filthiest toilet in Britain ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 6:16 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2005

Eyes and ears ...

I've stumbled into some great tunes and reading material lately. The combination makes those long plane flights infinitely more bearable.

Gillian Welch, by far one of my favorite musicians these days, is now set up so you can download CDs and songs from her site. I used this opportunity to flesh out my Gillian collection, adding Soul Journey and Revival to my iTunes library, along with several singles, including a live song from a show in Minneapolis. All I can say is this is very cool. I'll probably download everything she tosses up there ... (And Soul Journey really is a stupendous piece of work. David Rawlings' guitar work is so nice.)

On the reading front, I followed a recommendation from my bossman and picked up a copy of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. I'm still reading it, but it's really fascinating. In essence, Peter Bernstein argues that it wasn't until we developed a mathematical ability to calculate and manage risk that society as we know it could develop. Everything from gambling to insurance actuarial tables are based on this, and our ability to calculate these factors came relatively late in human history. He traces the history of the mathematical calculation of risk. And it's not nearly as dry as it sounds. It's well written, and at one point where he dives down into the weeds to explain complicated mathematical formulas, he provides a note saying readers who aren't interested (or are overhwelmed) can skip to page xx without losing anything in the narrative thread. Nice.

Favorite quote so far:

"Who has placed me here? By whose order and warrant was this place and this time ordained for me? The eternal silence of these infinite spaces leaves me in terror."

Sounds really existential, but it's just Pascal going on about why he turned into a religious zealot.

Now playing: One Monkey from the album "Soul Journey" by Gillian Welch

Posted by Bob Benz at 6:45 PM | Comments (1)

December 29, 2004

Recent readings ...

I've been off work for the past few weeks, which has given me plenty of time to sit in front of the fire and read. A few of the highlights:

• "Minor Characters," by Joyce Johnson. I've read Kerouac's "On the Road" twice. When I was 18, it was a mind-blowing experience, exposing unlimited vistas and infinite possibilities. But when I re-read it at 40, it was very different. His writing wavered between beautiful bop stream of consciousness and flacid sentences that sprawled limply across the page, often going nowhere. Maybe rewriting isn't such a bad thing? But mostly, I was appalled by how women were portrayed in the book. They were disposable decorations and temporary diversions. When I heard about Johnson's book, I ordered it immediately. She was Kerouac's lover for several years and brings a specifically feminine view of the Beat movement. She's not bitter. And she's a very good writer. But she also does a good job of putting women's role in perspective. A really telling passage is when she's discussing John Clellon Holmes' seminal beat novel "Go." In a preface to a later edition, he explains that each of the male characters in the novel correspond to specific, real people. But the women are "amalgams of several people." Then Johnson notes: "He can't quite remember them -- they were mere anonymous passengers on the big Greyhound bus of experience. Lacking centers, how could the burn with the fever that infected his young men? What they did, I guess, was fill up seats." If you're at all interested in the Beats, Johnson's book is a must-read.
• "The Plot Against America," Philip Roth. This one was really creepy. It's an alternative history, ostensibly, but it's really chasing something much deeper. It's an examination of how easily the majority can drift toward tyranny, and what it's like to be the "other" in society. Roth wonders what would have happened if FDR hadn't won re-election a third time. Instead, Charles Lindbergh, somewhat anti-Semitic and isolationist, wins and manages to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War. My one disappointment was toward the end, when Roth chooses to drop in a chapter that quickly details all the historical events that transpire before finishing the main thread of the story. I think he might have been trying to undercut the impact of the alternative history and emphasize the human toll of being the "other" in a repressive society, but it felt too expository and interrupted the flow. Still a book that's worth reading, and some of the contemporary parallels are downright disturbing.

• "Brother Man," Roger Mais. This is set in Jamaica in the '50s. Haven't finished it yet, but it's an interesting look at the Ras Tafari movement, stripping away the dope smoking caricature that Rastafarianism has become and looking at the roots of the movement through the eyes of Brother Man. Haven't finished it yet, but so far it's a great look at Jamaica in the '50s.

Posted by Bob Benz at 8:38 PM | Comments (1)

October 30, 2004

The Holy Goof ...

