The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness - Jill Filipovic (2017)

I need to start out this review with a confession.  In the past I've exhibited a few misogynistic tendencies, perhaps in part as a tongue-in-cheek backlash to the majority of my female friends who seem to identify as feminists, but more likely as a result of not being "successful" with women.  I watched  I Shot Andy Warhol about ten years ago and thought about writing an anti-S.C.U.M. manifesto, shortly before the phrase "men's rights" could cause someone to be "triggered." This was no doubt a result of the general frigidity that I felt from girls around this time, shortly after finishing college and entering the real world.  My feelings in retrospect are perhaps best summed up (as they often are) by a sketch from Mr. Show.

Girls didn't want to talk to me, and sometimes still don't want to talk to me.  There is something creepy or sleazy about me underneath.  My motives appear one-dimensional.  I am not confident enough.  I am not an alpha male (I am not even a beta male).  I do not make a lot of money.  My facial hair doesn't grow in the right way.  I am shy and do not make good eye contact.  I do not seem interested.  I seem too interested.  I have not, however, told anyone to smile, nor ever engaged in street harassment.  (Except the time my friend and I were drunk in a cab and we thought the girl in the next car over looked like Britney Spears and we tried to inform her of such as she inched away, and rolled up the window.)

Perhaps the reason most of my female friends are feminists and why I have scoffed at "typical girls" in general is, the girls that couldn't bear to waste their time on me haven't properly absorbed feminist values?  Or there is something legit wrong with me.  Probably the latter.  In any case, I think it's the type of girls that really just want to be a stay-at-home mom and have her husband provide for their family that have been most disinterested in me, followed by the girls that are extremely successful in their careers and sense that I would really just prefer to be a stay-at-home dad and have them provide for me and write in my free time.  So maybe I unfairly rejected the entire gender five years ago?  It was an immature position to take, that I could do that sort of thing in retaliation, or out of despair, and not out of a more basic understanding of orientation and acceptance of one's feelings going back to childhood.  It took a very long time to understand that all of these confusing emotions could be tidily ensconced within the "B" of LGBT.

I say all of this in the way of an apology, and to acknowledge that the reason many men treat women the way we do is wrapped up in our own issues that we haven't recognized or resolved.  That, and yes, the societal expectations that this book addresses.

Full disclosure: Jill Filipovic and I are friends on Facebook and went to NYU together.  We have a great deal of mutual friends (24 to be exact) but I am struck by a lack of independent recollection of personal interaction with one another.  We probably met briefly at a party or two.  Regardless, she is the third alum of the Class of 2005 to be featured on FH after Tao Lin (our mutual friend) and Aziz Ansari (we wish).  My short version opinion on the book is this: while it is fantastically written, and quite compelling overall, it is stymied a bit by its semi-clinical stance, teetering somewhere between a law review article and selective memoir.  And this is the right place to start the review for me, as an attorney in practice four years now that would like to leave the profession and write full-time.  If I could be so lucky!  I am not aware of where Jill went to law school, but I am assuming it was a very good one and that she did very well and that she got the Summer Associate 2L gig and made bank at a large firm and was able to retire her loans in short order, but maybe I'm misreading things or being presumptuous.  I'm sure she didn't go to a second-tier school, finish outside the top 50% of her class, and flounder from one horrible situation to the next after passing the bar, all while loans accrue at an outrageous interest rate and effectively become a perpetual burden.  But she earned it, and I applaud her for the decision.

Like the recently reviewed Letters to Felice, I have something to say about the end notes.  In this case, I say they are well-placed.  I also think if they were posted as footnotes on each page like a law review article, they would lose some of their impact.  Some of the sources are not exactly paragons of erudition.  But let's be clear about something in this law review comparison thing: law review articles have a citation for practically every sentence, and this is why their appearance becomes cartoonishly distinct.  The H Spot is sort of like a sloppily written law review article, and I mean that as a compliment.  Nobody likes to read those.  They're a perfect example of doing for the sake of doing, because it's the necessary thing to have on your resume.  Though students and professors may have a passion for the topic they write about, their composition is generally a tedious miserable exercise.  By contrast, The H-Spot is light enough to be read on a beach this summer.  Much of the time, it is very entertaining.  Sometimes it veers into preachy territory, but I was struck by the virtual absence of male-bashing for which feminism is often derided.  Jill opens up about her personal life just enough to give the reader insight into how she came to her perspective on these issues.  Something seemingly innocuous, like female partners in law firms being in charge of ordering lunch, inspires miniature outrage.  Also that most paralegals are female.  I would love to be a paralegal and be in charge of ordering lunch!  Is it a path towards assured financial success and growth?  At a large firm, probably!  But I digress.

The book opens up with an Introduction, which lays out its thesis, which is neatly summarized in the conclusion and its public policy proposal:

"One of the goals of this project was to show that there is no one definition of womanhood, no singular experience of pleasure seeking, and no individual things that will bring happiness for all women, but there are a great many commonalities, and a great many ways to improve the status quo.  My hope is that this book offered a little peak into the overlapping struggles of so many women, as well as the many joys--however unsupported and individualized." (267)

The best thing I can say about this book, I think, is that it made me want to be a better person.  It offers great insight into womanhood and all of its attendant anxieties, and it may cause men (such as myself) who have been insensitive in the past to think twice before making what seems like a harmless joke.  The only real criticism I can make is that "law review" thing mentioned above, and the statistical methodologies employed by the author.  The thing about the internet is that one can find pretty much any source to back up one's opinion, even if it's particularly odious or unreasonable (and just to be clear, this book is neither).  Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I feel like, when you sit down to start a law review article, you write up the position you want to take, and then you find your sources later to back up that position.  Maybe your initial position is informed by everything you have read and digested, but there is still sometimes that lingering feeling of padding by citation, as if you are not quite confident enough just to make an assertion without citation to any greater authority.  In law review contexts, it's because that's just not allowed.  In the context of a book, however, I feel like this book is most powerful (but also most challenging/slightly irksome) when it enters into "manifesto" territory.  I am thinking of Great Books from the past, like The Prince or Utopia, where the author simply writes down their thoughts, damned if anyone agrees with them or not.

Basically, in my opinion, the book is at its weakest when it is relying on statistical methodologies to define happiness, primarily because it makes me feel very anxious and insecure.  There are dozens of passages that made me curse my fate (but then again there are dozens of moments a day, dozens of things I see, that make me do the same), but here is just one:

"This new standard, of marrying an autonomous individual only once you're an autonomous individual yourself, is what marriage researchers call the 'capstone' model: marriage as the final marker of a solid, stable life, as opposed to a cornerstone of one.  Educated young people today see marriage as something they do after most of their other ducks are in a row: they have a college degree, they're working at a stable job, they can afford a wedding [Yes, No, No].  And most crucially, they want to marry someone who is a great match and from whom they derive emotional and sexual fulfillment [Gulp], not simply someone who plays a complimentary role--that is, an employed man looking for a woman who would be a good mother and homemaker, and vice versa.  Americans say a happy sexual relationship is one of the primary things that makes a marriage work, second only to faithfulness; more than 60 percent also agree that sharing household chores is crucial to a successful union [YES].  Of unmarried young people today, about a third say they haven't tied the knot because they're looking for the right person.  About the same number say they don't feel financially ready.
That capstone model means that women and men are marrying later than ever before [thank God], if they marry at all--and many don't.  The most well educated and financially prosperous, [fuck them] though, continue to wed, building their families like the children's rhyme: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage. [That's not all, that's not all, Jack is drinking alcohol]." (141, bracket parentheticals mine)

I could do this all day, as the book often caused me to reflect upon my own wretched state.  At the same time, however, I must admit that it felt very "cozy" and comforting at times, because Jill and I are the same age and went to the same school and know a lot of the same people and our experiences are sort of spiritually intertwined to an extent.  Moreover, Jill's own experience as a lawyer-turned-writer give me hope that a happier life is not necessarily a rank impossibility.

This review needs to be wrapped up, and I haven't given an appropriate road map of the territory this book covers.  Basically, there is an introduction and conclusion, and eight chapters in between.

