Sunday Review of Links: 01.25.09

News & Opinion
...Recession? What recession? There's a boom in the fast-paced and rewarding field of Thankless Jobs! (NYT)
...Lack of foresight. Ignored offers of aid and advice. Botched response when things really hit the fan. Iraq? The Financial Crisis? No. The Purple Tunnel of Doom at the Inauguration. (WaPo)
...When it comes to Hope, Gaza is the new Missouri: Show Me. (Newsweek)
...One doctor says that successful healthcare reform, wherever in the industrialized world that it's happened, has always transcended and included the particular system that came before it. (New Yorker)

Sports
...This profile of Arizona Cardinals head coach Ken Whisenhunt underscores the worst kept secret in elite athletics: i.e., the nigh on direct correlation between moderate-to-severe OCD and sporting success. (Arizona Republic)

Books
...According to this reviewer, John Grisham's been reading a lot of Beckett and/or watching a lot of Seinfeld lately because his latest novel is a delightful little tale about absolutely nothing at all. And lawyers. [Insert stale lawyer joke here.] (Time)
...Proof positive that web presence is everything when it comes to book buzz. Except -- psyche! -- not really. (NYT Sunday Book Review)

Alabamiana
...Pastor Jim on hitting the ground running on Day One. (Anniston Star)
...Retired steelworkers remember the good-and-bad old days, when Birmingham's now-dormant Sloss Furnace forged Birmingham's gritty identity as the Pittsburgh of the South. (al.com/Bham News)

Watch This!


In case you needed any more proof that 44's turned us into a nation of Hope junkies: It's the now infamous and apocalyptic Purple Tunnel of Doom! Thousands of people crammed into DC's Third Street Tunnel with absolutely none of the aformentioned hope (Yes-We-Can!) of getting out in time to see the inauguration. Everybody should be peeved, smelly, tearful, on the verge of panic...yet somehow the response is to...break into song? "Lean on Me," no less? No confirmation to the rumor that it was the new admin's "fixer" -- a kinder, gentler Rahm Emanuel --who snuck in there and sparked the feel-good singalong. (YouTube)

Progress Report: The Reading Life

FYI: finished A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. I mean, "-ish." There was one story in there, "He of the Assembly," that made me feel as if I was losing my mind. That story makes no sense, right? It's just words. Or is this just the ticking time-bomb of Beitelmanian dementia that the family tree seems to suggest is kinda-sorta buried in Ye Olde DNA? Only time will tell. I understood the other stories and they were, you know, fine. A solid B in my book.

I have since broken my rule -- no new book purchases -- and bought not one but three new books: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by DFW, The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Surely there are threads and themes connecting said purchases, but I don't care to analyze it. I'm reading Oscar Wao now and I have to say I'm pretty gobsmacked. I've ID'd a particular -- singular -- feeling I get when I read a certain kind of virtuosic book I really like. It's a simultaneous joy and -- not envy, exactly -- I think the word might be surrender. Like, yep, dude nailed it, in a way that only he could. That humans can do such a thing -- such a thing that I so very much want to do myself -- is both daunting and inspiring all at once.

Me, I kinda like that daunted-inspired feeling. Case in point: this!

Sunday Review of Links: 01.18.09

News & Opinion
...Yet another sign the World is Flat: in an effort to make themselves more viable, Catholic schools are moving to level their age-old notion of hierarchy. (NYT)
...Nothing like a recession to get folks flocking to that bastion of Free: the Li-berry. (WSJ)
...Seems their fittin to have some kind of throw-down in the Federal City. (WaPo)
...Obit for the anti-Pollack, Andrew Wyeth. (Time)

Sports
...Philly's never really loved Donovan McNabb. His comedic timing is dubious at best, and he's always puking in the huddle at the worst possible times. Well, Philly, don't look now but you're two wins away from being stuck with Donnie for life. [At least The Boss is playing the Superbowl halftime show.] (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Books
...Hey, guess what? Could just be a blip, but the NEA says more folks read the litch-ruh-chure in 2008 than they did in 2002. (NYT Book Review)
...Not a book but a story: Antonya Nelson's "Soldier's Joy" in the most recent... (New Yorker)

Alabamiana
...Pastor Jim weighs in on Pastor Rick and why prayers and political symbolism ought to be mutually exclusive. (Anniston Star)
...In Alabama, tigers are the new pit bulls. (Thicket)

Watch This!


