"The only people for me are the mad ones..."

"... the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

A sentence written by Jack Kerouac, submitted in a contest to pick the best sentences, chosen as one of the 3 best sentences, by Stanley Fish, who has written a book called "How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One," which I just bought, and you could buy too, using this link, causing Amazon to send 8% of the purchase price to me and making me go "Awww!"

"'Call me garbage,' one of the twins said again. 'I dare you.'"

"'O.K.,' I said, trying, for once, to be a good mother. 'You’re garbage.'"

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" in the New Yorker. Bonus: An illustration by Barry Blitt. (Click my Barry Blitt tag if you can't remember by loving Barry Blitt.)

"In truth, Ms. Chua’s memoir is about one little narcissist’s book-length search for happiness."

"And for all its quotable outbursts from Mama Grisly (the nickname was inevitable), it will gratify the same people who made a hit out of the granola-hearted 'Eat, Pray, Love.'"

CORRECTION: Lord knows how I changed "Eat, Pray, Love" into "Hat, Pray, Love." Corrected. But laughing. I hate crap like "Eat, Pray, Love." "Hat, Pray, Love"? Shoulda been "Hate, Pray, Love."

Bob Dylan will write 6 books.

Seeking an 8-figure sum, he got a deal with Simon & Shuster for an undisclosed amount.

Does the old man have 6 books in him? There are 2 more volumes of "Chronicles" to come. I loved Volume 1. A third book will be a compilation of dialogue from his "Theme Time" radio show (so that's something that doesn't need to be written). What are the other 3 books? Photographs, letters, song lyrics... coffee table type gift books. How hard can it be, really? Writing Volumes 2 and 4 of "Chronicles" will be difficult. I'm not suggesting he's cashing in and taking us for a ride. 8-figures? Sure. Give it to him.

Stanley Fish finds "a unity" to Sarah Palin book "America by Heart," but "it is not one Palin proclaims or works out discursively."

NYT readers will have their Sarah Palin processed through the Mind of Fish:

Rather, the unity is conveyed by the quotations that carry the argument, long (sometimes two-page) quotations from an impressive variety of authors, quotations that are strong in isolation and even stronger when they are laid next to one another. The book is really an anthology. The author does not present herself as controlling or magisterial; she gives her authorities space and then she gets out of the way. Her performance mimes the book’s lesson: rather than acting as a central authority, she lets individual voices speak for themselves. Humility is not something Palin is usually credited with, but here she enacts it by yielding the stage as others proclaims the truths she wants us to carry away.

Sarah Palin is doing something that is, perhaps, pure genius, and it takes the brilliant professor to say what she is doing so that the ideas are apparent even to New York Times readers, who are well-defended against the notion that Palin is anything but stupid. Even slapped in the face by Fish...



... they resist. I'll be the professor translating the diverse items into a unity for your easy consumption: NOOOOOOOOO! Favorite way of saying "no": surely, the book was actually written by Bill Ayers some ghostwriter.

"If you’re going to be a diva, then own it."

Says David Lat:

Was this lesson was lost on Yale law professor Amy Chua, the author of an incendiary essay in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, and a new book about Eastern versus Western parenting styles, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother?...

After her controversial essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers and hard-ass Asian parenting set the blogosphere on fire — and sent her book rocketing to #5 on the Amazon bestseller list — Chua backtracked a bit, instead of defiantly standing her ground....

Lat read the book and says the WSJ piecce is "a collection of the book’s most inflammatory, anti-Western-parenting portions, collected from far-flung chapters" that "lacks the nuance and the narrative arc of Chua’s full memoir." Nevertheless, the WSJ piece got the book immense attention (including the attention she's as she remakes her image), so how can she complain?

What troubles me about the book is the idea that other parents, with less good sense and less naturally talented children, will extract advice that will lead to child abuse... or something close to it. Children need to play to develop their minds. They need to find intrinsic delight in their experiences. What good is hyper-achievement for its own sake?

The Story of O.

There's this one and this one.

Both written by authors who hid their identity... as to the second one:

Washington is awash with rumours over the identity of the anonymous author of a new novel written by an Obama insider.

Oh, blah. Does anyone really care? As to the first one, people cared intensely!

"'I couldn’t be a woman,' Steve Martin once joked, 'because I’d play with my breasts all day.'"

"Now he has written a novel about a young woman, but nearly the only thing he can imagine about her is wanting to play with her breasts. The Object of Beauty is a nasty exercise in narcissism, particularly in the narcissism of the famous."

A nasty review that considers a book nasty because it seems only to say look at my breasts begins with 2 sentences that say look at my breasts.

What do you think of Ron Reagan's "My Father at 100"?

