This last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review has an essay about how to choose what to write next that cracked me up. It’s by Colson Whitehead, who has also written John Henry Days and, most recently, Sag Harbor. I have to admit I haven’t read either one of those novels and probably won’t, but I do know Whitehead once won a McArthur Genius Grant. So I guess that must mean he’s smart and so, no doubt, are his books. Also subversive. The essay is mostly funny because it caricatures literary genres, even some that it’s politically incorrect to caricature (for example the ethnic bildungsroman, the About a Little-Known Historical Genocide Novel, and the Southern Novel of Black Misery), but Whitehead can get away with it for various reasons that I couldn’t. I laughed loudest about the description of authors from “my” genre, thrillers: “Recommended for: Those who know only five adjectives, but know them really well.” I guess I have some work to do. I can only think of three.

Speaking of thrillers with a limited number of adjectives fitting as descriptors, I’ve been following the recent Pakistani offensive against Taliban strongholds (for example on The Long War Journal). Does it strike anyone else as odd that in what is touted as a major offensive with major gains in Southern Waziristan, which supposedly crawls with militants and now also with Pakistani soldiers, the number of terrorists killed when a “major stronghold” is cleared ends up being something like nine, plus two captives? Did anybody check the caves outside the town where all those goats are being kept and ask why there’s two shepherds per goat? (Although admittedly I did smirk at the end of the press release, where the Pakistani Army’s PR service ISPR notes that they’ve established an “Army helpline and complaint cell” for the area. I can hear it now. “AHCC? Can I help you?” “Yes, I wanted to lodge a complaint. Someone just bombed my house.” “Sorry, what did you say? I’m losing you. I’m going through this tunnel and…” Beep. Or maybe you can text it, complete with your coordinates.)

Oh, and before I forget: When I was driving through Chicago late at night last week, I ended up being on the road from Hinsdale to Rogers Park at one of those odd hours when all the music on the radio is bad and there was no plug-in for my iPod in the rental, so I ended up listening to NPR. What was on was Re:Sound, and the resound I happened to stumble upon was a segment from Earthsongs about Bonnie Jo Hunt, a Native American who is also an opera singer. I was just about to hit the scan button on the radio again when she mentioned something about a recording artist named Jim Wilson, who invited her one day to accompany some crickets. “Did I just hear that right?” I thought. “Did she say crickets?” And I had. Apparently, Wilson recorded cricket song in some godforsaken meadow somewhere and then adjusted it to the pitch and speed at which humans normally hear, and guess what — it sounds like gorgeous, harmonious choral music. Pretty astounding. You can hear some of it in the podcast of the interview at about 2 minutes in.  You can also find a recording of Jim Wilson’s “God’s Cricket Chorus” here.

I went to Chicago this weekend to help celebrate my sister’s (and her husband’s) birthdays, and my other sister was there, too, so all my four nephews were in one place, and as always it was great, and there are lots of pictures somewhere, but not any with me in it because I only pose for money. (Or maybe because I’m not nearly as cute as four boys aged six months to three years. It’s a possibility.)

Today, I’m going to be in Brooklyn to help my friend Steven research beers for his soon-to-open bar in Sunset Park. It’s going to be a retro bar (you can tweet him ideas for retro drinks you’d like to see — via his Twitter page). It’s also going to be an experimental jazz venue because Steven was bummed when the Tonic Jazz Club in Manhattan shut down, as Steven (for some unfathomable reason) really likes experimental jazz. I’m more about the drinks than the jazz, but then my favorite songwriter is Taylor Swift, so what do you expect… I don’t know what Steven’s having tonight, but I’m going to go for dark beers, my favorites.

(I’m posting this from Southside Coffee in Brooklyn, by the way, where I’m waiting for Steven to get past whatever traffic snarl is keeping him and which I chose because they have wireless and serve Intelligentsia Coffee, a Chicago brand some consider the best in the States and that I pay too much money for when I get it, but there you go – Chicago beats Brooklyn so far in my day. On the other hand, a man with a string bass just walked in.)

