Or, how to procrastinate at the end of the semester, but is this not what you get paid to do? Read?

Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West and the Fight Against Aids (Farrar Strauss, Giroux, 2007).

Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2006). From Democracy Now, interview with Hedges.

Bliss Broyard, One Drop (Little Brown, 2007).

Hari Kunzru, My Revolutions (Dutton, 2007). Review in The Guardian.

Peter Carey, His Illegal Self (Random House, 2008)

Davd Gilmour, The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son (Thomas Allen, 2007). Review at CBC .

Michael Eric Dyson, April 4, 1968: MLK Jr’s Death and How It Changed America (Basic Books, 2008)

Deepa Fernandes, Targeted: National Security and the Business of Immigration (Seven Stories Press, 2007).
Nice clip of her at Memphis NCMR on YouTube

Zachary Lazar -- Sway: A Novel (Little Brown, 2008).

A narrative wherein early Rolling Stones ca. Brian Jones till he gets booted from the band and drowns in a swimming pool while Anita P. runs with Keith and Mick learns how to sing and strut meets up with a middle-aged Kenneth Anger of cult films Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos (among many) notoriety who in turn is wanting to cast a young pre-Charlie Manson Bobby Beausoleil in Lucifer. Dark, at times funny, and remarkable that many of the real-life characters are still alive after imbibing that many drugs.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Wow, I knew Uncle Miltie was shady but I didn’t realize how deep his Chicago Boys went. Read Joseph Stiglitz’s review in The NY Times. I can’t wait to assign this book in one of my classes…

Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, 2006. NY: Norton.

Journalist Goldberg crossed the U.S. to examine how entrenched Christian fundamentalism has become in local, municipal, state and federal bureaucracies…in often subtle ways, but in other more egregious forms - from faith based initiatives (Bush’s gravy train) to abstinence only sex ed classes in high schools to debates over intelligent design to stripping away gay rights to the rise of mega-churches. Scary.

Read alongside Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher,

, a hilarious look at suburban sexual angst. I never finished it though….so I missed whether or not the two main characters ever resolved their tension and … did it. "It’s a book about abstinence, Mom, what do you think?"

Framing the Black Panthers, by Jane Rhodes. The New Press, 2007.
A fascinating look both at how the Panthers strategically used the mass media while creating their own iconography and newspaper, and how the U.S. (and international) media portrayed the Panthers during the late 60s-70s.

American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, by Bernard-Henri Levy. So The Atlantic Magazine asks BHL to tour the US just like the other frenchman did and record his observations about prisons, politics, and obesity. Occasionally very funny, sometimes dull, I kept thinking his needs a screenplay with a resurrected Jean-Paul Belmondo in a musical number.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta. Lusting for suburbia's sexual intrigue amidst wading pools, swing-sets, the neighborhood perv and online nasties?

Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. A stunning look at myth-making of heroes and some heroines (although back-to-the-stove was the new backlash there) after September 11, and the legacy of America's security myths from the 17thc to now. From the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson to

Nell Freudenberger's The Dissident, re Chinese performance artists in Beijing's East Village to cool pools in LA housing shrink-husbands and soccer-moms and the usual mixed up spoiled kids, and a visiting Chinese dissident artist. What is real, what is fake, what is authentic, what is plagiarism, what is art/love/beauty?

Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti (Seal Press, 2007). Subtitled A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters, this book, written by the founder of the spunky and newsworthy blog Feministing, should be required reading for all Grade 9 students in the US. OK, Canadians should read it too, but so much of the politics and backlash Valenti discusses are American-centric (e.g., access to affordable and ubiquitous healthcare, politics around repro rights, mat and pat policies, Congressional hijinks, etc).

Depressing politics aside, Valenti's upbeat nature and entreaties for social activism are encouraging. Makes me feel old, though. In 1972 I ran around my high school halls with a copy of Vivian Gornick's Woman in a Sexist Society and noone challenged me on that...

It's the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and the reissues and the tributes are pouring in, as with today's Sunday NY Times and Matt Weiland on reading K. twenty years ago and the Paper Cuts blog on Kerouac, including the original 1957 review of the book in the Times.

Sean O'Hagan in the Guardian reports on OTR's influence throughout the years, and how his legacy is being carried on -- or not. In production - a film, and now The Jack Kerouac Project, a clothing line by Hogan. You know, leather jackets that are new and chi-chi priced but you can get the more authentic cracked, stinky and ripped version in TO's Kensington Market.

