It takes him ninety-one pages, but Larry McMurty finally articulates the problem that plagues his newest memoir, Books.
“Here I am, thirty-four chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader,” he writes, “and yet why should these readers be interested in the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy? How many are going to care that I visited the great Seven Gables Bookshop, or dealt with the wily L.A. dealer Max Hunley, whose little store at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills is now a yogurt shop?”
McMurtry’s rhetorical question seems to lift a millstone from around his neck, because the memoir gets more readable as the book goes on. But to enjoy the lightened load, a reader has to make it to page ninety-one in the first place—which looks deceptively easy given the cavalcade of short chapters. (Page ninety-one is, indeed, the first page of chapter thirty-four.) Books with such short chapters typically fly by. Full story »
By Jeff Huber
Truth is truly stranger than fiction. Graham Greene’s 1958 spy novel Our Man in Havana told a tragicomic tale of false intelligence crafted to suit the needs of a political agenda. John le Carre’s 1996 The Tailor of Panama repeated the theme.
Ahmed Chalabi was Dick Cheney’s real life man of the hour when it came time to shake and bake the intelligence on Iraq, and the Dark Lord and his neocon chamberlains are still trying to fabricate a casus belli for Iran. The Persian Ploy may be running up against a term limit, but there’s all the time in the world left to slip on the Bananastan peel. Heck, western superpowers have been flinging themselves down that slope for centuries.
At this point in the American experiment, U.S. intelligence is to intelligence what Kenny G is to jazz. After nearly a decade of getting gang-buggered over the kitchen table by the minions of the Office of the Vice President, our spy agencies have no more credibility than our sacked and pillaged mainstream press. In fact Full story »
For the past eight years our energy and environmental policies have been run by children. Here are a few examples of the Bush administration’s irresponsibility and lack of foresight, courtesy of Our Broken Government, a new report by the Center for Public Integrity:
All of that is set to change with the welcome news of Obama’s apparent new Energy Secretary, Steven Chu. Brad Johnson writes:
It’s hard to decide if the selection of Dr. Chu is more remarkable for who he is — a Nobel laureate physicist and experienced public-sector administrator — or for who he is not. Unlike previous secretaries of energy, he is neither a politician, oil man, military officer, lawyer, nor utility executive. Full story »
