Sam Smith:

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A wonderful analysis on the difficulty of knowing and the impossibility of predicting.

Brian Angliss:

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

I’m not done with this book, but it’s been an interesting read thus far. Harris chronicles a long list of atrocities committed in the name of faith, with an understandable focus on the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. While it took me a long time to put aside my own biases (I’m an animist neo-pagan) and actually be able to read the book at all, I’ve found it an illuminating if occasionally frustrating read. Full Story »

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. Full Story »

Like a lot of other people, I watched the Watchmen this past weekend.

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. Full Story »

When baseball resumes in Moundville this year, it will do so after a 22-year rain delay.

In the intervening years, the town has reinvented itself around the rain. Homeowners have rigged giant sheets of plastic, like umbrellas, over their homes. Officials have constructed a series of canals around the town to siphon off water. Townsfolk have to go to the giant gymnasium if they want a rain-free place to exercise.

And the town itself has even earned a new nickname: Mudville.

The world is a whole lot cozier for Mudville’s creator, author Kurtis Scaletta. Full Story »

“To my wife, who read all the drafts of my book. I am the lucky beneficiary of not only her wise editorial comments, but her loving encouragement.”

“To my husband, whose generosity of spirit enables him to laugh at the irony that my writer’s solitude has imposed a life of solitude on him too.”

Ever notice how many volumes of poetry and prose these days are bookended by gushing dedications and acknowledgments like the fictional examples above? Writers outdo themselves in expressions of gratitude to their loved ones for their help and patience. It’s as if we’re in the midst of a golden age of support — emotional anyway — for writers. Full Story »

Stage and film star Claire Bloom and author Philip Roth took no prisoners when their 17-year relationship ended in a firestorm.

When one of the partners in a marriage is a man who’s been called “a gleeful misogynist” –- in a complimentary article, no less –- it comes as no surprise when their union is torn asunder.

Claire Bloom and Philip Roth became a couple in 1976. She was not only a classically trained actress, but her beauty rivaled that of fellow English-woman Elizabeth Taylor (who she actually beat to Richard Burton, with whom she had an affair). He, of course is the American novelist whose career ebbed and flowed, until, after bypass surgery in 1989, he devoted his whole being to writing and was been on a tear ever since. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Wendy Redal

Hermann Hesse, especially for Narcissus & Goldmund: His study of the tension between reason and emotion as told through the 14th century lives of these two protagonists has served as a backdrop for my enduring awareness of this often troubling juxtaposition — throughout culture and in my own life. I grew up as cool Narcissus — a means to cope with a childhood fraught by chaos — and have been wrestling ever since with how to handle my inner Goldmund. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Denny Wilkins

I wrote and edited news and commentary for a living for 20 years. I, as they say, “pumped out lots of copy” in two decades. That necessarily had as much of an impact on my progress and perspective as a writer as reading the well-regarded and much-honored fiction and non-fiction of others. Those people with whom we personally engage as mentor and mentee often play critical roles in our development as writers. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

J.S. O’Brien

The most influential writer and book of my life didn’t influence my writing style one bit (thank God!), but he and his book changed completely changed my life. Most deeply rural, Southern kids back in the day were exposed to no ideas outside the generally accepted ones of their fiercely insular society. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was my first look at American social institutions and mores from outside the mainstream, and it instilled in me a voracious appetite for moving my frame of reference outside the superego to get a wider, and extremely useful, perspective. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Lex

As a reader of mostly non-fiction, with its division by subject rather than author, this is kind of a tough one for me. It forces me pretty far back, and hence sounds cliched to me…but here goes.

Conrad and Dostoevsky for their examination of the dark recess of the human psyche. Dickens for teaching me that it’s okay to laugh at starving orphans. Melville (Billy Budd) and Conrad (Heart of Darkness) have always impressed me enough to reread and reread for the admirable ability to get whole novels into very short works. I’ve been through Billy Budd looking up and writing down every word that I couldn’t define and would probably have to look words up if I read it again tomorrow; that impresses me. Moby Dick needed an editor. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Jim Booth

F. Scott Fitzgerald for his prose style –  Ernest Hemingway for his prose style — Thomas Wolfe for his prose style

Jane Austen for her prose style — Doris Lessing for her prose style — Shirley Barker for her prose style

John Lennon for his prose style — Richard Brautigan for his prose style — Thomas Pynchon for his prose style Full Story »

In Bush Is a Book Lover at the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove chronicles his three-year-long Great American Reading Race with President Bush. He maintains that in the fiercest year of the competition, 2006, he defeated Bush, 110 books to 95.