The first is a sort of history lesson, which was one of my favorite parts, particularly when it was revealed that Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a feminist pioneer (and not actually the same person, which made me feel very dumb as a person that loved Frankenstein).  The second is about female friendship, and adequately covers the topic except for maybe not addressing the phenomena of girls going to the bathroom together.  The third will probably become the most infamous in the book, and is about female sexuality and pleasure.  The fourth is about women as mothers, the fifth is about women as wives, and the sixth is about women in the workplace.  The seventh is about female body issues and food, and was another one of my favorites (as a person with an unhealthy diet and a bizarre relationship with food).  The eighth is about the (fading?) tradition of women taking their husband's last name after marriage.

Jill does devote a fair portion of the book to primary sources, interviews she had with women and couples in several different states.  Generally, these are some of the best parts of the book, but there is no more noteworthy subject than Janet.  Janet's story is brutal and outrageous, but also ordinary in many poorer, predominantly black communities.  Her struggle is not uncommon, but the specifics are extreme:

"The one thing that keeps Janet afloat is her children.  The dream, Janet said, is a combination of basic financial stability and that coveted 'balance': that she could both enjoy time with her children and work full time at a job that would actually bring in enough income to support her family.  Both time and money, though, have proven elusive, no matter how hard she tries and no matter how much she sacrifices one for the other.....She was there when her second daughter walked, but only because she was unemployed.  She had found a new job by the time she had her son, and so she missed his first steps, too.  'When I work, I get up at 4:30 in the morning,' Janet said.  'I work.  And then normally I'd do doubles and get home at about one o'clock in the morning and my babies were asleep.  This is the most time I've ever spent with my kids.  And I've been sitting here thinking about that.  I worked all of these years.'" (202)

It's pretty much a terrible world in terms of the amount of time that people are expected to spend working to make a living, but Janet's case is simply too much.  You hear about people getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night, but 3.5?  Insane.  In a way this book is also about the impossibility of time management, and that hit me particularly hard as a person that doesn't think he ever has enough of it and has no spouse or kids to consume it.  Actually, a spouse should help with that time crunch, and the idea of better equality in relationships between spouses and partners is one of the most effectively presented in this book.  While The H-Spot is not necessarily perfect, it is a big-hearted contribution to the world, and one that will hopefully play some small role (if not as large as say, The Feminine Mystique or The Second Sex) in bringing about a more just and equal understanding between the sexes.

Happy 9th Birthday

As we come to the close of another year, let us attempt to reflect upon our accomplishments.  This time on our annual round-up, we bemoan that, for the third year in a row, our output is weak.  21 posts the last couple years, and it looks like 20 this year.  Honestly though, I don't care anymore.

I'm no longer interested in trying to grow this blog, but I have been reinvigorated with a desire to write.  This is due to my terrible livelihood.  A couple days ago, a pure wave of depression hit me as I considered my fate.  I struggle against this fate, yet cannot seem to overcome it, or see any way out of it.  In short, things will ever be as they have always been.  I am never going anywhere.

Now I could spend the time that I would be writing on other endeavors to try to boost my income, but even more sad is that I rarely write, and while I just stated that I have been "reinvigorated," I rarely find myself willing to sit down for 30 or 45 minutes and just type on a blank screen.  There are too many other distractions in this world now.  And the real writers should consider this an advantage--technology has provided so many distractions that less writers will actually do the work and be in competition for xxxxx number of books that get published each year.  (Perhaps this has nothing to do with reality, but the thought has crossed my mind a few times over the past couple of years, since I have had a smart phone.)

No more jibberish.  Let's get to the lists.

First of all, the top 5 most popular posts:

(5) The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt (tied with Boss and Then We Came to the End)

(4) Chicago Cubs 2016 Report Card (tie) 

(3) See a Little Light - Bob Mould (tie)

(2) Bossypants - Tina Fey
(1) Identical - Scott Turow 

First of all, it is shocking how popular the Identical review was--perhaps because I advertised it as a negative one, and perhaps because it may have gotten a tiny bit of traction on Twitter.  Second, the 6 other posts in the top 5 were all extremely close--between 58 and 63 views--which is even lower than last year, but like I said, I don't really care anymore.  

More important than quantity is quality, and here are the 5 posts of which I am most proud:

(1) The Goldfinch 

This is a classic FH review, in the style of many older posts.  It's quite long, and it's probably my favorite book reviewed in the past year.  The further I get away from it, the more fondly I recall it.

(2) Chicago Cubs Report Card

Of course, 2016 was a perfectly terrible year, one of the worst years in recent memory.  However, the Cubs won, so all was not lost.  

(3) Then We Came to the End

One of the more special books read in the past year, along with The Goldfinch.  One of the more entertaining reads in recent years, and I'm not sure my review itself was that entertaining, but still recommend this book to most. It casts a wide net and should appeal to a large number of readers

(4) The Third Coast - Thomas Dyja 

This is not a perfect post by any stretch, but it's a big book, and I think it was a fairly novel idea to keep track of the One Book, One Chicago project.  So I will try to keep doing that.  I think I hit on most of the major ideas from this book.  I don't think I'd read it again, but I definitely want to check out some of the other works that it references.

(5) Autobiography - Morrissey 

Not one of the best reads of the past year, but I felt this was a fairly well-written review.  I, along with everyone else, love the Smiths, and have a soft spot for Morrissey, even with how he has become increasingly strident.  There are incredibly beautiful moments in the book, and I am glad I captured them (that ending is so special to me, as I live very close to the Congress--indeed I moved even closer a couple months after the review was posted).  If you haven't read Autobiography but only have a vague interest in doing so, the review should appropriately inform you whether it's worth it to devote the 10-20 hours it should take to read.  That is the platonic ideal of a review for me and I will continue to aim to do that here.

Finally, THANK YOU ALL for reading again.  Few things in life give me greater pleasure than interacting with others that want to build and maintain a solid library of their own favorite books.  If you're reading this, you're the best!

Happy 8th Birthday

It's not like I have a ton of responsibilities.  I should be able to produce more than 21 posts a year, particularly when 3 of them are written by others.

Yes, you read that right, there were exactly as many posts written between April 1, 2015 - April 1, 2016 as there were from April 1, 2014 - April 1, 2015.  Flying Houses is not even a bi-monthly newsletter.

It's pathetic is what it is!  You know I've spent a lot of time over the past 8 years building this database, but does anybody really care about it?  We've had a few "celebrity visitors" in our time, but overall, this blog is not going viral anytime soon.

We now currently sit at 93,445 page views.  So we should hit 100,000 this year.  I should say that my page views are roughly current with the miles on my '05 Civic, but that car is 3 years older than this blog.  I hope to use that car for another 10 years (at least) and I hope to keep this blog another 30 years (or until I write my special comment on "facing the void").  Is it fatalistic to expect to die at 62?  I think if I got married I could go into my 80's, but if life continues its present course, I will remain single and yes, die prematurely.

Our growth slowed slightly, but again I haven't made many efforts to make many new friends or publicize the blog.   The current balance on my Google AdSense earnings is now $30.95, which means I "made" $1.74 on ad revenue over the past year (I have never been paid, as has been previously explained). (Note: I am testing out a new ad layout in an attempt to get paid more quickly.  If you find it particularly obnoxious--I am concerned it draws attention away from the links on the upper right, as well as the archived posts--please let me know in a comment.)

Perhaps our MD&A over here at FH harps on the same points every April Fool's Day, the primary point being "WTF."
WTF, why can't I get paid to write?
WTF, why doesn't anyone offer me a book deal?
WTF, can't you see I'm trying very hard here, on top of being a full-time attorney?
WTF, don't you think if I devoted myself full-time to writing that I could turn out a better product?
WTF, don't you think the product is pretty damn good as it stands?
WTF, who else is putting out content as relentlessly independent as FH?  
WTF, do you like me or should I just STFU?

