Eleven in '11 ... No. 2 (books)

London Library Reading Room

No. 2.

books.

What can I say here?  Like so many of you, Dear Reader, I am a bibliophile.  Books on architecture or apologetics. Poetry or politics. History or mystery.  Fiction and non.  Quirky books elaborating on the minutiae of the moment, or irreverent volumes making mathematics simple.  If a writer cranks out a book done well, is well-reviewed, inspiring, particularly helpful or simply has a nice hook (or a different take on things) -- especially if it can be found in the discount bin -- chances are I'll read it.  As I like to say, two books a week is all we ask.  And, if a friend writes a book, well, dang it!, I'll buy several copies.  

When I watched the PSA for literacy.org showing youngsters getting ready to embark on journeys to new worlds and their books stamped like a passport from the engineer who was boarding passengers, and then as the young lad begins to read the words on the page, the landscape around him -- reflected in the train window -- reveals itself as the Emerald City ... chills. 

Imagine if everyone read two books a week.  Real books, too.  Weighty books.  Let's make a deal, you and I. Or, at least you can just placate with a polite nod of "okay" over there on your side of the Internet's conjoined computer screen.  How about we agree to read at least one book a month?  That is doable.  If modern Presidents of the United States have time to read a book or two occasionally, then why not us?  I've seen the pictures of Bush and Obama and Reagan and Clinton strutting from Air Force One to an awaiting limo toting said tome.
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President Obama Note to Y. Martel (author Life of Pi)

One of the reasons I put up with Oprah (she's not my fave, but I truly respect the hell out of what she's built, her empire.  My ex-father in law worked with her in Nashville years ago.  They ran into each other at the Oscars, and she remembered him well.), is that she has had such an amazing impact on encouraging us to be the highest and best us, and that definitely includes her book club.  I also love that she is who she is, and she doesn't confuse herself or others with trying to be someone else that some a-hole like yours truly might want her to be.  She's real, er, real rich, but genuine to boot.
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London Library

Okay, so yes, as the big No.2 above indicates, I am a reader of books.  But, a true bibliophile holds a special place in the dusty racks and stacks of their heart for the setting that is the library.  The London Library for me is the literary locus of the printed media and book culture and erudition all festooned with a lovely British lilt. The staff exceeds all professional standards, and one can obtain with aplomb great research there.  Just ask the fictional American  research assistant, Roland Michell, from the novel (and movie) Possession: A Romance, by A.S. Byatt, both of which I highly recommend you read and view.

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When money's tight (which is usually the past couple of years), I'll get my fix from the library or via a free eReader or will gladly take a book second-hand from a friend.  You can obtain all the public domain classics on Google's free reader (or some other eReader), and we'd be busy, you and I, with a book a month for years.  And, we'd be so much better for it.  And, society would be better for having better versions of ourselves coursing through and over its causeways and byways and by the way, and not to mention, we'd be able to answer a lot more of those pesky questions on Jeopardy!  And, now, hundreds and hundreds of books later, I love crushing Alex Trebek's puny questions.  Books is brainfood, y'all!!!

Before I list some favorite books, here are some favorite authors. I say "some" because, well, almost all of my books are in storage right now, and this is off the top of my head.  It's a little Wordle that I put together especially; adds to the sense of occasion, dontcha think?

FatScribe Wordle of Authors

These aren't necessarily the big eleven in my (very) humble little existence.  Just eleven I thought represented certain aspects of my life well.  Btw, there is one important book that is obviously missing (really a collection of 66 separate books, old and new) that we can discuss a bit later.

The Catcher in the Rye was it for me when I read it in high school (three times) because Jerome David Salinger helped me finally to recognize what a writer's voice sounded like (I know, I know ...  many of you Eastern elites were ingesting The New Yorker when you were in junior high school and understood this sophisticated patois, but for us indolent Angelinos, it was revelatory.)  Franny and Zooey, however, really placed a hand with lighted cigarette on my shoulder and said with cocktail breath, "you wanna try this? You should try this, this writing thing ole boy."   I was hooked on the story of the family Glass as it took little (to me) surprising turns, with drinks at sophisticated joints, and college sports, and all the swells rocking sweaters and overcoats and pearls, featuring rooms in NY city apartments where one could take a melancholy-induced nap. It had trains and cabs and older brothers and family drama and young person angst.  Perhaps it's trite to say that Salinger is one of those writers that influenced me the most over the last 25 years to be sure, but sometimes trite is true.  For the first time I thought that it might be nice to sit and think and create a story with fountain pen and blank page, and to set in motion ex nihilo some wonderful characters of my creation the way Salinger does.

