Don Quixote Does Mardi Gras

Title: A Confederacy of Dunces

Rating: 5 Stars

It’s hard to get beyond the back story of this novel. John Kennedy Toole was a barely successful teacher that wrote a novel in 1963. He tried to sell it but found no takers. Depressed by this failure as well as beset by mental illness, Toole committed suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-three.

His mother stumbled upon the manuscript. At this point, it was just a loose pile of poorly mimeographed sheets. Dedicated to getting the novel published in his memory, his mother, Thelma Toole, doggedly pursued publishing houses and anyone else that could help her.

The writer Walker Percy, himself a Pulitzer Prize winner, teaching literature in a university in Louisiana, became her target. She essentially barged into his office and refused to leave until he agreed to read the manuscript.

Looking at the mess of papers and aware of how poorly amateur authors usually write, Percy told himself that he only needed to read the first paragraph or the first page before discarding it. At first, he was disappointed because it wasn’t bad enough to immediately reject. As he continued reading, he became excited and by the end he knew that it needed to be published. After even more travail, it was published in 1980 and it won the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

So, that’s its torturous path to publication. What about the novel itself?

It’s the story of Ignatius J Reilly. He’s a 30 year old man living in New Orleans. He’s convinced that he’s a philosopher of the ages, filling notebook after notebook with his grandiose ideas. He is a believer in the classics and holds modern culture in deep disdain. Believing that his genius lies elsewhere, he is loathe to consider anything approaching a job. Nagged by his mother, he begrudgingly makes attempts to work at a pants factory and as a hot dog vendor. Unsurprisingly, his attempts end in disaster, usually both for himself and for his employer.

Meanwhile, his mother, Irene, is at her wits end and is being convinced by her friend to have Ignatius committed to an asylum. Burma Jones, reluctantly working as a janitor at a strip club for poverty wages to avoid a vagrancy charge, is actively trying to use Ignatius to sabotage the strip club in revenge. Meanwhile, Myrna Minkoff, Ignatius’ on and off semi-sort of girlfriend, is beseeching Ignatius to come to New York to aid her in her myriad causes.

If you can’t tell by now, it’s not exactly an A to Z plot. It’s more of a picaresque novel describing the life adventures of Ignatius.

Reading this, it’s hard not to compare Ignatius to Don Quixote. Much like Quixote, Ignatius has perhaps read too much and all of that reading has scrambled his mind. He’s constantly putting himself in ridiculous situations made even more ridiculous by his own grandiose actions. People that he interacts with treat him with astonishment, anger, or as the butt of their own jokes.

New Orleans is a character in the novel all by itself. Writing with great descriptive clarity, the sections of the city come alive with great clarity. So it goes with all of the characters. Reading this in the year 2020, the characters are broadly stereotypical (the gay man, the black man, the ditzy aspiring stripper), but even so there is a warmth and a humanity to each of them.

Ignatius is a whirlwind of riotous anarchy. Burma Jones, always hiding behind dark glasses and a blur of smoke, speaks with the wisdom of his years being a black man in New Orleans. Even minor characters like the inept put upon police officer, Angelo Mancuso, is rich with life. Everyone in the book is dialed up to eleven and jump off of the page.

In case it’s not clear yet, this is a very funny book. There are parts where I laughed out loud.

For a good time, open this book.

German Expressionism Law & Order SVU

Title: M

Rating: 5 Stars

If I’ve gained one thing from the many months of pandemic isolation, it’s been an increased enjoyment for old films. Before a couple of years ago, I really didn’t watch many films that were over thirty or forty years old. Over the past year or so, I’ve begun to link old films to their place in history. Given my already existing love of history, doing so has given me a deeper appreciation for historically significant films.

The film M is a great case in point. It was made in 1931. It’s German. It’s subtitled. The director, Fritz Lang, was making a transition from silent to sound films. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the print that survived to the present day or Lang trying to figure out the mechanics of sound or if he was being intentional, but the film has occasionally awkward sound. There are entire stretches that are abruptly and entirely silent. You see characters walking on cobblestones with absolutely no sound. Not even music. Movies were using Foley effects starting in the 1920s, but for whatever reason, Lang chose not to overlay sound. On occasion I’d find myself checking my headphones to see if they were still working.

Given all of that, in previous years I might have given it a hard pass. After all, I’ve already seen Lang’s great film, Metropolis. I’ve already seen the great German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Why would I waste my time on another German film from the 1920s or 1930s?

