By Steve Rhodes
A weekly look at book reviews local and not.
Sex Machine
“Writer and former stripper Stephen Elliott likes sadomasochistic sex,” Mike Thomas writes in the Sun-Times. “And he doesn’t care who knows it.”
“In fact, he wrote about his kinkiest predilections at length in the sexual memoir My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, and he’s glad they’re no longer secret.
“‘It’s incredibly freeing to write about sex,’ says Elliott, 36. The politically active journalist, author and editor of several books – including the forthcoming collection Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica – Elliott grew up in Chicago, where for a time he did drugs and lived in tough group homes for lost kids.”
Mars and Venus
The most interesting thing in this week’s Tribune book review is the news that John Gray is still around – and still pimping his well-worn one-trick pony in a new title called Why Mars and Venus Collide.
Gray is appearing on Tuesday at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, which is such an excellent opportunity for heckling that it just might be worth the trip.
Religious Vows
“Having just read ‘Reading the Koran,’ by Tariq Ramadan, I am awed by its spiritual power,” the Rev. John Wiley Nelson of Provincetown writes to the New York Times Book Review this week.
“The most amazing aspect of the essay is that you could replace the word ‘Koran’ with the word ‘Bible’ and have an astonishingly accurate, devoutly spiritual interpretation of the basis of Scripture in Christianity.”
Rock Star
Who knew Slash grew up a privileged kid in 1970s L.A.?
“After his parents broke up, his mother dated David Bowie, who taught Slash that ‘being a rock star is the intersection of who you are and who you want to be,'” Alan Light notes in his dual review in the New York Times of the former gunner and Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries.
Sixx’s book, Light writes, “is something far bleaker” than Slash’s affair.
“[N]othing makes narcotics less alluring than the real-time rantings of an addict; night after night, the perversity ends with him hiding in a closet, surrounded by firearms, convinced that someone is coming to get him.”
Blog Fog
“In 1997 Jorn Barger, the keeper of Robot Wisdom, a Web site full of writings about James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and Judaism as racism (he’s reputedly a racist himself), coined the word ‘Weblog.’ In 1999 Peter Merholz, the author of a Weblog called Peterme, split it in two like this – ‘We blog’ – creating a word that could serve as either noun or verb. ‘Blog’ was born,” writes Sarah Boxer in The New York Review of Books.
“Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world, with about 15 million of them active. (In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles.) There are political blogs, confessional blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs, gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, and cartoon blogs, to name a few. Some people blog alone and some in groups. Every self-respecting newspaper and magazine has some reporters and critics blogging, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.”
Boxer considers the phenomenon in an essay that references 10 books on – one way or another – blogs.
“At the beginning of 1999 there were a few dozen blogs, Blood reports. By the end of the year there were thousands, and it was impossible for anyone to keep up. At the end of 2003 there were two million blogs and the number was doubling every five months. In early 2006 Technorati, a search engine that tracks blogs, counted 27 million. In late 2007, the count passed 100 million. (The largest number of blog posts, some 37 percent, are now in Japanese, according to a recent Washington Post article by Blaine Harden, and most of these are polite and self-effacing – ‘karaoke for shy people.’ Thirty-six percent of posts are in English, and most of them are the opposite of polite and self-effacing.)”
Which is all very interesting. But what does it amount to? Sadly, Boxer doesn’t get to that, instead offering the same tired examples of anonymous invective and political takedowns that fail to convey the import of a revolutionary publishing tool.
But then, Boxer is not exactly an enthusiastic explorer of the new world.
“Two years ago, I was given a dreadful idea for a book:create an anthology of blogs. It could not be done, I was sure. Books are tight. Blogs are reckless. Books are slow. Blogs are fast. Books ask you to stay between their covers. Blogs invite you to stray. Books fret over copyright and libel. Blogs grab whatever they want with impunity – news, gossip, pictures, videos. Making a book out of bloggy material, if it could be done at all, would kill it, wouldn’t it?”
Despite her reservations, she did produce Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web. But it’s not clear she learned much.
Rich Man, Poor Man
I used to like Frank Rich, but over the last couple of years I’ve come to regard his writing as hasty clips jobs pasting together stale Democratic talking points devoid of original thought and often containing outright factual errors.
It’s just so predictable.
In The New York Review of Books, he states that “[T]he Clinton campaign tried to muddy Barack Obama’s early opposition to the war, a signature element of his presidential candidacy, by claiming (also incorrectly) that he had gone wobbly in the years since.”
I wonder how Frank Rich explains Obama’s virtual silence on the war upon being seated in the U.S. Senate with a bully pulpit miles wide, or the removal of his famous (and possibly only) public statement against the war during his Senate campaign from his website, or his endorsement of Joe Lieberman over antiwar candidate Ned Lamont, or his continued funding of the war. Electing Barack Obama did no more to end the war than electing, oh, say, Hillary Clinton to the Senate.
“Clinton and Obama, whatever the fine points of their policy differences, hewed to standard party orthodoxy,” Rich goes on. Actually, Clinton’s policy prescriptions are relatively more progressive than Obama’s, according to none other than Rich’s New York Times Op-Ed colleague Paul Krugman.
“Clinton’s laundry list of programs recalled her husband’s centrism (and triangulation); she seemed to be campaigning for a third Clinton term.”
Which was won by Al Gore, but suddenly the potentially transformative nature of Bill Clinton’s presidency, had Gore served two terms, is no longer on the table for discussion. The right-wing noise machine has won over its liberal opposition.
“Obama’s domestic agenda was united by a larger, reconciliatory theme that at times echoed Michael Tomasky’s notion of a ‘common good.'”
Which sounds both vaporous and, well, very familiar to Bill Clinton’s Third Way centrism.
Bob Somerby has been right all these years: The biggest enemy of liberals and Democrats is their own gutless selves.
In the words of Mike Thomas, liberals like sadomasochistic politics. Next from Frank Rich: Republicans Come To The City And Beat Me Up – And I Like It.
Posted on January 28, 2008