Thomas Mahoney

It’s called “Outliers: The Story of Success.” It comes out on Tuesday, November 18th. It is written by the consistently brilliant Malcolm Gladwell, who needs no introduction to my loyal blog readers. If you are familiar with “Blink” and “The Tipping Point,” I’m sure you already have this pre-ordered. My goal is to not sell you on this book or describe it, but just to make you aware of it. This is what I’ll be reading in a few weeks. That’s all. You should be reading books by smart, innovative people, and Gladwell is one of them.

Where Silverlake Boulevard ends at Glendale Boulevard, mere minutes walking distance from my house, the city is building a library. When this library is complete, there will be a stretch no longer than a few hundred yards which contain the library, Still, an anusara-focused yoga studio, and the Cha Cha, a hipster dive bar fire-hazard decorated with all kinds of Mexican-themed bric-a-brac and velvet paintings.

I have two predictions about this area. First, twenty years from now, several of the best novels produced in the history of Los Angeles will be traced back to this section of town. Second, when I’m dead, you’ll be able to visit this little corner of the universe and within your field of vision have an accurate understanding of my life.

Good evening.

Roberto Bolaño’s final novel, 2666, is available today in its first ever English language edition, courtesty of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Author of The Savage Detectives, Bolaño famously died shortly after presenting 2666 to his publishers. His death was attributed to complications from Hepatitis C, which he contracted during his youth as an IV heroin abuser. Considering I can’t read Spanish, I was tipped off to this book by an acquaintance who received an uncorrected proof from FSG several months back. I have no review for you, only the suggestion of rumors claiming this labyrinth-like novel overtakes anything published by Jorge Luis Borges, which is no small claim and the impetus for an after work trip to the bookstore where I’ll be picking up my copy. We’ll get back to this one in a few weeks…

Also, I know I often link to entries from Wikipedia, but please take the time to read the entire entry on the author, including the section on his work Nazi Literature in the Americas and his thoughts on “literary culture as whore.”

UPDATE: If you want a hipster’s review of the book, check out the one just posted over at Lit Mob. I’ve read the first couple of pages and can already feel myself getting sucked in…

UPDATE 2 (19 Nov 2008): A blog out of Chile has linked to this article — check out Archivo Bolaño.

My dad doesn’t use the internet. He’s opposed to it. He’s not opposed to its existence; he is just opposed to having to understand it for himself, or how to work any kind of device reliant upon a microchip. It’s a goddamn shame that someone with as much knowledge of the 20th century, including politics, religion, and the spectacular failures of Boston sports teams isn’t spending time falsifying Wikipedia entries and firebombing unsuspecting bloggers. Last time I saw him, he admitted he used to second guess calculators when they first came into widespread use. Yes, my dad is old enough to remember such innovations. My dad is also old enough to have been in the same war with John McCain but wasn’t unlucky enough to get captured. To think of the political career he could have had if he had fucked up!

For whatever reason, I like to compile lists. I keep records on a variety of personal interests. I know my top 10 favorite bands. I also know my top 10 favorite albums. (It may be surprising to see how different those two lists are). I know my 12 favorite foods, my 6 favorite American cities, the 5 people I could never go without speaking to again, and the one that got away. I even have a list of the things I absolutely would not do or buy regardless of how much money I had (flashy cars, jewelry, vote Republican, have respect for the police). Considering my laissez-faire attitude toward my personal schedule and the organizational disaster that is my closet, this may be surprising, but by now it should be clear I live mostly inside of my head, so some kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior is necessary to maintain whatever fragile grip I have on functioning in society.

I had been engaged in a conversation with a friend a month or two ago about books I felt should be required reading for — well, I never defined the absolute demographic, but it’s safe to assume I meant like-minded individuals around my age. This made me wonder what books my dad would say. So I wrote down what I thought the books would be and sent an email to my mother to have her act as my dad’s digital agent and confirm or deny my guesses. The reply echoed my initial speculations.

Robert Frost: North of Boston
Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men In A Boat
George Orwell: Animal Farm
Joseph Campbell: Myths
James A. Michener: Hawaii
Garrison Keillor: Lake Wobegon Days
Sidney Harris: Chalk Up Another One: The Best of…
Jimmy Breslin: The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs & Steel
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead & Atlas Shrugged
The Bible
Dr. Jacob Bronowski: The Ascent of Man
William L. Shirer: The Collapse of the Third Republic
John Irving: A Prayer For Owen Meany

I forget my dad’s stance on Ivanhoe. He might of loved it, he might of hated it, but he certainly talked about, but it didn’t make the list. He suffers from the kind of lying that only afflicts the elderly, a fibbing to make up for gaps in his own memory. It’s the whitest of all lies. Who knows? Maybe he’ll call me to clear this up.

Taken from the Wikipedia entry on American novelist Don DeLillo:

George Will proclaimed the study of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra as “sandbox existentialism” and “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.” DeLillo responded “I don’t take it seriously, but being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.”

From Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine:

At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud [an Iraqi worker] what would happen if the plant was sold [to a private foreign company] despite their objections. “There are two choices,” he said, smiling kindly. “Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside it. But it will not be privatized.” It was an early warning — one of many — that the Bush team had definitely overestimated in its ability to shock Iraqis into submission.

Corporations of the world, take note.

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In other book news, I picked up Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live: Collected Nonfiction, which brings together her seven volumes of non-fiction from the late 60s to the beginning of this decade. She is uniquely obsessed with three of the topics I find most interesting: California, politics, and death. Didion has always been a hard person to directly quote, because so much of what she wrote is so perfect that to not quote what surrounds that particular paragraph or sentence becomes a crime of ommitance. With that said, here is a particular passage from “Los Angeles Notebook” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, about the Santa Ana winds:

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself: Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliablity. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes is out now on Verso.

Verso’s description:

Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In the postmodern world, ideologies of all kinds have been cast in doubt. In this combative new work, renowned theorist Slavoj Zizek takes on the reigning postmodern agenda with a manifesto for several “lost causes.” From a provocative redemption of Heidegger’s engagement with the Third Reich as “a right step in the wrong direction” to reasserting class struggle as the underlying reality of global capitalism, to a defense of the emancipatory legacy of Christianity against New Age spiritualism, Zizek confronts the failures of contemporary theory and proposes unexpected resolutions.

Many of you may only know Zizek from his rants featured as bonus material on the Children of Men DVD. To be honest, I won’t have time to read this until the fall, as my reading list at the moment is way too long. But I wanted to take a second and recognize Verso, my absolute favorite publisher in the world. From the Radical Thinkers series to the trilogy of Zizek/Verilio/Baudrillard polemics on terrorism in the wake of 9/11, Verso consistently puts out the most thought-provoking books in the world. If you’re into critical analysis, modern philosophy, and of course, proponents of Lacanian thought like Zizek, check out their vast catalogue right away.