Has there ever been a more unlikely story of how a major piece of real estate got its name, and undeservedly so, than that of America and Amerigo Vespucci? Absolutely not.
America is so named because in 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer who made a cut-out map for do-it-yourself globemakers, fell for a forgery called the Soderini Letter that implied Vespucci had discovered a new world. That world was described as being populated by giants, cannibals and nymphomaniacs, the latter inevitably included in most accounts during this phase of the Age of Discovery because travel writing was the most popular genre and such titillating if inaccurate details sold books.
Despite prodigious efforts to correct this whopper, the name America stuck — especially after the legendary mapmaker Gerardus Mercator used it for his Atlas Novus — and the Western Hemisphere would forever not be known as Christopheria, Columbia, That New Place, Over Yonder or any number of more appropriate monikers.
What is beyond dispute is that Vespucci was the first person to confirm that his rival Christopher Columbus had discovered a fourth land mass (Europe, Asia and Africa being the others) as a result of two voyages he made to the east coast of South America in 1499 and 1502. Everything else — and I mean literally everything else — associated with or attributed to Vespucci simply cannot be confirmed as the gospel truth.
Vespucci almost certainly was not behind the Soderini Letter but did not dispute it, and he was an extraordinary piece of work in his own right as is made vividly clear in Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, a brief and delightful biography by noted historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
As oft danced as Serge Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet has been over the last 70 years, the great Soviet composer’s original score and all of the original accompanying dances have never been performed. Yes, never, and therein lies a tale.
The production is based on Prokofiev’s original score, which was composed in 1935, and restores the original story line that he conceived with dramatist Sergei Radlov, 20 minutes of never-performed music, as well as six dance numbers choreographed by Leonid Lavrovsky of the Kirov Ballet but also never performed.
Prokofiev wrote in Autobiography that he had been focusing more on the lyrical aspects of his music and believed that a score based on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet would allow him to more fully explore this element. He composed motifs to express certain emotions, to signify the appearance of particular characters on stage, and to depict certain events. These motifs recur throughout the score and are a unifying characteristic.
Prokofiev and Radlov re-imagined the Shakespeare tragedy as the transcendence of love over oppression and ditched the traditional ending in which Juliet awakens just before Romeo poisons himself for one in which they live happily ever after.
“Prokoviev was a Christian Scientist and didn’t believe in death. So in his version, Romeo and Juliet don’t die. They go on to a new life, released from the false reality of their material being,” explains Botstein, who also is president of Bard College and one of the most erudite and funny men in classical music as we have learned through attending several seasons of the ASO’s marvelous Classics Declassified series.
Stalin decided that the masses should be exposed to the classics long denied them as Prokofiev was writing Romeo & Juliet. But the red czar’s schizophrenic cultural police soon began a crackdown on the arts and were outraged at the ballet’s nonconformist ending, which they declared was undemocratic. There also were complaints by the Kirov’s dancers that some of the choreography was too difficult and too discordant. The premiere production was canceled and the composer was sent back to the drawing board. What emerged at the 1940 premiere and has been performed ever since was different in key respects.
To visit the homes of many famous people is usually not to really know them. A conspicuous exception is Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the third president’s self-designed masterpiece of Palladian architecture where he lived for 56 historic years — from 1770 before he wrote the Declaration of Independence until his death on July 4, 1826.
Monticello, Italian for “little mountain,” sits atop an 850-foot peak in the Southwest Mountains above Charlottesville, Virginia and the world famous university that he founded. What was so striking for this first-time visitor was how small the house depicted on the flip side of the American nickel and countless other places actually is.
Befitting the life of the great man himself, Monticello seems much larger on the inside. It also is full of hidden passageways, secret chambers and other surprises.
This 322-page exposition on the outer actions and inner thoughts of the most complex and contradictory Founding Father focuses on the 17 turbulent years after Jefferson handed the reins of state to James Madison in March 1809, ducked out of his successor’s inaugural ball through a back door and without fanfare rode into a retirement during which he never stopped fretting about the future of a republic at whose birth he had played such a huge role.
