Category: books

04 Feb

Growing Up on the Farm

I grew up on a dairy farm. Well, it wasn’t a dairy farm when I lived there, but at one time it was.

I just finished reading “Stories From Floris,” a collection of essays written by people who grew up in the same area I did during the early- to mid-1900s. Back then it was all farm land, but except for a few remaining landmarks all that is left are subdivisions and shopping centers.

My neighborhood, Copper Crossing, was built on the land once known as Blossom Hill. A woman who grew up there said her family “had dairy and beef cattle, pigs, poultry, dogs and cats, and a Chincoteague pony.” There are plenty of dogs and cats still there, but in all my years I can honestly say I never saw a Chincoteague pony roaming our streets.

While many of the essays followed the same formula of naming every person ever related to anyone who set foot on each piece of land, it was neat hearing some of the things that never changed. Kids at Blossom Hill played tag at dusk, running around on the same ground that me and my friends used to play flashlight tag on summer nights.

Children also used the many hills in the area for sledding in the winter, doing their best to stay out of the creek that ran through the property. Across the street from my house was a great sledding hill, which with a little more speed than we could ever muster would have landed us in those chilly waters (I may have fallen in once while trying to walk on some ice).

The first person to settle that land came in 1742, when the property was part of Loudon County. Today it is in Fairfax County — a change that unfortunately cost me many snow days as a kid since our neighbors to the west always seemed to have school canceled when we didn’t.

Almost all of the essays lamented the way things have changed. There was an incredible sense of community and a way of life the writers really missed in our modern times. Where their farms once sprawled across the Floris area (now Oak Hill, or Herndon), now there are hundreds of homes packed together.

I put together a quick slide show of the area today, where neighborhoods and shopping centers bear the names of old family farms:

Of course, one nice thing about our community is that there are still some links to the past.

Just across from my neighborhood is the Frying Pan Meeting House, a worship space built in 1791 that hosted services until the late 1960s. Behind the building is a small cemetery where many of the area’s early settlers are buried.

Up the street is a church built in 1895 that served as the main congregation among Floris residents. Today the building — with a few additions — is a Korean Presbyterian Church.

One of my favorite places is Frying Pan Park, a working 1920s-1950s era farm that gives a sense of what the surrounding area was like during that time. It has historical farm equipment, a collection of animals and a nature trail that is one of the most peaceful places I have found to run.

On the park land there are a few buildings left from the early school system. The 1911 Floris Elementary School is there, as well as a 1921 building that high school boys used to learn tractor repair and woodworking (I attended the newer elementary school just up the street, which was built in 1954).

One of those boys wrote about his incredible role in the community, which we might want to think about bringing back today. He was involved in the Future Farmers of America, played on the football team and during his junior and senior years of high school drove the school bus.

That’s right, a high school student was in charge of picking up his classmates and getting them safely to school. I can’t decide if that system today would result in fewer or more surly bus drivers.

If I had read this book a few years ago — when I actually got it — I could have shared a picture of the community’s general store, which also for a time served as the post office. The store and an adjacent house later became a furniture store, which continued to operate when I lived there. A two-lane main road ran just past the store, but became a traffic bottleneck to wider parts of the road on either side. The road eventually needed to be widened, and while the four-lane road is nice, the chain link fence that runs alongside is not as quaint as the historic structure that had to be knocked down.

A look at some of the pieces that remain:

A quick shoutout to friend AV’s blog, Multimediating101.com, where I read about both the free slideshow creation site I used here as well as the type of camera that took the pictures.

By cjhannas books home Uncategorized
23 Jan

Foundation of Sand

With all of the books I have read in my life, I have never regretted reading one because of its physical size.

Until now.

The first book of 2011 was John Grisham’s “The Last Juror,” a story about a young guy who buys a newspaper in a small Southern town where a horrifying murder happens. From the title you can probably get that the resulting trial is a big part of the story.