Jack must be rolling in his grave.

Never doubt the influence, however, of OTR and beat lit on the formative psyche of American youth throughout the ages, including me some 30-odd years ago:

William Gibson's Spook Country, (Putnam, 2007).

His descriptions of everyday uses of technology have evolved from earlier fantasies of now commensensical realities to contemporary uses within art & culture - wardriving, mobile-VR locative art, ipods as data storage...

in a succinctness that is often hilariously low-key in its characterizations...referencing recent political events, news items and hip to mainstream and underground pop culture:

Hollis thought he looked a little like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot. His remaining hair neatly barbered. Seriously good dark overcoat. p. 294

T. Coraghessan Boyle (Penguin Books, 2006).

More than a 21st century tale of identity theft, the cross-country chase of Dana and Bridger across Middle America as depicted by Boyle is scathing and sticky. Here's the thief Peck in a western road resto:

Breakfast on the road was always the weakest link in the culinary chain, a kind of deprivation of the senses that reduced every possibility to a variant on eggs/sausage links/silver-dollar pancakes and maple-colored Karo syrup. It bored him. Made him angry...by the time they were sliding into the booth with its butt-warmed benches and the red Formica tabletop strewn with the refuse of the previous party, he was feeling murderous......She pointed to the next booth over, where a whole rat-pack of kids --six or seven of them -- dug into various ice-cream concoctions while their parents, two interchangeable couples with porcine faces and a lack of style that was nothing short of brutal, roared over their coffee and grease-splattered plates as if they'd been drunk for days." (p. 185-6)

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.
--Interview by Nick Horby with David Simon, the creater-writer-producer of HBO's brilliant The Wire, in the August 07 issue of The Believer.

Provocative and disturbing: The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in the July 30th issue of The Nation.

Read alongside excerpts of the brilliant Dispatches by Michael Herr abt his account of Viet Nam...published 30 years ago....

What if?

Miranda July's short story Roy Spivey in The New Yorker's Summer Fiction Issue.

A middle-aged woman recounts an experience she had sitting on a plane beside a Hollywood hearthrob years ago and wonders...what if...she had called him at his kids' nanny's personal line?

Sara Paretsky's Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso Books, 2007.

How do writers create and sustain the (fictional) voices that animate dedicated readers over decades; how do they imagine believable characters that embody morals within social and political currents, role models for these crazy and fractured times? I guess if I could be resurrected V.I. Warshawski would be one dame whose feet I'd love to fall into. And behind that tough dame is one tough writer, here vulnerable to all with her account of growing up in the midwest in the '50s and '60s, dealing with gender and racial politics in America, developing a core ethos later reflected in Warshawski, one of the few feminist lady 'dicks' that can run circles around the holey triumvirate of Marlowe-Spade-Hammer. The book's also about post-9/11 infringements - blatant and some sneakier than others -- on civil rights, freedom of expression... and the passion we need to maintain for these times.

James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar's Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, University of Toronto Press, 2007.

And another meditation on the '70s, (see extended entry)...

Seeing as it's a languid July en vacances, where the farthest I want to be in my mental space is thinking about pedagogy or the progress of my grad student's various theses, I admit to reading this book in chunks in between lighter fare, like the New Yorker's Summer Fiction Issue...

Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution....
Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz...
Dana Spiotto's Eat the Document (reviewed in NY Times )...

Megan Kelso's Watergate Sue in the Sunday NY Times Magazine
..read alongside the previous July's '70s crop:
Susan Choi's American Woman...
Neil Gordon's The Company You Keep...
Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind ...

Why are these men in dark suits smiling and chortling? It's 2003 and gawd bless america, they're signing the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. If you too have a visceral reaction to this image essential reading is Cristina Page's How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex. (NY: Perseus, 2006).

Page examines the discourses and debates amongst the pro-life movement and the pro-choice movement in the US. How, she asks, does the pro-life movement, with its alleged championing of 'life', serve to restrict women's access to birth control mechanisms that, yeah, stop the need for abortion? Birth control? Ha! For the pro-lifer's it a dirty 'lil word, and they'll just export that sensibility abroad. Or call for Abstinence, as the Vatican promotes the stance that using condoms is immoral, and the Bush Admin attempts to stop women's access to the emerg contraceptive Plan B ...I'm reeling in the years. Is this 1957?