Yesterday my paperback copy of Snarkmarket’s New Liberal Arts arrived in the mail, and I’m afraid it’s more interesting for the method of production than the actual content.

The book itself - which you can read for free in PDF form - attempts to catalogue the possible “new liberal arts” that we could find in the modern age: every discipline that would help us to live better no matter our occupation or place in life. The listing of topics includes everything from attention economics to video literacy, and each is accompanied by a short blog-posty explanation of what exactly they mean.

The 80-page count is generous, as the book is very very spaced out with quite a few facing blank pages. The whole thing is pretty voiceless and blandly written, with a lot more telling than showing in each entry. And the biggest crime is that they amount to theoretical toe-dipping, with none of the pieces really evoking the Big Questions in the same way traditional liberal arts tend to. From reading this book, you’d think that all those liberal art credits in college were mainly exercises in trendy analog lifehacking.

But more interesting is the production model, which married a limited run of 200 traditional paperbacks with a free release of the PDF once all 200 physical copies were sold. It’s a neat incentive structure designed to lure in bibliophiles, early-adopters, and other demographics who are traditionally willing to shell out more money for stuff. And hey, they got me to put out $$ for it so there’s a little bit of proof in the pudding.

This is a really neat step in the direction of micropublishing, which I think holds a lot of potential as we acclimate to being a society of voices. Blogs and the internet are nice, but there’s a certain rhetorical effect of books that can’t be copied online. The BLDGBLOG Book (which I reviewed earlier) is a great example of how some blogs make fantastic books, especially when freed from the tyranny of timestamps. Having a big list of posts from most-recent to least-recent is the dominant organization scheme in internet self-publishing, but it’s incredibly poor way of telling any sort of story. We haven’t found any better way online (outside of incredibly fragile tagging schemes), but books have had that stuff down for centuries.

So in conclusion, we all need to do our part and coerce Mills, Ragbag, Kyle Bingman, and some other Tumblrs to arrange their posts into some sort of grand book that we can buy and dig into away from computer screens. Because New Liberal Arts only hints at how awesome this aggregation method could be.

• Interested in the book reviews I’ve posted recently? Well, all the ones I’ve written so far have been nicely categorized using the tag function, ready for your perusal.
• I also have a Goodreads account now, in case you prefer that to Tumblr.
• Unfortunately, my reading pace is set to abate somewhat as I dig into some side-projects in July. This recent spate of book-reading was mainly an experiment to see if I could maintain the focus necessary for it, and I kinda succeeded in that. So it’s on to bigger and not-better-but-more-necessary things.
• I am in Iowa today for some sort of extended family gathering, and hopefully I’ll come back with at least one or two interesting pictures. But no more posts today.
• Mindy’s visiting Manhattan (KS) this weekend and bringing back her brand of awesome to our fine town, so I’ll be scuttling back there tomorrow for that.

Yesterday I finished Columbine by Dave Cullen and it’s incredibly, incredibly good. So good that I slammed through it in an afternoon and evening, only stopping for dinner and a mandatory scheduling meeting.

I originally heard about this book as the first complete accounting of the shootings at Columbine High School. And it succeeds on that count, deftly deconstructing the events of April 20, 1999, even as they confused the media, the police, and the student population while they happened. To tell the story of that day is an impressive feat of journalism in itself, but Cullen doesn’t stop there.

Out of a 350-page book, only the first 100 pages is devoted to a conventional recounting of the attack. For the remainder of the story, Cullen pursues twin narratives: Dylan and Eric as they slipped down into being ready for the attack, and the aftermath of the attack on both media and survivors. It seems gimmicky at first glance - like a parody of a New Yorker article - but works out tremendously well thanks to Cullen’s larger goal.

Using Columbine as the title of the book isn’t a blunt tool to lure sales in airport bookstores, but an uncannily subtle statement about the real subject; Cullen isn’t just talking about the shooting here, but what meanings the event and the word “Columbine” have for everyone involved.

To the media, it was a pair of loners and goths looking to wreak vengeance on those who had bullied and shunned them. To the police who responded that day, it was designed as a school shooting. To Cassie Bernall’s parents, it was the summation of their daughter’s spiritual journey as she bravely professed her faith to the gunmen. But all these explanations were categorically wrong.

