I finished Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone yesterday and - wow. Just - wow. If you thought the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq was inexperienced, unqualified, and inept, you have no idea. The utter incompetence of the civilian leadership, as objectively chronicled by Chandrasekara (often as an eye-witness), was far worse than I had imagined - and I thought I had imagined the worst. Given the gross mismanagement of and bad decisions made regarding... well, just about everything, one comes away mildly impressed that the state of Iraq isn't an even more colossal mess than it is.


Buy it, borrow it, steal it - whatever. Just read it it.

Over and out.

Tags: bibliophilia, politburo
humour: amazed

Sean and I are heading off to New York this weekend for his parents' 58th anniversary and will be pretty tied up with the business for the next day or two, so we did our last major errand run this afternoon - and slotted in a bit of Barnes-and-Nobling. Sean picked up a few more cosmology and Native American history titles for ongoing research-related endeavors and we also bought Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City (out in paperback at last), Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Wesley Clark's memoir, A Time to Lead, and The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another. And, of course, we picked up Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) and, to keep the sales stakes even, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal.

Nor much balance in this purchase, I'm afraid, but many interesting pages ahead - yee-hee!

Tags: bibliophilia, social and personal
humour: excited

Robert Anton Wilson
author, anarchist, faux psychologist, theorist in search of a conspiracy, total head
January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007


Wilson's last blog entry:


Requiescat in pace.



23

Tags: bibliophilia, duly noted, mourn not the dead
humour: content

Well, I doubt that 2005 will be a year that's too fondly remembered by much of anyone. I, for one, am very glad to see the back of it - though I must admit that any year with a Bush in the White House has to be among the lowest years in human history.

So I'm going to turn my back on a lot of the most dire transgressions of this pitiful excuse we've got for a government and focus more on year-end meme-type things. Yes, this is blatant escapism. Yes, this is me burying my head in the sand. Yes, this is me doing my damnedest to deny the grim reality of life in the twety-first century. And what better way, for a start, than through pop culture - and lists?

Here, then, for what it's worth are a few of my top picks for 2005:

Pop/Rock Albums:

1. Kaiser Chiefs - Employment
2. M.I.A. - Arular
3. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
4. Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better
5. Gorillaz - Demon Days
6. Death Cab for Cutie - Plans
7. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
8. Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth
9. Coldplay - X&Y
10. Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor

Compilations/Greatest Hits:

1. Working Class Hero: The Definitive Lennon
2. Eurythmics - The Ultimate Collection
3. Talking Heads Brick
4. The Essential Michael Jackson
5. Eminem - Curtain Call

Soundtracks:

1. Six Feet Under, Vol. 2: Everything Ends
2. Batman Begins
3. The Squid and the Whale
4. Elizabethtown
5. Brokeback Mountain

Defying Description:

Patti Smith - Horses: Legacy Edition

Films:

1. Crash
2. Mysterious Skin
3. Syriana
4. The Squid and the Whale
5. Good Night, and Good Luck
6. A History of Violence
7. Der Untergang (Downfall)
8. Capote
9. Kung Fu Hustle
10. Brokeback Mountain

Honorable Mention: The Devil's Reject's

On DVD:

1. Hotel Rwanda (Widescreen Edition)
2. Bad Education (Original Uncut NC-17 Edition)
3. Frank Miller's Sin City (Recut, Extended, Unrated)
4. The Incredibles (Widescreen 2-Disc Collector's Edition)
5. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (Unrated Extended Edition)

Books - Fiction:

1. Saturday - Ian McEwan
2. The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood
3. The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes - Caleb Carr
4. The Shroud of the Thwacker - Chris Elliott
5. Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman

Honorable Mention: Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk

Books - Nonfiction:

1. Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK - Lamar Waldron, Thom Hartmann
2. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 - Steve Coll [this should actually be in the next list - see honkytonkblues comment below]
3. Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World - Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian
4. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
5. Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis - Jimmy Carter
6. The Truth (with jokes) - Al Franken
7. Don't Get Too Comfortable - David Rakoff
8. A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut
9. 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann
10. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin

Best Nonfiction Read This Year, But Published Last Year:

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil - Michael C. Ruppert
Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA, the Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network and the Compromising of American Intelligence - Joseph J. Trento

Best Fiction Likely To Have Been Read This Century:

The Baroque Cycle - Neal Stephenson


Finally, the Find-your-first-post-from-each-month-and-paste-the-first-sentence-of-each meme:

JAN - Interestingly, we haven't heard much from the Religious Right in relation to disaster relief, have we?
FEB - After more than a year, I have reached the end of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.
MAR - I posted a broken link here last night, which was just brought to my attention.
APR - In a website announcement today, bloggers at the conservative website Powerline claim that they have convincing evidence that House Representative Tom DeLay is in fact a Democratic forgery.
MAY - Last week, anti-abortion extremist Otis O'Neal "Neal" Horsley was a guest on The Alan Colmes Show on FOX News radio.
JUN - So I had my (first) interview with Virgin yesterday.
JUL - At last, the epic and pointless series examining The Wertz Generation's Top Fifty Films comes to a close.
AUG - This post is too important to leave vacant any longer, especially during a war and a vital debate about UN reform.
SEP - There's an excellent article in Newsweek at the moment by Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
OCT - Well, the new computer is up and running, the printer, scanner, and most of the old software is installed (Adobe Premiere is fine, but Photoshop requires the original installation disk, which is in New York), and about half of my documents have been transfered.
NOV - Last week, Reporters sans frontiers published their annual World Press Freedom Index.
DEC - I'll publish the al Jazeera memo.

