So it's springtime, which means the tough little migrating birds are out. That means instead of reading for pleasure, I'm reading for work. This probably makes for a dull blog entry, because birds, am I right? They're adorable and colorful and fascinating, but I know you don't care about that.
In case you DO care, I recommend Identify Yourself: The 50 Most Common Birding Identification Challenges.
Also, go get in the woods sometime and sit down and look around and listen for a bit. THEY'RE NOT THAT BAD. And you might see a goshawk. I did the first time I went in the woods just to look for birds. Kinda peaked early, I'm afraid.
You know what? At some point I told someone that Hemingway's A Moveable Feast was my favorite book. But I haven't read it for at least a decade. What do you say we give it a read and see if it holds up? It's pretty short. Recently I reread The Great Gatsby for the first time since high school, and it was so good I almost want to see Baz Luhrmann destroy it. Will Hemingway's love letter to post-war Paris do the same?
I haven't seen Lincoln yet. I know. There are two main reasons. One is that it's almost three hours long and I have a long-standing policy of not watching movies that are longer than 2.5 hours that don't have Harry Potter in the title. The other is that I haven't finished the book yet and I don't want it spoiled.
The book in question is Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. I'm about a third of the way through and the dude hasn't even been elected yet. Stop me if you've heard this before, though. A candidate who is considered a shoe-in to win the nomination for the party - in this case the newly formed Republican party - and a handful of other folks who seem to have an OK chance of generating some press but that's about it. Then what happens? Some tall guy starts giving good speeches and then wham-o. A guy most folks hadn't heard of gets the big nod.
That's what you get so far with Team of Rivals. A lot of stories that seem very familiar, even though they happened so very long ago. You think that political rhetoric has gotten steadily worse than when you were young? Try this on and see how your thighs look in it:
"The illustrious Honest Old Abe has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation. His speeches have demonstrated the fact that although originally a Herculean rail splitter and more lately a whimsical story teller and side splitter, he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion. People now marvel how it came to pass that Mr. Lincoln should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world. The European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President. The truth is, Lincoln is only a moderate lawyer and in the larger cities of the Union could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger. Take him from his vocation and he loses even these small characteristics and indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy."
Now you might be thinking that some Southern rag was publishing that nonsense about the recently inaugurated President Lincoln. Nah, though. That was the Salem Advocate. The paper in Lincoln's own state of Illinois.
Political candidates losing or winning based on the thorny issues of immigration and religion? When William H. Seward, the aforementioned shoe-in candidate, bucked the anti-immigrant/anti-Catholic Whigs by providing education funding for (gasp!) all students, not just the Protestant English, he probably cost himself the nomination and eventual presidency.
In fact, the thing that really sets Team of Rivals apart from other Lincoln biographies is the context. This book is as much about those he defeated and then turned into friends as it is about Lincoln himself. Though there's plenty you'll enjoy learning about ol' Number 16. Like did you know he was basically a stand-up comedian before such things existed? People came for miles to hear his jokes. And some of them were about poop!
"One of Lincoln's favorite anecdotes sprang from the early days just after the Revolution. Shortly after the peace was signed, the story began, the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen 'had occasion to visit England,' where he was subject to considerable teasing banter. The British would make "fun of the Americans and General Washington in particular and one day they got a picture of General Washington" and displayed it prominently in the outhouse so Mr. Allen could not miss it. When he made no mention of it, they finally asked him if he had seen the Washington picture. Mr. Allen said, 'He thought that it was a very appropriate [place] for an Englishman to Keep it. Why they asked, for said Mr. Allen there is Nothing that Will Make and Englishman s**t so quick as the Sight of Gen. Washington.'"
Anyway, that's what I've learned so far about Abraham Lincoln. I'll be sure to tell you more as I learn it.
I will leave you with an original painting by one Joanna Howard. The medium is a combination of acrylics and adorable.
Sorry about Friday. I know that I totally made a post on Wednesday that was like I don't want to write one but I'm going to so that I don't break my streak and then Friday whoops.
Here's the deal. I was flying in a helicopter for work. I KNOW. It was fun. I would talk more about it but this isn't that kind of blog. Also, I'm not sure if there's much more to say until my pictures get posted on the work server. Maybe I'll throw 'em in! We'll see, is all I can say right now. We. Shall. See.