What isn’t big is the book itself — its 486 pages are contained in a roughly 4×7 inch paperback package. As the last book of a year, this wouldn’t be a problem. I’m not an engineer, but if the towers of books I built during past years are any indication, I could have some issues down the road:

The 2009 stack

The potentially disastrous base of 2011

The book itself is what you would expect from a multi-best-selling mystery/thriller author who basically has his own shelf at Barnes & Noble. Since this one involved a main character running a weekly newspaper, I was able to connect with some of the “slower” portions of the story.

I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the journalistic standards the newspaper editor, Willy, held himself too. Basically if he thought what he was saying could be right, and he wanted that to be the truth, he went with it.

The main crime involves the rape and murder of a mother with two small children who were in the house at the time. Relying on an unnamed source, Willy described the house and “estimated that the children’s beds were about thirty feet from their mother’s.”

He goes on to write that “experts” say it is unlikely the children would testify at trial — his expert being one of the reporters at his newspaper. I’m not saying this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s certainly not what we learn at journalism school.

Writing for a weekly newspaper can be very different from a news outlet with daily deadlines. If you cover something five days before the story has to be written, there isn’t the same energy and pressure to write your piece right away.

The man accused of the mother’s murder (who is arrested in the first chapter — no spoilers) goes on trial and the jury reaches a verdict. Even though he has several days before his deadline, Willy goes directly to his office and begins “typing with a fury” in order to capture the moment.

When I was in college, I wrote for our weekly newspaper, which had a Thursday afternoon deadline. I covered mostly sports, which involved going to a lot of basketball and volleyball games on Saturdays and Tuesdays. At first, I rarely wrote about the Saturday games right after they happened because I had so much time and more fun things to do those nights.

But then I discovered how much better the stories were when I captured them rather than interpreting them through my notes. There was a different energy to walking directly back to my dorm, sitting down at my desk and writing about the game without having to rely on what I had scribbled down.

Because of the genre, I don’t want to say anything more about the story. It’s not a physically solid book for foundation purposes, but storywise I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

By cjhannas books Uncategorized
31 Dec

Tell Me a Story

A few years ago I challenged myself to read 20 books in one year, kept a record of all of my reading and on December 31 took a step back to recap the year that was.

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By cjhannas book recap books nerdness
31 Dec

Nobody Likes Milhouse!

I like “The Simpsons.”

That actually might not capture my true feelings. Let me try again.

I just read a 430-page book about “The Simpsons.”

Chris Turner’s “Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation” is a discussion of the social impacts of the show, both the factors that brought it to popularity and the reflections of our world depicted in Springfield.

It’s not a book solely for super Simpsons nerds, since Turner gives a enough background with his show references that even those who haven’t seen a particular episode can follow along. Though most of the important points he makes seem to reference Season 7, so maybe watch that first.

His discussion veers into pop/political/tech influences as whole, whether that’s early ’90s indie filmmakers (Tarantino/Rodriguez/Coens), the music of Nirvana or the early Internet culture. At times it’s easy to forget the book is ostensibly about “The Simpsons,” but all of that background helps to give the show a context.

I took away three major arguments from the book — Homer as America, Consumerism is King (or not), and Culture: Reflected or Absorbed?

Homer as America

Homer Simpson is brash, selfish, loud and inflexible in his beliefs. He does what serves his life at that moment the best, or what he thinks is best for those around him. The consequences of those actions on others are not important. He is a force in the town — what he does affects everyone and nobody has a choice in the matter.

Turner argues Homer is an allegory of America. What the United States does (good/bad/well-meaning/successful) has a great impact on the rest of the world, whether that involves economic policy, military action or FCC policy.

More importantly, there is an acceptance of that force, a resignation by the people of Springfield/the world that this is just another factor in their lives that isn’t going to change soon. It’s what Homer’s friend Lenny would call “Homer being Homer.”

But it is the show’s ability to lampoon that type of influence through the Homer character that Turner argues makes it not only popular in the U.S., but especially so abroad.

“The show can look, at times, like a pirate broadcast from inside the palace gates, the work of double agents whose sympathies might well lie as much with those caught under America’s thumb as with the people in charge,” Turner writes. “In the realm of mainstream, mass-market American pop disseminated worldwide, ‘The Simpsons’ is — by a wide margin — American society’s most strident critic.”

