Quick Study

In 1985, a friend lent me a 4-song, 7-inch EP song by Billy Bragg. The name didn't ring a bell. But a couple of years earlier I'd read Christopher Hill's book about the underground groups that had emerged during the English Civil War (the Diggers, the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchy Men) some of which were putting forward a revolutionary socialist vision in religious language -- and here was Bragg bringing that tradition into the present day....

There is another book out "by" David Horowitz.

You have to wonder if he's read it.

My nominations for the most recent NBCC Good Reads list have now been posted at Critical Mass. My longer review (for Bookforum) of the title by Richard Sennett was reprinted at the Powell's website. An earlier piece on Victor Serge is here.

In the interest of accuracy, I should make clear that the photo at Critical Mass was taken before the gray hair started taking over (in particular, the beard). My days as a sad young literary man are well behind me.

As a matter of fact, I sometimes carry around a piece of paper containing an extract from an essay by James Baldwin, written in his mid-forties:

"Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more time stretches behind than stretches before one, some assessments, however reluctantly and incompletely, begin to be made. Between what one wishes to become and what one has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one's final margin, one's last opportunity, for creation. And between the self as it is and the self as one sees it, there is also a distance even harder to gauge. Some of us are compelled, around the middle of our lives, to make a study of this baffling geography, less in the hope of conquering these distances than in the determination that the distance shall not become any greater."

I must have gone over this passage a hundred times now. No maps available for navigating through "this baffling geography," alas. But it's good to have one's location so precisely identified.

The latest list of recommended new books from the National Book Critics Circle has just been posted. I must admit that I have read a grand total of one of them:

FICTION

1. Richard Price, LUSH LIFE, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, DANGEROUS LAUGHTER, Knopf
*4. Charles Baxter, THE SOUL THIEF, Pantheon
*4. Peter Carey, HIS ILLEGAL SELF, Knopf
*4. J. M. Coetzee, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Viking
*4. James Collins, BEGINNNER'S GREEK, Little, Brown
*4. Brian Hall, FALL OF FROST, Viking
*4. Roxana Robinson, COST, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
*4. Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE, Nan A. Talese: Doubleday

* tied for this position

NONFICTION

1. Nicholson Baker, HUMAN SMOKE: THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II, THE END OF CIVILIZATION, S. & S.
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: DEATH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, Knopf
3. Mark Harris, PICTURES AT THE REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, Penguin Press
4. Honor Moore, THE BISHOP'S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR, Norton
5. Susan Jacoby, THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, Pantheon

POETRY

1. Grace Paley, FIDELITY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Frank Bidart, WATCHING THE SPRING FESTIVAL, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
3. Eric Gansworth, A HALF-LIFE OF CARDIO-PULMONARY FUNCTION, Syracuse University Press
4. Marie Howe, THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME, Norton
5. Robert Pinsky, GULF MUSIC, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Once again, the titles I nominated did not make the cut. But then again my nomination for best nonfiction book last time was Julian Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Which, by the way, rocks.

The books I suggested this time were, perhaps, slightly easier to find at your nearby strip-mall, but still....I won' t say any more about what they were for now, since the nominations will be posted at Critical Mass at some point.

UPDATE:  Here are my recommendations

Thanks to Shane for the tip....

On this day in 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker appeared, promising to take seriously the church's program to "reconstruct the social order" according to the teachings of a certain revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and egalitarian organization from the Palestine, long ago

Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own.
Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone?

See also this post at Crooked Timber

Limited Inc. is urging Britney Spears to read up about Patty Hearst.

Not entirely sure I follow the logic here, but what the hell...Any excuse to post Patti Smith's cover of "Hey Joe" as Symbionese anthem is fine by me:

Being kidnapped by urban guerillas championing a make-believe revolutionary movement as an experience of personal liberation from the Establishment..... In so many ways, this version of the song is the ultimate expression of half-baked 1960s countercultural ideology in its most reductio ad absurdum form.

Then again, that is perfection, of a kind.

An email message sent to the listserv of the Association of American University Presses by its current president, Sanford G. Thatcher, encourages AAUP members to contact newspaper editors to try to persuade them to publish reviews by local writers, rather than just using syndicated material.

Yesterday, there were more than 7,000 visitors to Quick Study. Nearly half that many have already come by just today, and it isn't even noon yet. That is quite a lot of traffic, at least by local standards.

What happened is that on Thursday morning Andrew Sullivan linked to last week's post "Yo, Yo I'm a Cowboy Now", which seems then to have been picked up by two or three social networking sites. None of this did I seek out. In fact, I could not have made it happen if I'd tried.

For that matter, it's been kind of frustrating to look at the site log and find that barely one visitor in a hundred then looked around at other Quick Study content. The whole thing makes for a very striking bar-graph -- with Monday through Wednesday being little molehills in front of Himalaya Thursday. But it leaves QS itself no better situated relative to what I guess could be called "mainstream blogging."

So it goes. And on that note, we return to our usually scheduled broadcast. Or narrowcast, rather.

Presented for your consideration: An interview with left-wing country singer Steve Earle, from the pages of Socialist Worker newspaper.

Yeah, now that's more like it....

Two clips from fifty years ago. If you've never heard Wanda Jackson before, better buckle up....