Anyway. After flying in a helicopter for work I was coming down with a severe case of the barfies every evening. On Friday, and this is the ironic thing, I only had to do the thing that I mentioned at the beginning of this sentence (flying in a helicopter for work) for a few hours. So I had literally an entire day to write a few paragraphs and not break my streak. So instead I laid around and thought about how it would be good not to barf. And I think I watched a movie and maybe walked like two miles to an Arby's? Honestly, that day is kind of a blur.
So no blog last Friday. That's the upshot of the first four paragraphs you've just read.
Here it is, and it's Tuesday, and I have a video game from the Redbox, a half-hour on the elliptical that needs doing, and I just found out that Adventure Time is finally on Netflix, and what am I doing? I AM WRITING A BLOG FOR YOU. Also I haven't mentioned a book yet. Welcome to Howie's Book Club!!!!
Here's a couple of new entries to keep you, ahem, abreast. The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems - Billy Collins
I have this one at my house right now and I've read like three of the poems and you guys, so fun.
I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President - Josh Lieb
That second one? The title that I'm not sure if I capitalized right? I've actually already finished it. It's a quick read. Like, you can do it in a day. It's also very funny. I'm a sucker for a good anti-villain book, and this is one of those. It's also good because everything that the book is about is right there in the title. So I don't have to write a synopsis. Instead, I'll just say that it's very funny. And kind of sweet, in a way that might be just a little too sweet? But still funny and a general delight.
I don't know if this is really going to qualify as a post, since it's going to be short and it's like 9 pm. I wouldn't really say I just squeaked in there with a post. But I'll do this one anyway so that someday I can look back and say I never missed a Wednesday or a Friday.
Working long days in the field is not always conducive to creating, it turns out.
Anyway, I finished Fooling Houdini, and found it to be the perfect antidote to the downer hour that reading time had become lately. I'm not going to say I won't go right back to wallowing in the depths of humanity for a while, but it was nice to get a bit of a break among the goofballs and whackadoos who make up the magician community.
There's a great clip with Alex Stone performing one of the tricks he develops while writing the book for one Daniel Handler, AKA Lemony Snicket. It won't let me embed the video, though, so go Google "Alex Stone, Daniel Handler." Then enjoy.
I just picked this one up at the library, so I haven't read it yet, but it's Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, by Alex Stone.
It comes recommended by my cousin Casey, but just in case you've somehow never heard of the founder of Holy Fetch, your one-stop shop for busting or confirming Mormon myths, I'll back his recommendation up with a couple other hipsters you might have heard of.
I'm not always a sucker for blurbs, but when they're written by Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame, Ira Glass, and John Hodgman? Well my lil' head perks right up.
I'm excited to read it. To quote myself in the comments of my last entry, almost everything I know about the magic industry is from The Prestige and Arrested Development. The writer left a PHD program in physics to become a magician, so he brings some science.
Anyway, let's read it, shall we? It's the perfect palate cleanser after all those hard drugs.
In the days since Friday, I haven't made much progress on the books on my list. Well, ok, I finished two of them. Benedict Arnold and Methland are... in the books? That sounds awful.
Anyway, I'm going to get back to Native Son soon, and finish it, and then maybe leave society and all its ills? I haven't decided yet. In the meantime, I need to pick some new books. Since nobody has suggested any yet. HINT HINT. I'M SAYING HINT HINT BECAUSE IF YOU'RE READING THIS YOU SHOULD HAVE SUGGESTIONS. That's the end of the subtle hint portion of this post.
If you're watching Breaking Bad you know two things: The Mexican cartels are very, very scary and Walter Jr. sure loves his cereal.
Also, if you read or are reading Methland, you've learned that a very small minority of Mexican immigrants have taken over American meat-packing plants and have turned them into a drug-smuggling network.
Oh, and if you've known me at essentially any point in the last 2 decades you probably know that I lived for a couple of years in Mexico.
These things have combined, along with a fascination for the name "Ioan," brought me to El Narco. In it, already, there have been many beheadings. You guys sometimes find out how scary life is for some people and then think what the what? Yeah. Me too. By the way, Ioan is pronounced 'yo-an.' So there you go. And "Grillo" is spanish for cricket.
Speaking of drug cartels and callbacks to earlier blog posts, do you remember when I said that in a hypothetical future I could say something about having just read an Elvis Cole book and thinking it was fun? I'M DOING THAT RIGHT NOW. Well, not this instant, but while I'm out working, to get through some of the slower times, I've been listening to Taken, by Robert Crais. If you're into any of the private eye books I've mentioned in the past, Crais' Elvis Cole is one of the greats. You should probably just start at the beginning, though.