Just before this section, however, he also notes the work of a Mexican scholar who says that for those who see life in America as a perfect, unattainable example, the show serves to put the reality of American life within reach.

Consumerism is King (or not)

Besides creating a deep character universe that allows for boundless realistic storytelling, it is the underlying satirical take on many aspects of our culture that keeps the show running. Turner highlights the show’s railing against rampant consumerism and its ill effects. The copy I have is dated 2004, so the commentary is post-dotcom bubble, but pre-financial meltdown.

One interesting thing for me in reading this book is the description of the early years of the show. I was certainly alive in the early ’90s, but I wasn’t exactly plugged into everything that was going on.

In describing the boom in the SUV-driving culture, Turner talks about an episode in which Marge Simpson gets a behemoth Canyonero. It’s the typical over-the-top vehicle for a mom who’s really just driving to the grocery store and soccer practice, yet has the vehicular capability of taking on a small army in any terrain on Earth. The result is a feeling of protection inside her tank-like car, and a mean case of road rage.

Turner argues the me-me-me/SUV culture more or less created a boom in road rage, “which barely existed before 1990.” This struck me as a crazy statement — but being only 7 years old in 1990, I have little reference of what it was like to drive at the time. The statement seemed like one of those short-sighted ideas we hear so often that something today is the best, worst, biggest, most outrageous that has ever been without a true comparison with history.

But I could be wrong.

Another of the show’s examples has Bart visiting the local mall, which is made up mostly of Starbucks stores. He walks into a piercing store and is warned by an employee to act fast, “because in five minutes this place becomes a Starbucks.”

I spent some time working at a mall in a Washington, D.C., suburb that had two Starbucks locations when I started. Those stores are at either end of the same wing, no more than a five-minute walk from each other. Of course, that’s a ridiculous spacing for coffee stores. Good thing they later installed a third Starbucks store, right in the middle.

A final piece of the modern consumer puzzle is the ad gimmick. In Springfield, that is best personified by DuffMan, a character who exists entirely to promote Duff beer. Turner draws a parallel to Budweiser and its early ’90s ad campaign featuring Spuds MacKenzie. We wonder sometimes why we hang onto certain items, but the moment I read that section I felt vindicated in carrying this item from house to house as I moved over the years:

God Bless America.

Culture: Reflected or Absorbed?

“The Simpsons” is a show that at certain times during its run has been criticized by many groups who say it is a bad influence. Turner draws parallels between that thread of argument and the backlash against rapper Emimen. Turner says critics who blasted Eminem’s work “implicitly argued that pop culture was not a mirror of society but [rather] its engine.”

That is, the things artists/musicians/filmmakers/writers create are not a reflection of the values/events of society, but rather the things that drive those events and define those values.

At first, I totally disagreed with that statement. But it was one of those lines I re-read, and thought about for a little while. I would argue it’s much more in the middle, a kind of give-and-take. Art reflects society, which can then shape it, and further reflect it. It’s an on-going process in which both entities feed off one another, like the Moon going around the spinning Earth as both revolve around the Sun.

Turner says one of the factors in the show’s longevity is that unlike non-animated shows, we don’t see the actors in other roles or in real life. If you watch The Office, you see the character Michael Scott. But you also see actor Steve Carrell in movies, on Access Hollywood, on Leno or maybe at Starbucks. Every character he plays carries not only his real persona, but a history of all of his other roles.

With the residents of Springfield, you would be hard-pressed to find people who actually know what the actors look like. It is only the character that we know, and “we will not get sick of seeing them hawking crap on every other TV channel, nor of reading about their on-again, off-again romances with J.Lo or their painful struggles with alcoholism. We’ll never know anything about their lavish estates in the Hollywood Hills.”

Of course, to some members of Springfield, that anonymity is a ridiculous expectation for any celebrity.

Homer: “I believe that famous people have a debt to everyone. If celebrities didn’t want people pawing through their garbage and saying their gay, they shouldn’t have tried to express themselves creatively.”

My only real beef with Turner’s work is in his recreation of a certain scene in which he left out what is one of the show’s greatest lines.