Who doesn’t love a good movie? Whether they’re great art or great trash, there is no medium that can enrapture, entertain and offer escape from the real world, especially in these troubling times. In that spirit, I’m doing a Super Cinema Sunday over at my blog:
PAULINE KAEL: AN APPRECIATION is the 18th in a series of essays on people who have moved and inspired me over the years. Herein I note that we may have legendary movie critic Kael, in all of her combustible greatness, more than anyone else to thank for making America cinema as good as it is. LINK.
PAULINE KAEL: AN UN-APPRECIATION is a hilarious excerpt from Robert Stein’s unpublished memoirs about his relationship with Kael. Moderate Voice co-blogger Stein, while editor of McCall’s magazine, hired and fired Kael in the course of a few turbulent months before she went on to fame and infamy as The New Yorker’s longtime movie critic. LINK.
FROM ‘THE AFRICAN QUEEN’ TO ‘ZABRISKIE POINT’: MY 70 ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIES is just that and includes my Top 20 and abridged Kael capsule reviews of all 70 flicks, as well as an invitation for you to offer your own faves. LINK.
A couple new books are looking at behavioral economics and challenging the received wisdom of the market in ways that may actually break into our popular consciousness.
Near the beginning of “The Hidden Persuaders” (1957), Vance Packard quoted from Advertising Age magazine the first principle of the new science of motivation research: “In very few instances do people really know what they want, even when they say they do.” Fifty years later, this astounding revelation has begun to penetrate mainstream economic theory. Better late than never.
American political ideology since around 1980 can pretty much be summed up in four words: markets good, government bad. Unregulated competition, in this view, is optimally efficient; governments need only enforce contracts, tend to national security, and then step out of the way. Neoclassical economics demonstrates with mathematical elegance that, if not interfered with, supply and demand, production and consumption, will glide smoothly toward a stable equilibrium.
But any proof is only as good as the assumptions it rests on. According to conventional economics and political science, consumers and voters can be counted on to make rational choices. “The assumption that we are rational,” writes MIT economics professor Dan Ariely, “implies that in everyday life, we compute the value of all the options we face and then follow the best possible path.” It also implies that we have sufficient information to make a wise decision, and that the context in which we decide doesn’t matter - deciders are always calm and objective. It implies, as incoming Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein and University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler put it, that we are “Econs” rather than “Humans.”
We’re not, of course, as wise humans (and wily advertisers) have always known. A new sub-discipline called “behavioral economics” has begun to quantify this perennial intuition and assess its implications. Two engaging, enlightening new books divide these tasks. “Predictably Irrational” [link] describes some of the research leading economists to modify many standard assumptions. “Nudge” [link] turns these insights to account, suggesting improved strategies for individual decision-making and public policy.
Yes, and what I wonder is, once we make it through the market part, maybe can we move on to voter behavior?
For just one example, Sunstein notes that whoever gets the top spot on the ballot is given an inherent percentage edge over all others. Voters tend to vote for the person in that spot on the ballot more than any other for no other reason than placement. I’d think we ought address that. And that’s only the beginning.
So, one day, into Delaware’s great Basin/With strange Machinery sail Mr. Mason/And Mr. Dixon, by the Falmouth Packet/Connect, as with some invis’ble Bracket/Sharing a Fate, directed by the Stars/To mark the Earth with geometrick Scars. — TIMOTHY TOX
Mason & Dixon is the penultimate book in my long slog to read the complete works of Thomas Pynchon (only his Vineland awaits) and is of more than usual interest because your Faithful Reviewer plies his trade within a stone’s throw of the marker to the right, one of several placed by the eponomymous pair of 18th century surveyors in determining the demarcation line between Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia, and although they could not have known it, what would become the symbolic cultural boundary between the North and South nearly a century later during the bloody War Between the States.
Like Pynchon’s 2007 magnum opus, Against the Day (reviewed here), Mason & Dixon is complex, wonderfully subversive and laugh-out-loud funny. But also like that book, it is more accessible than his earlier works, notably Gravity’s Rainbow, a masterpiece but with prose so dense that you can stand a fork in them.
I knew I was in for a treat from the moment I read the Pynchonic run-on opening sentence of Mason & Dixon:
“Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,-the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel’d Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,-the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax’d and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.”