And that would be with The Monkey's Raincoat.
OK! So last night I had some crazy fever and hallucinations all night followed by a long day of physically demanding work, so I'm going to lie down.
Here's a quick chat about two books I'm about three quarters of the way through. The first one is Native Son, by Richard Wright. I didn't know anything going into this one. It was on my list, and it was 2 bucks on the Kindle store, and I was like OK.
I'm not sure if that's the ideal way to get into it, but since it's the way I did it, I refuse to tell you more than only the barest of details. It's a protest novel about racism in 1940. It's based loosely on a true story, but I don't want to tell you what story it's based on, because then you won't have the same experience that I did and isn't that what life is all about? All of us doing things the same way and then meeting again and comparing notes about how similar our experiences were?
YES.
OK, I'll tell you one thing. It's almost unrelentingly bleak. So much so, that by the third act I was like, Yeah, Ima take a break. So I started Methland, by Nick Reding. Because the only thing that cheers me up more than crushing racism and terrible decisions is maybe the worst drug known to man.
This one I will talk a lot about. Because I can't stop thinking about it.
Welcome to Oelwein, Iowa. Population, about 6,000.
Anyway, yeah. Oelwein, in 2005 or so, we're definitely talking about Trouble with a capital P and that rhymes with pool.
"I say your young men'll be fritterin!"
But listen, this is no time to be making Music Man jokes, 'cause guys, something in the rural U S of A is broken.
I was going to look up some of the facts in this book, because they are straight up harrowing. But I thought instead I'd stick with some of the anecdotal information. For example: in Iowa they had to ban bake sales. Why? Because too many kids were bringing in treats with so much meth in them that they were making other kids sick. These aren't intentional drug-laced brownies like they have at your better dispensaries in California. Oh no, this is incidental to the cooking process in their homes.
Or how about this one? Two kids were found to have the most meth residue in their hair of any human being tested. Why, do you ask? Because their parents found a new way to squeeze just a bit more of the powder out of their coffee filters. It's by microwaving them. And, you know, it's the only microwave in the house. And most folks who are cooking meth don't spend a lot of time cooking meals for their children on the stove.
According to Reding, between 1998 and 2002, meth production and sales went up by 1,000 percent. In 1998, 321 meth labs were busted in Iowa. In 2005 it was 1,370. And not just Iowa. Missouri topped the charts with 2,087. And here's the worst stat in the whole book: the Oelwein chief of police at the time estimated that for each lab found, another 10 existed without their knowing. If you take that number and look at 2003 and 2004, when 700 labs were dismantled in Iowa alone, it means that "at least 7,000 kids were living every day in homes that produce five pounds of toxic waste, which is often just thrown in the kitchen trash, for each pound of usable methamphetamine."
Methland doesn't just dwell on Oelwein, though, or meth all by itself. Reding looks at the impact of meth as a whole on the nation. The way it's been reported on in the news. The pharmaceutical companies' long fight against regulations on pseudoephedrine, and their number one defender:
From the book:
What the Hatch camp wanted in 1995 was proof that pseudoephedrine was being used to make meth. DEA had what it thought to be incontrovertible verification: nearly a quarter of all the meth superlabs it had dismantled in the last year had already made the switch from ephedrine to pseudoephedrine. Even in labs that were still using the old method, agents had founds bills of lading for bulk orders ofpseudo, a further indication that the market was in the midst of a dynamic shift. Hatch, though, didn’t consider this compelling enough, and he tabled the proposal by calling for more investigation.
Yeah Orrin! He finally did buckle, though. Sort of.
It wasn’t until the spring of 1996 that Hatch and Haislip finally agreed on language that was acceptable to both the government and the pharmaceutical companies: vendors of pill-form pseudoephedrine would be subject to DEA licensing and bookkeeping unless those pills were sold in the now-ubiquitous clear-plastic containers with aluminum backing. Hatch’s logic, it seems, was that the narco-empire built around methamphetamine would crumble in the face of the tamper-proof blister pack.
Oh. Um.
You guys, I'm just getting to the surface here. This is a book you should read. This stuff is CRAY. And I haven't even gotten to the Mexican drug cartels and their use of meat-packing plants as the perfect cover for dealers. Or Tom Arnold's meth-empire-building sister. Or the Greek restaurant that serves mostly pizza, and not even Greek pizza!!
"Few men ever met with so many hairbreadth escapes in so short a period of time."
