Richard Grant interview on KUAZ FM Tucson

Richard Grant, author of God's Middle Finger talks about his awesome book. Interview is at 7:40 in this recent edition of KUAZ FM Tucson's Arizona Spotlight.

God's Middle Finger is a great book about a very interesting range of mountains in Mexico. You can actually see the northern reaches from Douglas, Arizona. The range goes 800 miles down into Mexico and has never been tamed. God's Middle Finger is Grant's book about his journey down there. Great reading.

I am also reading another great book by Grant called American Nomads. In this book Richard Grant writes about the road, and really takes you back into history about the subject of wanderlust in the U.S. Western states. Awesome reading.

BushCo National Security incompetency

Philip Shenon's new book The Commission : The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation fingers Condoleeza Rice in the Bush administration's national security failure of 7 1/2 years ago. This excerpt from Shenon's book published in The Sydney Morning Herald shows the U.S. intellegence apparatus doing its best to warn the Administration about Bin Laden's crazies and just how dangerous they were. The book paints Rice as almost a highly-paid do-nothing, choosing to ignore intelligence and focus instead on promoting the administration, focus on what appears to be PR, game-playing, a big show. As the book follows the 9/11 commission one Richard Clarke emerges as a true soldier, intent on protecting the country. Clarke was at the time the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director. He'd been demoted by the time of the attacks. From the excerpt:

Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.

But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.

More:

Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.

He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden's network and the "nearly existential" threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage - in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.

Shenon's book seems to offer a thru-the lens glimpse into a shameful and tragic chapter of U.S. history: the bumbling incompetence of an administration created by the most hated and destructive U.S. president of all time.

Amazon.com's reference to Shenon's book is here.


This guy is a hell of a journalist. It should be hilarious to hear what Limbaugh and the other highly-paid fart-generators say about him.

About the author, quoting Amazon:

Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter with The New York Times, based in Washington. He was the lead reporter on the investigation of the September 11 commission and has held several of the most important assignments of the Washington Bureau, including chief Defense Department correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, Congressional correspondent and Justice Department Correspondent. He was one of two Times reporters embedded with American grounds troops during the invasion of Iraq and worked in pre-war Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran for Times foreign staff.

No Country for Old Men followup

No one's posted the Oprah interview with Cormac McCarthy to uTube. I went to Oprah's site, the interview's sound and vid were distorted, and did not load in a cohesive or orderly fashion. Oh yeah, then there's the annoying "registration." Why the hell should I have to give them my email address just because I want to watch an interview with my favorite author or access any of Oprah's other fascinating topics? Tell us why, marketing luminaries. Is it because you went to a seminar where someone in an expensive suit told you you might be able to indirectly squeeze a few more dollars out of your target audience by insidiously gathering personal data? ...Go to bugmenot.com when they tell you need to "register" or "sign in."

Ahem. Anyways here is a McCarthy-esque thread that came up when a friend asked what Cormac McCarthy book to get for an inlaw for Xxxmasss. My bud was like "hey what is the best Cormac McCarthy book?"

It's so strange how dark this stuff is, and how gripping somehow.

No Country for Old Men, btw takes place in 1980, yes, 1980. The Cohen brothers did a good job with it, but it was more like a filmic exercise- they got everything down and it worked pretty good- especially the complexity of the plot.

I think as far as handling the odd zen questions of McCarthy they depended on the photography to handle it more than the conflict of the central character. That worked, but still, other characters were developed more thoroughly in the book, and in the book their conflicts meshed with the odd, lifelike, roaming central questions of the book.

What the Cohen bros. faced in the movie is what you face when you turn a book into a movie, typically. You try to have a film that says what the author said but works as a film too, and can be gripping the same way most films are gripping. Nice effort, you should go see this, just go get Claire and just go see it.

Best...Hmm...best.... hmmmmm....

The border trilogy is probably considered his most important work- it's really just 3 books written several years apart that have an interlocking storyline and message. I'd say of all the tough questions McCarthy asks, they are all encapsulated in their most stunning, thought-provoking, disturbing form in the Border Trilogy, especially in All the Pretty Horses.

Blood Meridian would have to run a close second, even compared to the trilogy.

I think the strangest and most puzzling thing about this guy is that his books describe a world that is so beautiful, but there are these dark and random doings going on at the hands of people. You read one of his books and you feel like you've been through one of the most beautiful landscapes you've ever seen- the Earth in its cruel, wonderful, merciful, blooming ways. Then the humans come around, and you never know what you're going to witness, the ugly part, or the inspiring part. Dig?