Let’s start with the plot. It stars a young Peter Lorre playing Hans Beckert. Beckert is a child murderer. At the start of the film, you see him taking the latest in a long string of young children. The people of the town are in an uproar.  The police, under extreme pressure and desperate to catch the murderer, go in hard and heavy and disrupt all criminal activity. The criminal gang lords, now desperate to get out from under the very heavy thumb of the police, decide to catch the murderer themselves. They enlist the invisible population of street beggars to keep a look out.

One of the beggars recognize Beckert as he’s attempting to seduce another young girl. Beckert, realizing that he’s been spotted, desperate seeks to escape from the noose closing in on him. The criminal gang traps him in a building. Simultaneously, the police are following their clues and are closing in on him as well. Captured by the criminals, they put Beckert on a show trial. Despite desperate pleas from his assigned defense counsel, it appears that Beckert is doomed to be murdered. At the last moment, the police swoop him and arrest him. He must now face the state justice system.

There are so many things going on. First of all, there’s the shocking nature of the crime. There is no actual violence, but there is no mistaking the grisly if not sexual nature of Beckert’s crimes. Lorre, already perfecting his creepy and oily persona, is eerie as Beckert. This is a 1930s black and white version of an SVU episode.

Historically it’s interesting because this is a very early example of a police procedural. Here are the elements that you will see over and over again. There’s the outraged and terrified public demanding results from the police. There’s the police commissioner putting pressure on the detectives to solve the case. There’s the detectives investigating crime scenes and finding clues. There’s the detectives finding suspects and surreptitiously poking around the suspect’s room. There’s the lead detective, stressed and disheveled, stumbling upon one loose strand of evidence and using deductive reasoning to build a chain of evidence leading him to the suspect.

Much like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead defined the rules for succeeding zombie films, M is the template for all police procedurals to come.

 The show trial at the end of the film is fascinating. Clearly designed to give the criminal gangs some basic semi-legal facade for their planned murder of him, Beckert turns the tables on the criminals. He claims that they are actually more guilty than he is. After all, they have all chosen to be grifters, burglars, pickpockets, and murderers. On the other hand, he has no choice. He is compelled to hunt his victims. Unlike the criminals accusing him, he had no freedom of action.

The man assigned to be his defense lawyer makes a similar argument. He essentially argues for a not guilty by insanity argument. Beckert can have no guilt if his crimes aren’t the result of voluntary actions. Society should protect itself by keeping Beckert confined, but should not punish him for something over which he has no control.

At the same time there are characters in the crowd demanding justice. What about the mothers of the murdered children? Don’t they deserve to see Beckert punished? Who will speak for the women?

I found the fact that all of this was being discussed in a 1931 German film fascinating. Watching it, I felt that it was at least forty years ahead of its time. 

Finally, the amount of smoking taking place in this film was hilarious. There were scenes where the characters would become obscured by all of the smoke. There were all kinds of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars being smoked. My favorite was a pipe like device that had a long, thick, more than slightly phallic shaped cigar jammed at the end of it that a man was happily puffing away at.

I started watching the film because it felt like a historically significant film but ended up enjoying it on its own merits.

Turtles All The Way Down

Title: Why Does The World Exist?

Rating: 4 Stars

The book title pretty much says it all. It tries to answer one of the simplest but most difficult questions. Why are we here? Why is there something instead of nothing? How was this something (if it actually is something) created?

Holt ends up having conversations with philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, authors, and theologians. Unsurprisingly, despite a proof he created that he seems to be pretty proud of, no definitive answers were discovered.

His journey was interesting. He has serious conversations with very smart people that have been, in some cases, spending a good chunk of their lives trying to answer these very questions.

Let’s go through some possibilities. Keep in mind that I definitely am not a philosopher, mathematician, physicist, author, or theologian, so don’t throw too much shade at more poor attempts at understanding.

Cosmological Argument: The universe exists. It need not have to. Therefore, there must be a reason for its existence. It must have been brought into existence by some other being. This other being must be self explanatory (ie not require a reason for its existence). This being is God.

Ontological Argument: The universe need not exist. God possesses all perfections. It is more perfect to exist than not to exist. Therefore, God exists. God created the universe.

Quantum Cosmology: Quantum theory allows for the possibility of particles to spontaneously come into existence in a vacuum. Theoretical physicists have determined that an unimaginably tiny vacuum could spontaneously tunnel into existence. With inflation, this vacuum could undergo a runaway expansion and ultimately emit the Big Bang. This could be constantly happening.

Principle of Fecundity: All possible universes are real but are isolated from each other.