Turner is talking about the characters’ ability to go immediately from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other. In this case, Springfield has a bear sighting, and naturally the citizens are incensed that the government/police aren’t doing enough to protect them from bears. When the city creates a bear task force, and an accompanying tax to pay for it, the people are equally angry that they have to actually pay for the service they demand.

Homer (upon receiving the tax bill): “Let the bears pay the bear tax! I already pay the Homer tax!”
Lisa: “Dad, that’s the home-owner tax.”

Homer is by far the most popular character, perhaps because of his logic skills. For me, he’s got nothing on the comedic genius that is Milhouse Van Houten.

And yes, I did write this entry while drinking out of a Simpsons cup:

By cjhannas books Simpsons Uncategorized
24 Dec

Heavenly Pastures

I finished John Steinbeck’s “The Pastures of Heaven” several weeks ago, but have been wholly uninspired to post its requisite entry here.

That’s not a knock on the text itself; it’s just one of those that didn’t bring up much that had me thinking afterward. I only marked one page, and that was in the introduction section written by someone else.

It turns out that before becoming a successful writer, Steinbeck had some interesting jobs. After failing to establish his writing career in New York, he pushed wheelbarrows of concrete for the construction of Madison Square Garden. I don’t think you’ll see Stephenie Meyer doing that. (Sidenote: Stephenie with three E’s? Come on…)

Usually with authors I have read before, I mention the other works and link to those posts. But since I have quite a few Steinbeck books in my recent reading history I’ll point out the search function of the blog. It’s easy to miss, but in the top left there’s a box that searches my entire archives. So you could just plug in “Steinbeck” for those posts, or have some fun looking up things like “Helga” or “snow.”

Given that it’s Christmas Eve, I have a present for you (actually for my sister):

I spent a solid hour constructing it, and wish I took a picture of the underlying cardboard frame before I put the paper on. Probably safe to say she won’t guess what’s inside. Also safe to say I have too much time on my hands.

By cjhannas books Christmas Uncategorized
28 Nov

Just Crazy Enough to be True

[Note: This post got really long, so I used some sub-heads if you want to skip to different portions — Unabomber’s Lament near the end is probably the most interesting point]

Some of the books I read have really nothing to with my everyday life, and after I write about them here I don’t think about them again.

Chuck Klosterman’s “Eating The Dinosaur” is not one of those books. I finished reading it last week and already I have brought up some of Klosterman’s points in two separate conversations.

I guess you could describe Klosterman as a culture critic, or as one of the blurbs says, “pop-culture philosopher.” Basically he has spent some time thinking about things that are culturally relevant to people alive today. That means discussing the “reality” of art using Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo or the way technology effects us with the Unabomber’s manifesto. In short, his examples bring to mind phrases like, “I saw that movie,” “I have that album” or “I remember when that guy got arrested.”

Talk To Me

One of the early themes in the book is the nature of interviews, and the relationship between interviewers and their subjects. Klosterman writes that as journalists, we ask questions in interviews that we would never ask of our friends or in any normal conversation. And yet, people answer. They accept the “acceleration of intimacy” and open up to someone they usually have never met.

So why do celebrities, public officials and everyday people involved in newsworthy events respond to interviewers? Klosterman writes, “People answer questions because it feels strange to do the opposite.”

If you’ve never conducted an interview, this is a key point to understand. We feel naturally compelled to answer questions when people ask. A really effective technique as an interviewer is to wait a second or two after you think the person is done giving an answer before launching into your next question. What happens is this moment where they finish, and then feel compelled to keep going and add onto their response. Why? It feels strange to sit there when someone seems interested in what you’re saying.

One of the aforementioned conversations about the book was with my younger brother as we drove to and from New Jersey this weekend. With his iPod on shuffle, we heard a lot of songs from bands who were once very popular but now have disappeared from the music landscape.

Think about a band like Creed. Today it is popular to say you don’t like Creed and can’t understand why anyone ever would. But in 2000-01, you liked Creed. If the song “My Own Prison” came on the radio today with no one else around, you would nod along and enjoy yourself. If someone walked in the room you would change the station and say you’ve always hated Creed. But in 2000, the band had the 4th-highest selling record in the U.S., and a year later had another album in the Top 10. You could make similar statements about bands like Hootie & The Blowfish, Maroon 5 and Limp Bizkit.