No Country for Old Men trailer link

This film blogger has posted a trailer from Cormac McCarthy's No country for old men here. The movie is from the Cohen brothers, who always kick ass.

The trailer of course looks like it was put together by the Marketing department, and is full of jump-cuts and those annoying booming/squishy noises that Hollywood film adverts always seem to have these days. At least there are none of those annoying flashes.

Life returning to Chernobyl

Martin Cruz Smith had it right- the mystery writer's mystery writer, in what damn well may be my favorite of his book, Wolves Eat Dogs, describes the area surrounding Chernobyl as a twisted but thriving natural paradise. Today's news story in this link to the UK Guardian corroborates Cruz' vision. Older folks who refused to move out after the meltdown of 1986 describe packs of wolves, forests growing up in the towns and fields, and dozens of other animal species thriving. The area is still polluted, loaded with radiation. Of course Mom Nature keeps doing what she can to heal the wounds.

Cruz Smith makes you feel like you were there. You can see the place. After I read the book I got on the web and found the journal of a woman who'd take motorcycle trips through the area, stopping to take photos and measure the radiation. She wrote that she was glad to have a fast bike, as it was a comfort getting quickly through the areas that were still really hot, and the roads were deserted so she could haul ass as much as the deterioration of the pavement would let her.

The pictures above are of Pripyat, a town near Chernobyl. The woman's riding journal is here. Read and enjoy.

Wolve Eat Dogs also chillingly predicted the Alexander Litvinenko affair.

Cormac McCarthy on Oprah

Now this is unbelievable.

If you have not read Cormac McCarthy, and you are at all interested in the desert southwest, any kind of dark, bleak literature, well told, gripping stories that do not necessarily have a cheery, rosy, happy, neat ending, then McCarthy is highly recommended. His books include All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, & Cities of the Plain- AKA the Border Trilogy, and Suttree, and 2 newer books, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, which I believe won a pulitzer. Oh and don't forget Blood Meridian- WOW.

The amazing thing about him appearing on Oprah is that he's super non-celebrity, the opposite of famous. The CNN article here quotes a time when he turned down a well-paid speaking engagement in the years when he was barely scratching by. I know from other articles I've read about him that reason he's done that kind of thing is he's too busy writing! He's been kind of a writer's writer for years and years but his stuff is so good that more and more people are reading his books.

As soon as this appears on You Tube I will embed it.

[update 7/11/07: found the trailer for No Country for Old Men here. ]
[update 8/8/07: Dang this guy really is hard to find info on. His books say it best, boys and girls, I will tell you that. However there is an awesome interview here from 1992 published at the New York Times by Richard B. Woodward. Still no Oprah interview on YouTube. Apparently clips are available on Oprah's site & you have to register & etc. C7]

Kurt Vonnegut dies

This guy had a bearing on life that was a big influence on me from the time I started reading his books when I was 12. Like the AP copy below says, he spoke out about many destructive things- things others just blindly accepepted. The AP copy does not emphasize something else: Vonnegut was a VERY FUNNY GUY. Humor was interlaced in every book he wrote.

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic.
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.
He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.
He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the city.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

I was always shaken, inspired, enlightened by every book of his I read. No matter what age I was, each Vonnegut book meant something very big to me and I read many of them a few times. They say he had depression- but here was one guy who didn't spread depression, as I believe so many others do, he spread humor instead.

"Librarians gone wild."

This is what Melissa used to say when we were temps, and wondering if many of these folks ever got out for a drink- "It's librarians gone wild!!"

But Wow!

Here is something that will get the attention of all of those library information associates, library information analysts, library specialists, librarians, and lovely digital archivists.

It's some of the most lovely libraries in the world, and I mean lovely, together here in this book, in hot, slippery living color.

Seriously, the book is called "Libraries," photographs by Candida Höfer.

Nice work huh? It looks like all the libraries are in Europe, at least in the link to the "thenonist.com" blog I post above. However I know there are some dandy library architecture spaces here in the U.S. and certainly in good old Tucson. The Gould Simpson building's library is a small gem with a million dollar view. The old library in the AZ State Museum has the coolest reading room in the world, and probably some of the biggest windows you'll ever see. The Main Library on Campus has good mezzanines- unknown, cluttered behind poor interior decoration- I think they have a committee discussing, and discussing, and discussing, that- and a great courtyard in front of the entrance, which courtyard is of course full of disgusting smokers breathing their vaporized chemical shit in the general direction of the rest of us. Oh, also, the 2 stroke gas powered blowers all over the place a couple times a week too. The guys wielding them have ear and eye protection and masks, but naturally they blast our ears and fill the courtyard with pollution and dust during peak hours. Yes, I know, welcome to Arizona.