The real drama here isn’t the incident itself, but instead how each person sought to work out the meaning of that incident. To Eric Harris, it meant a display of tyrannical superiority over everyone. To Dylan Klebold, it meant having an outlet for the internal pains that wracked his psyche.

Everyone, in the course of the book, ends up working out their own meaning as to what happened. Columbine - which started out the novel as the name of the high-school and surrounding community - starts to fracture both literally and figuratively. Differences in meaning lead to different factions within the community of victims, factions who often argue over how they should interact with the county government, the media, and the watching nation.

It’s incredibly interesting and touching and heartbreaking stuff. I’d recommend it to almost everyone from casual readers to “serious” book nerds like myself, and will be shocked if it doesn’t clean house when awards season swings around. Regardless of whether you’re interested in the shootings themselves, the larger world evoked by this book is amazing.

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley was hugely disappointing, and probably because it’s not that good.

The premise of the book is actually pretty interesting: illustrate the various philosophies to death by recounting the personal deaths (and lives) of famous philosophers throughout history and how that compared or contrasted with their philosophy. However, there are a few mistakes that Critchley makes in telling the tales:

• Trying to tell the stories of over 190 different philosophers… in a 250 page book.
• Unable to decide whether the capsule biograpies are meant to be read in sequence or at will.
• Immediately - and with little supporting evidence - imposing his own viewpoint in the picture and allowing it to warp his histories without any apparent consideration of alternative stances beyond mere recounting.

As a result, Critchley rarely manages to eke any depth out of the philosophers discussed. This isn’t too much of a problem early on in the greek philosophers, whose differences can be bluntly hashed out without too much loss in detail. But once he gets to medieval times, the enterprise starts to fall apart. (More later.)

Critchley’s prose is merely middling, despite being specifically praised by Lewis Lapham (who normally has excellent taste as showcased in Lapham’s Quarterly). His tone is so bland that it seems equally ill-suited to discussing philosophy or humorous anecdotes, despite being employed in the service of both. Sometimes there enough transitions between sections to indicate they were meant to be read as a whole, but other times they seem almost slapdash. Even when we’re being given the These Are Connected signposts, there doesn’t seem to be much added by their juxtaposition.

Finally, the whole book is semi-stifled by Critchley himself, who declares his position from the beginning and never ceases to remind you whether he agrees or disagrees with the author at hand. This is ok when it comes to constructing philosophy, but not when you’re laying claim to exegenesis (deciphering the meaning of texts) or recounting their lives in a historically-accurate manner. But yet it does, and the result is that I was deeply suspicious of everything Critchley said. And because he slammed all 190 people into only 250 pages, there’s very little given in the way of corroborating evidence. Yuck.

I almost wrote this negative review last night at about 100 pages in, but decided to persevere in hopes that it would get better once we reached more modern philosophers with better documentation of their personal lives. It did get better, but only mildly. There were moments that made me laugh, but only a handful in the whole book.

The Book of Dead Philosophers would be far better served as a two-part arrangement: a quick survey of the deaths of philosophers, followed by a deeper examination of the handful of philosophers whose work Critchley truly finds valuable. As is, it seems too much like Critchley wants to impress you with his research and then slip a fast one on you by sneaking in his own opinion as fact. I found it frustrating in the same way that I find it frustrating to read The Economist’s smug claim to stating The Way Things Are while cutting off at the knees my own ability to critically examine the claims.

In the end, the best praise I can give this book is that it was smoothly-written enough that I was over with it fairly quickly. Only a night and a morning spent, and I’m onward to greener pastures.

This weekend I also finished reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s the most beautiful - but also unnerving - novel I’ve ever read.

First things first: the novel starts out with the best opening to anything ever in the English language.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Impressive, huh? But more importantly, the beautiful writing has an effect in the storytelling, working as a sort of aesthetic anaesthetic that dulls our gut-level revulsion to what the narrator Humbert Humbert does to secure control over his love Lolita. There are sections that sound like the most entrancing love-letter ever… until Nabokov reminds us a few sentences later that Lolita isn’t even in her teens yet. The effect is unbelievably disconcerting, and kept me on my toes throughout the early part of the novel.

Kubrick pursued a similar paradox in A Clockwork Orange, seeking to make the violence so beautiful that the viewer sympathizes - in a way - with the main character’s psychopathic behavior. He neglects others’ interests, but seemingly in the pursuit of a Greater Good like beauty, truth, etc. We’re seduced by Humbert Humbert’s artistic gifts, which were ironically insufficient to seduce Lolita herself.

