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Stuck this evening by these words, amongst other passages as apropos to our times as they were to Mailer’s: “the time had come when Americans, many Americans, would have to face the possibility of going to jail for their ideas… The war in [Vietnam] was an obscene war…”

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is America’s greatest novel.

It is the most prescient portrait of the American character, and our ultimate fate as a nation, and perhaps a species. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. — Chris Hedges

Finally doing it. And, I get it. Total classic. Timeless, despite its setting. All about character, and it’s already amazing. Melville understood people and our existential predicament, generally.

Greetings! I'm off on this rainy day after Marx's b-day to visit his tomb in N. London. I'm not a sappy graveside loiterer, nor a Marxist, nor do I buy into great man theories, the state, hierarchy, or allowance for abuse of power. This little trip is a chance for self-reflection on Marx's contributions to our ongoing struggle to restore human reason and autonomy and throw the bums out. No pasaran! indeed.

Have painfully come to the conclusion that more reading means less writing and must force self to read even… less, temporarily, until I force myself to re-write daily?
Where does it end?

Is this how skilled but shallowly commercial writers start, by forcing themselves to write down to a 10th grade audience, targeting the just-so Gladwell non-readers? Madness. (Apologies for the cliche).

Bradbury’s absurdist atheism: the only effective weapon against the ‘wicked’ is absurdity. Laughter in the face of the horror of meaninglessness wins the day.

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

Only permanent, intolerable uncertainty makes life liveable.

From the blurb, this sounds close to my own thesis, damn it. Sent off proposals to HUP and half a dozen agents just last week.

Just picked up a signed first edition of this beauty!

Seems to have been written largely in direct response to Trumpian populism, which unfortunately distracts throughout and delves frequently into unnecessary refutation of many of the absurd arguments the big orange baby made in his ‘16 campaign.

That aside, Stiglitz here provides careful, lay-reader-friendly exposition of the major problems facing the U.S. (it is unabashedly written from the American perspective).

He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the line he got warped.

We are a NATO troll farm

Extremely sloppy or utter lack of planning throughout the 50s and 60s (at least).

No allowance for attacking Russia or China separately. It was (is?)logistically impossible by design. An opportunity to take out a nominally communist regime in the case of attack on another, regardless of war posture. Ignoring the fact that neither state have been anything resembling communist since shortly after their revolutions.

I bought the very nicely bound hard cover set of this hack’s books a few years ago in Philly. Finally getting around to reading the other one. Sapiens was such a bog that I really don’t wanna read this one, but it’s time.

Kawabata’s archaic Japanese makes this a true chore, but the turn of phrase—beautiful poetic language and clever use of kanji to portray volumes in a single character—is genius. Much of this bounty is lost in the good but hopelessly weak translations out there.

Loses at least one star for using “concrete” as an action verb (“concretizes vision” - pp86).

Losses at least one star for using “concrete” as an action verb (“concretizes vision” - pp86).

Through Vol. 1 on the underlying crime of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the Trump campaign’s efforts to conspire with the Russians to benefit from the interference and then cover it up. I count so far 23 distinct crimes committed by Russians and campaign officials, including one clear sanctions violation by DT himself, and at least 21 distinct efforts to conspire.

I normally avoid this "type" of book: Glib, cliché-addled, self-help technique. But this one is potentially life-changing.

Ugh. I don’t know how or why I was into this stuff in 7th grade. Donaldson’s writing is awful, and now understanding the majority of his GRE-rejected, bottom-of-the-thesaurus-barrel-scrapings vocabulary somehow makes it worse. Sigh. Soldiering on...