"Related or unrelated, if it was a fact, I knew it. Important or unimportant, whether the amount of coffee grown in Brazil last year, or the weight of Trotsky's brain, I deal with facts."
-- Neal Cassady, in a letter to Allen Ginsberg

When I read this, it struck me as a brick and mortar incarnation of William Carlos Williams' edict: "No ideas but in things."

I just finished William Plummer's biography of Neal Cassady, "The Holy Goof." Great read. Cassady is one of those figures who always fascinated me. On one hand, he was this brilliant Beat cyclone who didn't waste his time writing about life. He was too busy living it. On the other, he was a piece of crap who treated women terribly and often took advantage of his friends.

"The Holy Goof" does a good job of presenting both Cassadys, but it's clearly a sympathetic bio. If you're interested in Cassady, Kerouac and/or Kesey, this is worth checking out.

Now Playing: Pumpkin Headed Troll Woman from the album The Road Goes on Forever by Cold Beans and Bacon

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:09 AM | Comments (2)

September 25, 2004

Kill Your Idols

I read Kill Your Idols a while ago, but it's worth a mention. It's a series of essays by Generation X and Y rock critics. The premise is pretty simple. Take aim at classic rock icons and open fire.

It's a lot like shooting trout in a barrel. The essays range from fun to obvious to annoying. The best one (and I'm prejudice here) is by my friend Leanne. She takes on Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Pronounced" album. But she turns it more into a commentary on Southern culture, which is incredibly on the mark. To quote:

"I'm here to tell you that the definitive Southern rock band is handing you an F-350 truckload of bombastic, sentimental bullshit. Its vision of the South as a land of rebels resisting all things modern, intellectual and Northern is as outdated as hoop skirts, and was even when the band made its debut in 1973."

Other essays tackle everything from the Dead Kennedys to the Byrds. It's fun in the way top 100 lists are fun. I didn't even realize some of these albums were part of the canon. There were several I'd never heard. And when you look at the critics' favorite albums in the back of the book, it's amusing to note some of them list music that's targeted in "Kill Your Idols."

Definitely worth picking up for anyone who grew up with classic rock as their soundtrack ...

Now Playing: Long Black Veil from the album The Pizza Tapes by Jerry Garcia, David Grisman & Tony Rice

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:29 PM | Comments (6)

August 21, 2004

Stuever on NPR ...

NPR's Weekend Edition had a feature this morning on Hank's book, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It's worth checking out.

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2004

The great American elsewhere ...

At first it seemed odd, reading Hank Stuever's "Off Ramp" while swilling rum and watching the waves in Jamaica. The book is subtitled "Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere."

But it didn't take Stuever long to bring the great American elsewhere to my little island. As I was reading his meditation on the omnipresence of the plastic chair, I looked up to spy a whole herd of said chairs milling around right there between me and the Caribbean Sea. Small world. And in many ways, that's the point of Stuever's writing. It's not the grandiose that catches his eye. It's the small things -- plastic chairs, two regular kids getting married, the guy whose couch is too big to be carried up the stairs -- that reveal so much about what it's like to live in early 21st century America. Hank sweats the small things, putting them under the microscope and marveling at them, revealing more about life than a hundred Kerry campaign stories ever will.

To quote Hank: "The great American Noplace makes sense to me as a journalist preoccupied with how life feels, and what it's like to live in milennial times."

That sense of milennial times reverberates throughout the slices of life in his book, a collection of stories he wrote while working at the Albuquerque Tribune, the Austin American-Statesman and most recently, the Washington Post. The big bang. Space. Emptiness. A creeping sense of entropy filters through these meditations, but it's always countered by flare-ups of simple beauty and the glow of common people being wonderfully common.

I worked with Hank in Albuquerque, and I've been a fan from the start. I've engaged in boozy, heated arguments over the merits of Hank's style of journalism, coming to his defense when the "hard news" whores wanted to write Hank off as fluff. I'm amazed at how much he's grown as a writer in the past decade or so. I'd argue he's one of the best journalists of our time.