But after the opening 100 pages or so, Humbert Humbert’s manipulation of the reader starts to fall apart. We see glimpses of his efforts at control, such as how he would physically force his former wife to agree. By the time Lolita is his captive prey, we’re familiar with his twisted logic and rationalizations for actions. Notable amongst these is one scheme to drug Lolita and fondle her unconscious body, as to not cause her psychic pain from an attempt while awake.

As the novel progresses, the horror shifts. Humbert Humbert isn’t in love with Lolita, but some twisted shadow of a fantasy that he resolutely associates with her. Pedophilia is troubling enough, but Nabokov reveals it to be layered on a vile brand of unrequited love. Humbert is willing to do almost anything to keep his power over Lolita, even when his willpower is good for nothing more than… well, I’ll just say that Nabokov knows all about Chekhov’s gun.

Despite the moral stomach-twisting that it puts me through, the prose really is fantastic enough to justify reading the novel all by itself. I devoured the novel’s 300 pages in less than two days, and I’ve found my own writing style to have sightly shifted since starting my read. My sentences tend to be longer and more gnarled, favoring the longer constructions that Nabokov occasionally slips into.

It sounds ridiculous but our finest prose-stylist of the English language may be Nabokov, who first started writing in Russian. He was trilingual in his childhood, though, which he shows off throughout the novel by throwing in snippets of French. It’s for those and other obscure references that I’m tempted to buy the The Annotated Lolita featuring translations and all sorts of explanatory footnotes. I’m glad that I went with the plain novel first, though, since I’ve heard that the annotations spoil later events in the novel. As is, I could just skip over the confusing references and just enjoy the beauty in the words.

Anyways, I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone. The book is over 50 years old, but reads as fresh as ever. I’m beginning to suspect that Pynchon and others started to play postmodernism’s games afterwards because you just can’t beat Nabokov in a straight write-off. He’s utterly amazing, and his other stuff (like the poem/story/?? Pale Fire) just shot onto my reading list.

On Friday I finished Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which includes all his published short stories between 1947 and 1972. It’s the first I’ve read by Marquez, and ok, I guess.

One of Marquez’s themes that becomes clear over the course of these twenty-six stories is the way that the odd quickly becomes familiar, and how some things that are familiar are actually rather odd in practice. The first batch of stories, published as “Eyes of a Blue Dog” in Spanish, are insistently concerned with the limits of physical existence. The characters experience blindness, death, and other hardships tied to their bodies. Marquez finds a way to pick out the salient details, creating drama out of even a man shaving himself using his own reflection.

That reflection story in particular manages to hint at his later moves towards the fantastic. The third and final batch of stories starts with the excellent story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” which chronicles the arrival in town of a very old man with enormous wings. Initially a spectacle, he quickly ceases to hold any value for the town’s residents, forced to subsist on mush in a chicken coop. Marquez shows how the ordinary can subtly be fantastic by presenting a fantastic situation that quickly turns ordinary. I suppose this is an aim of the larger magical realism movement too.

The voice is hard to pin down, too. It’s got that slippery feel of translated prose to it, but not the simple, plain-spoken quality of Murakami’s take on magical realism. It can be sensuous one moment, and clinical the next. It dives into characters and spins out of them just as quickly. It refuses to be pinned down, but still feels as if it was all written by the same author. I could never really get my thumb on it, partially because the stories span such a length of time in the developing talent of Marquez.

Overall, it was a pleasure to read but I can’t say that I was blown away like I was by some of the other stuff I’ve read recently. The stories did have their wonderful moments, but they were diffuse and not quite as discrete-blow-to-the-cranium as the best ones are. The book felt weird, but too comfortable for my taste. Maybe it’s because today’s authors have already digested and iterated on Marquez’s style, but the whole experience felt like I was reading something I’d seen somewhere else. I can understand why my friend Maggie so eagerly pushed it on me, but the effect was more of recognizing why it’s good, not feeling why it’s good.

I do think, though, that I’ll eventually try tackling One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez.

Just finished reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace.