These April Fool's Day MD&As do not consist of falsehoods, but operate as sarcastic truths.
You can't get paid to write because you are, in fact, a bad writer (at least one person has assured me).
You can't get a book deal because your blog is not a cultural phenomenon, and does not suggest that you will develop a bankable audience.
You may be trying hard, but it's getting to the point where you need to prioritize.  Everybody can't just be Scott Turow if they want to be.
You will never know because the only time when you would be able to devote yourself full-time to writing is when you might be otherwise unemployed, and at such times you are hounded by doubts that you are spending your time as productively as possible (i.e. writing instead of job searching).
Your product is pretty damn good, I agree, but sometimes you also get lazy and write tons of shit that would never be considered publishable by a reputable source of book reviews like the NYT or Bookslut.
Everyone else whose head isn't on straight and still thinks they've been misunderstood and discounted for the past 32 years.
Me personally, I like you, but sometimes I really don't, and I think you should STFU on your insecurities and focus on the more palatable truths on which you'll have greater agreement from the masses.

Nobody ever got a book deal by whining and saying, I really am good--look at all I've done!  So without further ado, here are the top 5 posts of the past year.

Wait, before I get there, here are the top 5 most popular posts of the past year (the number is total page views--yes my numbers really are that sad):
(1) NIED #26: 185 (because I'll always be most famous for my comments on legal education)
(2) Happy 7th Birthday: 150 (because people love reading lists and MD&As)
(3) The Pale King: 95 (because DFW is gone but not forgotten)
(4) WITAWITAR: 84 (because Murakami is so in right now)
(5) Why We Write About Ourselves: 82 (tie with Please Kill Me) (because it got retweeted by the author)

#5: S/M: Experience #4
This is the final chapter in my second novel which has managed to avoid serialization on a blog to this point.  It may not survive 2016 in its hidden form because it is quickly becoming obsolete.  Whatever I wrote about in 2007-2008 has already changed.  Regardless, it was posted on 9/11/15 because this chapter depicts that very as-yet-unknown date in the future.  I had predicted that 9/11 would be made a national holiday.  While that was wrong, it remains a "holiday week" at the Daley Center, and all attorneys must pass through security in remembrance of how dangerous we all might be.

#4: Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life
This is just an extremely long review of a very long book that is also very good (one of the "Best Books of Flying Houses").  Carver is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and I hope to review each of his collections before the end comes.

#3: Modern Romance
This is just a controversial choice that I'm surprised did not get more views.  I thought it was more titillating than any of the other reviews (except perhaps NIED #26).

#2: Chicago Cubs 2015 Report Card
A yearly Chicago Cubs report card has become as great a tradition on FH as has this MD&A.  Truly, this was the most sublime yet, though my younger brother suggested that there were many things he disagreed with (Jason Hammel and Tommy LaStella in particular).  I was worried about tweeting it @ Jon Lester when I suggested that he must have a complex over the fact that he was getting paid 40 times more than Kyle Hendricks and yet barely pitched any better than him (Michael also suggested that I oversold Hendricks, but I do not think that is the case as he has retained the #5 spot in the rotation, at this juncture, at least).

#1: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Really I think any of the above are better than this, but I felt this was one of the few instances where I offered a "critique."  It's possible I'm susceptible to the accusation that I'm not a real "critic" because I don't say enough books are bad.  Certainly, this is not a bad book, but I didn't consider it the greatest of the 21st century.

Finally, thank you all for reading.  I never really address you often enough, but if you are paying attention, know that I appreciate it.  All too often I feel as if I am speaking into a void, though even if I am, I am glad to lay down a body of work which at least includes an ur-text on The Beautiful and Damned (821 views on April 1, 2012; 5,597 views on April 1, 2016).   

Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk - Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1997)

I first read Please Kill Me about 9 or 10 years ago, right after I graduated college.  I decided to read it again when I finished my last couple books quickly and the newest one hadn't arrived at the library yet.  I am very glad I did this, and it seems really cliche at this point and non-prestigious, but I must anoint this yet another one of the Best Books reviewed on Flying Houses.  This book is not perfect--it's maybe 50-100 pages too long, but once you start to get wrapped up in the characters, you would probably go on another 200.  I mean, this book never got boring to me.  There were some parts that just aren't as well told as others, but there is so much detail and vulnerability in these pages that no reader can encounter this text without becoming unmoved.  Not everybody is into punk rock music, but everybody should read this book.  Most people like some kind of music, and this book hits on most genres anyways.

There are a lot of similarities to Lexicon Devil (also on the Best Books list), and perhaps one could accuse me of being a sucker for the oral history genre.  I mean, I also really liked Rant.  But it's more than the format, or the concept of a book devoid of exposition, operating purely on dialogue.  The genre just tends to elevate storytelling to a higher level, accentuating unique details from shared memories and sensory impressions.  More obviously, none of these books are PC.  They describe experiences that never should have been allowed to happen.  Please Kill Me positively revels in this material.

Still, it's not an endorsement of a dissolute lifestyle, and focuses a little bit more on the music than Lexicon Devil.  Now this may be because the Germs were a terrible band who seemed to actively avoid improving their chops.  But the other book this calls to mind is Our Band Could Be Your Life.  Where Please Kill Me leaves off (late 70's/early 80's), Our Band Could Be Your Life pretty much picks up.  The format is different, but the attitude is similar.  OBCBYL feels a little bit more academic, and is probably not as engaging a read because once you finish the story of each band, you're done.  I think ultimately what makes Please Kill Me so special is the power of its story.

The story starts in 1965 with Lou Reed and ends in 1992 with the death of Jerry Nolan.  The interviews that comprise this "oral history" seem to have started in the late 70's with Punk magazine and wrapped up with more comprehensive, authoritative, and "sober" interviews in 1994 and 1995.

Before moving on, I want to note that this book is ripe for a re-issue, with new material.  The final section of the book (the epilogue) is titled "Nevermind: 1980-1992."  Now, when this book was published in 1997, one of the most fucked up periods of popular music was ascendant, and few would anticipate the backlash to that era, or the revival of the so-called "CBGB scene."  Almost all of the artists in Please Kill Me made "comebacks" (to varying levels of success), and many others have died.  To recognize such occurrences, I would include a "post-epilogue" and title it "Cashing In: 2003-2015."  Apparently, a 20th anniversary edition will be released next year, so my predictions are not far off.

The book starts off on an impossibly high note with its material on the Velvet Underground.  Straight out of the gates, it is immediately apparent that nobody is trying to maintain a squeaky-clean PR image.  Lou Reed is basically at the center of the depravity.  There are PLENTY of juicy excerpts that I could include here, but I will leave them to be sought out by discerning readers.  Instead, I will try to focus on the historical import of the artists described.

Now, most people will say punk rock started with the Ramones.  Some say the Stooges.  Others say the Sex Pistols.  The authors contend that they invented the term themselves.  Sometimes I say that the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" is the real beginning of punk rock.  But truly, honestly, the Velvet Underground embodied everything that came to define the genre (except the faster tempos):

"Lou Reed: Andy Warhol told me that what we were doing with the music was the same thing he was doing with painting and movies and writing--i.e., not kidding around.  To my mind, nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us.  We were doing a specific thing that was very, very real.  It wasn't slick or a lie in any conceivable way, which was the only way we could work with him.  Because the first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real." (7)

Danny Fields makes his first appearance here, and describes how he convinced Lou Reed and John Cale to cut "the Exploding Plastic Inevitable" from their live show (which was a kind of S&M performance with lights and film projections) and to leave Andy Warhol for a better manager, to "make it" as a band.  Fields is practically a non-stop presence throughout the book and tells many of the best stories--though the reader tends to wonder if some of these stories are more "legend" than "fact."  Actually, there are several points in the book where the speaker (or interviewee) draws a distinction between the story everyone hears and the reality that happened.  One of them is the famed meeting of Jim Morrison with Nico and Andy Warhol, indelibly portrayed by Crispin Glover in The Doors:

"Danny Fields: I've never had any respect for Oliver Stone, but after seeing his version of the Morrison/Nico meeting in the Doors movie--'Hello, I am Nico, would you like to go to bed with me?'--the reality of it couldn't have been more different.
What really happened was that I met Morrison at the Elektra office in Los Angeles and he followed me back to the Castle in his rented car.  Morrison walked into the kitchen and Nico was there and they stood and circled each other.
Then they stared at the floor and didn't say a word to each other.  They were both too poetic to say anything.  It was a very boring, poetic, silent thing that was going on between them.  They formed a mystical bond immediately--I think Morrison pulled Nico's hair and then he proceeded to get extremely drunk and I fed him whatever was left of my drugs that Edie Sedgwick hadn't stolen." (29)