Speaking of irrational decisions, I flew out of Newark to Chicago, and because I knew how depressing that would be I remembered this video in which John Green gets really excited because his book Paper Towns made first place in the 2009 YALSA popularity contest, which is a contest where teens vote on their favorite book, and he beat out Stephenie Meyer, which recommends him strongly as far as I’m concerned. Oh, and his book was presented by the Bella Twins, which also recommends him, in a way. Also his nerdiness is off the chain. So I read the book. It’s not half bad, if you’re just wanting some light entertainment, which I did – something about a high school’s most nerdy guy crushing on the high school’s queen bee after she breaks into his room one night dressed as a ninja and makes him be her getaway driver while she wreaks vengeance on lots of other popular kids and then disappears and maybe is dead, but she leaves weird clues that only he and his nerdy friends can decipher before it’s too late, and he has to do it all before prom, and it ends in a road trip. That sort of light entertainment. On the way back I read Lyndsay Faye’s Dust and Shadow, which is about Sherlock Holmes taking on Jack the Ripper.

As my friend the poetry critic Everett Reed pointed out to me earlier, one of my favorite poets, Ted Hughes, died eleven years ago today. Most people remember him for being British Poet Laureate or his unfortunate marriage to that suicidal poetaster Sylvia Plath, but I’ve always liked him best for his poem “Pike” (not the pointy stick, rather the ugly and very predatory river fish):

“Pike”

Pike, three inches long, perfect

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,

Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

Of submarine delicacy and horror.

A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-

Gloom of their stillness:

Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.

Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

Not to be changed at this date:

A life subdued to its instrument;

The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,

Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

And four and a half: red fry to them-

Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

And indeed they spare nobody.

Two, six pounds each, over two feet long

High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:

The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-

The same iron in this eye

Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,

Whose lilies and muscular tench

Had outlasted every visible stone

Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:

It was as deep as England. It held

Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished

With the hair frozen on my head

For what might move, for what eye might move.

The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods

Frail on my ear against the dream

Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,

That rose slowly toward me, watching.

It’s from his book New Selected Poems 1957- 1994 (Faber, 1995). You can’t just buy the one poem, but, if you were so inclined, you could buy the entire collection here and put it on your bookshelf and look all literate and impress your bookish and artsy friends next time they are bored at your party and are scanning the bookshelf so as not to seem like losers who stare into space since they’ve already looked at all the photos on your refrigerator and captioned them with your magnetic poetry magnets and can’t stay and stare at the Monet print in the bathroom because someone else is worshiping the porcelain god in there.

Finally, as promised, here are the links for the complete Held by the Taliban series from the New York Times. I’d be surprised if David Rohde doesn’t receive a Pulitzer for these. There are a bunch of interactive features there as well.

Held By the Taliban (Part One): “7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity”

Held By the Taliban (Part Two): “Inside the Islamic Emirate”

Held By the Taliban (Part Three): “You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers”

Held By the Taliban (Part Four): “A Drone Strike and Dwindling Hope”

Held By the Taliban (Part Five): “A Rope and A Prayer”

Held By the Taliban: “Epilogue”

I love the series not just because it’s well-written and entertaining, but also because it unwittingly hits all the stereotypes we know and love from adventure novels written in colonial times – and all that’s different, really, is that the serious tone of Victorian Manifest Destiny is replaced by the just-as-serious tone of Postmodern Manifest Destiny. Others with interesting questions/ insights about the series and what it reveals have been brought up my friends in the wider intelligence community (Small Wars Journal twice, Abu Muqawama, Baghdad Bureau, Danger Room twice, and Interesting Times), as well as religion reporters who address the question that nags me the most: Do the Taliban really believe that wearing a necktie is a secret signal that the necktie-wearer is a Christian?

I’ve found these two exposé series eminently readable:

The Taliban abducted New York Times reporter David Rohde last year. The paper is now running a five-part series about Rohde’s ordeal that gives a unique and important insight into the Taliban subculture. It also reads a lot like a good old-fashioned adventure novel about being taken by tribesmen that one might expect to come across in a shelf of books from the 19^th century, except with updated language (and except for the fact that it’s true). I’m sure there’ll be a book and a movie.