This (along with “Good People”) is probably the best introduction to DFW’s fiction that I’ve found, featuring pretty-short stories in a bunch of different styles and voices. You’re pretty much guaranteed to find one that you’ll fall in love with, like one of the titular interviews or his second-person voice in “Forever Overhead”:

Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

DFW can flip into this poetic-prose mode when he wants to, but rarely does. Instead, he tries to carve at the truth using words as people speak them, and only occasionally as they don’t. One essay is written as if a greek myth transplanted to late-90s Los Angeles, which takes a few pages to get used to. Most of the essays don’t require such deciphering, and the ones that do try to pay off such effort through laughs or revelation.

Most of the pieces - especially the interviews - are utterly magnetic and horrifying in a way. They’re all interviews with “hideous men,” something that becomes clear in the telling of each. But what you don’t expect is how each essay manages to hit close to home. I can recognize parts of myself in some of these writings, parts that weren’t fully elucidated or realized until after they’re read.

That makes them troubling, but it’s what they describe that makes them horrific. They’re full of moral traps, attempts at being Good that end up tragically backfiring in a way that’s often masked by their intended aims. You’re left with somewhat of confusion, a mixture of feelings that have to be worked out by yourself. But it’s a good confusion - if that makes any kind of sense - in that you feel for once as if you’re striking the motherload, uncovering the disease that produces all the aches and pains and symptoms that is the human condition.

This sounds all kind of overwrought and melodramatic and it probably is. But reading these stories, especially in close succession, is one hell of a trip. You end up looking at yourself (literally “your self”) differently.

I can’t recommend it enough.

I also just finished the BLDGBLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh, and it was pretty awesome.

In case you’re not familiar with the source material, BLDGBLOG is one of my favorite blogs out there. The tagline is Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures; in practice, this works out to be a mix of everything imaginable (and a fair amount of stuff that is barely so).

The organizing feature of this viewpoint is understanding the shape of the world as inescapably tied to its function, the aesthetic as more than just aesthetic. Manaugh asks us to consider the possibilities inherent in the sky, under the ground, and everywhere in between. Essays, interviews, and artwork serve as a stream-of-consciousness, allowing us to thread our way through Manaugh’s dreams and nightmares of the world.

This sounds like a dry work of academic criticism, but it’s the closest descendant I’ve found to Jorge Luis Borges’ short fiction. Manaugh loves to spin off outlines of short-stories, pulling real drama and excitement out of what could be mere dry wisdom. He never forgets that - in the end - our surroundings are ultimately processed and received by us. Even his lifeless landscapes are viewed through the lens of humanity.

This might be what stops his stuff from being widely-cited within the formal field of architecture, but it makes his book into a series of adventures and one of my favorite recent reads. Very cool.

I read my first issue of Lapham’s Quarterly last week, and it was absolutely wonderful.

Each issue features a wide variety of voices talking about a central theme - such as love, war, crime, or learning. The voices are drawn from the broad swath of history, stretching from early Greece to late-modern America. They’re accompanied by pictures and art on that theme (like the one shown above), which serve as potent perspectives in themselves. There are also some longer, commissioned essays written for the occasion of the issue at the back. The whole effect is multi-faceted and kaleidoscopic, rendering a greater whole than merely the sum of its parts.

It’s rather expensive at $60 a year - making each issue $15 for about 225 pages of ad-free awesome - but the effect is unparalleled amongst anything else I’ve read. The revelation/minute ratio is insanely high, as picking from all of history allows you to drill down to the truly excellent stuff. It’s only in its second year of publication, but is a mature and fully-formed work of art. I cannot recommend it enough.

I’m so hooked that I went ahead and dropped the money on the boxed set of the first year’s four issues; that’s 900 pages of amazing headed my way in the next week or two! I plan on temporarily becoming a hermit once it shows up.

(painting is “Prison Courtyard” by Vincent Van Gogh)

I went to Lawrence today to eat lunch with Maggie and Will, and after lunch wandered around in the post-parade downtown. I picked up this book - which I’d heard prestigious-sounding things about for a while - in their Dusty Bookshelf.

Reading the back, I think it might be a masterpiece of “those damn kids and their rap music” writ large across the last 500 years of Western Civilization. At least, that’s how Safire makes it sound when he praises it as “a stunning five-century study of civilization’s cultural retreat.” The National Review also has a blurb on the book. :(

The book’s internal structure looks insane, though. Should be exciting!