Right after this early section about the Velvet Underground with passing references to the Doors, the Stooges are introduced.  Now, the Stooges are one of the major elements of this book, and almost all of the anecdotes about them are mind-boggling.  I particularly appreciate the story of Iggy Pop's first experience with weed:

"Iggy Pop:...I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it, which is what most white blues bands did.
Then one night, I smoked a joint.  I'd always wanted to take drugs, but I'd never been able to because the only drug I knew about was marijuana and I was a really bad asthmatic.  Before that, I wasn't interested in drugs, or getting drunk, either.  I just wanted to play and get something going, that was all I cared about.  But this girl, Vivian, who had given me the ride to Chicago, left me with a little grass.
So one night I went down by the sewage treatment plant by the Loop, where the river is entirely industrialized.  It's all concrete banks and effluvia by the Marina Towers.  So I smoked this joint and then it hit me.
I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues.  I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs...
So that's what I did.  I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase--either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs.  So 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' is probably my mishearing of 'Baby Please Don't Go.'" (38-39)

The MC5 are also introduced around this section.  Together, these two bands (along with the Dead Boys, who come along towards the end) comprise the entirety of bands based outside of New York City.  While this is a book about the origins of punk rock, it is also a vivid portrait of NYC in the 70's.  The material on MC5, I can take or leave.  I've tried listening to them, and just can't really get into it.  The music just sounds more dated to me, for some reason.

The New York Dolls come next.  Now, I actually saw the Stooges and the New York Dolls for the first time on the same day, at Little Steven's Underground Garage Festival on Randall's Island in August of 2003 (maybe '04, I can't remember).  Syl Sylvain had just died, and the New York Dolls were the third to last band.  They seemed a bit like a nostalgia act, but David Johansen was energetic and enthused and the crowd loved them.  The Strokes then played next, a very efficient, no-frills, solid set.  The Stooges closed, and to date remains one of the best performances I have seen.  Mike Watt was on bass, but both Asheton brothers were in, and Iggy (then in his mid-50's) seemed as potent as ever.

Really I'm skipping around though.  There's a section before the New York Dolls that introduces Patti Smith.  The material on Patti Smith in this book is essential.  It might as well be Patti Smith's book.  After I finished it again, I watched a performance from the Primavera Sound Festival in May 2015, and while I was slightly let down when I saw her at Lollapalooza in 2005, she seemed like she has tapped into a more powerful energy of late.  Her rendition of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" (despite screwing up the words) is an emotionally devastating experience that should make you cry in the most beautiful way.

There are several "hearts" of this book, and Patti Smith is one of them (Iggy is another).  The success of her memoir Just Kids has fueled a late-career renaissance, and I hope to read and review that book in the near future on this site.

Jim Carroll, another one of the several characters in this story that recently passed away, is introduced near this point.  So is David Bowie:

"Cyrinda Foxe: David Bowie and his wife Angela had a very open marriage.  They were sleeping with anybody they felt like sleeping with.  David and Angela and I had a menage a trois for about five minutes, but then I made her leave because David and I were gonna play.  Angela was fucking David's black bodyguard, and David and I used to get down on all fours and peek in their keyhole and watch them fuck.  I was sort of like a new toy for David on the Ziggy Stardust tour.  But while we were in San Francisco, David asked me, 'Are you in love with me?'
I said, 'No.'  I wasn't about to say, 'Yes!' I was still tripping around.  I had no flies on me then.  No salt on my tail.  I didn't want to get tied down.  Besides, Tony DeFries wanted everybody to be this Bowie thing.  I didn't want to cut my hair like that.  So I wasn't impressed with them.  I mean, okay, I get to go on a plane and go somewhere, but that's all I thought it was.  So when David Bowie asked if I was in love with him, and I told him no, he left me there." (134)

Soon after, Patti Smith and Television take center stage.  At this point, Richard Hell was still in the band, and perhaps because of his "literary" background tells some of the best stories.  This one explains the book's title:

"Richard Lloyd: Richard Hell had designed a T-shirt for himself that said Please Kill Me, but he wouldn't wear it.  I was like, 'I'll wear it.'  So I wore it when we played upstairs at Max's Kansas City, and afterwards these kids came up to me.  These fans gave me this really psychotic look--they looked as deep into my eyes as they possibly could--and said, 'Are you serious?'
Then they said, 'If that's what you want, we'll be glad to oblige because we're such big fans!' They were just looking at me, with that wild-eyed look, and I thought, I'm not wearing this shirt again." (173)

The Ramones come into the picture, and are introduced by their infamous song about street hustling, "53rd and 3rd," with background history supplied by Jim Carroll.  There is also an interesting story about the song "Chinese Rocks," which sheds light on one of the lines to the song ("Is Dee Dee home?"):

"Richard Hell: Dee Dee called me one day and said, 'I wrote a song that the Ramones won't do.'  He said, 'It's not finished.  How about I come over and show it to you and we can finish it if you like it?'  So I believe he brought an acoustic guitar over.  And I had my bass.  Basically the song was done, but he just didn't have another verse.  I wrote two lines.  That's all.  It was basically Dee Dee's song, though I think the lyrics, the verses I wrote, were good.
Dee Dee Ramone: The reason I wrote that song was out of spite for Richard Hell, because he told me he was gonna write a song better than Lou Reed's 'Heroin,' so I went home and wrote 'Chinese Rocks.'
I wrote it by myself, in Debbie Harry's apartment on First Avenue and First Street.  Then Richard Hell put that line in it, so I gave him some credit." (213-214)

After this, the story jumps over to England briefly and covers the Sex Pistols.  There is one story that made me smile (anybody that has run with a crew of "punks" should be able to relate):

"Bob Gruen:...I didn't see Johnny with a girl until the last night.  He left the last show with some girl who was backstage.  It was kind of a surprise, because from the first minute I met him, Johnny didn't seem to ever like anything.
He just seemed to be in a really bad mood from day one.  You know, everything sucked.  He was so cynical and sarcastic about everything that he would always point out the derogatory aspect of everything.  That's why I was so surprised when I saw him leave the Winterland gig with a girl on his arm and half a smile on his face.  It was the most human thing I ever saw, because it was something so out of character to see him enjoy a moment of life." (331)

The book ends with a few interesting stories: Phil Spector's production of the Ramones album End of the Century, the deaths of Sid & Nancy, Nico and Johnny Thunders, and a lot of stuff about the Dead Boys...I could quote more (obviously the Phil Spector anecdotes are priceless)--but I've gone on long enough in this review and it's time to wrap it up.  I want to include one final quote that I found very punk, and certainly pertinent one month after the blockbuster SCOTUS decision:

"Legs McNeil: Gay liberation had really exploded.  Homosexual culture had really taken over--Donna Summer, disco, it was so boring.  Suddenly in New York, it was cool to be gay, but it just seemed to be about suburbanites who sucked cock and went to discos.  I mean, come on, 'Disco, Disco Duck?' I don't think so.
So we said, 'No, being gay doesn't make you cool.  Being cool makes you cool, whether you're gay or straight.'  People didn't like that too much.  So they called us homophobic.  And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, 'Fuck you, you faggots.'
Mass movements are always so un-hip  That's what was great about punk.  It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think.  Hip can never be a mass movement.  And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us.  Real fascism, more rules.
But as far as being homophobic, that was ludicrous, because everyone we hung out with was gay.  No one had a problem with that, you know, fine, fuck whoever you want.  I mean Arturo would regale me with these great sex stories.  I'd be going, 'Wow, what happened then?'
What was great about the scene was that people's curiosity seemed stronger than their fear.  The time was rife with genuine exploration, but not in a trendy mass-movement way.  And I was always fascinated by how anyone made it through the day, what they really did when the lights were out, to keep their sanity, or lose it." (275)

In short, if you read this book, not only will you understand me better, but you will also understand yourself better.  How you react to some of the more salacious stuff can act as a barometer of the types of art you appreciate.  I always prefer the real, the raw, and the honest truth: psychological realism.  It seems that most all of the artists on display in this "bible" think along similar lines, and I can only state that they have been powerful influences.