Harold Berman was quoted by so many of my law school professors that I went out and purchased the book.  However, it wasn't until a couple of years later that I could actually read the book with some free time.  The tome is a masterpiece, a magnum opus without peer.  When I think of the biggies here in this little category, it goes: Blackstone.  Berman.  Bork.  If you practice law, you owe it to yourself to read this wonderful contribution to the cannon.  If you don't (as I do not), you can show-up all of those lawyers who've never read a single book since law school (and there are MANY) by taking a few months to get through Law and Revolution.

Michael Chabon, in my humble opinion, is the greatest American writer of the last fifty years.  His plots and characters are masterful. His use of language nonpareil.   I was given his first book (his master's thesis for the UCI writer's program) when I was an undergrad, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.  His book Summerland, I read to my boys when they were small, and then my eldest read it sua sponte when he was eleven (genius, sheer genius, said his dad ... and how appropriate in light of, you know, the big play on the "eleven" theme).  Chabon won the Pulitzer for his Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  But, my favorite book of his has to be Wonder Boys.  Steve Kloves adapted this book masterfully (as he has done almost all of the Harry Potter books for the big screen), and I put his script for Wonder Boys up as a perfect pitched game for anyone looking to see a great script.  Anyway, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a great way for you to understand the brilliance of this writer.  And, as you might imagine, Dear Reader, he and I have absolutely zero in common when it comes to politics.  But, I love the guy anyway, er, not love love, but you get my meaning.

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This book by Allan Bloom made me decide to go to graduate school and get a master's in public policy.  I became fascinated with Bloom in high school (and his professor) Leo Strauss and a few other more conservative Chicago intellectuals.  Bloom's erudition and grasp of history and the negative implications of the wont of academia and media to practice historicism when it fits their needs, to twist it for their own expedient ends, have informed the way I view all of post-modern American politics.  Bloom took an amazing amount of heat from his fellow academicians for The Closing of the American Mind, being labeled and confirmed a neocon (a word I love, btw) for his effort.   An older friend of mine from church, who was one of ABC's political editors, had recently introduced the phrase real politik to me after a discussion we had on Bloom.  I would later name the first Internet website I developed (a very successful, student-run public policy journal) called NeoPolitique in honor of Bloom.  Highly suggested reading ... even thirty years later.

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No one can equal this dandy and his skill with the roman a clef.  I appreciate his white suits and wonderful stories and his conservative bent.  Where I loathe pretensionist novelists like Norman Mailer (RIP) and John Irving telling everyone how to live, I can stand proud that a novelist of Tom Wolfe's caliber can tell them and other Eastern sophisticates (in my stead) exactly where to get off.    My good friend (best man at my wedding) and I were in South Carolina helping his parents move into their lovely new home sitting on the 17th fairway.  My friend's dad was dying from a blood cancer, and he wanted me to take any books I wanted.  I took many good ones, but this A Man in Full was my favorite.  I read it in like two or three days, sitting late nights in the Charleston heat on the back patio, drinking sweet tea  and smoking an occasional cigar.  My friend's dad also had an amazing pen collection.  He was, truly, a man in full, who rebounded from borderline bankruptcy, who called his 30 yr-old son "sweetie" and who never ceased to provide for his family, even when he was at death's door. 

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I personally owe, and I believe the country also owes, a debt of gratitude to Shelby Steele for this work.  The Content of Our Character is THE book on race-relations.  As a father of two boys with a black mother and white dad, I am very sensitive to this issue. Have been since I was a boy and witnessed the event that was Alex Haley's "Roots" on ABC network television (that used to be a big deal back then).  When I was a boy, I can remember exactly where I was the first and only time I used the "N" word (and, no, it's not a sequel show to Showtime's The "L" Word ).  I was with the son of a Cy Young and MVP winner (a Dodger great, the second black-American to be admitted to play in the Majors), and he and I were playing a basketball game called "tip-in."  We were in junior high school, and I had just beaten him out for the scholar athlete award, and we were killing time before the bus was supposed to pick us up.  I missed a crucial shot and out of nowhere, I used the word as curse word, not as a racial epithet directed at anyone.  Don't know why I said it.  I'd never said the word before in my life, and right there in front of the son of a racial pioneer I uttered it.  He chased me around A.E. Wright Middle School for a full ten minutes before he finally said, "Goot, I'll make you a deal.  You stop running and I'll only hit you once.  Then we can go finish our game."  I stopped and he hit and we played.  We played football and basketball on our high school teams (he would later play at Stanford) and neither ever mentioned it again.  Coda: LuxeMont, the Internet company I founded a few year's back, was asked to play in an LPGA event by one of our advertisers, a company that was the official LPGA provider of private jets.  I had no idea, but it was owned by my childhood friend.  Yes, the same. 

