Book Review: Last Night

Last Night by James Salter

Sometimes there is nothing quite as liberating as a really good short story collection. The story devoured in one sitting. The new engagement every time you open the cover. Salter's Last Night is an excellent collection. The stories are easy, casual, yet transporting. The writing is so simple and traditional, you'd think it was written in the sixties. References to cell phones and the like were a little jarring.

I also love stumbling on a story I've read before in a collection, especially a story like "Last Night" that is particularly memorable. It is definitely one of those that deserve to be anthologized and studied.

I'd read Salter's A Sport and A Pastime awhile ago and quite enjoyed it. Upon completion I promptly went to the bookstore to see what else I could find by him. I found this collection in the bargain section and picked it up without a moment's contemplation. It took me this long to get around to reading it, but I will be back to the book store looking for more Salter shortly.

Lower E-Reader Prices Make Them More Tempting

I've said this before: I'm a book guy. Good old fashioned paper books, complete with the smell, the weight, the feel. Yet, as the prices for e-readers like the Nook and the Kindle come down to earth, I find them tempting. It's not that I want to toss away my library and clear my bookshelves for knick-knacks, but I like the idea of a library in a slim piece of electronic gadgetry.

I don't think of books as consumables. I don't read books and then dismiss them. I like knowing they still exist on my shelf (in a tangible, physical form) for me to reference. I know that if I want to go back to a particular story in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, the book is there. E-readers are good for folks who might read a book once and be done with it, but I'm beginning to think that they might be good for reference too. Might not be bad, when I'm sitting down to write several pages tonight, to pull out a Kindle and reread "Car Crash While Hitchhiking." And I think they might be very good for non-fiction, for the important books that come out in hardback and make a stir but you don't necessarily need them on your bookshelf for all of eternity (I still need to get around to Nassim Taleb's Black Swan).

And what about magazines? I am definitely a magazine reader, thought I rarely seem to get through them. Wouldn't an e-reader be the best place for The New Yorker or Business Week?

So, I'm tempted.

I did put my hands on a Nook a couple of weeks ago, and I wasn't impressed. It felt clunky and the model on display at the store was stuck loading a page. The sales person had to power it off and back on to get it working again.

But then I wonder if I would be doing damage to two industries I'm fond of, publishing and bookselling. I'd rather not aid in the demise of either.

I'm not convinced that I'm buying one of these things yet, but with more reasonable pricing it is worth considering.

Book Review: Outer Dark

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

Another one of McCarthy's wandering books, Outer Dark, doesn't disappoint. It is everything you'd expect from him. Rich descriptions, dialogue that sticks in your head, landscapes, fear, and of course unspeakable violence.

Living in the old, tough South, Culla Holme and his sister have a child together. Culla leaves the child in the woods, telling his sister that the child died, but instead it was found by a wandering tinker. While Culla is out hunting work, his sister sets out to hunt the tinker and her child. Culla then takes of to find his sister. Meanwhile, three true villains are terrorizing the area.

The premise itself is tough, especially for a reader with young children, but it is the wandering, the walking, unknowingly, into danger. And somehow surviving. McCarthy rarely spends any time in a character's mind, so we are left to interpret the emotional struggles through the landscapes, the hot sun, the need for food, water, and rest. I'd thought of filling this review with long excerpts of description or snippets of dialogue just to give you an example of McCarthy's skill, but I'd rather tell you instead to just read the book. It's no Suttree, but it's short and a good intro to Cormac McCarthy.

Winter's Bone, the Movie, Is Coming

From the 2006 Daniel Woodrell book, Winter's Bone, one of the best new books I've read in many years, the movie adaptation is on its way to theaters after a good showing at Sundance. Adaptations always seem to disappoint in one way or another. And, from watching this trailer, I don't remember the book being quite so frightening.

Reviews: NYT, WSJ, LA Times, HuffPost

Mental Illness in Winnie-the-Pooh? Of course.

Mental-health students even explore children's literature for buried psychological themes. Analysts have had a field day in the "Hundred Acre Wood" with A.A. Milne's characters. While the world of Winnie the Pooh seems innocent on the surface, "it is clear to our group of modern neuro-developmentalists that these are in fact stories of seriously troubled individuals, many of whom meet DSM-IV criteria for significant disorders," wrote Sarah E. Shea and colleagues in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2000, referring to the handbook of diagnoses.

Piglet clearly suffers from generalized anxiety disorder, the authors noted. Eeyore has chronic dysthymia (mild depression) and could benefit greatly from an antidepressant. Tigger is hyperactive, impulsive and a risk-taker.

Pooh is a bundle of comorbidities that may include cognitive impairment, as he is often described as a "bear of very little brain."

