Not Buying It
Refugees from the consumer carnage of Black Friday might greatly appreciate Judith Levine’s Not Buying It: My Year without Shopping.
At the end of 2003, Levine took stock of her place on the endlessly spinning gerbil’s wheel of consumerism and decided, along with her somewhat reluctant husband, to jump off. After a mini-frenzy of December shopping, including an 11:00 p.m. New Year’s Eve online purchase of a random garden decoration, the Levines vowed to only buy the absolute necessities for the next twelve months.
Not Buying It chronicles the family’s month-by-month struggles to define “necessities” (her husband makes a fairly compelling argument for liquor and wine) and re-think their priorities in the immediate post-9/11 climate where consumption was often equated with patriotism.
Levine is partially motivated by the desire to leave a smaller environmental footprint by consuming less, and she includes some accompanying guilt-laden statistics to bolster her case. The idea of the average American family generating 4 pounds of garbage a day (that’s a cool billion pounds a day nationwide) was enough to bolster this reader’s committment to at least filling up the recycling bin as much as possible.
Ultimately, the book presents a valuable exercise in re-thinking the relative rewards and pleasures of shopping. Levine and her husband are forced to find creative ways to entertain themselves without spending money, and one unintended result found them reveling in the ordinary simplicity of their day-to-day lives. They read more books, had more conversations, and were forced to think more about the value of the things they already had.
Another happy result, as Levine’s December 25 journal entry finds her realizing, was “for the first time in our lives together, we have passed an entire year without a single worried discussion (okay, fight) about money.”
College Football in Print
If it’s late November, another college football season must be hurtling right on schedule toward utter B.C.S. chaos and bowl season insanity. One valuable place to look for answers in between consulting computer rankings, strength of schedule logarithms, and Bob Stoops’s astrology chart is Sports Illustrated columnist Stewart Mandel’s 2007 book Bowls, Polls & Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy That Reign over College Football.
Mandel is an opinionated but basically rational observer of college football who maintains an excellent blog and mailbag on Sports Illustrated’s website. In his first book, he takes on ten of the most confounding issues in the sport chapter by chapter, from the controversial history of the B.C.S. to the inscrutable workings of the bowl system.
Mandel devotes an entire fascinating chapter to the various polling systems, and he reveals the struggles and somewhat subjective methods he uses to assemble his own weekly AP ballot. Another chapter considers the very special (if you’re a fan), endlessly infuriating (if you’re anyone else) legacy of Notre Dame football. Mandel also calls for a major overhaul of the Heisman voting system, and in one of the very best chapters he tells the amazing story of the realignment of conferences over the last two decades; a.k.a., “How Boston College and Clemson Became Neighbors.”
Ultimately, Mandel argues that it’s the chaos and controversy that make college football special. If the conferences and schedules were rigidly standardized with a logical playoff system and a homogenous national structure, well, as Mandel points out, then you’d have the N.F.L. It might be a hard argument for fans of whichever team finishes second in the Big 12 South this season to swallow, but maybe all that unpredictable, political, ambiguous, passionate madness is worth embracing for its own sake.
Speaking of madness, Warren St. John’s Rammer, Jammer, Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania is one of the most entertaining, informative, and rather disturbing looks inside the world of college football ever written. St. John immersed himself in the fan culture of his childhood heroes, the Alabama Crimson Tide, for a season which saw him invest in a rickety $5,000 RV to travel the highways with some of the most die-hard fans in the nation.
Among his observations on the psychology of hard-core fans is the interesting contrast between students of the school and the often even harder-core fans who may never have attended a class. St. John befriended a group of the latter who persuasively argue that their fandom is much more pure, as they chose the team with which they live and die rather than taking it on as a byproduct of paying college tuition for four years.
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is an excellent travelogue of the American south and a penetrating look at the passions and obsessions that drive college football fans season after season. Its title also answers the age-old question of what the hell Crimson Tide fans manage to rhyme with “Give ‘em hell, Alabama.”