Milton Friedman's introduction to F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was the first time I was able to read his words of economic wisdom.  After reading Hayek's book in grad school, I went on to devour everything I could get my hands on by Friedman, including any YouTube videos I could watch.  Genius, as all Nobel Prize winners are.  Well, most prize winners are.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Frederick Douglass, to me, represents one of the greatest bootstrapping stories in Western history.  From slave to publisher, from beaten chattel to feted White House guest. After his first wife passed away, Douglass would marry a white woman (to the consternation of some), and die at a ripe old age.   Douglass would hold several political and bureaucratic positions of power in DC.  Talk about your real Horatio Alger story.  

Read State of Fear, it blows the claims of those insipid, anthropogenic-preaching, lie-disseminating and fear-mongering miscreants out of the water who want to re-engineer the capitalistic West in their radical leftist Utopian image.  I never knew Michael Crichton to be conservative, but when I read this latest tome, I had one of the most surprising aha moments in my reading life. Regardless, the prescient Michael Crichton has always been a fave.  A take-me-to-the-beach sort of fave, who nonetheless was a terrific spinner of yarns fave in terms of his techno-drenched SciFi thrillers.  His oeuvre routinely presaged the headlines of tomorrow.  With degrees from Harvard (including Harvard medical) he decided to write novels during his time in medical school.  Renaissance man he (the bastard), Crichton would break new ground throughout his life, becoming the first to have a top-selling novel, hit movie, and television show concurrently, simultaneously, and famously (he created the medical drama, ER).  His home in the Pacific Palisades was filled with art that even Steve Martin would covet and lovely comfy furnishings for his family (and to hold his 6'9" frame) as well as two unpublished novels. After his recent death at an early age, his family discovered that Crichton had produced two more novels (one completely finished and self-edited, and the other almost so).  I can't tell you how much I respect a writer of his caliber.  Here's what Crichton said in Architectural Digest about his home and his love of books:

“All the bedrooms are stacked—there are books piled in the garage, and there are books in boxes in the basement,” he says. “The paperbacks are yellow and cracked, but I won’t give them up. I can’t—I annotate as I read. At one point I calculated that half the weight and volume of what we own is books."  A house with room for books and a family—and one of the most spectacular careers on record—are more than a writer dares to hope for. Though Michael Crichton is not one to hype his domestic pleasures, he can’t deny his good fortune. “This has been,” he says, with measured bliss, “a very happy, very positive house.”

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Last but most important, The Federalist Papers.  Here is the book (another important anthology of 85 essays) that each and every one of you, Dear Readers, should read (I know, that's obnoxious, my encouraging you to read a rather old, yet important book).  The Federalist Papers informs everything about our Constitutional Republic and its formation, and the role of the Constitution in each and every one of our lives today.  TFP is a collection from three giants who decided to publish their writings with a pseudonym of Publius, mostly to keep the reader's focus on what they were writing, not on who was writing these essays.


So, there you go. 
Up next?

No. 3.

film.   

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Eleven in '11 ... No. 1

The "Eleven in '11" series is all about those favorite things we all have. Be they things small or large, simple or expensive, important or humble. Whether they're things bound or fitted, wrapped in steel or a pashmina, living and breathing or centuries still. If it's a favorite thing, we can't help it (and we don't care) if it means nothing to someone else. It's a you thing and it's a me thing when it comes to the Eleven in '11. It's personal and subjective, and darn it, we can't live without these things (or, perhaps it's a thing we'd like to have).

I'll share eleven of mine over the next era, epoch, or eon (however long it takes, there will be eleven entries from yours truly), and just as important, I look forward to hearing about yours! Our respective Eleven in '11 are coeval and equal herein the pages of the ole porkster.

So, here goes:

No. 1.

fountain pens.

Love 'em since high school when mom (lovely mom) gave me my first one. Here are some of the good or more popular ones that I have:

Pelikan

Montblanc

Parker

Shaeffer

Porsche

Namiki

Sailor

Waterman
Faber-Castell

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There is something about fountain pens that hearkens back to a time when men wrote their letters to the women ("er, woman, Jg. You mean woman.") they loved; and young women at college wrote their betters, that is to say, the parents left behind in that one-horse town, who expected and received a beautifully crafted missive with nary a misspelling ... and both sexes drafted these fine documents via a writing instrument containing a gold nib and an ample ink reservoir, aka, the fountain pen.