Pynchon casts Charles Mason, who actually was an astronomer by trade, and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon as straight man and goof ball in a rollicking epic that deftly combines fiction and fact through a cast of characters that include the poet Timothy Tox, a Pynchon invention, and the very real Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal and owner of one of the most evocative names in English history. The story of this dynamic duo’s adventures is told by the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke 20 years after the fact in his sister’s Philadelphia parlor in an 18th century dialect which I fell into rather easily. (And now find Meself talkin’ to the Cats in said Dialeckt.)
The muffin cars, electric-powered vehicles built to resemble cupcakes, scoot around the open spaces of the San Mateo Event Center & Expo, a sprawling fairground about 20 miles south of San Francisco and, on this day, a million miles from normal.
Just inside the gates of the third annual Maker Faire, a converted fire engine belches an occasional explosive flare that sends a chest-pounding Pfoomp! throughout the fairground, startling bystanders over and over again. That contraption was made by folks from the Crucible, an industrial arts studio based in Oakland where people can take lessons in welding, blacksmithing and many, many other ways to play with heat and flame.
Nearby is the Swarm, a set of 30-inch cut-aluminum orbs that roll around on the grass, self-powered but guided by remote control. Children are playing keep-away with them.
But they are definitely not playing tag with Justin Gray’s fire sculptures around the corner. It could have something to do with the fact that they look like menacing tanks on clanking treads. Or it could be the way Robot Libby, the one that emits a horrifying turbine whine from a metallic ball bobbing on a heavy iron chain, spits gouts of multicolored flame. (As Mr. Gray manipulates the remote control, the machine mixes powders into the flame to change its color: strontium for red, copper for bluish green, steel powder for a fireworks effect.) Each burst sends a heat wave that rocks the onlookers back a step or two.
At first blush, then, this festival, sponsored by Make magazine, is a gathering place of pyromaniacs and noise junkies, the multiply pierced and the extensively tattooed. But wander awhile, and the showy surface gives way to a wondrous thing: the gathering of folks from all walks of life who blend science, technology, craft and art to make things both goofy and grand. (See images from the fair and listen to audio interviews with some participants.)
This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog.
Book Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
by Jessica Schneider
It is always frustrating to begin a book that has some potential but ultimately just doesn’t deliver. Such is the case with Mark Haddon’s debut novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It is not so much that this is a bad book, just one that could have been so much better than what it was.
In his book, Schecter makes the case for why, although he supported McCain in his run in 2000, McCain no longer deserves support and in fact, his candidacy should be fought actively, without hesitation and on all fronts. Schecter outlines his reasons for these sentiments and fills in those reasons with more details than you may be able to absorb. Schecter draws a portrait of both McCain’s political trajectory and the parallel trajectory of how his political choices since 2001 are a thumbing of his nose at the very people who got him to the presidential precipice in the first place.
A couple of disclosures before I offer you my phone interview with Cliff: I’ve never been a McCain supporter. And I haven’t known of Schecter that long either - here’s the first post I ever wrote about Schecter. However, it was fascinating talking to someone with a seemingly vast knowledge base about someone whom I’ve never really studied.
JMZ: You argue on behalf of former McCain supporters who should be able to realize that McCain isn’t what he once was. Who, then, is the alternative and why?
CS: Well. There’s always, “What we have versus what we’d like to have.” I’m an Obama supporter and he has a lot of appeal to Independents. But he hasn’t done it the way McCain did it – by attacking his own party in big speeches. Obama has done it by standing up, not by splitting. Obama talks about rising above partisanship and reaching out to all people on all sides and getting past the muck where politics has gotten so nasty. Obama says, I’m going to talk to you like an adult. And that’s what McCain had called “straight talk” – but he hasn’t given us much of that [this election cycle.] Read the rest of this entry »
April 23rd, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog.
Tin Lizard Tales: Reflections From A Train by Schuyler T. Wallace
by Jessica Schneider
Upon reading this book, there are several ways in which it could be classified. On one hand, it is definitely travel writing, and yet it is also a compiled memoir broken down into separate essays—which discuss not only Wallace’s actual month long trip but a history of all the places he and his wife visited, the food that they ate, the people they encountered. So in other words, it is a little bit of everything.
The book begins with Wallace and his wife Carol leaving for a month long trip by train, or as the back of the book notes, “a train trip provides the opportunity to blow off steam.” Starting off from Bakersfield, California, he and his wife travel to Fort Morgan, to Chicago, to New York City, and then Toronto, (with some added places in between) and along the way, not only are readers given glimpses into their travels, but Wallace goes as far as to provide readers with a brief history lesson on each place he visits in addition to his funny observations and minor annoyances along the way.