Sarah Vowell
Hipster historian Sarah Vowell spins her admittedly quirky personal obsessions into bestselling popular history books like 2006’s Assassination Vacation and her newest work, The Wordy Shipmates.
In her personal and historical essays, Vowell occasionally notes her Oklahoma roots and Cherokee heritage. Born in Muskogee, Vowell began working in radio while at college in Montana, and her distinctive voice first gained national attention on the beloved public radio show This American Life. Movie fans will also recognize her endearingly pinched, humorously intellectual tones from her role voicing the character of Violet in The Incredibles.
Vowell’s books are entertaining side trips into weird Americana, obscure historical tales, and the author’s own unapologetically nerdy social commentaries. In 2002’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Vowell traveled across the United States to apply her skeptical, questioning brand of patriotism to the post-September 11th landscape. In Assassination Vacation, she narrowed her focus to consider the murders of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley in a breezy travelogue occasionally interrupted by serious ruminations on America’s often violent political history.
Vowell is a master at unearthing strange quirks of history, as in Assassination Vacation’s tale of Robert Lincoln, the President’s son who was present at all three Presidential assassinations from 1865 to 1901. Robert Lincoln, described by Vowell as “some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom,” is one of the author’s ideal subjects. His weird cameo appearances in history are reconsidered with her acid wit and genuinely insightful commentary to illustrate larger insights about the oddities of our history.
These same qualities are on display in her newest book, The Wordy Shipmates, which studies the “messy but endearing” quest of the Puritans, led by John Winthrop, to found an ideal “city upon a hill” in 1630s Massachusetts. Vowell finds much to admire in the radical efforts of Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson to create a new kind of society apart from England, and she finds the roots of many recognizably modern American characteristics in the backwater colony.
“The Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes . . . a sort of republic–the most severely limited, totalitarian, closed-minded, vindictive, hard-ass republic possible. But the democratic impulse is a mutating virus that adapts and changes, quickens and grows; it is contagious, and the (Massachusetts Bay) Charter is one important sneeze.”
Flaming Lips in Print
In honor of last week’s long-awaited release of the Christmas on Mars DVD, it’s well worth taking a look at Jim DeRogatis’s band biography Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips.
The Christmas on Mars movie is only the latest amazing production from Oklahoma City’s fearless freaks of rock and roll. While their history is so often shrouded in local mythology and urban legend, DeRogatis’s book tells the unvarnished story of this group of true Oklahoma cultural heroes whose influence and fame has spread worldwide.
Noted music journalist DeRogatis first interviewed the band in 1989, and he has kept close tabs on their development and groundbreaking work ever since. His book not only profiles the band’s rise and relates the biographies of its members, but DeRogatis also provides an outsider’s perspective on Oklahoma culture and society from the time band leader Wayne Coyne’s family arrived from Pennsylvania in the early 1960s.
Coyne’s roots in the Classen-Ten-Penn neighborhood of Oklahoma City are well drawn by the author, as is the story of bassist Michael Ivins’s transformation from Classen High School valedictorian to mohawked, skeleton-suited psychedelic rocker. Between their first gig at the Blue Note Lounge to a triumphant New Year’s Eve 2004 appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden, DeRogatis draws on family photo albums, interviews with old friends and bandmates, and his own thoughtful insight to profile this unpretentiously brilliant group.
Early on DeRogatis notes Oklahoma’s official Latin motto, which translates as “work conquers all.” Coyne tells the writer at one point, “Anybody with as much luck and determination as me could do this,” but as DeRogatis makes clear, the band’s extraordinary work ethic was paired with a genuinely inspired artistic vision. The reader is often reminded of Coyne’s 11 years as a fast-food fry cook on Classen Blvd., during which time he expanded the band’s horizons and craft with constant touring until reaching major-label success in the early 1990s.