I guess the only criticism I have of "Off Ramp" is the "updating" that's grafted onto the end of several stories. It's sometimes abrupt and a bit, well, after the fact. It feels almost like a Dragnet epilogue. It's the peril, I guess, of pulling together stories that were written several years ago. And it's almost as jarring when there is no update. I can't help but wonder: What ever happened to Andy and Darlene, the two kids whose wedding Hank chronicles in unflinching detail? Are they still married? What are they doing now? How did life work out for them?

Posted by Bob Benz at 5:34 PM | Comments (7)

July 5, 2004

There's a Mingus among us ...

Snapped up a copy of Charles Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um" the other day. It's incredible. This is the remastered version with some new stuff added. I highly recommend it, even if you have only a passing interest in jazz.

Other cool, recent finds:

Trailer Park Boys: This Canadian show on BBC America is a scream. After three episodes, I'm officially hooked. It's shot like a reality TV thingy, and the characters are constantly talking directly to the audience and making reference to the sound and cameraman. Keep an eye out for Bubbles, the Trailer Park Buddha behind the Coke-bottle glasses.

During one of my regular surfs of Cruel.com, I came across IWorkWithFools.com. Some pretty amusing stuff in there, and I get the frightening feeling it's not fiction.

Now Playing: Ooh Bop Sh'Bam from the album Charlie Parker Carvin The Bird by Charlie Parker Carvin The Bird

Posted by Bob Benz at 1:56 PM | Comments (9)

June 16, 2004

Happy Bloomsday

Almost forgot that today is Bloomsday, and the 100th anniversary at that. Google did a neat Joyce thingy with its logo. Check it out, or if it's already gone, you can see it here.

I'd hoped to get through Ulysses by now, but I'm still slogging away. I got about half-way through and started getting sidetracked by other books (most recently, Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," which is awesome.) For some reason, Joyce is a cold weather read for me. I really need to finish it, though. I'm getting a lot more out of it this time through. The first time left me mostly bewildered. Now it's all coming together, thanks to Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book.

Posted by Bob Benz at 9:52 AM | Comments (10)

April 25, 2004

The epistolary novel goes 21st century

This is very interesting. Haven't had a chance to really look it over yet, but it mirrors something I was toying with attempting for the Homestead novel I'm kicking around.

I've signed up to be a beta tester. Hope the pick me ...

And speaking of things literary, heard an NPR interview with Pulitzer winner Franz Wright yesterday. His father is James Wright, one of my favorite poets. The selections they read from Franz's "Walking to Martha's Vineyard" were really powerful. So much so that I jumped over to Powell's and ordered a copy.

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:58 PM | Comments (1)

April 3, 2004

Haiku dojo ...

Long time no post. Too much life clouding my creativity, I guess.

This one is worth the wait. Glenbot has launched the Haiku Dojo. Very cool. My favorite so far:

my random thoughts knock
like pebbles on your windshield
tossed by a dump truck

Go Glenbot ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 7:44 PM | Comments (2)

December 29, 2003

Dancing in the Wake

I'm juggling several books right now:

1. After reading Ellmann's biography of Joyce, I decided to re-read Ulysses. During our tree decorating party, I was discussing this with a random LBJ liberal who suggested The New Bloomsday Book, Harry Blamires' guide to Ulysses. Said liberal then sent me a copy of the book. It's incredible. I'm getting much more out of Ulysses this time around thanks to Blamires. And I'm finding it odd that a great writer like Joyce seems to bring out the best in his critics. Both the Ellmann and Blamires books are exceptionally readable.

2. The Ellmann bio spawned another obsession: Joyce's daugher, Lucia. I found myself irked when Ellmann would go through an entire chapter with little or no mention of Lucia. Her story within Joyce's story fascinated me. That's why I was glad when Carol Loeb Shloss released Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake in December, and I immediately purchased a copy. Shloss, unfortunately, is falling short of the standards Ellmann and Blamires set in Joyce sholarship, and I have to admit that I agree with Hermione Lee's review in yesteday's New York Times, where Lee says: "I lost count of the incidences of 'We can imagine' or 'It is safe to imagine' or 'We can speculate' ..."

Shloss indeed reads a lot into Lucia's story that simply isn't supported by fact. I'm only a hundred pages into the book, and Schoss already has implied some sort of incestous relationship between Giorgio and Lucia and that Joyce had incestuous feelings toward his daugher. I'm not seeing any facts that even remotely back up these suppositions.