“The president,” Rove writes, “lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of the Free World.” Full Story »

Mike Sheehan:

I’m reading Marty Beckerman’s Dumbocracy (Disinformation, 2008). Beckerman, who proudly boasts that Hunter Thompson called him a “morbid little bastard,” is an engaging, sharp, equal-opportunity ballbuster who revels in taking to task extremists of the “loony left” and ”rabid right” infecting American sociopolitics. Armed with factoids, anecdotes and amusing personal experiences (such as his brief encounter with Rev. Jerry Falwell), he gleefully skewers self-righteous ignoramuses on both sides from his perch in the middle.  While his distracting sexual braggadocio and gratuitous profanities betray his age (he’s in his mid-20’s), he’s clearly on his way to becoming a top satirist.  One to watch.  His official site: Marty Beckerman. Full Story »

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 »

It has been alleged that Scholars & Rogues is not, strictly speaking, a political blog. Sure, we write about overtly political issues and devote our share of time to things like media policy, energy and the environment, business and the economy, and international dynamics. Yes, we were credentialed to cover the DNC, but we don’t really do hard, insider, by god politics. Daily Kos is a political blog. Firedoglake is a political blog. Little Green Footballs, The Agonist, Politico, The Seminal - these are real poliblogs.

S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.

So really, what is S&R? Full Story »

For a guy who’s been dead for nearly four hundred years, it’s pretty amazing that Shakespeare is still cranking out the hits.

And I’m not talking about great productions of his classic plays. I’m not talking about recently discovered “lost manuscripts.” I’m talking brand-spanking-new plays.

That’s what John Reed has cooked up in All the World’s a Grave, a new tragedy by William Shakespeare.

With all the cleverness of Touchstone and the mischievousness of Puck, Reed has boldly reimagined the Bard by cutting, pasting, puzzling, and rearranging Shakespeare’s own words and characters into an entirely new play.

Full Story »

“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”

“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”"Were they an inspiration?”

She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.

He nodded.

- William Gibson, Spook Country

I’ve always been intrigued by the curious dynamic of influence. Full Story »

If you are what you read, it is indeed evident that our cast of characters is composed of both scholars and rogues. . .

Chris Mackowski:

All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare by John Reed (Plume, 2008). Take all the best plot ingredients from Shakespeare’s greatest plays, cut and paste the Bard’s own language, keep all the insights into human behavior, and mix creatively — the result is Reed’s invigorating re-envisioning of Shakespeare, written by Shakespeare himself. Full Story »

When David Foster Wallace climbed aboard John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” media caravan in the early days of the 2000 presidential primary season, he hoped to understand why McCain generated so much excitement, so much attention, so much hope. In fact, Wallace was amazed by “the enormous hopes and enthusiasm [McCain’s] generating in press and voters alike.”

Much has changed in the past eight years. McCain, the maverick “anticandidate” who peddled change and hope, who raged against the Washington establishment, now is the Washington establishment. As the 2008 republican nominees, his current campaign lacks the spontaneity and access of his first bid for the White House, and “Straight Talk” has been replaced by on-message scripts written by political marketers. The hope is gone.

And Wallace is dead, victim of an apparent suicide earlier this month. Full Story »

With the presidential election season in full swing, bookstores have transformed into veritable Libraries of Congress, featuring titles by and about politicians on the national stage. Add to that the flood of books on policy issues like health care, national security, environment, and the role of government and, indeed, it takes a village to sort through it.

What’s of particular note, though, is an irony often overlooked in the midst of the mass media hubbub: The same election circus that has perfected the ten-second soundbite also makes indispensable use of an older, wordier technology—the book. Full Story »