Despite his unlimited access and lengthy interviews with the band, DeRogatis isn’t shy about including honest critiques of their body of work. The result is an excellent read both for longtime fans and new acolytes who wonder how the singer in a dapper designer suit ended up surfing across concert crowds in his giant inflatable ball.
Jim DeRogatis’s Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock is a sweeping history of the genre that deeply influenced the Lips and so many other bands. Fascinating portraits of supergroups like Pink Floyd are balanced by obscure tales of artists like Texas’s 13th Floor Elevators and the Andy Warhol associates of the Velvet Underground.
DeRogatis’s excellent, heartbreaking study of the iconic rock writer Lester Bangs, Let It Blurt, tells the amazing story of the real-life character memorably played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous and is one of the most remarkable rock and roll biographies ever written.
Team of Rivals
As the new Presidential administration begins to fill out cabinet positions, the term “Team of Rivals” seems to have been used in every media account of the decision-making process. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book of the same name describes President Lincoln’s essential “political genius” as he balanced the competing egos of the 19th century political titans he assembled to advise him.
Goodwin’s lengthy but rewarding work provides informative biographies of Lincoln’s key cabinet members, each of whom had sought the Presidency for himself and no doubt believed he could do a better job than the Illinios lawyer and former one-term Congressman. Goodwin argues that while Lincoln’s team may have been more politically accomplished than the President they served, Lincoln himself possessed a capacity for empathy and psychological insight that tamed the internal rivalries and ultimately preserved a unified nation.
Lincoln described his cabinet as “the very strongest men . . . . I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” As Goodwin notes, “(I)n the end it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all.”
Goodwin is a fascinating character in her own right, having served as an aide to Lyndon Johnson in the last year of his Presidency and an assistant in the writing of his memoirs. Her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, contains rare insights on Johnson’s complex political and personal life and his ruthless pursuit of power.
Like Team of Rivals, Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time portrays the inner workings of a White House engaged in a titanic war while riven by internal struggles. Its intimate portraits of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt reveal the humanity of these iconic figures and the deeply troubled marriage that barely survived a crucible of ambition, infidelity, and wartime tragedies.
Looking beyond her slightly dotty public persona as a frequent guest on political talk shows, as well as the allegations of plagiarism that once tarnished her writing career, Goodwin’s books are rich with psychological insight and valuable research. Her writing has consistently illuminated the inner lives of legendary figures whose human characteristics are so often obscured by mythologized history.
Metro Bookstores
A giant hole exists in the heart of the Metro area. Between the Borders on the Northwest Expressway and Norman’s Barnes & Noble, a span of 26 miles that must be home to tens of thousands of book-reading, coffee-drinking, magazine-perusing Oklahomans, there are exactly zero big-box bookstores.
I have to admit that every time a construction project of a certain size starts going up on my benighted side of town, a tiny spark of hope flickers in my heart. Inevitably the building will turn out to be another 24-hour pharmacy, and I’ll wonder again if some sophisticated demographic study has led the corporate decision-makers to conclude that this massive stretch of urban real estate couldn’t support such an enterprise.
Maybe there are too many others like me who use these giant bookstores like libraries. I’ll read a magazine article or two if I can find a vacant overstuffed chair, and I’ll page through a few books that have caught my eye and write down the titles to look up later on the real library’s online catalog. This probably counts as some sort of intangible shoplifting since I’m not paying for the pleasure of reading these words-for-sale, but if they were that concerned I can’t believe they’d have made the chairs so comfortable.
Oklahoma City’s Black Hole of Big Bookstores has also happily left room for a few hardy, independent shops to fill the literary void.
My favorite is Book Beat & Co., which is exactly the kind of singular, ruggedly individualist bookstore that the giant chains would try to crush under their wheels. Book Beat & Co. has moved to several locations around the south side of Oklahoma City since it opened in 1997, and its current site at 1139 SW 59th Street features an amazing collection of art, music, and books that founder Shilo Brown describes as ”the rare and obscure, even the forbidden.”