This book has one of the funniest and entertaining narrations—certainly for a travel memoir—that I’ve read. He talks about his wife’s “tiny bladder” (something I’m very sympathetic to) and isn’t shy about voicing his straightforward opinions about poor customer service, the homeless, Howard Stern, MTV’s Jackass, pollution, to the meat packing industry.
Reading it, you will come away learning at least one thing (if not many) that you might not have known before. When reading about Chicago, for example, he devotes several sections talking about the miserable working life at the Union Stock Yard, and also the Great Fire. He also mentions a brief history about the Chicago White Sox and specifically how “Shoeless” Joe Jackson got his name. While that might be common knowledge for many, for a sports dunce like myself, I indeed got a refresher course and learned something new. See what I mean?
It was also interesting to read his summation on what happened on 9/11 in New York City (it’s been a few years) as though you might be an objective observer unfamiliar with the specificities behind the events. Having worked as a fire chief, he has many opinions about the rescue missions performed by the NYC rescuers as well as the public’s reactions and criticisms of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Bluegrass traditionalists are still in shock over a 2007 album collaboration between bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs and free-wheeling pianist Bruce Hornsby.
Pianos typically are not welcome additions to the acoustic guitars, mandolins, banjos, fiddles and upright basses of bluegrass bands, and I was inclined to agree until the Dear Friend & Conscience and I heard Hornsby and Skaggs in front of Skaggs’ marvelous six-piece Kentucky Thunder backup band last night at the F.M. Kirby Center in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
Nevertheless, Hornsby’s presence was a hard sell.
It took perhaps a third of the two hour-plus concert before we could even hear Hornsby except on solos. Even after the sound was adjusted, his terrific keyboard stylings tended to get lost in the cacophony of strings, including Skaggs’ brilliant mandolin playing and gorgeous fiddling by Stuart Duncan and nonpareil banjo picking by Jim Mills.
And perhaps it is a reflection of my own tastes, but it seemed like Skaggs and Company brought more to Hornsby’s extended rock- , blues- and jazz-influenced songs such as “White-Wheeled Limousine” and “Mandolin Rain” than Hornsby did to Skaggs standards such as “Stubb” and “The Dreaded Spoon,” although their set-closing cover of Rick James‘ “Super Freak” was terrific.
Would I see this ensemble again? Absolutely, but it would be nice if the sound was right from the outset.
Like many a lad, I drank in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories like so many bottles of soda pop without knowing anything about their creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. It didn’t really matter because Holmes and the world of 221B Baker Street seemed so lifelike that many readers believed that he really existed.
Both similarly portray Doyle as a likeable medical doctor of middling competence who became a prolific, enormously popular and wealthy writer, historian, fantasist and propagandist for Britannia and his myriad pet causes who in the waning years of Victorian England dove into the deep end of the spiritualism pool head first. Once in those charlatan-filled waters, Doyle did not cast aside the deductive logic of his own medical training that his famous detective used to such great effect as to apply it (with little success) to the fuzzy pseudo-religious belief that the dead can be contacted by mediums who are able to inform them about the afterlife.
Long story short: Doyle was as prim as any proper Victorian gentleman, but he was a bit of a kook.
This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog.
Book Review: Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
By Jessica Schneider
This is an odd book. Yet, highly entertaining is it as long as excessive sexual details don’t deter you. Honestly, this book was better than I thought it would be—it’s quite funny actually, and I found myself laughing out loud. Here’s the thing: I had read Philip Roth in the past, two novellas of his, and found them to be rather humorless and silly. Portnoy’s Complaint, however, is rather silly and full of humor. So that’s not so bad.
The story all takes place on a shrink’s couch, where Alexander Portnoy is disclosing his Jewish American life story, or his impression of it anyway. Like most young males, he is sex obsessed and takes to extreme methods masturbation, (some involving food and socks and other objects) all detailed in length. He also lies to his mother about using the bathroom (for his own erotic purposes but he tells her he has diarrhea) creating a hilarious scene where Mrs. Portnoy demands to “look inside the bowl and see his poopie” to see just what it ailing her son, and all he can tell her is to “stop calling it poopie” because he’s in high school.