From the WSJ article, Fiction Stars, Real Problems

Book Review: The Trial

The Trial by Franz Kafka

This book has been on my reading list for a long time. In fact, I've started it many times, but contemplating reading through the frustrations that I knew would ensure hardly encouraged me to continue. Restarting my pleasure reading this summer, I thought it would be a good idea to get through some of the books that I have started and, for some reason, put down. (Rabbit, Run is also on this list.)

I didn't find it nearly as frustrating as all that, though. Neither did I find it terribly compelling. Kafka is good at getting to the existential frustrations of bureaucracy and paranoia, but he's short on the sort of haunting depictions I was looking for. The Trial was more similar to Dostoevsky than to The Metamorphosis. We were part of the delusions and hubris of the protagonist, but I didn't often feel the same confusions and frustrations he seemed to experience.

The Trial wasn't as difficult to get through as I expected, but it doesn't even rank among the Kafka masterpieces.

The End of the Mercury Brand

This morning I was driving behind a 70's era Grand Marquis, one of those huge hunks of metal that you wouldn't believe could be made in an era of gasoline shortages. But still the Mercury Grand Marquis was just a rebranded Ford LTD. In fact, I don't remember Mercury having its unique model in the modern era. So, it is understandable that it might be time for the brand to go.

I appreciate creative destruction and some serious destruction was necessary in the US auto industry.

I've never really understood the real business reasons for throwing some different chrome or taillights along with a new badge on a car and calling it something else. If the manufacturer sold all of the models under one brand, without all of the changes, the efficiencies would grow and they should be cheaper to make. Instead they make redundant models that sell at different dealers. And good luck convincing someone that they should pay more for a rebranded Ford.

So, despite the sentimental attachment we may have to brands, sometimes it is just time for them to go.

Bag Day at the Book Sale

Nothing better than bag day at the book sale. Another decent, varied haul, in no particular order:

Bullet Park - John Cheever
World's End and Other Stories - Paul Theroux
Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
The Sonnets - William Shakespeare
Stories and Prose Poems - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Big Laugh - John O'Hara
Elmer Gantry - Sinclair Lewis
Letting Go - Philip Roth
The Plague - Albert Camus
A Mercy - Toni Morrison
The Cave - Robert Penn Warren
Weight - Jeanette Winterson
Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - Alexandra Fuller
Miramar - Naguib Mahfouz
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Passion - Jeanette Winterson
100 Selected Poems - e.e. cummings
America America - Ethan Canin
The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud
Peace - Richard Bausch
Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century - John Gerassi
Scenes from American Life - Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean
Troubled Sleep - Jean-Paul Sartre
The Music of Chance - Paul Auster
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
Fool For Love and Other Plays - Sam Shepard
Dostoevsky - Edited by Rene Weller
Capital, Communism and Coexistence - John Kenneth Gailbraith and Stanislav Menshikov
The World Is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman

MBA Graduation Yesterday

Well, that's it. Finally and officially done with the Executive MBA. It was a bit of a proud moment, I have to say, thinking of all the work that went into it, all of the sacrifices. And of all that I learned and experienced. And there's the people. Sure, there were a handful I didn't care for. Funny, they're also the ones I feel don't really deserve the MBA since they didn't put in nearly the work the rest of us did. But that's a selfish thought. They're not my concern.

One question asked of me yesterday was whether the MBA has changed my outlook, how I view business, capitalism. In many ways the answer is 'no.' I think I had a pretty good sense of business before, and nothing I learned changed my view of the virtues and tragic flaws of capitalism. Where the program has changed my views is in the opportunities out there. The careers, the ways to do business, the opportunities for improvement. The program has also taught me of what I am capable. The intellectual challenges, the time and project management, the reserve of energy and motivation. There was always so much to do, and more that I wanted to get done. And somehow I got most of it done, I found the energy to do what was required. We also blazed through a lot of very valuable material, things that I would have loved to study more in depth. I emerge so much smarter about some things (macroeconomics) and with interest piqued about other things (strategy).

No one has dared to but should someone ask whether it was worth it, the answer is an obvious 'yes.' Though there is no immediate, obvious financial benefit, no dramatic career change or advancement that is imminent now that the degree is in my hand (I would hardly have done it solely for these reasons), I am a better person for having done it. I am a better manager, employee, intellectual, husband, father. And now that I am finished I will have more time and energy to devote to these things.

Where Are the BP Boycotts?

After the Wall Street Journal articles exposing BP's failings and the opening of a criminal probe into the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, I would expect people would be screaming for a boycott of BP. Sometimes we forget our role as consumers in driving the conduct of corporations. Much of the managment and finance talk speaks to the power of the shareholders, and this is why we've seen the sell off in BP stock. But just as the stockholders are a source of financing for BP, the customers are the source of revenue. We need to let BP know that we cannot support their lack of concern for safety and their inability to plan for disaster. The CEO can have his "life back" when he gets fired.