The store’s “Electric Chair Gallery” of local artists is an Oklahoma City treasure in itself, and the well-tended shelves of great fiction, art, music, philosophy, and avant-garde books make Book Beat & Co. an unmissable destination for Metro book lovers. As the staff personally selects each title, they can almost always provide the best kind of personal insight from one book lover to another. Book Beat & Co. is also a hangout for Oklahoma writers and artists and stocks a great selection of locally-grown books, zines, CDs, and chapbooks.
Maybe the south side doesn’t needs its own soulless book super-stores after all.
James Bond in Print
I had assumed the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, involved Agent Double-O Seven uncovering a high school science project gone horribly awry or foiling the world-domination plans of a profoundly depressed physics professor.
A look at the original Ian Fleming short story makes much more sense of the odd title phrase. It also sent me on a weeks-long odyssey through the literary world of the original international man of mystery.
Fleming’s James Bond novels haven’t aged particularly well in many cases, as they reveal the casual racism and misogyny rooted in his early 20th century, upper-class British background. This year’s centenary of the author’s birth, however, has been celebrated with new editions of the 14 Bond books, complete with awesomely retro covers that at least still revel in unapologetic sexism.
“Quantum of Solace” is a real oddity among Fleming’s works. The short story was first published in Modern Woman magazine, of all places, in 1959, and it finds James Bond sitting quietly in a Caribbean mansion listening to an elderly diplomat’s odd tale of a broken marriage.
The Bond novels and short stories described a much colder, crueller Bond than has been portrayed on screen, but in “Quantum of Solace” the jaded spy is surprisingly confronted with the difficult realities of actual human relationships. The mathematical formula that inspires the title may have reflected its author’s own well-publicized marital problems. In the story’s calculation, when the quantum of solace is reduced to zero, love is dead.
This story can be found with four others in the short story collection For Your Eyes Only, which features the reliably exotic settings and stylized violence that made Bond a cultural icon. I can’t imagine the film, opening Nov. 14, will bear much resemblance to the rather haunting original story, but for its rare attempt at fleshing out the humanity of the usually one-dimensional James Bond it is well worth a quick read.
Basketball Books
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around our “Big League City” status as a permanent NBA town. It’s also difficult to let go of my long-held belief that all team names should be plural, (”The Thunder are ___?” Kevin Durant is a Thunder?”) but that ship has clearly sailed.
Other sports, notably baseball and boxing, have inspired more books that are reliably considered classics. Pro basketball might not have as impressive a pedigree as those 19th century games, but several books on the subject are well worth the attention of fans fighting their way through a lottery-bound season.
The great David Halberstam tackled the subject of sports in between brilliant books on politics, history, media, and American culture. One of his most overlooked works is The Breaks of the Game, a genuine masterpiece that profiles the troubled NBA of the late 1970s and early 80s.
Halberstam followed Bill Walton’s Portland Trail Blazers in the seasons following their 1977 championship as the team, and the whole league, almost imploded from controversies and injuries. While Walton is one of the book’s fascinating characters, with the same infuriating personality on display 30 years later in his TV color commentaries, the heart of the book is the tragic figure of Kermit Washington.
In one of professional sports’ ugliest moments, Washington nearly killed opposing player Rudy Tomjanovich during a bench-clearing brawl with a wild but too-perfect punch. The soft-spoken, thoughtful Washington was haunted by his almost unforgiveable act for years, and his internal scars are shown by Halberstam to be almost as awful as Tomjanovich’s physical ones.
Halberstam was a genius at telling revealing stories through the words of his interview subjects, and the tales of this gritty, pre-skybox, pre-Michael Jordan era give a fascinating background to the well-oiled corporate machine of today’s NBA.
Book Review Websites
Sometimes reading a great book review is almost as satisfying as wrestling your way to the end of a 900-page Russian novel.