The book then covers his later years and his experiences with a whore named The Monkey (nicknamed The Monkey because she ate a banana while watching a couple have sex) who is fairly uneducated and dumb as a log and can’t seem to spell simple words, yet Alex stays with her because they have sex all the time. Some have said he has a hatred for women, and I didn’t find that to be the case. Since he is untrustworthy as a narrator, everything he says has to be taken with a grain of salt because his disclosures are, more often than not, hyperbole.
Mostly this book consists of a man’s ramblings about his sexual fantasies, and many reviewers online have commented that Alex is not a likeable character. I disagree with that, for while I didn’t particularly like him, he’s not unlikeable—just typical, and perhaps a tad bit immature. Read the rest of this entry »
It is a testament to the complexity of the brain that despite decades of research we still have relatively little understanding of why so many of us enjoy music so deeply and revel in its ability to alter our moods, trigger memories and even change our lives.
That is just fine with me as someone who has never heard a kind of music that he didn’t like.
Regular readers of my blog (the cats, my next door neighbor’s cats, my faithful brother and that sweet woman from England who keeps seeing UFOs) know that I adore music.
Music is pretty much a full-time companion. It wakes me up in the morning and relaxes me in the evening. It helps me celebrate good times and weather bad times. It makes me move my body in fun and interesting ways when the Dear Friend & Conscience and I are at a concert or roll up the living room rug on a Saturday night and boogie. And I can say without equivocation that it does strange and wondrous things to my mind.
Yet for all of the music that I have absorbed since I first heard “Pop Goes the Weasel” played on a jack in the box, I don’t have a clue as to how and why it does those things to my mind.
Sacks, a groundbreaking neurologist and prolific medical writer, presents a pastiche of medical case studies ranging from the amazing tale of a man struck by lightning who subsequently develops a passion and talent for the concert piano to less fortunate souls who have violently disruptive musical hallucinations or less intrusive “ear wigs,” songs that play in a continuing loop in their minds. These “musical misalignments,” as Sacks calls them, are seldom fully treatable, let alone understood.
Even less understood are why some people, myself included, find such joy and even rapture in music while others – Sacks cites Che Guevara, who was rhythm-deaf, and Sigmund Freud and Vladimir Nabokov, brilliant men who didn’t get even the least bit of pleasure from music – as representative of large segments of the population.
March 17th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog.
Book Review: Fidel Castro: A Spoken Autobiography
By Jessica Schneider
There are many different ways one could approach when reviewing this book. On one hand, it’s an excellent source when thinking of Fidel Castro. Not so much because of historical and objective accuracy, but one of Castro’s character. On the other hand, could one claim this a pleasant read? Unless you are just a die-hard Fidel fanatic, I think most readers would find this boring.
Just to give a bit of background, the book is a spoken autobiography, and so basically it’s a 600-page interview with Fidel Castro. The interview, conducted by Ignacio Ramonet, consists of unchallenging questions, and ones that don’t really focus Castro in his replies. For example, a good interviewer should be asking questions that prompt discussion, for the most interesting and entertaining interviews are those where you have a discussion going on between the interviewer and interviewee.
Such is not the case with this book.
For one, Ramonet doesn’t ever challenge Castro on the things he says. Just to give an example, Castro spends a decent length of time talking about Che Guevara and what a great and “gentle” man he was, yet Ramonet doesn’t even bother asking Castro to comment about Che’s controversy and why many consider him to be nothing more than a mass murderer.
A good interviewer would have at least challenged that fact, even if he didn’t necessarily agree with it. Another example is when Castro speaks about his childhood and how he loathed authority. Ironic then that one who loathed authority as much as he did eventually grew into a dictator. None of this is mentioned, and these examples only allow me to conclude that the entire interview is pretty much 600 pages of puffery.
Yet, having said that, the positive side is that readers will be given an “in” into Castro’s character. Read the rest of this entry »
A MING DYNASTY TEMPLE (TOP) IN JIAYUGUAN ON THE SILK ROAD (MAP)
I have read perhaps a dozen books in recent years about the Silk Road, the amazing ancient network of trade and cultural routes linking China and the Mediterranean coast. All were good in their own right and I recommend a couple of them below, but none have the combination of beautiful prose and deep insight as does Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road.