-General Horatio Gates
Check it out. That monument is of a boot. Just a boot. The inscription reads as follows:
"Erected 1887 By JOHN WATTS de PEYSTER Brev: Maj: Gen: S.N.Y. 2nd V. Pres't Saratoga Mon't Ass't'n: In memory of the "most brilliant soldier" of the Continental Army who was desperately wounded on this spot the sally port of BORGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT 7th October, 1777 winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major General."
No name, though. That's because that "most brilliant soldier" was Benedict Arnold. His leg was seriously wounded in that battle, and he never fully recovered. When, after his betrayal, he asked an American prisoner "What will the Americans do if they capture me?" The prisoner supposedly responded, "They will cut off the leg which was wounded when you were fighting so gloriously for the cause of liberty, and bury it with the honors of war, and hang the rest of your body on a gibbet."
According to Steve Sheinkin, author of The Notorious Benedict Arnold,
If Arnold had died from his wounds at the Battle of Saratoga, we would think of him today as one of the all-time great American heroes. Aside from Washington, we'd say, he did more to win our Revolution than anyone. We'd celebrate his life as one of the best action stories we have -- Washington never did anything half as exciting as the march to Quebec or the Battle of Valcour Island. Sure, we'd say Arnold was unstable, tormented, a loose cannon. But he'd be our loose cannon.
He didn't die, though. Instead he's gone down in the books as one of the most well-known traitors in history. He set out to make his name famous, he just didn't do it in the way he'd hoped.
The book also tells the story of British soldier John Andre. Who is, and bear with me here, like a James Bond without the spy skills. I'm saying he was good with the ladies. And for the most part, he seemed to have a fine time during the Revolutionary war. Except for the bit at the end.
Anyway, The Notorious Benedict Arnold isn't very long and it reads like a fine adventure story. You know in movies how the hero seems to be invulnerable to a hail of bullets and you're like what the crap? That's what this book is like, but TOTALLY TRUE. Guns were much less accurate back then, I guess, so you'd think that the guy up on a horse waving a sword around would be the easiest target, but really before rifling became a thing, war at the time was more about shooting walls of lead into walls of dudes at short range, so maybe being up high gave you an advantage.
In the true spirit of Easter, I have decided to revive an old Facebook club, merge it with my previous blog, and make something that is somehow more delicious even then the sum of its parts. You know, like a Cadbury Egg.
Thus we witness the birth of something new, like would emerge from some kind of pagan fertility festival. Or a blackout during a Super Bowl. I bring to you HOWIE'S BOOK CLUB.
In other words, this new blog will do the same thing as my last one did, just minus the video games.
Because I am some kind of optimist, I present to you two main goals of this blog. Number one: I will pledge to you that it will be updated semi-weekly, which I think means twice a week. These updates will occur on Wednesday and Friday. They might not always be a full post, but they will always relate to the books that I'm (and hopefully you!) will be reading. That brings us to the second, and admittedly much more difficult part of this experiment. Yes, imaginary reader, you are correct in the assumption that I am going to invite you to not only read my writings, but those of the authors I'm reading at the time.
I know. It's bold. While we're being bold, though, I'm also going to invite you, the dear reader, to make your own posts if you so desire. IT IS LIKE THE ENTIRE WORLD IS FRESH AND EXCITING. Like if you were a brand-new baby, born approximately nine months after February 3, 2013. (That is a reference to those Super Bowl Blackout babies I was referencing earlier.)
Or maybe it's just like every other book club, except that since I live far away from the vast majority of those I consider dear friends, it will consist mostly of written words transferred over imaginary Internet tubes. Note: Internet tubes are not, in fact, imaginary. We will not, unfortunately, be discussing these books by a fire over a plate of cookies. At least not yet.
Since this is the kick-off post. I will now tell you what I am currently reading or have recently read. I'll be talking about these books in the coming weeks, and you should, too.
The Notorious Benedict Arnold - Steve Sheinkin
Native Son - Richard Wright
Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town - Nick Reding
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin
I've been reading that last one all winter, and probably will be by next winter as well, so no rush on that one, folks. It is amazing, and very long.
I've read a few quick books that I might talk about briefly as well, but are more for fun than for my improvement as a person, so I'm less likely to expound about them. Just be prepared if at some point I say, Yo I just read another Elvis Cole book and it was super duper fun, and then you're like What gives, Howie? I didn't know we were reading that one? What gives is that WE weren't reading that one, I was. So stay out of my life.