To be honest, the only Russian novel I’ve ever finished is the conveniently slim One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I stand by my original statement.
I always appreciate when a book review sums up the relevant details of some massive tome, works in a bit of thoughtful analysis, and leaves me feeling like I’ve enriched myself so much in about five minutes that I won’t have to add yet another title to my massive list of books to read.
It doesn’t always end so cleanly, though. So many excellent book review resources on the web inevitably unearth fascinating new authors or revisit classics I predictably haven’t read.
Here are some that I try to keep up with, and I’m curious what other sites readers find especially useful:
The New York Times Book Review kind of seems like the granddaddy of them all, even though it’s been pared down like so much other newspaper content over the last few years. Still, the big-name reviewers who know they can make or break careers like small-time Oprahs seem to take their responsibilities here seriously.
The New York Review of Books is the place to go in between breezing through those Russian novels, as their exhaustingly lengthy reviews often require almost as much heavy lifting.
Arts & Letters Daily is way too packed with fascinating articles, and their often misleadingly named “New Books” section is great for dragging overlooked classics out of semi-obscurity.
Blogcritics.org’s book reviews are great for quirky genre stuff, and the wide range of reviewers offers truly (small “d”) democratic opinions.
Slate.com’s Books section often features interesting “Book Club” discussion groups where medium- to big-name writers shoot emails back and forth for a week or so. For readers, it’s like eavesdropping on the conversations of geniuses (or wacked out but entertaining nut jobs).
What other book review resources on the web should readers know about?
Deep in the Stacks
For someone who likes to read, working in a library is a terrible, crippling curse.
For four years I have compiled a list entitled “Books I Someday Plan to Read,” which has grown to a staggering 55 pages. Sadly, the number of these books that I have gone back and actually read probably numbers in the extremely low double digits. This is due in large part to the unbelievable amount of cool books I notice, one way or the other, every day in the library.
Just on the short walk from the front door to my desk this morning, I glanced at two titles that absolutely had to be added to my list based on the book covers alone: Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis, and Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty, by Tim Sandlin.
While I waited for the elevator at lunchtime, I stole a quick look at the shelves full of new books customers have ordered from all the other libraries in the county. As the elevator door impatiently opened and closed behind me, I wrote down more fascinating titles like Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture, by Kevin Phinney, and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan.
Daily I fear and avoid the enticing displays of brand-new books, and the maliciously arranged themed displays with which the librarians lure hardcore junkies like me. (But there’s just so much cool-looking vampire fiction I’d never noticed before. It’s like the genre that, *shudder*, can never die . . . .)
They’ll all go on the list, these enticing titles, waiting for the day that I’m conveniently bedridden by an incurable but extremely slow-acting disease that will allow me 12 to 15 years of pure, uninterrupted reading.
The real problem is that I rarely even go back to the list to find books I once recommended to myself. Too many new ones appear in the meantime while I’m already juggling three or four books whose first few pages, at least, have been totally fascinating. I hardly ever really need these weeks- and months-old suggestions since I’ve repeatedly filled up the allotted 30 items on my library card account in the interim.
Compounding my difficulties is an awesome new feature of the Metropolitan Library System’s website at www.metrolibrary.org. From the homepage, a quick click on the “RSS” (Really Simple Syndication) link reveals a diabolical menu on which a reader can see the newest titles added to the library’s collection in dozens of helpful (or fiendishly alluring) sub-categories.
If you’re like me, and the only way you’ll eventually get to read everything you’d like to is if your eyes and brain are actively preserved in a cryogenic chamber for the next three centuries, I would sincerely like to dissuade you from ever consulting that website.
On the other hand, if you’re too curious to look away, and if you’re interested in what other people are reading and recommending and arguing about and reviewing, check back on the “Bookmarking” blog here and add your thoughts.
Despite my ridiculous list and the increasing likelihood that I won’t live long enough to read even one one-thousandth of all the fascinating books in the world, I’m always looking for new recommendations.