I'm noticing this book because Instapundit did one of his "IN THE MAIL" posts that acknowledge the receipt of a free book but express no opinion. Sending one free book is a frightfully cheap way to buy publicity. I get free books, but I wouldn't post about them unless I took the time to form some kind of opinion about them, and sending me a free book is a frightfully cheap way to buy my time, the time it would take to form an opinion of a book.

But I don't even need to look beyond the author and title of Ron Reagan's "My Father at 100" to form an opinion. It annoys me. I've seen too much — not all that much — TV commentary by Ron Reagan to want to read a book he wrote about the iconic conservative President. Example:

Reagan: My father knew what he stood for, you can agree with it or disagree with it, he knew how -- what he stood for, he could explain what he stood for. He was conversant in domestic and foreign policy -- [Sarah Palin is] neither! She can't explain where she stands on anything!

Geller: Your father would love her, and frankly I don't think you can speak for your father, because you -- you don't even espouse --

Reagan: No, Pam, actually, have you ever met my father, Pam? Pam, did you ever meet my father?... Did you ever meet my father? I'm asking you a simple question. You can't answer that because the answer is no. So why don't you rely on someone who knew him very well to tell you what he would think of Sarah Palin.

Yes, the 100th anniversary of his birth is an occasion, an excuse, but the birthdayness of it also says: twaddle.

"In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: ... And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy."

A book title... on the list of things readers have bought via my Amazon portal...




... which I encourage you to use, of course, in case you're looking for a way to show your love for Althouse, the blog... and Althouse, the chick.

Now, I'm doing a search inside that book — it's by Adam Corolla — and — what can I look for? — shorts! What does Corolla have to say about men in shorts?

When the Patriot Act cam back in the news in 2005, every single one of my faggoty, lefty Hollywood friends squealed like a stuck pig. "I don't want the government eavesdropping on my e-mail exchanges or listening in on my cell-phone conversations." Everyone had their cargo shorts in a bunch over it. I was the only one I knew who was like, "Hey, Agent Double-O Douchebag, if the government intercepts any of your e-mails all they're going to find out is that you're not funny. And how about spending a little less time worrying about the government and a little more time focusing on your narcissistic disorder, the one that leads you to believe the government actually gives a shit about you."

It's dangerous for a comedian to do a riff about how other people are not funny. He'd better be seriously funny at that point or he's asking for it.

Anyway, cargo shorts... wear them, guys, to walk toward the future in which you will all be chicks.

"Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless."

"I once spent an evening chatting about the complexity of modern relationships with a male acquaintance, his ex-girlfriend, and her roommate. When I went to bed that night, I thought our conversation had been wonderful. Twelve hours later, I was informed that the ex-girlfriend spent the entire evening 'in a rage,' apparently becasue the other male in our foursome had been 'brooding and surly,' creating a tension that subsequently made the ex-girlfriend's roommate 'completely uncomfortable' with the nature of our dialogue. I never noticed any of this. .I never have any idea how people feel; they always appear fine to me. But if somebody had pointedly played Pat Benatars 'Love is a Battlefield' that night, I'm sure I could have constructed some empathy."

From Chuck Klosterman's  "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" (comparing the TV shows "Big Brother" and "The Real World")

With the arrest of Professor David Epstein for incest, let's revisit the praise for the 1997 father-daughter incest memoir "The Kiss."

I've already started the conversation here about David Epstein. (I show you that Justice Scalia has explained the law on the subject: A father has a constitutional right to have sexual intercourse with his adult, consenting daughter.) I know most of the commentary around the web amounts to little more than ugh. (Come on, people. Hasn't the Supreme Court taught you by now that your disgust is not a proper foundation for law?) Now, let's move this conversation forward. There was a time, it was during the Clinton administration, 1997, when a golden literary light shone on the subject of incest. There was a "beautifully written memoir" by Kathryn Harrison that everyone was talking about:

Her narrative is spare and stark, written in a present tense that perfectly conveys how her experience happened ''out of time as well as out of place.'' ''We meet at airports,'' she begins, plunging the reader straight into the hell of the incestuous affair. ''We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us. . . . these nowheres and notimes are the only home we have.''

Then she goes back to the start of her experience, when she first meets her estranged father as an adult. ''My father looks at me, then, as no one has ever looked at me before.'' Having not seen her since 10 years earlier, when she was 10, he is enthralled by her resemblance to him. When she drives him to the airport, he kisses her goodbye and ''pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn.''

She writes: ''In years to come, I'll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is the point at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed. It's the drug my father administers in order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed.''

"The Kiss" — makes a great Christmas gift for Dad.

"Palin is still talking about how much she loves C. S. Lewis."