Some mistakenly think that fountain pens are snobbish, and that those with a nice Montblanc in their pocket must be putting on airs. Not so! (Doth he protest too much? He doth.) Or, perhaps that's true for some, but you'll know in an instant when that cap twists off, and the pen is brought into service, if a dandy is prancing around before you with an affectation instead of a real pen. Have I ever played the dancing fool? Perhaps, but that would have been decades ago. Now, they're simply utilitarian. I like 'em well made, inexpensive, with plenty of elan. The old American pens (Parker, Cross, Sheaffer) are work horses, though most are now made in China. The Japanese pens (Sailor, Nimiki) have great nibs and the companies give great service. The German (Lamy, Montblanc, Pelikan) pens last a lifetime and are about function (think Mies Van Der Rohe and "form follows function"). The Italian and French pens are beautiful (Waterman, Dupont, Montegrappa, Aurora) and can be expensive.

But the folks (humble salt of the earth types, reared up here in Shropshire) that I spy with my wicked little eye carrying these badboys around in their jacket pockets tend to be academic or writerly or engineers. Nothing like indelible ink hitting a blank page -- a tabula rasa for dreaming or scheming -- a fresh surface to give birth to some wonderful idea that could change the world, or a funny joke that'll make audience members change their shorts. A man or woman with a fountain pen knows no bounds. They are merciless in crafting their prose or laying out architectural fenestration or editing some lucky bloke's latest opus.

Of course, you must have a decent journal to go with your pen. I carry mine everywhere I go to capture an idea for business, or note taking at church, or remembering a thought on a potential article, or suggesting a new direction on a screenplay I might be working on. Pen and journal especially come in handy when you hear GREAT dialog next to you flowing freely for all to hear at a restaurant or The Coffee Bean or your kid's school.

These pens can be very expense, that is to say, upwards of a $1,000 or more (There are some ridiculous examples with even higher price tags, but let's focus on an actual pen that we might like to have or use.), but most decent fountain pens can be had from $100 to $300 American.

And, did I mention they make great gifts? I've given these as gifts over the years to at least a dozen friends or more, and they do make an impression. I received one after high school, college, and law school graduation, and I still have all three and know who gave them to me. And some day, my kids already know this, when they get to high school, they can have any one or two of mine.

Up next?

No. 2.

books.

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Let's NOT Politicize Murder

Every fiber in my being (an overused phrase if there ever was one) wants to shout out in anger over the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. I have a personal response that I'll share with you Re: situations such as these: I never use the perpetrator's name. I give no satisfaction of limelight or infamy or notoriety to fools who seek attention by destroying others. I wish the media would follow suit and simply report on the event and victims and the arrest and eventual trial and execution of these maladjusted types. Instead, we will sit vigil for several news cycles as the media hordes and whores (you know the usual suspects of whom I speak) begin their preternatural muck-wallowing journalism, where they will roll around on their backs on top of the most putrid aspects of this story, like a dog would a carcass sniffed out in the backyard, all in the name of ratings.

I also was/am disgusted by media pundits (with political axes to grind) who seek to imply or impute political motives to this tragedy vis-a-vis certain political camps not of their liking. I found the following Taranto article to be thoughtful, informative and a sobering reminder of what happens when certain politicos and literati are confronted by the unsavory reality of the evil that lurks amongst us.

Click here for the --> JAMES TARANTO Piece in Wall St. Journal

We are all hurting when tragedies like the one in Arizona occur. We become distrusting, or nervous, or worst of all, inured to these sorts of tragedies. I go to a rather large church in Los Angeles, and there are times after I've dropped my kids off at their Sunday school classes, that I look around and wonder, "what would we do if a nutter walked onto our campus?" James Taranto's piece in the Wall Street Journal is worth a read if, like me, you find yourself dismayed by blubbering simpletons seeking to assign blame for this tragedy to their political enemies.

Each morning, I read several English papers (Telegraph, Globe and Mail [Canadian, actually], The Times) to whet my Anglophile appetite. Yet, all three of these fine papers were guilty of attributing, within mere hours, political motives for this tragedy across the pond or to the south. The evening of the tragedy, each had above the fold articles or opinion pieces wondering about, intimating or attributing a supposed motive to the shooting. Too soon? Yes, way too soon; they didn't have anything resembling the full facts of the situation. Nor do we still, IMHO. Bottom line, we need to support our friends in Arizona as they deal with this horrible situation, and send them our prayers and thoughts and well-wishes.

UPDATE: From Steve Kornacki, the News Editor at Salon.com (no conservative rag, she):
Article linked here: Salon.com

Headline: "Americans Get It: It's Just a Horrible Coincidence"

"CBS News is out with a new poll today that finds Americans strongly rejecting the notion that the political climate played a role in Saturday's attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents say that the nation's "harsh political tone" didn't have anything to do with the shooting rampage, compared with 32 percent who say it did play a role. Not surprisingly, Republicans are more unified in denying any linkage (a 69 to 19 percent margin), but even a plurality of Democrats -- 49 percent -- agree that there was no connection. Among independents, the spread is 56 to 33."

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