This selection of Lorca’s poetry does a good job of  illustrating his career from beginning to end and his growth as a poet. The poems are arranged chronologically. His immaturity as a poet are evident in the early works. He hones his skills and develops his own style noticeably with the selections from his third book of poems. From then on, the poems sing with a folk lyricism and surrealism. This collection contains translations by many notable writers, including Langston Hughes and W.S. Merwin; however, I don’t think the translations in this collection are the best translations of Lorca’s work.

This is one of the best books about Christian faith I have read. Peterson draws his title from Friedrich Nietzsche, a most unlikely place. “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is… that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.” Peterson’s premise is that today’s marketing/tourist mindset has changed religion and how people practice it. He examines Psalms 120-134, the Songs of Ascent, and how they pertain to the “long obedience in the same direction” of Christianity.

Some quotes:

“There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.”

“…I am quite sure that for a pastor in Western culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the aspect of the world that makes the work of leading Christians in the way of faith most difficult is what Gore Vidal has analyzed as ‘today’s passion for the immediate and the casual.’ Everyone is in a hurry. The persons whom I lead in worship… want shortcuts. They want me to help them fill out the form that will get them instant credit (in eternity). They are impatient for results.”

On joy- “We try to get it through entertainment. We pay someone to make jokes, tell stories, perform dramatic actions, sing songs. We buy the vitality of another’s imagination to divert and enliven our own poor lives. The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives… When we run out of money, the joy trickles away.”

“Western culture takes up where Babel left off and deifies human effort as such. The machine is the symbol of this way of life which attempts to control and manage… Machines become more important than the people who use them. We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.”

It came in a vision.

I was driving home with my brother and son from a movie.  We stopped at a traffic light.  The owner of the 1980 something vehicle to my left had spent more money on the rims and stereo of his car than he did on the car itself.  A six- or seven-year-old boy was sitting in the passenger seat.  He was wearing those huge, gaudy throwback sunglasses and waving a hand full of cash fanned like cards at me.  He was smiling a gap tooth smile.  Their radio was extremely loud.  Way too loud to have a boy under the age of 16 in the car, in my opinion.  The man who was driving was smoking a cigar and looking at himself in the sun-visor mirror.  I got really scared because I thought I had somehow been sucked into a rap video.  And then I turned right.  Everything went back to normal, but I will be forever changed.  I have seen how it will all end.

If you have ever questioned whether graphic novels can be as poignant and powerful as traditional novels or memoirs, Stitches proves that they can. In fact, I don’t think David Small’s memoir could be told as powerfully in any other format.

David’s mother was a “difficult” person to live with, and everyone in the house retreated into their own forms of silence. Tragically and ironically, David is left a virtual mute at the age of fourteen after what he thought would be a simple operation to remove a cyst in his throat. It was cancer, but no one thought he needed to know that. As his family crumbles under his mother’s austere dictatorship and his father’s belief that he gave David the cancer, David finds his voice through art and escapes the mental illness that seems to haunt his mother’s side of the family.

The simple artwork captures the mood of the Small family perfectly. Pages will go by without a word, beautifully capturing the silence and agony David was experiencing. It would take pages and pages of text to describe what Small is able to express in a few simply rendered panels.

This is a great graphic novel and memoir.

Another great ARC from ijustfinished.com

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Pygmy is advertised as “The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park.” If I had to put definitive numbers to that statement, I would say the book is 95 percent South Park. This satire is chocked full of good ‘ole 13-year-old-American-male humor, which is what will either make the reader love it or hate it. But before you can do either, you’ll have to figure out how to read the damn thing.

The book is narrated in the first person dispatches of a teenage terrorist from a unnamed Asian country who is in the U.S. as part of a student exchange program. He’s here with several other undercover agents to unleash a massive attack on civilians. He speaks in a stereotypical broken English with lots of cliche, communist-totalitarian-like phrases. If you can get used to Pygmy’s phrasing, it almost becomes poetic later in the book. Until then it’s just annoying.

Pygmy, like all of Palahniuk’s novels, makes some very general insights into how American society is degenerate, hypocritical, and weak-minded. Nothing new. It also includes tons of cartoonish violence and sex, including a teenage boy brutally raping another teenage boy in the bathroom at Walmart and a school shooting. Cartoonish is the key word. Otherwise it would be unreadable. Think Borat (which I cut off halfway through the movie).

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club set him up to be a promising literary star for the new century. In my opinion, he hasn’t lived up to that literary potential at all, but Palahniuk has a devoted following that would certainly disagree with me. It seems that every book since Fight Club has tried to top the last in shock value and inventiveness, which suggests he’s writing for pure entertainment value. Pulp is not bad for pulp’s sake, but it’s not art. I still have hope, the audacity. I have one more Palahniuk book on the shelf to read. It’s like tonguing a sore tooth. It hurts, but I keep doing it.