"What is up with this? Chunky Bobo is always talking about C. S. Lewis too. Is he the new Edmund Burke? I read a bunch of C. S. Lewis books when I was a kid and I don’t see what makes them so conservative, aside from all the Jeebus stuff."

Sayeth DougJ. For a couple of seconds, I was all "who's Chunky Bobo?" but I figured it out.

***

Here's there underlying story about Palin. (She's on Barbara Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People of 2010." Ah, but how influential is she in Madison ?)

Here's a really nice — giftable — book collecting the works of C.S. Lewis. And here's a "daily readings" collection. And here's "The Portable Edmund Burke."

Justice John Paul Stevens writes about the death penalty in the New York Review of Books.

The book under review is David Garland's "Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition." The review itself is much more of a straightforward summary of the book than the usual NYRB essay. Toward the end:

To be reasonable, legislative imposition of death eligibility must be rooted in benefits for at least one of the five classes of persons affected by capital offenses.

First, of course, are victims. By definition murder victims are no longer alive and so have no continuing interest.

That's all he says about the victims! They're already dead. As if making murder a heavily punished crime doesn't prevent some people from becoming victims. Recent research undermines the convenient old assumption that the death penalty has no deterrent effect.  Stevens says nothing about that because, I suspect, Garland doesn't.

In the UK, a 15-year-old girl is arrested for burning the Koran — and posting a video of her conduct/speech on Facebook.

This is happening in the U.K.!

It is thought the girl, who lives in the Sandwell Council area, was allegedly filmed setting the booklet alight while other pupils watched.

Booklet?

It is understood that the group who published that version of the Koran have since been to the school to talk to pupils.

Were Korans distributed by public school officials? Under what circumstances? If you want a book to be treated with respect, don't hand it out free to teenagers. Maybe the school officials should be arrested.

Bob Badham, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council cabinet member for education, said he had visited the school and believed the atmosphere was generally good among pupils. He added that he did not believe there was a "deeper problem" in the area.

Is contempt for religious indoctrination a "deeper problem" that government should concern itself with? I think the deeper problem is that government officials in the U.K. seem to have lost touch with basic principles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

"In 'Satisfaction' I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded."

"I'd already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, this is gonna be in the horn line. But we didn't have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that's the sound that caught everybody's imagination. Next thing I know, we're listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, 'Hit of the Week,' and we didn't even know Andrew had put the fucking thing out! At first I was mortified. As far as I was concerned that was just the dub.... And I learned that lesson — sometimes you can overwork things."

That's Keith Richards, in his autobiography, "Life," learning a lesson about spontaneity and minimalism. (Page 177.)

Here's the Otis Redding version, with the horns as Richards had originally intended. Speaking of intent, I don't think Richards intended to imply a criticism of Redding's version, only to tell the story of how he produced the sound we hear on the Rolling Stones original recording. He's essentially giving himself a double compliment: 1. I imagined the full orchestration that the best soul music people of the time produced, and 2. I ingeniously used the guitar (with a Gibson fuzz tone pedal) to produce that sound and outdid them by cranking it all out quickly.

But Richards did, backhandedly, put down Otis Redding. You can overwork things. 

I talk to Jacob Weisberg about his book "Palinisms."

Why "Palinisms" after his famous "Bushisms" — why not "Obamisms"? And many other questions:



If you'd like to buy the book, go here.

ADDED: If you need the pause button or other controls, watch the video here.

"How Bad Are Bananas?"

"The Carbon Footprint of Everything."

Oh, the carbon footprint... What a diverse range of possibilities ran through my head when I saw the question "How Bad Are Bananas?" And how dreary the reality: The carbon footprint. Of everything.

"Mark Twain had a very tender heart."

"He liked to say nasty things – he's really good at it – but he didn't like the idea of being there when the person heard them, and was hurt by them!"

An interesting definition of a tender heart!

***

Please use this link if you want to buy Mark Twain's autobiography.

"There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book," says Patti Smith, winning the National Book Award.

Last night, in the nonfiction category, for her memoir "Just Kids" about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe:

Accepting the award to applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up as she recalled her days as a clerk in the Scribner bookstore as a young woman.

“I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

Congratulations to Patti Smith. She's a longtime favorite of mine.

I used to hang out in bookstores and buy piles of books. Nowadays, I hang out of the internet, and though I read many, many hours a day, it's mostly on the computer screen. When I've had enough screen time, I like to listen to audiobooks. There are 27 audiobooks in my iPhone at the moment. But I do occasionally choose to have my reading in old-fashioned book form. This year, of the few books I bought, one was "Just Kids."

I'm not really into the romanticism of the physical object that is the book. I think the internet is more beautiful than a book. But is the internet "in our material world"?