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Grappling With The Help's Warm Fuzzy Racism

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Toure's savage review of the movie helped crystallize my feelings about the book

I read The Help last year, several months before the movie came out. I had some qualms about the novel, and I was pretty sure the movie would make things even worse. More sanitized, less nuanced, and much more "feel-good movie of the year"-ist.

Complaints about The Help have slowly, quietly been piling up here and there. I'm glad for this, because for a long time I thought it was just me. Everyone was raving about what a great book it was, how heart-felt, how honest and forthright about its depiction of slavery and the consequences of life in the deep South during the Jim Crow era.

The Permanence of E-Books

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The truth is, physical books "die" all the time.

Jonathan Franzen recently talked about the impermanence of e-books compared to physical books. He told the Telegraph, "Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that's reassuring,"

A lot of people feel this way about e-books versus physical books. But here is the thing: it's wrong. I know it's tempting to hold a physical book in your hands and think, "Here is a permanent thing, an object for the ages! Not like those e-books, which can be deleted in a few keystrokes!"

But physical books die all the time. If anything, physical books are LESS permanent than e-books, because you can't create a backup copy.

E-Books: Jonathon Franzen is Against e-books.

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It should no longer be a competition between e-books versus print books.

Jonathon Franzen doesn’t seem to like anything other than his own writing; the esteemed author was most famously noted for getting pissy that his novel “The Corrections” was included in the Oprah book club. Now that the author has another book in the spotlight, Jonathon Franzen is again trying to make controversy, this time by trying to stir up controversy about whether e-books are worthwhile or not.

His opinion? Jonathon Franzen says that e-books are not valuable.
Read more about E-Books: Jonathon Franzen is Against e-books.

The Magus of Java

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Teachings of a Mo-ist Immortal!

I happen to be personally interested in Taoist spirituality, and I pick up every serious book I can find on the subject. It's very different from what most people believe, and much less focused on the Tao Te Ching. (Defining Taoism by the Tao Te Ching is a lot like defining Christianity by the Book of Proverbs.) My most recent “Taoist” read is “The Magus of Java” by Kosta Dervenis, and it's an odd little book in several ways. For one thing, the Magus of Java is really a Mo-ist, not a Taoist, but nobody knows what Mo-ism is anymore so you couldn't really put that on the book cover.

Read more about The Magus of Java

Martin Eden

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By Jack London

One of my all-time favorite books is “Martin Eden” by Jack London, which is a very different work from some of his other books like White Fang. Martin Eden is a blue-collar tough guy, a sailor, a street-fighter and a sometime gang member. When he meets and falls in love with an upper-middle-class girl named Ruth, he falls for her completely, but he doesn't realize it's not really her he loves. He loves her apparent refinement and veneer of education, because Martin is actually extremely intelligent and inside himself he recognizes that he wants to have what he thinks she has.

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E-Books Will Kill The Library Book Sale

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And that's a good thing!

Literary news blog The Millions has a great essay by Rebecca Rego Barry titled "A Rare Book Collector's Guide to the College Library Book Sale." Rather than a literal guide to book sales, Rego Barry's essay is a paean to books themselves, to the history they contain, the fads they speak of, and the promise they hold for the future. It is wonderfully evocative of the experience of browsing a college library's book sale, and it made me nostalgic for a book sale I attended decades ago on a perfect autumn day.

After reading this eminently satisfying essay I sat back in my desk chair - for I read her essay on the computer, not to point out the obvious - and thought, "That's one more thing that e-books will kill."

American Insurgents, American Patriots

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The Revolution Of The Common People

I picked up “American Insurgents, American Patriots” for two main reasons. One is that two of my direct ancestors fought in the American Revolution as citizen soldiers in the New York Militia, and I wanted to better understand their motivations and their experiences. The second reason is that I'm an Occupier, and reading about an earlier generation of American revolutionaries and patriots is inspiring to me.

McDonald's UK: Happy Meal Books Instead Of Toys

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I remember how excited I was, as a kid in the late 1970s, to get a Moby Books Illustrated Classic with my fast food meal.

The Huffington Post is reporting that McDonalds stores in the UK will soon be offering books instead of toys as prizes in their Happy Meals. This is - if you ask me - pretty much the best thing ever.

First of all, kids do not need any more toys. I know that sounds curmudgeonly of me, but it's true. Especially the cheap plastic toys that come with Happy Meals. These are just merchandising tie-ins to the latest fad movie, and all they do is encourage kids to consume more advertising. (Sure, the book is a promotional tie-in with the movie War Horse. But the promo item is a real book, "Mudpuddle Farm" by the author of the book "War Horse.")

The Land of Non-Readers

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So much less taxing, so much simpler to just watch television or play video games or mess about endlessly on the internet.

Essayist Jonathan Gourlay recently wrote a sort of confession about the months he spent as a non-reader. It is surprisingly easy to slip away from reading. After a lifetime as a bookworm, I quit reading for almost a decade. Only recently, in the last three or four years, have I started to make reading a priority again.

As Gourlay notes, my experience is that "not reading" was a surprisingly seductive pleasure. It is the height of laziness to not read a book. So much less taxing, so much simpler to just watch television or play video games or mess about endlessly on the internet. (It MUST be easy to not read - otherwise, why would so many Americans be doing it? [i.e. not reading.])

I did some of my worst writing during those ten years. That's no coincidence.

Lord of The Rings

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A Literary Masterpiece

J.R.R. Tolkien's “Lord of the Rings” is one of the most significant literary works of the Twentieth Century, with tremendous influence at all levels of popular culture. The fact that the literary establishment still doesn't recognize this is an indictment of the validity of that establishment as a whole.

Read more about Lord of The Rings

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