The magic of a good book is that it takes you on a journey and you feel as if you have lived vicariously through the characters.  Cutting for Stone is that kind of book.  The narrator and protagonist, Marion Stone, recounts his life story starting with his mother, an Indian nun, and his father, a British doctor, meeting on a boat from India to Yemen. The majority of the book takes place in Ethiopia as Marion and his twin brother survive a precarious birth and come of age living at “Missing” hospital in the Ethiopian highlands.  He later travels to the U.S. to finish his surgical education in a ghetto hospital.

Verghese, a doctor of internal medicine and pulmonary and infectious diseases, builds this family saga around his  love of medicine- the passion good doctors must have, the calling.  Marion’s story includes the history, myths, scents, and foods of Ethiopia, shifting seamlessly from beauty to poverty and back again.  As in all family sagas, there’s love, regret, loss, humor, mystery, and redemption.  Verghese even throws in a little magic realism for good measure.

The medical terms and surgical descriptions may put off some readers, but I found the book engrossing.

I just want you to know that I watched the new Friday the 13th on DVD. That’s an hour and thirty minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Not only is Jason immortal. He can build underground tunnels equipped with electric lights. He also disposes of his kills, and evidently, he likes to grow large quantities of marijuana. I never imagined Jason as a pot head, but I guess it’s just a sign of the times.

I was in the market for a telecaster after I regretted selling my custom built Warmoth tele.  The thing about the Warmoth I loved the most was the neck.  It had a unfinished smooth feel to it that felt very “worn in.”  After a little research, I stumbled on the Joe Strummer edition Fender Telecaster, which is heavily reliced.  The neck was supposed to have a great feel, so I bought it. I went on a Clash kick, which led me to borrow the biography from a buddy at work.  Strange how we end up where we are.

It took me longer to read the 613 pages than I originally guessed, and I have a lot of excuses.  My wife and I had our fourth child, a second daughter. We now have an even set- two boys and two girls.  I’ve been busy with the kids and various projects.  The book is dense, a veritable Moby Dick of rock biographies.  But the truth is, I’ve just been slack in my reading habits.

When I say the book is dense, I mean Salewicz includes dizzying amounts of details.  I think he recorded every trip Joe made to the pub.  In case you didn’t know, Joe was powerful thirsty.  That’s not to say the book isn’t good.  It’s very good. But you have to be committed to finishing it.

I was a little wary at the beginning because Salewicz obviously adored Joe Strummer, which often leads to biographers airbrushing their subjects’ warts and blemishes.  Once you get past the first three chapters, which recount the funeral, some of Salewicz’s last moments with Joe, and a trip to Joe’s ancestor’s home in Scotland; Salewicz gives a very balanced account of Joe’s life – his faults, as well as his virtues.

The book is fairly evenly divided between Joe’s early years, his years with the Clash, and his solo years.  If you don’t know, The Clash began as a punk band in the late seventies, but quickly turned into a genre-breaking band fusing punk, rock, reggae, and world music.  You’ll learn, with plenty of specific examples, Joe loved people.  The cast of characters is endless and includes some unusual suspects.  He genuinely loved music from all over the world, especially reggae, cumbia, and African music.  He always had a “ghetto blaster” with him.  Joe also loved a bar and could talk the owner into keeping it open until dawn.  Perhaps his last great love was a campfire, which connected all of the above – people sitting around drinking, talking, and listening to music.

Salewicz writes towards the end of the book, “…Those who knew him, that international group of interconnected old souls who formed his and The Clash’s posse, knew he wasn’t Saint Joe. No, he was much more interesting than that.”  Joe felt his biggest mistakes were firing two of the four essential members of The Clash- Topper Headon and Mick Jones.  But throughout his life, he wasn’t the easiest person to work with.  He had trouble handling situations, especially if they involved people close to him.  He could be the kindest guy in the world giving bums $50 bills, but whip a microphone at the drummer’s head on stage for missing a change.   He would apologize later, but the damage was usually done.

As with most biographies dealing with a hero, the reader wants the hero to rise above the fray (synonym of “clash,” me trying to be clever).  Joe was able to maintain his integrity through the years and revive his career in the late 90s and early 2000s with his last band, The Mescaleros.   But he was still heavily abusing substances  and just generally not taking care of himself, often only getting four or five hours of sleep.  His relationships with the muscicians in the band were often shaky, but perhaps that’s what fed his creative energy.  His last album, completed posthumously by the band using Joe’s guide vocal tracks, is a great, driving rock record.  Something Joe had been striving to make for years.  He officially died of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect, but one has to think that the alcohol, drugs, and late nights took years off his life.