From the east on the Silk Road came Chinese gunpowder, printing and paper, the astrolabe and compass, silk and Buddhism. From the west came woods, fruits, metals, musical instruments and Christianity. And that was just for starters.
Thubron is an Englishman who speaks Mandarin and Russian and has spent a lifetime traveling throughout Asia. His trek began in Xian in central China and went west through ethnic lands where the Chinese are populating, paving over and plowing under settlements, shrines and cemeteries in their relentless mission of make everything everywhere modern and Chinese. Then Thubron crossed several former Soviet republics, war-ravaged Afghanistan and Iran before ending his trek in Antioch in Turkey.
And Thubron did it the hard way, traveling third-class or no class in a variety of conveyances ranging from rattletrap buses to donkey carts. He stayed in decrepit inns and farmer’s houses, battled the local bureaucracies and once was quarantined by health officials because of the SARS virus.
Sometimes the mere knowledge that one is not alone in the cosmos is enough to suffice one’s view. But if that ‘other’ not only exists, but elucidates their own similar and cogent viewpoints well, it is cause for celebration. Such was my feeling when I finished Lee Siegel’s latest book, Against The Machine: Being Human In The Age Of The Electronic Mob.
In just under 180 pages, Siegel illustrates, in very simple language, and lucid terms, what is wrong with the current state of the Internet.
Or, more precisely, the many things that are wrong with the current state of the Internet. Yet, so deep is the diagnosis, and so sharp the rapier, that its analogues can also be applied to the current states of the arts, the sciences, and much of general life lessened by the slow erosion of the constant dumbing down of all things to the Lowest Common Denominator.
Before reading this book I had encountered Siegel’s The New Republic columns online only a few times, when linked to by others, sent to me in emails, or whilst reading a blog. Nothing much stood out about them as being far above other online commentators, known or not. This is not because his comments were not well-written, simply the things others thought cogent rarely interested me enough to read.
Thus I missed what, to Siegel detractors, was his Scarlet Letter episode: apparently, in 2006, he lost that magazine post when he was found to be sockpuppeting his own online blog in defense of himself, under the pseudonym sprezzatura; an activity that many bloggers and their readers do, and is easily seen through, but when done by someone actually getting paid to write for a living, one supposes, is seen as somehow verboten, regardless of the nonsense the online trolls may have accused him of.
I only mention this episode because it seems to be what most online reviews of the book, especially the negative, devolve down to; that and the idea that, like me, he actually takes his role as a critic seriously. Therefore, the fact that he kicked ass under another guise is ’shocking,’ and he is nothing but a ‘disgrace’ whose opinion about things online is hopelessly biased. Boo! Hiss!
However, Against The Machine amply demonstrates why such hard critical tactics are often needed, as it exposes the Internet as what most intelligent people know it as, ‘a vast wasteland,’ far more corrosive in our time than television ever has been, even back in 1961 when former FCC chairman Newt Minnow famously derided tv with the above mentioned label. From wealth scams to penis enlargement ads to Myspace and Facebook, to porno websites, mindless blogs that are ill wrought and intellectually nihil to laughable bastions of learning such as Wikipedia, the Internet has taken the Lowest Common Denominator to a new nadir. Read the rest of this entry »
February 28th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
In the interests of full disclosure, I have been drinking beer since I was 14 and Don Russell, the author of Joe Sixpack’s Philly Beer Guide, is a former colleague and old friend. Oh, and I’m a terrible beer snob.
My first taste of beer was not a secretive swig from a quart bottle of Miller High Life behind my junior high school but a Heinecken from a German uncle’s amply stocked beer refrigerator with his full approval. And so from the outset of my 40-plus year love affair with beer I was hooked on fuller bodied European brews and never developed a taste for watered down American brands.
Don Russell is a consummate journalist with whom I labored for many years at the Philadelphia Daily News, a street-smart tabloid that dispatched him to Phillies game in a toilet known as Veterans Stadium on a cold April day in 1998 with a notebook and measuring cup to check out a rumor that concession stand workers were short pouring beers.
The front-page headline the next day said it all:
SQUEEZE PLAY ON TAP:
Suds Fans Cheated 2 oz. Per Cup At Vet
Adding Up To Big Bucks
Wrote Russell with appropriate indignation:
“In a town where beer is a fundamental part of baseball lore . . . failing to give an honest pour is worse than striking out with the bases loaded.