"If you recant a blurb," asked Ron Hogan at GalleyCat last week, "does anybody really care?" My impression so far is, not really.

If there is nothing else to learn from the case of Houston Baker's dust-jacket encomium for Michael Eric Dyson -- and there isn't -- then at least this much is clear: If you are going to blurb a book you haven't actually paid much attention to, the important thing is to be consistent. Don't even look at the book again. If for some reason you happen to see it, don't read it. And if, perchance, you do read the book and realize it's terrible, just keep this belated realization to yourself. That's only being fair to everyone.

But in the meantime, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has started a thread inspired by some of the blurbs for War and Decision -- the new book by strategic genius Doug Feith about how necessary and well-thought-through the Iraq war was, all appearances to the contrary. The jacket features various luminaries using superlatives such as "controversial" and "readable," as well as "not nearly as delusional as you might suppose."

Okay, I made that last one up -- but it's more an exaggeration of the general drift than something spun out of thin air. "And these were the blurbs they chose to promote the book," as Henry points out.

But the Crooked Timber item is less a matter of discussing War and Decision than it is a pretext for encouraging readers to nominate other great moments in the history of dubious endorsements. A few are obviously snippets from reviews, rather than blurbs. The highlights:

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterrley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping." -- Ed Zern

"I have been stunned and baffled by Roger Lewis's vast biography of the stunningly baffling Anthony Burgess." -- Jan Morris, author of The Meaning of Nowhere

On a volume about Social Security: "This is the type of book that, once you put it down, you will not be able to pick it up again."

"The covers of this book are too far apart." -- from a review by Ambrose Bierce.

And finally, The Irish Times on Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory: "It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparallelled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author's imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it."

As Henry Farrell then says: "How could you possibly, possibly refuse to buy a book with a blurb like that?"

(crossposted from Critical Mass)

Kathy G. Spot believes that I am a geezer. She is, of course, quite correct. As mentioned in the comments section on this weekend's post about Poly Styrene (highly recommended), my effort to track down the double CD containing pretty much every noise X Ray Spex ever emitted came to grief this weekend because it was not where it ought to be. She points out that I could subscribe to a digital service and not have to worry about it.

No doubt she has a point. Actually the reason I cannot find that CD is probably that I now have more CDs than can easily fit into the floor-to-ceiling Tower of Jewel Boxes in the living room. The extreme clunkiness of that format (which takes up more shelf space than makes any sense at all) is a real obstacle since we aren't going to move anytime soon.

But the idea of going de-material just bugs the hell out of me. I have, of course, elaborated a grand theory to justify my disinclination. That news should surprise no one. Anyway, here it is:

The decadence of the culture of late capitalism is obvious. It will soon lead to a trend towards major Hollywood remakes of earlier movies based on TV shows that weren't worth watching to begin with, for example. Being incapable of generating anything new, the system can now survive only by getting us to keep buying the same old content in new formats while steadily phasing out the ability to play things available in earlier formats.

To be up-to-date is, therefore, profoundly reactionary. That, in a nutshell, is one of the main slogan of the Zizekist Workers Party.

Haven't had anything to say about Lee Siegel in a while. Although I was going to review Against the Machine for Bookforum, my editor there finally said, more or less, "Why bother?" and no very plausible reply came to mind.

Siegel's work is aptly described by James Wolcott as the result of "applying grotesque amounts of Human Growth Hormone--gobs of it--on otherwise banal observations for bombastic effect." And with that he's just getting started:

Exiled to the outer boroughs of critical journalism where the trains don't run after midnight, Siegel nursed his grievance against the snide nobodies who dared mock a snide somebody like him and sought vengeance and vindication, crafting a heroic tale titled Against the Machine, starring "Lee Siegel" as the last defiant individualist in the pygmy global village of Internet ignorati. Imagine Look Back in Anger's Jimmy Porter pounding away at the computer on a wet Sunday afternoon and you get the general idea of the temper of his text. Like Osborne's Porter, Siegel stormed in vain, convincing only himself of his stunning convictions. It must be vexing, being as brilliant as Siegel thinks he is and, instead of receiving the tokens of tribute from the literary community for his brilliance, getting yet another round of Bronx cheers and hostile snickers. Having one's genius unrecognized during one's lifetime is no doubt frustrating, especially when one once strutted so tall and proud in the pages of The New Republic, wearing a topcat and monocle like Mr. Peanut.

More here.

This seems like the opportunity to mention that there is an occasional guest to the Quick Study comments section who calls himself Spamzatura, though he's not been that frequent a visitor.

I am going to try to upload the PDF of a short piece appearing in the new issue of Dissent. Not exactly sure how to do this, but here goes....

McLemee-Dissent.pdf

I have not posted much about either Lyndon LaRouche or Bob Avakian lately, much to the dismay of at least some of you. One friend points out that the Chairman Bob stuff in particular always gives him a laugh. This friend has been really sick, so lifting his spirits seems like a duty.

For a while there, however, it was starting to seem as if my very occasional items on Avakian and LaRouche (representing something like 2 percent of my total published output within last year) were getting wider attention than work I cared about far more. The stink does rub off, it seems.

So the political fringewalking kind of went on suspension for a while.

But today is a really remarkable circumstance -- kind of a harmonic convergence of strangeness.