I’ll repost these links when all five parts are up, but here are the first three, for those of you who are slow readers like me and want a head start. The report also includes video footage.

Held By the Taliban (Part One): “7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity”

Held By the Taliban (Part Two): “Inside the Islamic Emirate”

Held By the Taliban (Part Three): “You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers”

The other series is running in the Los Angeles Times and has something Wire-esque about it, which is no doubt intentional and which also makes it a good story, especially for those of us still bummed about having long ago arrived at the last episode of that show. It’s about a girl who was robbed by a former football star from her high school, and her struggle about reporting the crime and the dangerous life she lives once she does, you know, snitchin’ and all (i.e. being courageous and doing the right thing).

The report includes video footage as well.

Part One: “Holdup Sets the Scene for Tragedy”

Part Two: “Family Had Feared Violence But Hadn’t Foreseen Victim”

I find that following well-crafted exposés like these makes me a much better writer and also helps me to teach students how to tell stories well, even if they’re non-fiction, with striking images and a plot line. By the way, one of my favorite article along these lines is still Dan Barry’s post-Hurricane Katrina story for the New York Times from Sep. 8, 2005, “Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street,” which I use in nearly every composition course and for many of my writing consulting clients.

Thanks to SZE for this somewhat hilarious news story about brides in India who refuse to marry unless their husbands-to-be have installed a working toilet in their future home, by Emily Wax of the Washington Post, aptly (?) titled “In India, A New Seat of Power for Women.”

Oh, and in case you wondered what Twilight might be doing to your sisters/girlfriends/daughters, it looks like we should be more worried about what it does to your moms… (In case you’re sane enough to never have read Twilight, here is a hilarious and astute summary of those literary masterpieces Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn a.k.a. “American Girls Love Vampires Because Really They Want to Boff Their Gay Best Friend.” Obviously.) Which reminds me, I am working on a tab with academic resources on fields that I’ve studied, and it will include a source list for those of us interested in seriously teaching vampire fiction as a genre, from a religious anthropology course I took at Chicago with Bruce Lincoln called “Liminal Beings.” Sometime I’ll also tell you a story about the time I met the world’s leading academic vampirologist.

On an unrelated note, I have been successfully subduing a cold and I thought I’d share the great home remedy that seems to have done it:

-       Take a large mug.

-       Squeeze the juice out of a large lemon. Pour into mug.

-       Take a ginger root. Shred into mug through a grate, to taste (but plenty).

-       Add a spoonful of honey.

-       Top off with boiling water.

Intersperse cups of this lemon-ginger tea with mint or chamomile tea, and you’ll also successfully fight sinus headache and stomach symptoms. And dehydration.

You know the Esquire Big Black Book for Fall 2009 has fallen into hands it shouldn’t have fallen into if they’re choice of the “The Most Important Meal of the Day” is breakfast, and the breakfast James Bond supposedly has is “Scrambled eggs with chopped chives, served on hot buttered toast with pink champagne.” That sounds more like what James Bond’s mom might have for breakfast. Or James Bond when he’s cross-dressing. Or what he might order for the Bond girl before he leaves her at the hotel, where she then dies all coated in gold paint. James Bond has Scotch for breakfast. (Or is that just me?) Or at least a strong espresso.

Although I did like their list of books to help you sleep: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The last one was also a finalist for the National Book Award’s Best of All Times Category, which tells you something about the people there (i.e. they don’t read like I do much). That and that they all seem to have voted for Flannery O’Connor, who is nice in that grandmotherly sort of way, and that’s why I’ve always tried to like her, but is she really the BEST? I guess most readers must be grandmothers. That would make sense. I voted for Faulkner.

I also agree with quite a few of their “Nineteen Things a Man Should Never Say.” With the obvious exceptions – “Teens,” “cool,” and “bye-bye” get a pass from me. Instead I’d add “bro/bra,” “word,” and “totally.”

The next book I’m going to read while I’m pretending to get writing done is David Finkel’s Good Soldiers. I’m looking forward to it. It’s time to replace Vietnam as the dominant American war story in fiction and near-fiction, and these sort of well-written book-length exposés might do it.