Beauty In The Eye

Then again, any form of art is open to interpretation. In later essays, Klosterman writes about director Wong Kar-Wai’s “terrible” film “My Blueberry Nights,” which I happened to really enjoy. That may be partially explained by the presence of both Norah Jones and Natalie Portman, but I found the story interesting as well. He’s also clearly not a fan of the CBS geek comedy “The Big Bang Theory,” which my DVR is set to automatically record each week. But whatever. I know from his previous works that he is a big fan of the band KISS, which I could care less about.

Before reading the book I had heard it was a sort of return to the style of his earlier “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” (SDCP). I would partially agree, but would say “Eating The Dinosaur” is much more of a critical selection of essays with less overt humor. Where SDCP is non-stop hilarious for pages at a time, this book is peppered with just a few funny sentences that break up more serious discussion.

I’ll use the same device and provide some examples to break up my longer piece.

Last year, one of the books I read was George Orwell’s “1984,” which I had originally read in high school. I wrote then how different it seemed to read it the second time. Klosterman had a similar experience with H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine.”

“It became my favorite novel for the next two years, but solely for textual reasons: I saw no metaphorical meaning in the narrative. It was nothing except plot, because I was a fucking sixth grader.” He goes on to describe how as a 30-year-old he tapped into the metaphorical side.

In an essay complaining about the use of canned laughter in television sitcoms, he gives a great modern way to tell someone to shove it. “Perhaps you think that railing against canned laughter is like complaining that nuclear detonations are bad for the local bunny population. I don’t care. Go read a vampire novel.”

Miley-Mania

For those who can’t understand why Miley Cyrus is popular or why so many people watch shows like “The Hills” and “Jersey Shore,” Klosterman has your answer. Certain pop-culture phenomenons that many may describe as “idiotic” or “trashy” serve a few important functions in our culture. “They allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not,” he says. “They allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider.” Basically, we don’t need to care about Britney Spears, but she gave us something to talk about and bond over as a society.

Unabomber’s Lament

Probably the most interesting section of the book is Klosterman’s discussion of the Unabomber, a.k.a. Ted Kaczynski. I have to admit that even though I was very much aware of Kaczynski when he was arrested, I had no idea why he was called the Unabomber. As Klosterman points out, most of his bombing targets were (UN)iversities and (A)irlines.

He is quick to point out that Kaczynski is a psychopath who clearly has destructive ideas. But in analyzing the manifesto Kaczynski insisted be published in the Washington Post and New York Times, Klosterman finds the psychopath does have some good points about how technology — more specifically, the Internet — is affecting our culture.

“Even though he deserves to die in jail, Kaczynski’s thesis is correct: Technology is bad for civilization. We are living in a manner that is unnatural. We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. The benefits of technology are easy to point out (medicine, transportation, the ability to send and receive text messages during Michael Jackson’s televised funeral), but they do not compensate for the overall loss of humanity that is its inevitable consequence.”

I was talking with a co-worker last week about the way things like Facebook and smartphones have changed the way we interact, and not always for the better. Kaczynski would say those are technologies that we created, and now feel an obligation to use in a cycle that continues to perpetuate itself.

As my co-worker cited about herself, we can’t sit in a waiting room without reflexively pulling out our phones to have a text conversation or update our status to let everyone know we are sitting in a waiting room. That changes the way we communicate, and the way we experience the world around us. Gone are those times where we sit quietly and reflect on something or enjoy moments of being completely disconnected from the pace of everyday life.

I am certainly guilty of this trend. While writing this admittedly long post, I have checked on my fantasy football team, Facebook and Twitter, all while watching a football game on TV.

Even More Technology

If you want more on the way technology is shaping us, both beneficially and not, I’ll leave you with two interesting pieces:

Frontline: Digital Nation

WNYC’s Radiolab podcast: What Does Technology Want?

By cjhannas books Norah Jones technology Uncategorized
12 Nov

Star-Cross’d Story

People on the Metro are passively nosy, which is perfectly acceptable given the confined space and general boring nature of sitting in a rail car.