“It’s un-American.”
And so was launched the career of Joe Sixpack, who has gone on to become an award-winning beer columnist (it’s a tough job but somebody has to do it) and now the man behind Philly Beer Guide, a delightfully written and highly informative book on all things Philadelphia and beer.
February 28th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for the highly-visited site Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog.
Book Review: Desperate Passage by Ethan Rarick
by Jessica Schneider
The Donner Party. When I first learned about them I recall my history teacher telling me about a comic strip involving two pieces of bread with a leg sticking out of it. Yet we all remember learning about this in history class, about how these families became trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for months, having to live off the flesh from those who died. It is the ultimate survival tale, and also one that could have been avoided had certain egos not gotten in the way.
Ethan Rarick discusses this journey, how the Donners, Reeds, and other parties ended up in this situation, what they did to survive, and how ultimately the fortunate were rescued. This book is a fascinating read because it reads like a novel, and for those who are drawn to American history (Manifest Destiny is one of my favorite periods) coupled with one of the most grisly survival tales in history, then this is the absolute book for you.
The book begins with a brief history of the families and why many of them were eager to head west. Like most, they were in search of a better life that would bring them better times. Starting off from Independence Missouri, Rarick details not only how boring this journey must have been, but how unbearably slow. He estimates that the families with all their buggies and oxen and whathaveyou probably moved at most one to two miles an hour. It has been said that individuals could have literally walked faster than those oxen pulled.
So how did this ordeal happen? Basically, the parties relied on false information from a con-artist named Hastings, promising a “short cut” which of course did not exist since what they faced was not reasonable traveling roads, but mountainous terrain. Try getting an ox to pull a buggy up that. While reading this, it is easy for one to become aggravated by how often they avoided the signs and warnings that pointed to Hasting’s “short cut” as a bad idea. Yet, despite the trip itself being very, very slow, the saddest part was the fact that these were families overrun with children, many of them infants and toddlers—certainly not the type of party meant to “experiment” through terrain one has never crossed or knows nothing about.
So once reaching their impassable destination (the mountain ranges and cliffs that make it physically impossible to go on) they remain in their cold place, erecting mediocre lodges that do a lousy job of keeping out the biting winter winds. And as readers, we know it is only a matter of time before the families run out of food. Read the rest of this entry »
February 21st, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for the highly-visited site Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog.‘
Book Review: The Reserve by Russell Banks
by Jessica Schneider
This being my first time reading Russell Banks, I had high hopes. Yet after reading his latest novel, The Reserve, coupled with the many negative reviews it has gotten, my hopes have been a bit deflated, yet not totally. It turns out that while The Reserve is not a great book, it’s not as bad as some of what the reviewers said.
For one, this story is set during the Great Depression, on a reserve within the Adirondacks, and the characters are members of the idle rich—they lounge around, have no real skills, have not been impacted by the Great Depression like so many, and they happen to also create their own problems.
Boy, do they.
Insanity. Lobotomies. Incest. Adultery. Murder.
You see where this is going. Basically, the soap-opera plot overshadows any actual character insights that might result. So many things go wrong in such short a space that one does not have time to absorb, or more importantly, care. Read the rest of this entry »
America is so named because in 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer who made a cut-out map for do-it-yourself globemakers, fell for a forgery called the Soderini Letter that implied Vespucci had discovered a new world. That world was described as being populated by giants, cannibals and nymphomaniacs, the latter inevitably included in most accounts during this phase of the Age of Discovery because travel writing was the most popular genre and such titillating if inaccurate details sold books.
PAULINE KAEL: AN APPRECIATION is the 18th in a series of essays on people who have moved and inspired me over the years. Herein I note that we may have legendary movie critic Kael, in all of her combustible greatness, more than anyone else to thank for making America cinema as good as it is. 
Like many a lad, I drank in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories like so many bottles of soda pop without knowing anything about their creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. It didn’t really matter because Holmes and the world of 221B Baker Street seemed so lifelike that many readers believed that he really existed.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have been drinking beer since I was 14 and Don Russell, the author of Joe Sixpack’s Philly Beer Guide, is a former colleague and old friend. Oh, and I’m a terrible beer snob.