That being said, I'm still glad to get more detail on Lucia's troubled life. At this point, I'm of the mind that Ellmann had it right: Lucia was mad and Joyce was in denial. He just couldn't deal with it, and I think he also realized his bohemian, artist's lifestyle might have contributed to or even caused Lucia's problems. Shloss asks: ' "Why should Joyce's primary biographer have judged Joyce to be a man of extraordinary discernment in some matters but foolish in judging Lucia?"

Well, because people of extraordinary discernment, even genius, can be wrong. Especially when it comes to family.

3. John Gardner: The Life and Death of a Literary Outlaw. This is a proof copy of a bio that will be released in January 2004. I haven't started reading it yet, but I'm glad it's finally been written. When I was doing my master's work, I wanted to focus on Gardner's "moral fiction." I see him as a progeny of Matthew Arnold on some levels, and I love his books. His guide to writing, the Art of Fiction, is exceptional. But alas. The politically correct world of academia didn't want to have much to do with Gardner and his outlandish ideas that some fiction rises above others. I was steered away from Gardner (and a second idea of doing a thesis on water imagery in the lyrics of Robert Hunter). I regret that. I still think Gardner was a major figure. The Sunlight Dialogues still haunts me. Grendel is a fascinating reworking of Beowulf. It's been years since I read most of his books, but his characters remain vivid in my mind. Can't wait to start reading this bio, and I suspect it will resurrect my Gardner obsession.

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:25 AM | Comments (2)

December 23, 2003

The Zombie Survival Guide

My staff, incredible folks that they are, gave me a few Cuban cigars and The Zombie Survival Guide. Needless to say, I was on the verge of tears. Now I can survive an onslaught of the undead and enjoy fine Cuban cigars while I do so.

The book is by Max Brooks, Mel's son. Very deadpan. I was expecting it to be a bit more over the top. But what they heck. We are dealing with the undead here. In includes details about the undead, fighting tactics and general strategies.

"Don't be carefree and foolish with your most precious asset -- life. This book is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now without even knowing it."

Guess that could apply to Christmas shoppers, too ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 10:26 AM | TrackBack

May 16, 2003

The Dead Walk

Bought this book by Andy Black on zombie films with high hopes. Mostly, those hopes were dashed. It's poorly edited (though he has the audacity to thank his proofreader in the credits -- he should flog the proofreader). Too much plot summary, not enough analysis. His read on Romero is generally on target but superficial. Though I do think he hits Argento right on, and he does include plenty of detail on Cemetery Man (Dellamorte, Dellamore). Nice to see the greatest zombie movie ever made get some credit. Rent this film if for no other reason than to marvel at the beauty of Anna Falci. Wow. He also mentions Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, another of my favorites.

My main complaint is that he spends too much time on stuff that really isn't "zombie." Plan Nine from Outer Space, etc. If it doesn't eat flesh, it ain't a zombie, dude.

Instead of buying The Dead Walk, go out and rent Cemetery Man and Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. Buy a six pack of beer. Walk with the dead ...

Posted by Bob Benz at 9:09 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2002

Zombies and cool comics ...

Anyone who knows me knows I love zombie movies. I'm particularly fond of Romero's work, especially because of the Pittsburgh ties. I've found a great, Pittsburgh-based zombie site that's worth checking out -- ZombieGirls.net. It has a lot of reviews. Still needs work in places, but overall it's an impressive effort.

Another good, recent find in the living dead realm is ZombieKeeper. I particularly liked their "Best in Horror" section. There were several films there I'd never heard of. "Shatter Dead" sounded so interesting I went out and ordered a copy on their recommendations. They also have a positive review of Romero's "Martin," one of my favorites, even if it's not about zombies. They might not be able to spell Pittsburgh, but they know their horror flicks.

And finally, my favorite comic strip these days is Boondocks. It's definitely worth checking out. Aaron McGruder is one of the best artists doing comics, and the characters in the strip -- Huey Freeman and his little brother Riley -- are hilarious. Great social commentary. One of my recent favorites is the strip on Ann Kournikova.

Posted by Bob Benz at 9:40 PM | Comments (0)