But sometimes I wish there were a way to announce to everyone you are open to clearing up any misconceptions they may have formed about you. Never was that more true than the past two weeks, as I sat on the train reading a bright yellow book with the words “Juliet, Naked” emblazoned across the front.

The book is the latest by Nick Hornby, and the title is actually quite PG — a clever play on the title of an album from one of the main characters. I think I may have dog-eared a record number of pages, including the first ever double-dog-ear. I actually had to stop and think about how best to accomplish that feat and settled on doing the top of one side of the page and the bottom of the other side.

Hornby’s strength is in the way his characters interact, and being able to have them push the story along both by themselves and in their collective interaction. This story is no different, as two sets of people on two continents play out somewhat parallel situations. They include an aging musician, his die-hard fan and the fan’s “girlfriend.” The girl exists, it’s just that their situation is hard to define.

Three quick notes before I get into what I think will be more substantive points:

1. In one scene the girl, Annie, is sitting at the kitchen table reading The Guardian. If you’ve never read it, you’re missing out on one of the better newspapers out there.

2. She works at a local museum that is putting on a retrospective exhibit about the town in 1964. Someone sends them a picture “with a little girl standing next to a Punch and Judy booth.” A month ago I would have no idea what that meant, but thanks to the last book I read, I actually knew what they were talking about.

3. The musician, Tucker, is getting set to host a daughter he has never met and went to the store to get some food. As a former hot dog addict, I appreciated his grocery store train of thought: “The trouble was that even young female carnivores wouldn’t eat red meat. Well, hot dogs were pinky orange. Did pinky orange count as red? He was pretty sure the strange hue was chemical rather than sanguine. Vegeterians could eat chemicals, right?”

When I say that the fan, Duncan, is a fan of Tucker’s work, that’s really an understatement. Tucker’s work defines Duncan’s life. A large part of Duncan’s everyday routine revolves around a website for Tucker fans, even though Tucker hasn’t made any new music in 20 years. They discuss every aspect of the music, but in true modern fashion also delve into Tucker’s personal life. Since Tucker hasn’t been seen in public since disappearing from the music scene, most of the information is complete conjecture.

While considering what he perceives as an intrusion into his life, Tucker thinks to himself, “If you wanted to get into people’s living rooms, could you then object if they wanted to get into yours?”

That is, if your goal is to get famous and have your work become a part of people’s lives, can you expect them to accept that as a one-way transaction? If you’re a Kardashian, and you have a television show that purports to follow your real life, can you get mad if someone takes a picture of you at the grocery store?

I’m all for respecting people’s privacy — it’s really none of my business what the Kardashians are eating for breakfast. But when you voluntarily break down that wall and define your public interaction in that way, it’s hard to adequately discern exactly where the line should be.

Later, Duncan talks about Tucker’s musical contributions and says he doesn’t think Tucker really appreciates his own work. “I don’t think people with talent necessarily value it,” he says, “because it all comes so easy to them, and we never value things that come easy to us.”

How many people do you know who downplay what are clearly great talents? They may not be composing a Beethoven-esque concerto, but you think, “If only they did something with ____.” In a world where the Kardashians are famous for…whatever they are famous for, maybe we need to recalibrate the way we recognize and develop talent.

Two quick final items:

At one point Duncan is having a bit of a life crisis and wants to “try to grab the steering wheel back from the maniac who seemed to be driving his life.”

Without revealing any plot points, page 395 holds further proof that women are crazy.

For those scoring at home, this is book No. 15 of the year. As in years past, aiming for the 20 range, but not sure that’s in the cards for 2010.

By cjhannas books metro Uncategorized
30 Oct

Talking Retro

I always enjoy when people recommend books to me, but for some reason it always takes me forever to get around to reading those titles.

Ralph Keyes’ “I Love It When You Talk Retro” is a prime example. My friend Jaclyn turned me onto it, probably a year ago, but I just now found time for it in my reading schedule.

It’s not like I was dubious about the recommendation since she has told me about several other books that I thoroughly enjoyed. I guess we can just say my procrastination abilities are quite strong.