Mathematical Platonist: Mathematical forms have an existence independent of the mind. Accordingly, there are three worlds. There’s the platonic world of pure mathematics, the physical world, and the mental world of our conscious perceptions. 

Axiarchism: The universe exists because there is an abstract need for goodness.

Simulation: We’re basically Sims living in an artificially constructed universe for the pleasure of beings of a higher intelligence.

Where did all of this leave me?

Well, in case I’d forgotten, I was reminded that there are people in the world way smarter than me.

It’s been a while since religious arguments have moved me. They continue to be problematic. Trying to answer the mystery of our existence with a deeper mystery of the nature of God still is quite problematic to me.

The quantum arguments feel more compelling. I can picture countless spontaneous Big Bang explosions. Nearly all of them end up with universes that are incompatible with life. Very rarely one of the Big Bangs might end up creating a universe that has factors set just right to sustain life, and here I am.

Who knows? Maybe the universe is a flat plate resting on the back of a giant tortoise. If you wonder what the tortoise is resting upon, don’t worry. It’s just turtles all the way down.

Eat The Rich

Title: Evil Geniuses

Rating: 5 Stars

I’d read Kurt Andersen’s previous book, Fantasyland, some time ago. It was a broad survey of 500 years of American history with the hypothesis that America, for its entire history, has been populated by dreamers and magical thinkers. It was interesting, but it seemed to be a bit too broad.

This time around, he’s focused on a much smaller time frame. It’s the story of how, starting in 1980, a group of conservative economists and business people, horrified at the current state of American politics and economics, began a multi-million dollar, multi-decade effort to divert the US to a conservative course. Now, in 2020, our country is in a much different place than it was in 1980. 

Focusing on a much tighter subject over a narrower period of time, Andersen’s arguments are much more convincing and compelling. I’ve read several books that discuss this period of time but this is by far the clearest.

The intellectual godfather of the movement is Milton Friedman. It seems naive now, but there was a time when corporations felt that they had a responsibility to be good stewards to their community, environment, and their employees. Call it the It’s a Wonderful Life Bailey years.

Friedman put the kibosh on all of that. He thought all of that was hogwash. The only responsibility that a corporation had was to maximize shareholder value. Anything that did not contribute directly to the bottom line was waste if not actually fraudulent.

Another character that pops up is Lewis Powell. I’d only know of him in the context of being a member of the Supreme Court. It turns out that before then, he was a conservative lawyer that created an overarching plan outlining how the conservative movement could achieve its goals. This plan served as the blueprint for the gains that the movement made over the ensuing decade. 

This blindness to all things other than corporate profits had other impacts. As strange as it is now, climate change was once accepted by Republicans and fighting it was part of the Republican party platform. This now seems as strange as the fact that it also included support for the Equal Rights Amendment.

As with Friedman and Powell, must of the genesis of the opposition to climate change comes down to one man. John Sununu, chief of staff to George H. W. Bush was an overbearing man that resolutely removed all references to climate change. Despite the fact that even at that time climate change was close to universally accepted in the science community, he started the whole science isn’t settled argument that conservatives use even to the present day. 

Another key part of the conservatives’ war to maximize corporatism was to defang unions. As a natural result from the weakening of the unions, employees now bear more of the health care cost and have lost the security of pensions. The 401K replacement to the pensions have the dual disadvantages of being less than the guaranteed pension and providing an opportunity for the obscenely wealthy financial sector to make even more money.

So after 40 years of these shenanigans, where are we?It’s safe to say that we are now in the It’s a Wonderful Life Potter years.

Inequality is now as bad as it’s ever been in the US. The corporate barons of today match the robber barons from the nineteenth century. Thanks to the removal of campaign finance laws, economic inequality feeds political inequality which feeds economic inequality which feeds ad infinitum. Today, if you’re born poor, you have at best a 1 in 4 chance of even reaching middle class. With the development of the gig economy, the US is essentially creating a new servant class. People are making the reasonable decision that the game is rigged against them and have given up. Ten to twenty percent of white Americans with only a high school diploma are now on Social Security disability. 

This inequality isn’t going to go away on its own. In fact, left to its own devices, it’ll only get worse. Further automation will continue to eliminate both white collar and blue collar middle class jobs. Further off-shoring will continue to eliminate jobs located here.

Currently, the median annual income of an American is $64,000 with a median network of $100,000. Imagine if we were to equally spread out income and net worth across all Americans. Doing so yields an income of $140,000 and a net worth of $800,000.

No one is advocating that. What that does tell is how much margin we have to play with.