Happy 7th Birthday

Another gloriously unproductive year on Flying Houses, but for some reason, it felt better than the last one.  There were only 21 posts, compared to last year's 25.  We currently sit at 77,318 page views, when we had 59,169 last year, and just over 30,000 the year before.  Thus, our growth has slowed, and that makes me sad.  It makes me feel like I am dying.

Of course, everyone who reads this blog knows two things: (1) blogs about books are not all that popular; (2) I don't market the hell out of it, and apparently update it less than twice per month.

But still, this year feels better than last year, and I have to attribute that to my professional situation.  Those of you who have been with us all the way from beginning (brave souls!) know that it was started at 11100 Santa Monica Blvd.  I forget which floor.  Though that job sucked, and though I have posted highly-sensitive details about my exit and distaste for the temporary help industry, I have very fond memories of those days.  However, it was an unsustainable and ultimately sad life that I lived in L.A.  Certain days (this morning included) I wish I had tried harder there, not given up, not gone home, not bought an LSAT book.  I suppose most of us have to learn the hard way; sometimes things do not have a way of working themselves out.

I digress!  I would not have started this blog if I had not been at Jefferies & Co. at that specific time in history and I thank them for that inspiration.  (I'd also like to thank Rahm Emanuel for causing the recession.)

We did not hit 300 posts this year.  We are 4 short.  I am not going to quit, however.  I may quit one day, but that may be when I know the end is near, or the day the printed word becomes obsolete.  There is still work to be done.

The most notable achievement from the last year was certainly the posting of Think and Grow Poor, which now sits above Daylight Savings Time on this blog's homepage.  I am seriously depressed that I'm not making money off of this writing, but I have avoided posting S/M for a long time now.  I may release that as an e-book.

Speaking of money, this blog has earned $29.21 in seven years.  It must be the most unprofitable venture of all time.

That said, I am reasonably sure that AdSense has systematically raised the minimum payment amount several times to avoid any remuneration to me.  I'm pretty sure it used to be $10, then it was $25, and now it is $100.  So it will take me a long time to get paid.  I read about a class action lawsuit that was going to be filed against them.  I hope to be included, but I'm afraid my claim is not substantially similar.

I realize it was about 15 years ago that people used to tell their friends, "Click on an ad!" but I will just ask once.  About a year ago I was working at CTA, and we had a plaintiff come in for a deposition.  She said she fell down on a bus that slammed on its brakes.  Somehow it got brought out that she ran a blog--a fashion blog--where she took pictures of herself in various plus-size outfits.  She said she made about $300 a month on the advertising.  I was like, holy shit.  This girl could teach me something.

So don't be surprised if I start putting myself out there.

Speaking of putting myself out there, I am afraid to Google myself.  I know what used to show up, at least, and it makes me want to either kill myself or fly into a murderous rage.  Neither would be conducive towards a happy future.  At this time, I am concerned that it has turned me into a joke of a person that no one would ever want to hire.  Now I may be a joke of a person, but I want to be my joke of a person--not anybody else's.  Fuck people who presume to know the details.

Having said that, there is a request for a new NIED piece.  It would appear that all of my columns have been archived at BLS Advocate, However, #25 was chopped in two, and I think it seriously lost its power by being cut down into manageable bite-size portions, one with convenient advice for passing the bar exam.  The original text of #25 is lost, so it must remain in its expurgated form on BLS Advocate.  #26, however, will be coming soon...

Generally, this was a good year in terms of maintaining a readership and eliciting fascinating and helpful comments.  I received an offer for a review copy of a book by a Turkish feminist about the 16th century Ottoman Empire.  I said I would be delighted to receive a copy and review it, though none has arrived.  It is unfortunate that neither the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, nor any other publication has reached out to me regarding a part-time position for once weekly or monthly book reviews, but perhaps, if forced to work within the confines of an editorial staff, the substance of my criticism would be sapped.  For there is little substance.  It is all reader-response here.  I do not deign to posit a formula for a great book other than being moved by my past tangible experience.

Stay tuned for NIED #26, which could be a doozy, and a double (possibly triple) review of The Pale King.  Be patient for the latter.

Happy 6th Birthday

Today, Flying Houses turns 6.  Truthfully, it has not been a very exciting year for us.  There were only 25 posts all year.  In my defense, the months of May - October were spent in a daze, studying for an exam and then worrying constantly about if I passed or not.  Then, November through the present has been spent in a different sort of daze, trying to make some sort of way in the world.  Still, we will go on, and hope for a better year.  This year should get off to a good start, as the next two reviews will be books by Tao Lin and Dave Eggers, certainly two of literature's most interesting subjects (just don't be surprised if they don't show up until May).

While this year has not been the greatest cause for celebration, some figures are worth noting.

Today, our total number of views is 59,169.  I can only tell from last year's post that "we cracked 30,000 views," and foolishly did not provide an exact number.  I also hoped to hit 75,000 and go over 300 posts by this point.  Thus we have failed, and if I don't crack 300 posts by next year I will probably stop posting altogether.  But that is highly unlikely.

The month of May 2013 had more visits than any other month in our history (2,790).

The most popular post was on scamblogs, NIED #23, but that got me into so much trouble that I won't even link to it.

The review of We All Sleep in the Same Room was the 2nd most popular and I will link to that.

I feel that Wild Bill is one of the best reviews I wrote this past year.  But The Confessions of Felix Krull was also quite noteworthy.

Thank you all for reading, and please continue to visit!  I've increasingly felt this blog is most useful for people that need to kill time while at work, and read something that is vaguely intellectually engaging.  Of course it is still a record of my constant education in literature, and I am continually proud of how much material I've produced.  This blog may never be a comprehensive encyclopedia, but it is an encyclopedia of the life of my mind in art.  My goal has been to turn these reviews into an art form.  Whether that has come off is up for debate, but I will always keep trying to do better.  

The Marbled Swarm - Dennis Cooper (2011)

It's not often that I read other reviews of a book before I attempt to write my own.  I used to think that was "cheating" when I wrote film reviews for Washington Square News Weekend at NYU.  It was "cheating" because it was almost like I was afraid to say how I felt about something--or more specifically, afraid that I would praise a film that would be dismissed as a cinematic disaster, or pan a film that would show up on every critic's year-end top 10 list.

We are reaching an important point on Flying Houses.  Recently I applied for a Press Pass for the Pitchfork Festival.  If I get one, it will be the most audacious experience in our history, as I will try to bring in a cameraman and film interviews with the likes of St. Vincent and Beck.  But I won't find out until June and dreams tend not to come true.  Moreover, April 1st will mark our sixth birthday here, and I will post as I have the past couple of years an "MD&A."  After more than 270 posts, one would think I would have the courage to state how I felt about a book without consulting other reviews.  But The Marbled Swarm is one of the more troubling books I have read.  I both liked it, and didn't like it.  It's probably easiest for me to list all of the other books by Dennis Cooper that I have reviewed here and state that I liked it less than all of them.

That's my knee-jerk reaction before even checking all of the others.  But between Closer, Ugly Man,  and Try, I certainly rank it below Closer and Try, and probably beneath Ugly Man too, though maybe I would say it's on par with that.  More importantly from the Ugly Man review, I list and rank all of his books that I've read (six others, three or four of which I would re-read), and from this list I would not put it any higher than #7.