The book is all about retroterms — those words that refer to a “person, a product, a past bestseller, an old radio or TV show, an athletic contest, a comic strip, an acronym, or an advertisement long forgotten.” In short, something in the past gave us a word we still use today even though few remember the original inspiration for the term.

Take “dufus” (or doofus) for example. You’ve called someone a doofus at some point in your life. Probably today. You probably don’t know that — according to Keyes — Dufus was the name of Popeye’s dimwitted nephew. Who knew a spinach-loving sailor could give us such a great word?

You have also undoubtedly walked towards a car and yelled “shotgun.” We know what that means in terms of who gets to sit where in the car (regional/personal rules not withstanding), but why do we use the term?

Keyes says stagecoaches were at risk of Indian attacks, “therefore many companies employed a security guard who sat next to the driver on an elevated perch outside the wagon, shotgun at the ready.” The guard was known as “the shotgun.” So next time you’re sitting in that seat, be ready to repel an Indian attack.

With my apologies for getting the song stuck in your head, anyone who has seen the Showtime show “Weeds” is familiar with the term “ticky tacky.” It comes from the 1962 Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes” and in terms of the show, perfectly captures the rows upon rows of identical houses filled with people who seem perfectly alike. As Keyes says, ticky tacky “has been our preferred catchphrase for uniform homes and those thought to live in them.”

Other than giving us the idea of “drinking the Kool-Aid,” “Jonestown” is used as a way to describe cultlike experiences. In many of the entries, Keyes gives a contemporary example of the word’s usage in a newspaper, TV show, book or magazine. For Jonestown, he describes how it is used by a character in Nick Hornby’s “How to be Good,” which happens to be one of the better books I have read in the past few years.

Keyes also talks about using “breadbox” as a comparative measurement rather than an actual place to store bread. While I have never heard anyone say something is “as big as a breadbox,” the term did bring to mind a tangentially interesting point about the habits we inherit from our parents.

Not long ago I was talking to my mom about something and the topic of having bugs in your house came up. Back in the day, she lived in an apartment that had a bug problem (roaches?), which led her to start storing her bread in the refrigerator. I have always put my bread in the fridge, but only because that’s the way we did it when I was growing up. Good to learn there was an actual reason, even if the original issue is long forgotten.

By cjhannas books Uncategorized
12 Oct

Don’t Read That!

Last week, groups of librarians, publishers, journalists and authors marked the annual Banned Books Week to “celebrate the freedom to read.”

The event brings attention to the works that have been banned by states and communities, often for issues that people decide they would just rather not address. The books range from modern pop lit (Twilight, My Sister’s Keeper, Harry Potter) to classics that used to be standard reading (To Kill a Mockingbird, Black Boy, The Giver).

Like any self-respecting journalist, I did my best to turn an evergreen blog post — reading J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” — into a timely piece pegged to a news event. I even finished the book late last week so that I could actually post the blog during Banned Books Week.

Somewhere between setting the book down, and sitting down here at the keyboard I got a little distracted. I partly blame my previous post, which involved a lot more effort than usual, but will give credit to general laziness and the need to clear out space on the DVR.

“Catcher in the Rye” is one of those books that it seems like I should have read a long, long time ago, but somehow slipped by. I have been trying to plow through some of that backlog, and in the process have apparently been reading some “scandalous” books.

In the past three years (my lists from 2008, 2009), I have read three of the top 100 banned books of this decade. Those corrupting titles include “Of Mice and Men,” “The Kite Runner” and “Fahrenheit 451.” In my life, I have probably read about a third of that list.

I found it particularly interesting to see “Fahrenheit 451” on the list, since the plot is largely driven by a world in which all books are banned and destroyed on sight.

The American Library Association has a map of book bannings, as well as lists that detail why certain powers that be wanted those words hidden. A lot of their reasoning falls in a few categories they don’t want students exposed to — sexuality, racism and profanity.

One listing for Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” says the book was banned because of the way black characters were portrayed. As in the case of most of these instances, someone is missing the fact that those elements present the very thing that can foster incredibly useful conversations.