As jobs continue to be eliminated, ideas like universal basic income will have to be explored. Tying health care to a person’s job will no longer make sense. Climate change will have to be faced.

Believe it or not, I came away from this book with a note of optimism that I’m usually lacking when I’ve similar books of such ilk. What has happened to our country was not inevitable. A relatively small group of people were able to spark tremendous change. That implies that different change can be sparked. As a country we’ve been through this before. Attitudes, especially among the young, are changing.

We can take back our country. In fact, we have to.

Regarding the title of this blog entry, yes I know that it’s a popular slogan and has been the title of songs. In fact, amusingly enough, this is the not the first, not the second, but the third time that I’ve titled one of my blog posts thusly.

The saying has been attributed to Rousseau. The President of the Paris Commune referred to it during the Reign of Terror, saying: 

Rousseau, who was also one of the people, said: When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!

More Than Just One Good One

I’ve written about the Good One podcast before when I described how Gilbert Gottfried saved America. This podcast is a pretty simple concept. A comedy journalist named Jesse David Fox interviews a comedian. The interview is structured around one joke that the comedian does. Fox then does a deep drill down on the joke, deconstructing it as he goes. 

Fox has been doing it for years. He’s done enough now that the show has become somewhat hit or miss. He’s branched out beyond strictly comedians and has talked to people who do things like sketch comedy or that write comedy shows. In my opinion, these episodes aren’t as interesting.

If you get a chance, take a look at the older episodes. The Gilbert Gottfried episode is hilarious. They discuss the old joke known as The Aristocrats. If you don’t know it, it’s a very basic joke that allows comedians to be as lewd and crude as possible. I’m not a huge fan of Gottfried, but listening to him laugh uproariously as Fox asks him about how he made the subtle choice of deciding to include a rabid gerbil being anally inserted was worth the price of admission in itself.

The live interview of Anthony Jeselnik is also pretty awesome. Fox deconstructs Jeselnik’s baby drop joke. For those not aware, Jeselnik has a stage persona of being aloofly arrogant. In private life, Jeselnik apparently is a kind hearted person. Fox conducts the interview in front of a live audience. Listening to Jeselnik fight the urge to lapse into his onstage asshole personality and occasionally failing at the attempt is pretty humorous.

When you think about it, stand up comedy is a very simple art. Someone takes the stage with a microphone and talks into it. One of the things that I find most interesting about the podcast is the wide variety of approaches that comedians take. For example, Whitney Cummings writes down every joke, word for word. During her act, she concentrates on creating the best presentation for the jokes that she’s written. For others, like Nate Bargtaze, they write on stage. They come on stage with at best a vague idea of a story. Onstage, they work out what sections of the joke do and do not work. By the time that they’re ready to produce a special, their jokes have become honed.

My favorite thing about the show is how seriously the comedians take their jokes. Fox asks in depth questions with deep subtleties about either the meaning or the delivery of a joke and the comedians answer with equal depth and subtlety. They clearly obsess over their material and treat it with great seriousness. This is true of every comedian that has been interviewed.

This brings me to the inspiration of this post.  I just listened to Bert Kreischer. For those who have not heard of Kreischer, he’s what would be charitably defined as a bro comedian. He comes on stage and usually immediately strips off his shirt and is naked from the waist up for his entire act. He bellows. His stories are usually about his drunken, crazy antics. If you picture a cerebral comedian like Marc Maron, Kreischer is pretty much the exact opposite.

The story he chose to write about was, probably inevitably, The Machine. It is by far his most famous story. I first heard it probably close to ten years ago. Some five years ago, he released it and it went viral, making him one of the more popular comedians in the country.

If you’ve never heard the story, keep in mind that it is nearly completely true. He was, in the 90s, infamously anointed by Rolling Stone magazine as the country’s biggest college partier. While attending Florida State, he managed to take four Russian language courses without learning a word of Russian. Told that he could get a minor in Russian by going on a trip to Russia, he jumped at the chance. While in Russia, he partied with the mafia and things go, to put it mildly, a little crazy. 

I enjoyed the story ten years ago, but now I’m in a much different place. I’m at the age where comedians like Bert Kreischer, Dane Cook, and yes, even Kevin Hart, are just not my cup of tea. There’s just a little too much testosterone in their comedic cup of bro.

I decided to listen to just the first couple of minutes of the episode. I ended up listening to the entire hour and forty-five. Behind the blustery bro-ness, Kreischer is a very careful comedian making smart choices. He talked about how he thought he could never adapt it for the stage. It was such a long story that he could never condense it down to the twelve minutes or so required for a set. He talked about the choices that he made in ruthlessly cutting out parts that were very funny but were no longer important to the story. He discussed sections that he took out as his own views matured.