I mean. For obvious reasons. (YouTube)

Calling All Cars!

If you live in the Heart-o-Dixie, be on the lookout for a guy on a motorcycle who...ah, I don't know how to even explain it. This crazy guy from Indiana tried to fake his death in a plane crash and he parachuted down in Alabama, near Childersburg. On the one hand that's pretty ingenious. But then they were on him like white on rice from the get-go, practically. I don't really get the state of investigative prowess in the New Millenium. A random guy can't successfully fake his own death in some elaborate scheme involving a plane crash, a parachute, and a motorcycle waiting in storage in rural Alabama, and yet we can't figure out for sure, one way or another, whether Iraq had WMD or if Osama bin Laden's still alive and where he is. Or even if Paula Abdul's nearly as liquored up as she always seems to be on that show they used to have back in the day* where folks juggle knives and caterwaul. Weird. (NPR/ATC)

Update: As expected, Marcus Schrenker once was lost, but now... (MSN)

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* (They did cancel that show by now, right?)

Sunday Review of Links: 01.11.09

News & Opinion
...Would somebody please tell McDonald's we're in a recession? (NYT)
...Healthcare is the new food. (WaPo)
...The grim Steve Jobs deathwatch continues. (Newsweek)
...There are, in fact, Israeli Peaceniks and the war in Gaza is bolstering them. The question is, is it bolstering them enough to have a real effect on parliamentary elections next month? (Newsweek)

Sports
...Let's just say if you're Northern State University basketball coach Don Meyer, you've had an eventful last three months. (ESPN)

Books
...Some guy just wrote a book that says the artistic impulse can be explained by evolutionary psychology and that MoMA is actually the ninth circle of hell. Some reviewer read said book and said, well, you know, not exactly. Some blogger read said review, agreed with it, and will likely not read said book. Damn critics. (WaPo)

Alabamiana
...Pastor Jim rats out the two weirdo Buddhists who are headed to Congress this year. (Anniston Star)
...Chuck Barkley: Alabama's Prodigal Son. (al.com/BhamNews)
...Okay, sure, why not -- here's some histrionic writerly advice courtesy of, well: (BhamWeekly)

Watch This!


Tom Friedman rallying for -- among other things -- the liberal arts. Go Tom! (MIT)

Housekeeping: Two New Bells/Whistles

FYI: You'll notice two new features in the righthand column: "The Nightstand" -- books that, for whatever reason, are currently on my "nightstand," such as it is -- and "52 Books in 52 Weeks," where I'll be listing all the unrequired reading I'm requiring of myself in ought-nine.

This. Is. Funny.

Stuff White People Like.

Updates

1. Radio silence of the last few days = burgeoning sickness and the restoration of festivities at Ye Olde Day Job.

2. Finished The Sheltering Sky. (One down, 51 to go!) Two enthusiastic thumbs up! Weird, weird final section. Such a satisfying final gesture -- if it could really be called "satisfying" when somebody goes batty and...oh, you don't want me to spoil it for you, I'm sure. Next I'll read One Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, another Bowles offering.

3. Saw Doubt this past week. For a movie about doubt, it's thesis was pretty clear-cut: You just never really know, do you? Don't know if that's a fair complaint, but there really wasn't anything that upended expectations here. Luckily the biggest expectation -- that the acting would be good -- was also upheld.