And finally, in case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m not the most creatively gifted of my siblings. My younger sister is. She’s a photographer. She took the picture up in my blog header. Apart from author portraits, she also does photo shoots that turn average brides into models, average grooms into sujets d’arte, and, most recently, my nephews into advertisements for the fact that my family makes endearing children…

Jonah

Abner

I should perhaps announce that my short story “The Assassination of a Ghost” won an honorable mention for literary excellence in this year’s Lorian Hemingway Short Story Contest.

I admit I did brag about it to Ms. Treisman at The New Yorker and to my family, but I’m told I’m not supposed to think it’s bad manners to mention it to other people, once, and then not again. So there it is.

The visual artist Christoph Niemann writes an art blog for the New York Times. He has recently moved to Berlin, Europe’s hippest city (which is why all the artists move there these days). Where I also happen to have been born.

(It hasn’t rubbed off on me much, obviously. To wit, in the decade and a half since it’s become Europe’s capital of cool – as the mayor likes to say, “poor but sexy” — I’ve spent maybe a total of six years there, five of which were in high school. As I write this I’m sitting at a Starbucks in a Chicago suburb. Where it’s nice and sunny. And the only hipsters I’ve seen are high schoolers whose combined slovenly outfit cost roughly $400 at Urban Outfitters.)

Anyway, I vividly remember the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, even if I was still a little kid at the time. My parents took us to the Glienicker Brücke, a famous Cold War exchange spot for spies, and we greeted the odd-looking East German cars as they slowly rolled into Free Berlin. (That’s the West, for those of you who skipped European history that day.)

I’ve noticed that a lot of people this side of the Atlantic have pretty much forgotten about the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a day that changed the world when the Soviet totalitarian tyranny — by far the most murderous regime in history — finally crumbled.

Christoph Niemann remembers that day, too. This is his artistic recounting of his experience of Berlin and the Berlin Wall. Go and have a look.

(Thanks to Steven Baird for the tip.)

You’ve all seen Monty Python’s football/soccer match of philosophers.

If you laughed, you might also like this team roster of great writers. I did.

Its only great failing is its omission of German authors. They’d normally claim the coach position and the offensive midfield.

Some of you know that I am an avid reader of most things Neil Gaiman writes.

One of his books, the disturbingly scary and brilliant children’s (-ish) book Coraline has been made into a movie that will be released in the spring.

The movie was adapted and directed by Henry Selick, who also did The Nightmare Before Christmas. You can check out the movie’s website with a featurette and other fun things.

Now, one of the characters — a Russian gymnast and mouse trainer called Sergi Alexander Bobinsky, or Mr. B. for short, who lives upstairs from Coraline — has his own blog. Read the book first. Then read the blog. Rather fantastically funny.

P.S. Do NOT try his Best Beet Smoothie recipe, though.

P.P.S. Yes, I know he’s supposed to be Russian. But he’s fictional, so it’s ok.

Here’s something I’m slightly ashamed to admit to. I love a lot of these lists. They’re addictive, and they make me laugh my head off. Sort of like the Hamster Dance, which I had hoped by now would’ve disappeared forever as just slightly less evil than the virus in 28 Days Later, but hasn’t.

Why am I ashamed?

First, because it’s rather nerdy to enjoy any lists except the Harper’s Index, the New York Times bestseller list,  the Dow Jones index, ESPN’s college football rankings (or for the civilized, Europe’s soccer leagues), and the beer rankings at Berlin’s Bierbörse.

Second, because, while it’s an excellent and often very funny publication, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern was co-founded by Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers’ first novel was the oh-so-ironic A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was neither. Although, come to think of it, I have a signed first edition. Don’t tell anyone.

John Crace over at The Guardian (a UK newspaper) reviews books old and new by condensing them into a usually uproariously funny summary version. I’m sure it occasionally rankles fans of said books to be so astutely mocked, but I found myself laughing out loud even at the podcasts about books that I’m a little less critical about than Mr. Crace.

Check it out (and subscribe via iTunes) here.

(Sensitive Christian Alert: Many of the podcasts are as explicit as the books are.)