That was pointless.


Okay, 2005 - you can fuck off now. You won't be missed.

Tags: bibliophilia, duly noted, movie madness, muzik, teh internets
humour: contemplative

( Another pointless meme... )

:::::::::::::::::::::::::
( And another )

Tags: bibliophilia, media, movie madness, muzik, tee-vee, teh internets
humour: blah

About five years ago, much of my spare, non-working time was spent reading (primarily fiction) and gaming - mostly sim and strategy games. Over the course of a month or so, for reasons that I can't quite pin down - though the election of George W Bush may have had a considerable amount to do with it - I made the transition to spending most of that spare, non-working time reading (primarily non-fiction) and participating in online discussion boards.

Now, it seems that cycle may be starting over. Or maybe it's just the past couple of weeks. Anyway, I've found myself reading a lot more fiction of late (and non-fiction of a less political nature) and spending a lot more time with a few new games. This may, of course, be relatively short-lived - I'm already finding the games a bit repetitive and the fiction a bit pointless. Nevertheless, I'm not online at all as much as I was even a month ago. I guess we'll just see how this develops.

Meanwhile, I've had an assignment at work that feels like, well, homework. There's a new policy at Virgin in which employees who make book, CD, or DVD recommendations (for the "Staff Picks" shelves) have to accompany their selections with capsule reviews. As I'm currently working in the books department, these feel very much like terse little book reports. Here, in 350 characters or less, are my first submissions:


I'll probably have to update it with more recent releases in the next coupla weeks (though The Devil in the White City is still on the bestseller list, the Baroque Cycle has just finished coming out in paper, and there's a new edition of Foucault's Pendulum just out), but I'll first have to finish a few books that I'd actually recommend. And I'll still feel like a high school sophomore.

Now, back to Halflife²...

Tags: bibliophilia, social and personal
humour: nostalgic

Punditville and the blogosphere are full of references to "poor Harriet Miers" these days: "The right wing is Borking poor Harriet Miers" and "Poor Harriet Miers. Apparently, she's only ever known one man. Just wait until she goes to the Supreme Court and gets to meet seven new men!" and "Poor Harriet is just the lighting rod for a five year gathering storm" and on and on.

Maybe it comes with the name. In Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, one of the central characters is Harriet Lovatt. She and her husband David are throw-backs (according to their 1960s peers) to obsolete values of family and fidelity. "It must be something in her childhood that's made her like this," they tut. "Poor thing." Poor thing, indeed. She and David eventually give birth to a monstrous child, an irredeemable sociopath and poor Harriet spends the rest of the novel unsuccessfully trying to cover up for him, amid repeatedly failed efforts to rehabilitate him. I draw no parallels between poor Harriet's struggles with her fifth child and the relationship between poor Harriet Miers and George W Bush.

About a hundred years earlier, George Elliot's Middlemarch gave us Harriet Bulstrode - a kind, honest, religious woman married to a hypocritical, conniving banker who made his fortune by pawning stolen goods. Even when she learns of Bulstrode's misdeeds, "poor Harriet" stands by him:


Again, I draw no parallels between poor Harriet Miers and the most brilliant man she ever met.

Perhaps the first "poor Harriet" in literature, though, is poor Harriet Smith in Jane Austen's Emma. Austen's Harriet is a woman of uncertain background that the affable busybody Emma Woodhouse embraces as an admirer in whose flattery she can bask. She attempts to elevate poor Harriet above her station by getting her to spurn the honest tenant farmer whom she loves for the more noble Mr. Elton. Like most of Emma's errors of judgement, the results are disastrous - Harriet is humiliated and Emma herself deeply embarrassed. Throughout, there is much talk of "poor Harriet" (indeed "Poor Harriet" even appears in two chapter titles):


Again, I draw no parallels, but before meddling in the lives of poor Harriets, George W Bush could have done worse than to have read some Jane Austen.


Ach - poor Harriet be damned. What's so poor about the woman who passed the August 6, 2001, brief (the one entitled "bin Laden determined to strike in US") to President Bush or the woman who signed Jeff Gannon into the White House on all those days when there were no press briefings? Okay, maybe an aging Texas fag-hag who's seriously out of her depth is more to be pitied than censured, but what I'd like to know is this: Where are all of the Congressional Republicans with their incessant demands for up or down votes? It's worked for them in every other instance - why are they being so coy now? Maybe it's time for the Democrats to demand an up or down vote for a change...

Tags: bibliophilia, political diversion
humour: amused