It was a fascinating discussion and I came out with a fresh respect not only for Bert Kreischer but also for the craft of comedy.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Pop Culture

Title: X

Rating: 2 Stars

I’ve mentioned a couple of times here my challenge with Chuck Klosterman. He’s a prolific essayist on popular culture. He specializes in music and sports. He interviews interesting and/or usually publicity shy celebrities. He focuses on specific cultural moments and attempts to deconstruct them to come to a deeper understanding.

Here’s the thing. I enjoy reading essays. I enjoy music. I enjoy reading about sports. I enjoy learning about celebrities that are usually out of the spotlight. I’m interested in trying to find deeper meanings behind seemingly shallow cultural moments. Klosterman is a bit younger than me but the subjects that he writes about are ones that I’m at least aware of, if not actively interested in. He’s written for magazines like Spin and Esquire. He was one of the original contributors to Grantland. Klosterman’s essays should be right up my alley.

But.

I just don’t click with his essays. I’m not sure exactly why. Perhaps some of his writings just read too much like short magazine pieces to me. Perhaps some of the artists and subjects that he’s interested in just don’t jibe with my interests.

Whatever the reason, this is the fifth collection of his essays that I’ve read. The highest rating that I’ve ever given him is 3 stars. Having finished X, that rating is still unchallenged.

I wanted to like it. I even started liking it. The first essay, Three-Man Weave, is a compelling story of an inconsequential tournament basketball game in North Dakota that Klosterman witnessed decades ago as a young man. One team had only five players. In the last minute or so of a very close game, two of their players fouled out. This should have been lights out for the team. A basketball team that can only field three players should have no chance in a close game. Instead, they managed to hang on to win. Describing the excitement of watching the game first hand along with interviewing players from both teams decades later made for an interesting story.

If only all of the essays were of this ilk. Some were. Another essay, My Zombie, Myself, made the point that zombie movies have become popular because the mindless drudgery of killing zombies is similar to the ennui of working in an office dealing with an never ending onslaught of e-mails and meeting invites.

The celebrity interviews were the weakest link. Interviews with Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen seemed to reveal nothing more than their discomfort with being interviewed. This was especially true of Tom Brady, in which we learned absolutely nothing but that Brady can be churlish, showed up late, and terminated the interview when he didn’t like the questions about Deflategate.

His essays on pop culture of the moment inadvertently reveal the truth of pop culture essays. They simply don’t age well. This collection was published in 2017 and was gathered from essays dating as far back as the early 2000s.

Essays that must have seemed relevant in 2004 or 2008 or 2011 just don’t matter anymore. Do I really need a deconstruction of Hannah Montana? Do I need to try to get into the mind of Danger Mouse? There was a whole article about Royce White, who if I ever heard of, he’s way out of my mind now.

Such topical essays seemed like they refer to events from the Victorian Age. In fifty years, they might as well be written in Sanskrit. I’ve written about this before, but I keep being reminded of that witty and perceptive Elizabethan theater critic that wrote in such contemporary Elizabethan slang and colloquialism that he’s now considered unreadable. I fear that Klosterman will suffer the same fate.

Finally, there is KISS. Klosterman is a huge fan of the band. The largest essay in the collection is Advertising Worked On Me. It’s a 10,000 word essay (~35 pages) on KISS. If he was saying something innovative about the band, that’d be one thing. Instead, a significant chunk of it is dedicated to an album by album review of KISS’ entire oeuvre. I’m not just talking about the early records. I’m talking about each record. I’m talking about each members’ solo records. He discusses each one and gives it a grade. I’m guessing that he reviews around thirty records. Why?

He does make points about whether or not KISS belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He discusses what it means to be a devoted fan of a band that appears to be only interested in milking every last possible cent from their fans (he claims to have paid for some fifteen different versions of Rock and Roll All Nite). All of which was interesting but, holy cow, so many album reviews.

He closes with a couple of meditations on death. Having just spent some four hundred pages discussing such topics as whether or not Creed and Nickelback suck, suddenly discussing how his feelings of death have changed as he moved from his thirties to his forties with small children brought about a case of serious cognitive dissonance.

Having said all of that, two stars might be a little unfair. Until I hit the KISS essay, it was a begrudging three stars.

So Chuck, I gave you more than a fair shot. I have read five of your collections. I think that I’m done with you.

It’s not me, it’s you.