4. Did I mention that I'm sick?

5. Stay tuned for Sunday Links tomorrow. Because I know you plan your week around them...

The Ecstatic Truth of Longhand

This here study says people lie more in e-mail than they would in handwritten notes. By a lot. Hence, the following oblique and solipsistic connections: A) I have excellent handwriting (seriously) and B) I've been writing my writing-writing (as opposed to bloggery) by hand these days, for reasons both instinctive and mysterious. Which means A) I am uniquely poised to unearth, any day now, the Essential Truth of All Existence or, far more likely, B) nothing. (MSN)

Sunday Review of Links: 01.04.09

News & Opinion
...Here's a little hunch: what's brewing in the Arab world isn't going to yield a mellow distillation of "Yes-We-Can!" Centrism-in-Disguise. It's gonna taste a whole lot more like "Oh-No-You-Don't!" populism. (WaPo + PBS/Frontline)
...What exacting Israeli accountability on the "road" to "peace" might look like. (Newsweek)
...A Zen koan: if you don't have to pay for the news, is it really news? (Time)

Sports
...Big Brother NFL goes bottom-up to make its stadiums safer: "Text us your vote for the scariest hooligan in your section!" (NYT)

Books
...J.D. Salinger just turned 90. (NYT)
...Old (used books) + new[ish] (interwebs) = viable, at least for now. (WaPo)
...Curtis Sittenfeld so totally killed the market for Laura Bush's memoir. (New Yorker)

Alabamiana
...Pastor Jim says the Word won't fit on no bumper sticker. (Anniston Star)
...Birmingham-based media company Bedouins International is on a mission: change the world, one documentary at a time. (BhamNews/al.com)

Watch This!


A glib little interview with wirewalker Phillipe Petit and "Man on Wire" director James Marsh that proves what we already knew: if there's something weird and dangerous and oddly transcendent, Werner Herzog is gonna go sniff it out.

Charlie Rose Says, Thank You for Being a Friend*

Strange news from what appears to be the very lonely, insular world of Charlie Rose, whose heady interviews on the Education TeeVee separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to who gets to call themselves a full-fledged North American intellectual. Thing is, when you get so engaged in all the issues of the day -- as Mr. Rose has so clearly done for decades now -- you lose touch with all your friends. One way to address this inherent problem is to just randomly announce that they're dead. On TV. To every single full-fledged intellectual in North America. All 10,471 of them.

Cuz, you know, even if said friend(s) is/are still technically breathing and working and, you know, doing all the stuff that live people do, they're dead to you and that's all that really matters.

In all seriousness, what Chuck meant to say is that this poor schmoe is actually just his Facebook "friend," which would explain the fact that he doesn't really know him well enough to know whether he's alive or dead.

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* ("And if you threw a party / and invited everyone you knew, / you would see / the biggest gift would be from me / and the card attached would say: / 'I really thought you were dead!'")

Miami Is the New Shreveport, or They Threw an Orange Bowl and an Independence Bowl Broke Out!

Wilbon's mad that all the college bowl games are boring and they're spread out now, instead of them all being on New Year's Day like back in the day. An American tradition of pageantry and excessive passive-aggressive boob-tube consumption is ruined! I'm not sure how he can say that when The Ageless Great American Rock-and-Roll Band, The Doobie Brothers, played at half time of the Orange Bowl last night, whipping the less-than-capacity crowd into a confused, nacho-munching stupor. Without love, Michael Wilbon, where would you be now? Hmm? (PS: Go Hokies.) (WaPo)

Paul Bowles Presages the Blogger's Dilemma

I knew I was reading The Sheltering Sky for a reason! Right there on p. 199-200. PB (that's the back of his head up there) riffs about that age old question: To blog or not to blog?!

A journal, filled in each evening with the day's thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth at the beginning -- namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing -- should be clearly and calmly demonstrated....But then when he had got settled in the hotel, and they had started their little pattern of cafe life at the Eckmuhl-Noiseux, there had been nothing to write about -- he could not establish a connection in his mind between the absurd trivialities which filled the day and the serious business of putting words on paper....As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it....But that was all right. He would not have written well, and so he would have got no pleasure from it. And even if what he might have written had been good, how many people would have known it? It was all right to speed ahead into the desert leaving no trace.

Go on, Brother Paul! Preach it!!