On an interesting note, the book literally fell apart as I was reading it.  Large chunks of pages came unglued from the spine.  I’ve never had that happen before, so I’m not sure if I did something to cause it or what.  The bad thing was I borrowed it from a buddy at work, so I ended up buying a copy to replace it.

Charles Murray, social scientist extraordinaire, describes the problems with America’s educational system using four easy points:

1. Ability varies

2. Half of the children are below average

3. Too many people are going to college

4. America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted

Murray argues that these problems stem from our hopelessly romantic ideals involving education.  I argue that many of the problems in the country today stem from our romantic ideals and our lack of substance to back them up anymore, but that’s a blog for another day.  Many of the programs in the U.S. school systems are products of educational romanticism.  The most obvious is No Child Left Behind, which sets dates for 100% of all children in schools to pass a standardized test.  Most teachers will tell you that the only way that will ever happen is if they only grade whether the children can write their names on the answer sheet- not absolutely correct mind you, but close enough that they know the child was trying to write his or her name.  And even then they would have to give the ones who forgot to write it a second chance.

Murray’s first premise is that ability varies.  Not all kids are academically bright.  Some just aren’t bright at all.  Everyone realizes that not every child is athletically or musically gifted and no one has a problem with that.  We don’t say we can turn every child into an athlete or a concert pianist.  The same principle applies to mathematical and linguistic ability.  The U.S. educational system ignores this and says that we can raise every child’s mathematical and linguistic ability to a set standard.  All kids can do it.  Well, all kids have a ingrained linguistic and mathematical ability, and once they hit that wall, that’s it.  We just don’t want to admit that not all of our children have great academic ability.

Murray talks about the Coleman Report that began in the 1960s to study the discrepancies and inequality in segregated schools and how it affected student achievement.  Congress was so certain the results would show a correlation between crappy schools and student achievement that they began Title I programs and threw money at the problem before the report was complete.  When the results came back, it showed that the schools and teachers had almost no affect on student achievement.  It didn’t matter if the school was run down and had mediocre teachers or had all the best resources and the best teachers. Student achievement was relatively the same.  What mattered was what kind family background the kids had.  Now a really good teacher will make a difference in a individual student’s educational experience, but looking at the numbers as a whole, schools have little affect on achievement.

This leads to half the kids being below average.  It seems like common sense, but educational romantics will refuse to accept it.  I worked for a principal who refused to have a basic English class in the curriculum because “None of our students are below average.”  So, students who could not do the work in a grade-level English class were forced to stay in the class.  They felt hopeless, misbehaved, failed, etc.  Not everyone has the same mathematical and linguistic ability.  Not everyone is an athlete or musician.  Accept it.

Not everybody use to go to college.  Now employers use it as a basic aptitude test.  Do you have a college degree?  I don’t care what it’s in, just as long as you have one.  It proves you were able to pool enough resources to pay for it and you managed to put forth enough effort to get the piece of paper. Murray argues that since  at least two-thirds of the population are not academically gifted and are going to join the work force at positions that require on the job training rather than a formal liberal arts education, only the top 10% of students should go to college.  Now I have issues with this one because I think as a representative democracy people need to get a liberal arts education to be intelligent enough to make good decisions, etc.  I am a romantic in that I think people should value education for education’s sake rather than as a means to some other end (a job). But I’m one of those people who needed a liberal arts education.  I like learning difficult things, abstract things.  I like reading.  If you don’t like those things, then you shouldn’t go to college according to Murray. This sounds elitist, but he argues that the problem with everyone going is that only about 10% of the population really get anything out of it.  Sure, more than 10% can flounder through a BA as they drink like a fish, screw everything that moves, and get a piece of paper, but how much do they really learn? Then they get a job where they never use anything they took in college and forget it all anyway.

And we segue into the last point,  how we educate the gifted is important to the country because it is the academically gifted that go on to be doctors, corporate leaders, lawmakers, scientists, etc.  If we do not teach these people the basics of the liberal arts education of old- what is a good life, what is happiness, how to be humble, how to make decisions involving the welfare of others, how to effectively communicate- they enter positions of power lacking ethics, critical thinking skills, introspection, etc.  When we force these students to sit in classes bored out of their minds because the teacher is trying to raise the academic ability of the other students who are below average, we miss giving them the opportunity to find how far their own ability goes and even how to fail and be humble.  Some of these kids leave high school thinking they can do no wrong simply because they were smarter than the majority of their peers.  I’ve seen it happen.

Murray finishes the book by giving recommendations for how we can fix some of these problems, but I’m afraid the system is so ingrained that it will take a disaster to change.  Otherwise, the educational system is like a biological organism. When something foreign comes into it, it makes it assimilate or it destroys it.  But looking at the economy, the disaster needed to change the system may be on the way.