The Wave - Excerpt from Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Strange Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971)

Hero

HST is one of my heroes. This is a great movie about him, his passion, and those heady days of my generation in the late 1960s-70s. This movie captures the excitement, the struggle and the hope of those days. 

Thompson was a true patriot. George W. Bush killed him. We can only imagine his views on Donald Trump and what Trumpism says about America and the American Dream. 

I wish that he could have stood it and was here to put his words to the frustration, fear, loathing and lost hope we have felt since Trump's emergence as a force in the Republican Party. Nobody could do it better.

This Book Says It All

Great book by a great writer. A book that needed to be written.

Who needs tell-alls from Anonymous, Mattis, Mary Trump, etc.?? This book says it all.

Read it, weep and share it with your friends.

(PS - I'm sorry this website is getting so political. It is hard not to be in these crazy times.)

Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

I read my first science fiction book in the early 1970s when I read the first of the Foundation Trilogy recommended by a new college friend who shared my enthusiasm for books.

It started my appreciation and love for the genre.

I've just started re-reading it. Like my friendship with that college friend, it has held up well after all of these years.

Thank you my friend.

I Hope This Helps in These Crazy Times

Your Quarantine Reader

Fearing the worst? Writers have been doing that for centuries. Here are the best pandemic novels from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King. You're probably reading and hearing a lot about coronavirus - the symptoms, its spread around the world, the calls for " social distancing."

Shantaram

Too many great quotes, sentences, images of real life to quote here. Read them for yourself.

Two Great Books for the Martin Luther King Holiday

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar

A good friend recommended this book to me and it is great.  I am only part-way into to it and I have been laughing out loud since starting it, learning at the same time.

For example, here is one of the jokes they use to illustrate one of Leibniz's philosophical thoughts:

"An optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds.  The  pessimist fears that the optimist is right."

I have a feeling I may be posting more jokes from this book in the future so stay tuned!! Better yet, check out the entire book yourself!!!

Thoughts of Joyce - A Week After Bloomsday

Michael Hastings - The Operators

Michael Hastings' The Operators is a fantastic book about Afghanistan and General Stan McChrystal, Obama and others in 2009 - 2010 based on Hastings' Rolling Stone article that got McChrystal fired.

I didn’t I like the message but I love the way Hastings writes. 

Now, eight years later, it is déjà vu all over except Trump has turned it over to the generals and CIA, not having smarts to understand their bullshit nor the backbone to stand up to them like Obama.  

Pity the Afghan people and our poor troops tasked with an impossible job.

Happy 55th Birthday David Foster Wallace!

From today's Writer's Almanac on NPR:

Huston Smith - Tales of Wonder

I woke up today to news in the New York Times that Huston Smith died yesterday at the ripe old age of 97.

If you have an interest in the divine and haven't read any of his books, you should; particularly Tales of Wonder.  It is a wonderful book.

Read the article in the New York Times about him and his wonderful life.   It closes with this:

""His favorite prayer was written by a 9-year-old boy whose mother found it scribbled on a piece of paper beside his bed. "Dear God," it said, "I'm doing the best I can.""

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

 

"Billy asked him what being in a firefight was like.  Shroom thought for a minute, "It's not like anything, except maybe being raped by angels.  

He'd say, "I love you" to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt or warbly Christian smart in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone's soul."

Literature Anticipates Quantum Physics

"Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass Weave, weaver of the wind."    

- James Joyce's Ulysses. 

Everything About Everything: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ at 20

Everything About Everything is a great article by Tom Bissell in New York Times David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

The book is so dense with entertaining, far-out manly sentences that I can only read a few pages per sitting and I am only 20% into it after reading it for a couple of months analysis.  I am happy I have started it.

Based on what I have read so far, Bissell's analysis is right on target.  It ain’t a book for sissies but I am finding it well worth the effort so far as I giggle through a few pages in a sitting.  I will finish it some day.

Happy Birthday Bukowski!

Who would have known that I would be wishing Bukowski happy birthday here today when I watched drunken friends 30 some years ago call him in San Pedro after getting his telephone number from calling information?

From Charles Bukowski’s Pulp:

I pressed the button.  I heard footsteps.  Then the door opened.

She was a stunner.  In a red dress.  Green eyes.  Long dark hair.  A smell of mint.  Her lips smiled.

“Mr. Belane, please come in.”

I followed her into the room.  Then there was a hard object in my back.

“Freeze, motherfucker!  Except your arms.  Stretch them up!  See if you can reach the ceiling, motherfucker!”

“You black” I asked.

“What?”

“Only blacks say motherfucker”

He was patting me down.  He found my piece, took it.

“All right, you can turn around now, Mr. Belane.”

I turned to look at him.  Big guy but white.

“But you are white,” I said.

“So are you,” he said.

“Well, I’ll be a motherfucker,” I said.

Happy Birthday Nelson Algren!!

From today's Writers Almanac:

"It’s the birthday of Nelson Algren (1909) (books by this author). Born Nelson Algren Abraham to working-class parents in Detroit, he grew up in Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods. He wrote his first story, “So Help Me,” during the Great Depression, while he was working at a gas station in Texas. His life — and work — changed dramatically after he was caught stealing a typewriter and spent five months in jail. 

His later novels and stories would feature the down-and-out, the loser, and the reject. He became known as a writer of Chicago; he wrote: “People ask me why I don’t write about nature or the suburbs. If a writer could write the truth about one Chicago street, that would be a good life’s work.” 

In A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), set in the world of pimps and prostitutes in New Orleans, Algren gives his three rules for life: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” 

The novel is, in many ways, about the contempt of a nation for its dispossessed, and in it he wrote: “When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough.” 

Nelson Algren, who said, “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”"

If you love cities, see suffering and have compassion for your fellow man, and have never read any Nelson Algren, you need to.

Excellent Book - The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

As one who reads a lot of war fiction, I highly recommend Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, a war story about a soldier, his friend and their sergeant that takes place in Iraq but could have happened in any war of any time.

Paul Krugman on Seven Bad Ideas by Jeff Madrick

Though I haven't read Jeff Madrick's book, Seven Bad Ideas:  How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World, I liked Paul Krugman's recent review of it in the New York Times:

"Such quibbles aside, “Seven Bad Ideas” tells us an important and broadly accurate story about what went wrong. Economists presented as reality an idealized vision of free markets, dressed up in fancy math that gave it a false appearance of rigor. As a result, the world was unprepared when markets went bad. Economic ideas, declared John Maynard Keynes, are “dangerous for good or evil.” And in recent years, sad to say, evil has had the upper hand."

Happy Birthday Walt Whitman!

It is Walt Whitman's 195th birthday today so Garrison Keillor had a blurb about him on this morning's Writer's Almanac that I liked.  

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php