It will be fun to try to explain what this book is about.  First, to continue with the comparison theme, I will say it is most similar to Period in that it is extremely experimental.  I would also say it is better than Period, but maybe I wouldn't stand by that statement if I re-read that book.  But the plot:

The narrator (who is nameless, I am pretty sure) is rich--apparently he is a 22-year-old billionaire (though it doesn't really seem like he is that rich) whose parents were famous French actors.  Well, at least his father, Pierre Clementi, was (I'd need to re-read to check on his mother).  He wants to buy a chateau.  He meets the owners--the father, the mother, and their 14-year-old son Serge--and decides he wants to buy it.  They had another son--16-year-old Claude--who died (Maybe, I think?  For some reason I'm not concerned about spoilers in this review).  Basically, Serge is "interested" in the narrator, and the father seems to think he is a nuisance so he says he will "include him" in the price of the house.  The narrator puts Serge in the trunk of his car and is driven back to Paris (he has a driver, Azmir, of course).  Serge is then raped, murdered, and eaten (Maybe?).  The narrator then starts reminiscing about his younger brother, Alfonse, who was very into Manga and was also eventually raped, murdered, and eaten.  By the narrator and a couple cohorts.  One of those cohorts has a son named Didier who is eventually groomed to look exactly like Alfonse.  Finally, there is the issue of the narrator's father, who apparently dies at some point after Alfonse (though this is confusing, too), and has another property in his will that nobody really knows about in a remote part of France.  There is another story about this house and the people that stayed in it/the reasons why his father built it, that seems to coalesce with the chateau from the beginning of the novel as well as the lofts in which the narrator, Alfonse, and their father reside at in Paris.  Then, the novel ends, and the ending I have to admit is one of the more beautiful endings that Cooper has written.

Why is the ending beautiful?  Because, as may be clear from my plot summary, this book is fucking bonkers and basically impossible to "get."  The most obvious "themes" are younger/older brothers (and this is not the first time Cooper has touched incest--see My Loose Thread), rape/murder/cannibalism (the first two are in nearly every single one of his novels; the last is something new, but seems more "out there" for some reason, and just there to shock), and most conspicuously, secret passageways.  But the ending ties things together as best as it possibly could.

This book is not totally inscrutable.  Cooper does pull back the curtain a couple of times and acknowledges that  he knows that he is not presenting anything close to a linear narrative.  Even so, it is very hard to tell what happened, and I'm not really sure what the whole point of it is:

"The play was set in a chateau whose history of on-site murders, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena required a lengthy spoken foreword, which Claude's father had recited through the speakers for what would have felt like months were not the bloodthirsty details of this story so custom-made for mordant teenagers.
To cite the most agentive of these details, the couple's older son had either killed himself, been murdered, died by tragic accident, or faked his death within the previous few months.
The anguished man and wife had put the crime scene on the market, and the young Parisian, struck by certain parallels between their son's obituary in Le Monde and the clueless death of his own brother years before, found himself inspired to visit the chateau and then acquire it." (171)

I think I've made most of the points I wanted to make about this book, but it is worth noting that in my search for reviews, I came across an interview that Cooper did for The Paris Review in 2011.  You may find it here.  I highly recommend it, as I do most interviews in The Paris Review, which is probably the most important literary journal apart from The New Yorker (though I find The New Yorker to be pretentious most of the time, and really consider an interview in The Paris Review one of the highest honors a writer can receive).  In it, Cooper had this to say about this novel:

"With The Marbled Swarm, I was trying to write a novel the way a sound technician mixes a song or piece of music into its final form. I’ve been studying recorded music and trying to transpose its principles into my fiction ­going all the way back to my first novel,Closer, where one thing I did was try to simulate the sonic effect of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy album with my prose. In The Marbled Swarm I found a voice that let me do that. I thought about each element of the novel, whether it was a narrative thread or character or reference point or an ongoing motif or tone or rhythm. The idea was that they would all always be there, but they would be emphasized or de-emphasized at different points, mixed into the foreground, middle ground, or background, being moved around constantly so the reader’s attention would be directed all over the place. My idea was that it would give the writing a three-dimensional quality, as the reader is carried along by the musical surface of the novel, but he or she would also be chasing different story lines and recurring ideas as they waver and scamper about and hide inside the prose."

This novel certainly creates that sort of feeling.  Cooper also says in the interview that he wants to write one more novel, and then be done with them, so that he can finish with an even ten.  That makes me sad, but he has been pretty prolific over the past 25 years, and the world of literature is richer for the contributions he has made.  I'm sure some people would take issue with that statement, but one of the factors that makes his work more interesting than 90% of his contemporaries is its divisiveness.  While this is not my favorite book by him by a good stretch, it was still a worthwhile read, and the ending was very nice:

"I've failed the marbled swarm as I semi-understand its rules and premise, and, although you'll never know the difference, barring errors that weren't meant as an insidious direction, there is nowhere deeper or more intricately stifled by my story than this hotel room, and I'm out of means to keep you waiting for the secret that involved my sleight of hand unless you think a very frightened thirteen-year-old boy who looks vaguely like Pierre Clementi seems magical or promising enough." (194)

I also loved the references to Isabelle Adjani.

IV - Chuck Klosterman (2007)

In April of 2008, I reviewed Killing Yourself to Live as the 6th review on Flying Houses.  I have just re-read that post, and I am almost completely embarrassed by it.  However, it did confirm my earlier suspicions about IV.  I first read it in October 2007 (about 6 1/2 years ago) and I ranked it below both Killing Yourself to Live and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.  I didn't keep up with Klosterman after IV - I seem to remember that he published a novel.  And after checking Amazon it appears that he has maintained his prolific output--he has actually published two novels and two other books of essays.  I am writing this paragraph from the Logan Square branch of the Chicago Public Library, and I will most likely check out at least a couple of these books and review them in a few months.

But why revisit IV?  Well, my sister had borrowed both IV and a DVD of Boogie Nights, and I saw her over Christmas, and she gave them back to me.  I didn't have much else to read and I had a long commute back on December 26th.  I had to take a ferry, then a bus, then wait in the airport for an hour or two, and then a plane.  It was basically 9 hours in various forms of transportation from door-to-door.  I took out IV because I had nothing else to read.  I read 175 pages that day.

Which actually doesn't seem like a lot because Klosterman's writing is a quick read.  However, I barely read anything on the plane ride because I could not concentrate.  I overheard an incredibly frank airplane conversation between two men on a variety of sexual subjects - one was a gay 19-year-old from Macedonia, and the other was a 72-year-old widower from Tennessee.  It was hard to tune out, particularly when I wanted to interrupt and either offer my own opinion or mock-scold them for how graphically they were speaking.  But this is beside the point.

Klosterman divides IV up into three sections: interviews/profiles of celebrities and other ephemera about "trends," theoretical essays on various subjects, and a short story/novel fragment.  Parts of each of the three are very good.  I believe I enjoyed reading IV more more at age 30 than at age 24.

And it must be pointed out that this is a strange book to review.  After all, it is "dated."  Probably the most heartbreaking thing about it is the "cultural moment" that has passed.  Also, while IV is not a book of reviews, it is not far off from that, and reviewing it feels oddly meta.

It kicks off with a profile done on Britney Spears.  This is probably about as accurate today as it was then, even though it is now more than 10 years old.  There are some interesting tidbits about Justin Timberlake and Fred Durst that I had forgotten about, but otherwise, there is little here that the reader will not already know.
The other subjects include Bono, Val Kilmer, Steve Nash, Gilbert Arenas, the White Stripes, Radiohead, Wilco, Billy Joel and Mike Skinner.  Approximately nothing has changed for all of these subjects except Arenas and Skinner.  "Debriefing Agent Zero" is probably the most controversial essay here since Arenas comes off as perhaps the most lovable NBA player ever, and his image suffered considerably after he put a gun in his locker at an arena.  Skinner has since faded into obscurity, though I am sure any new Streets album would receive fairly significant coverage.  The White Stripes are obviously broken up, but their whole mystique and legacy has only grown with time.  

Still, all of these essays are good.  Sometimes Klosterman comes off kind of sounding like a jerk (in the Britney Spears piece, for example, and maybe even the Mike Skinner one), but he always asks good questions and has a clever way of recognizing why certain artists are acclaimed and others remain obscure.

He also writes about eating chicken McNuggets and nothing else for a week, a Morrissey convention with a heavy concentration of Latinos, Some Kind of Monster, "Bats Day" at Disneyland (basically a ton of goths going there on the same day), female tribute bands, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and Journey playing on a cruise, Led Zeppelin's fourth album, fortune tellers, and a collection of obituaries.