The ALA listing says there was worry about African American students feeling uncomfortable discussing the text. I read the book in ninth grade English, a class taught by a black woman with several black students. We didn’t skip over portions or sanitize our conversations. We talked about the issues, the implications of race relations in that era and how they affected the very conversations we have today. In short, we used what is probably the seminal novel for such a discussion to have, well, those discussions.

I’m not saying second graders should be reading “The Kite Runner,” but the parents of 10th graders shouldn’t overreact to one scene in one chapter that happens to set an important emotional tone in the story.

I’m glad my parents had a different philosophy, which I can best describe as reading = good. There’s a book fair at school this month? Great, here’s some cash. There’s a magazine drive and you want to subscribe to something? No problem. You have a summer reading list? Let me know which ones you are reading, and I’ll get them (as opposed to the huge number of kids who never bothered to open a book over the summer).

Ok, end of rant.

I have described in the past my general process for the book blogs — mainly dog-earing pages that have something I think I want to discuss later.

The bad part about waiting so long to talk about “Catcher in the Rye” is that I haven’t the slightest clue why I tagged any of these pages. But at least I am pretty confident I haven’t been totally corrupted by the “sexually explicit” material full of “offensive language.”

By cjhannas books Uncategorized
19 Sep

Be the Ball

After a book that takes forever to get through, I always go to one I know I can easily read in just a few days.

After William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” the quick read this time was Carl Hiaasen’s “The Downhill Lie.” It’s about his journey as a self-described “hacker” to return to playing golf many years after quitting the sport.

As a fellow hacker, I found it interesting to get inside the mind of someone who plays at exactly the same level. My usual playing partners are both better than I am, so while we are always out there to just have fun there’s something to knowing you are the weakest link in any group.

I think Hiaasen would enjoy my general outlook on playing with those who consistently beat me — if they shoot an 88 and I rock a 95, we paid the same amount of money but I got to hit seven extra shots.

One thing I found troubling about Hiaasen is that he’s a University of Florida journalism graduate. When I worked in Florida, it seemed like three-quarters of my coworkers went to the UF J-school, and really, nothing good can come of that. (OK, they were pretty cool, but having to hear about Tim Tebow every day will wear on you).

But Hiaasen did redeem himself by introducing me to a new term I can use to describe my golf game. Actually, it’s one of Hiaasen’s friends who tells him about “Ray Ray golf.” In the hacker world, our rounds are marked by stretches of a few good holes that make us feel like we can actually play this game, and then holes so disastrous we wonder how our friends can stand to watch such a spectacle. In the words of Hiaasen’s friend, “One hole you play like Ray Floyd, and the next you play like Ray Charles.”

The thing about those good holes is that they are sustaining. It only takes a few good shots to keep you going. “That’s the secret of the sport’s infernal seduction,” Hiaasen says. “It surrenders just enough good shots to let you talk yourself out of quitting.”

He talks later about the effect of even one good shot, the way it feels to swing a club and have a little white ball go exactly where you want it to. “That’s the killer. A good shot is a total rush, possibly the second most pleasurable sensation in the human experience. It will mess with your head in wild and delusive ways.”

He’s right. There’s something about a perfect shot that makes you feel slightly superhuman. When you hit the ball right in the sweet spot of the club, it feels different. There’s an ease with which the ball flies off the club face and continues to an exact point off in the distance.

The setting helps enhance that feeling. You’re out on a narrow strip of grass, maybe nestled between the woods with nothing but the sound of birds around you. You pause for a second in that stillness, the club in your hand and your eyes on the ball in front of you. And then your actions — the way you pull back the club, rotate your body into a corkscrew and then unravel it all — cause this pinpoint flight as if you had just picked up the ball and set it down exactly where you wanted to hit the next shot.

It’s kind of like hitting a home run in baseball. To the observer, there’s the really violent action of a bat slamming into a ball that has been hurled in its direction. But crushing a baseball — hitting it in just the right part of the bat at the right angle — can feel smooth and effortless in a way that can seem totally opposed to the resulting flight of the ball.

You don’t have quite the same control over where the ball lands, but a few of those will definitely make you forget some of the strikeouts and feeble groundouts to second base.

By cjhannas baseball books golf Uncategorized