This is a hard review to write because there is something quotable in almost every essay.  It could get incredibly long and tedious.  I suppose it was interesting to read the White Stripes essay because it quoted Wendy Case.  Now I wanted to say that I hadn't yet seen the Paybacks play live, but now I realize that I did in 2006 or 2007, before I read the piece.  I don't know if they are still playing, but that was one of the best shows I've seen without knowing a band's material beforehand.  Klosterman's short description of her is a good example of his style:

"Wendy Case is considerably less shy than Meg White.
In fact, Wendy Case is considerably less shy than David Lee Roth.  She is the thirty-eight-year-old lead singer/guitarist for the Paybacks, a band Case describes as "hard pop." Her hair is blond on top and brown underneath, she laughs like a '73 Plymouth Scamp that refuses to turn over, and she can probably outdrink 90 percent of the men in Michigan." (119)

However, that is a kind of personal quote because of the aforementioned anecdote.  But the bullet points in the Arenas piece are a near-perfect example of Klosterman's humor:

• Occasionally plays poker on a laptop computer during halftime, but denies that he plays against other people on-line (he evidently competes against the computer).
• Once took a shower at halftime without removing his uniform.
• Favorably compares himself to a Japanese cooking device.
• Prefers to spend road trips alone in his hotel room, staying awake all night to watch infomercials and do sit-ups.
• Enjoys bowling (his high game is 277) and the work of the rapper The Game (with whom he is friends).
• Installed a hypobaric tent in his Virginia home to simulate high-altitude oxygen levels.
• Has essentially become the guardian of a twelve-year-old boy named Andre McAllister, who lost most of his family in a house fire.  Arenas contacted the boy after reading his story in the newspaper (this, I suppose, is more "nice" than insane).
• A maniacal grudge holder, Arenas claimed he would sacrifice an entire NBA season to play one game at the collegiate level, solely to punish Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski for leaving him off the U.S. Olympic Team.  "One college game," he wrote on his blog.  "That's five fouls, right?...40-minute game...at Duke, they got soft rims....I'd probably score 84 or 85. (178)

The last bullet point is the most ironic point in the essay (Arenas was suspended for almost an entire NBA season, and currently plays in the Chinese Basketball Association) but the essay is one of the most surprising in the book.  So is the essay on Steve Nash.  

But the best part of the first part is the collection of obituaries: Dee Dee Ramone/Robbin Crosby, Spalding Gray/Mary-Ellis Bunim, Eric Griffiths, and Johnny Carson.  The first two pieces in this larger "essay" are fantastic.  Of course nobody remembers Robbin Crosby, and Klosterman perfectly elucidates why: 

"The reason Crosby's June 6 death was mostly ignored is that his band seemed corporate and fake and pedestrian; the reason Ramone's June 5th death will be remembered is that his band was seen as representative of a counterculture that lacked a voice.  The contradiction is that countercultures get endless media attention: the only American perspectives thought to have any meaningful impact are those that come from the fringes.  The voice of the counterculture is, in  fact, inexplicably deafening.  Meanwhile, mainstream culture (i.e., the millions and millions of people who bought Ratt albums merely because that music happened to be the soundtrack for their lives) is usually portrayed as an army of mindless automatons who provide that counterculture with something to rail against.  The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people." (209)

The distinction between Spalding Gray and Mary-Ellis Bunim (who created The Real World) is also beautifully teased out in four short pages.  It is hard to pick out a passage from it (the essay is essentially perfect) but perhaps the main point about what drives reality television should be noted:

"The twentysomethings cast on The Real World were not complex subjects meant to be uncovered and examined; they were supposed to be archetypes of youth culture, and they were supposed to make the melodramatic choices (and exhibit the melodramatic behavior) that would drive a serial TV program.  They were supposed to be hyperreal versions of who they already were.  What they did, ultimately, was unknowingly embody the same aesthetic Spalding Gray invented when he first became a monologist.  'I became a kind of inverted Method Actor,' Gray wrote.  'I was using myself to play myself.  [It was] a kind of creative narcissism.'" (212)

Truthfully, "Part One" is hit-or-miss.  True, all of the essays are "good" but whether or not you enjoy it may depend on whether you find that particular subject "interesting." "Part Two," then, has a more global focus, and I just realized that I hadn't watched Lost when I read this book in 2007, so that was one thing that was new to me.  But more of what comes across is the "lost era" that was 2004-2007 and how Klosterman did not really make it his business to predict what would happen very soon.  

The topics of "Part Two" include Barry Bonds (not Alex Rodriguez), nemeses/arch-enemies, "advancement," the Olympics, clothes, anti-American sentiment, "guilty pleasures," mainstream/obscure culture, staying with one person for your whole life, artists that are neither overrated nor underrated but "rated," pirates, robots, stem-cell research, and a couple other things (I don't want to write a table of contents posing as a review, but that is kind of what this is turning into).  Most of these essays were written for Esquire.  Most of them are pretty good, but they are really more musings than anything else.  These also contain the funniest parts in the entire book.  

"4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42" is a comparison between Lost and Survivor and is fantastic.  However, another personal anecdote is necessary with "I Wanna Get Free."  This essay was written in 2006, so I could not have used it in my colloquium on "Political Rebellion in Literature" at Gallatin (it was delivered in 2005).  However, it is essentially the point I was trying to make in that project.  This would not have any application in reality until the Occupy Movement, but the quotes are prescient:

"Something has occupied my mind as of late, and I can't tell if this thought is reassuring or terrifying: I've been thinking about the possibility of a revolution, or--more accurately--the impossibility of revolution.  I've started wondering what would have to happen before the American populace would try to overthrow its government and how such a coup would play itself out.  My conclusions are that (a) nothing could make this happen, and (b) no one would know what to do if it somehow did.  The country is too large, its social systems are too complex, and its people are too complacent, too reasonable, too confused.  I've decided that the U.S. government is (for lack of a better, preexisting term) 'unoverthrowable.'  And this would probably make a man like Patrick Henry profoundly depressed, were it not for the fact that he's been dead for 207 years." (338) 

I'm not sure which "Part" I like better, but "Part Two" feels like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs "extra content."  Some of these essays are actually really good, but for some reason, like I expressed previously, I considered SD&CP (no longer SDACP) my favorite.  I should probably re-read that.

"Part Three" is a piece of fiction that is pretty good, though I seem to remember not liking it that much the first time I read it.  However, I also wrote that it was "pretty good" in 2008 so my opinion has not changed on it.  I guess it just feels to me like a piece that someone in one of my former creative writing classes would have written.  Now, it would have been "one of the best" of those stories, but if this is "publishable fiction" then we get to the heart of why I have a love-hate relationship with Chuck Klosterman.  

I love his writing because it is breezy, articulate, and occasionally surprising (like seeing a reference to Comets on Fire in "Cultural Betrayal").  He is very witty, and knows how to write well.  However, I hate him because I am jealous of him.  Perhaps he is not fabulously well-to-do, but I would imagine he's been paid pretty well for his writing.  And he gets to publish pretty much whatever he wants.  

Now I get to publish pretty much whatever I want on Flying Houses, but I get no pay from it (in nearly six years I have made about $10.00 that should be mailed to me in a check relatively soon).  So I am jealous and I am sure if Esquire or GQ or some other such magazine gave me a chance to write for pay, I could do just as good a job.  Some of these essays date back to 1996.  Klosterman knew what he was doing from a young age and managed to progress through the journalistic ranks to his current position, and I should not begrudge him for my failures.  I just tend to feel like a superfluous figure in the universe as of late, and I know I should be getting paid for something.   

My Beloved World - Sonia Sotomayor

It is appropriate that My Beloved World will be my final post on Flying Houses before I leave Brooklyn Law School.  I expected to put the blog on hiatus for most of law school, but I ended up remaining somewhat prolific and increased its popularity exponentially.  "My Beloved World" refers to Puerto Rico in this book, but my beloved world will be the library at Brooklyn Law School, which I will be sad to leave.  There have been many miserable things about law school, and while aesthetically our library cannot compete with say, Pepperdine's (which features a view of the Pacific Ocean that surely puts it at the very top), I have always felt that there has been such a wealth of knowledge and information here that learning about the "legal aspect" of any topic was within my grasp.  In my case it came in the form of the biographical accounts of Supreme Court Justices--truly the best models one could hope to have in trying to achieve excellence.

Of course, it is extraordinarily unlikely that I will ever be a federal judge, but at the very beginning of this book, Sotomayor assures all that it is okay to dream:

"A student recently posed another question that gave me pause: 'Given that there are only nine Supreme Court Justices, each with life tenure, can anyone realistically aspire to such a goal?  How do we hold on to dreams that, statistically, are almost impossible?'  As I tell in these pages, the dream I first followed was to become a judge, which itself seemed far-fetched until it actually happened.  The idea of my becoming a Supreme Court Justice--which, indeed, as a goal would inevitably elude the vast majority of aspirants--never occurred to me except as the remotest of fantasies.  But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to their odds of coming true.  Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.  That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward.  And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today."  (viii)

Most striking about My Beloved World is Sotomayor's natural flair as a storyteller.  It is written almost as if it were a novel, and even has a couple of moments of "magical realism" that would not be out of place in a Marquez novel.  However, Sotomayor ends the story when she is appointed as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York in 1992.  Of course many law students and legal scholars will want to hear about Citizens United or Sebelius or other landmark decisions that were heard sufficiently long before publication, but no such treats are offered.  And it is probably for good reason: Sotomayor (like almost all federal judges) is politically savvy.  Later on in the book she rebuffs a colleague's suggestion to join the Republican party in order to have a better chance of nomination, deciding instead to register without any party affiliation.  Of course people view her as one of the "liberal Justices" and for the most part she has lived up to that stereotype.  However, I was quite surprised to read about her feelings on the criminal justice system.  While I am sure that she considers all cases fairly and without bias, I would generally presume that a "liberal Justice" would show slight bias to the Defense, and not the Prosecution.  However, Sotomayor started her career at the New York County District Attorney's Office, and I was shocked to read some of her statements regarding criminal law:

"However caustic, Judge Rothwax was no cynic, though like many a cynic he had been disillusioned, having started his career as a Legal Aid attorney and civil rights advocate before becoming a prosecutor.  That early experience led him to conclude that given all the elaborate protections of the rights of the accused, any defendant whose case eventually came to trial was almost certainly guilty.  In a controversial book, the judge proposed abolishing the Miranda warning and other rules that he believed handicapped the police and prosecutors; he also argued that a 10-2 jury verdict was close enough to unanimous for conviction.  I wasn't prepared to accept his presumption of guilt, though it is borne out statistically: policemen don't normally make arrests on sheer caprice; most defendants do turn out to be guilty.  But a probability of guilt doesn't seem reason enough to revise our standards of due process.  These are designed to protect everyone from the human frailties of those whom we entrust to enforce the state's tremendous powers.  Even if the vast majority of the law's agents exercise these powers scrupulously, it is unconscionable that anyone should pay for a crime of which he was unjustly accused.  Blackstone's famous ratio ('better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer') still speaks to a deep-seated sense of what is just." (208)

Thus, Sotomayor covers herself--at least in this regard.  She does offer up some incredible stories and is not afraid to write about sensitive topics.  I would say that this book should be required reading for anybody that would like to be a prosecutor (or a criminal defense attorney, for that matter), if only because she offers valuable tips for success.  It is extremely difficult to argue with Sotomayor: she is wise, and what the book beautifully captures is how she turned her "humble beginnings" into an asset rather than a liability.  But first, two tips for criminal trial attorneys.  The first is emotion:

"Granting myself permission to use my innate skills of the heart, accepting that emotion was perfectly valid in the art of persuasion, amounted to nothing less than a breakthrough.  Warren [Murray] would teach me much else in the way of trial skills, as had John Fried, Katie Law, and others at the DA's Office.  But that was the single most powerful lesson I would learn.  It changed my entire approach to jurors, from the voir dire to the structure of my summations, and the results spoke for themselves: I never lost a case again.  I had hung juries a couple of times, and once or twice a conviction on fewer than all counts of the indictment, but never an acquittal.
Leveraging emotional intelligence in the courtroom, as in life, depends on being attentive; the key is always to watch and listen.  You don't need to take notes with the court reporter getting down every word.  Lower your eyes to your pad, and you're bound to miss that hint of a doubt that flits across the witness's face.  Scribble instead of listening, and you won't notice the split second of hesitation in which a witness hedges a choice of words, avoiding the ones that would flow naturally in favor of the ones whose truth he or she is more certain of." (210)

The second is jury selection, debunking a myth that still seems to creep into the minds of attorneys today:

"Other lessons I would figure out for myself, often contrary to conventional wisdom.  Some prosecutors, for instance, would look for legitimate reasons to eliminate black and Hispanic juror candidates in the voir dire, the assumption being that minorities are biased in favor of defendants.  But to me that made sense only if you saw all people of color as potential perpetrators and believed, even more implausibly, that they all saw one another that way, too.  It was obvious to me that any black or Latino who held a job, or went to school, or stay home to care for an elderly parent was likely as law-abiding as anyone in my own family and, if anything, far likelier to be the victim of a crime than to commit one.  The notion that such a person would, on the basis of racial or ethnic solidarity, let anyone walk who might pose a danger to the community would have seemed laughable where I came from.  And so I packed my juries with the kinds of people I'd grown up among; the results, again, spoke for themselves."  (211-212)

While I do not believe this book will get any "bad reviews," it is not perfect (I found two typos: "Riven" instead of "Driven" near the beginning; "judge (last name)").  Some might decry sections of the book as being too "touchy-feely" and lacking in clues to Sotomayor's jurisprudence--but she anticipates this in the preface.  I would have liked to see a section on her decision that ended the Major League Baseball strike in 1994, but perhaps we will need to wait until she retires for her "judicial autobiography."  I must say that I read the book in a week, as "pleasure reading" while studying for the Bar, and was dismayed that she did not devote a single word to her experience of taking it (perhaps some memories are better forgotten).  But while I cannot say it is one of the best books I have reviewed on Flying Houses, it contains unmistakable wisdom, clarity and value.  And I found Chapter 24 to be the single best moment of the book.  Justice Sotomayor indulges in a fair bit of self-deprecation, which is welcome in a book where she has to explain how she achieved such magnificent heights.  She is also extremely funny at times.

In Chapter 24 she describes her life after her divorce from her high-school sweetheart, moving to Carroll Gardens and getting advice from friends on dating, with which she did not have much experience.  She writes about her prospects of giving birth to a child and her life as a diabetic.  She writes about adoption.  She writes about her circle of friends and how they have kept her from feeling alone.

She also writes about smoking:

"I had been a smoker since high school, burning through three and a half packs a day for much of my life.  I made my first serious attempt at quitting in my final year of law school: every time I felt the urge, I ran around the block, often with Kevin and Star chugging alongside in solidarity.  Going cold turkey during exams may sound like a needlessly brutal rigor, but in retrospect it seems less perversely self-punishing than lighting up again two years later when Kevin and I split.  There would be further attempts, using various methods, including hypnosis, but nothing worked for good until I saw little Kiley holding a pencil between two fingers, blowing imaginary smoke rings.  The guilt of endangering the health of a loved one is by far the best motivation I've discovered." (284)

She also writes about Puerto Rico's strange situation as an American territory, but not a State.  I do not know if Puerto Rico will ever become a State, but if it does, I think Sotomayor will be considered an important figure in bringing the issue back to the forefront.  However, her feelings on the matter are somewhat masked:

"Again and again, the conversation returned to the island's political status.  Did we want to remain a commonwealth, with some self-rule and a preferential trade relationship with the mainland?  Half the class believed that was no better than being a colony of the United States, living as second-class citizens.  But if we should aspire to statehood, the full rights of citizenship would come at the price of the full obligations, including a tax burden that, arguably, might have crippled our economy at the time.  Some proposed, with passionate conviction, that full independence was the only way to preserve our culture and the proper dignity of self-determination.  The economic repercussions of each position were as inscrutably complex as they were critical to the arguments.  And for those who are eager to discern my present views on the status question, I can only advise you not to give too much weight to whatever ideas vied for prominence in a young student's mind." (152)

All I can say is that this book really made me appreciate Sotomayor and the contributions she continues to make to our country.  If I ever get the chance to meet her, I will ask her for a hug.  I would imagine she gives amazing hugs.

Here is a clip that perhaps better encapsulates what is so great about her: her willingness to be a public figure and to serve as a role model par excellence: