Irregular Books

The focus on geography starts with the subtitle of the book A World Treasury of Myths, Legends, and Folktales: Stories from Six Continents. So, I may be seeming picky, but my criticism is from the standard set by the publishers.

Toward the end of the book, there is a story called The Snake’s Arrow, which is about a younger brother who defeats a pair of demon monkeys and marries a magical toad woman. It’s an interesting story, but it’s quality is damaged for me by a set of illustrations by Mikhail Fiodorov.

The problem is that the illustrations get the monkeys wrong. The folktale is set in South America, but the monkeys are mandrills. Mandrills are Old World monkeys. Furthermore, the mandrills are shown having tails. Mandrills don’t have tails.

I know that some imagination is allowed in mythological illustrations, but the imagination ought to take place from within the cultural area from which the story comes. Fiodorov might as well have had maple trees in the background, with a man in a plaid shirt collecting syrup for his pancakes.

In general, I’ve enjoyed sharing this book with my son, but I won’t be able to read this story again without suppressing a grimace.

Scott McClellan has made it to the number one selling spot on Amazon.com in less than one day with his tell-some book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

In this book, McClellan admits that he misled the American people as Press Secretary for George W. Bush, telling people things that just weren’t true. McClellan also tells us that he was left out of the inner circle, so that he didn’t really know what was going on in the Bush White House. Yes, that’s right - in a book entitled What Happened, the author acknowledges that he doesn’t know what happened.

Why are people reading this book? The author already acknowledges that he has been untruthful to us. Why should we believe him now?

Well, there’s a lot I don’t understand about why people buy things. So, maybe instead of thinking my way to success in the book industry, I should just copy Scott McClellan’s approach and hope for the best.

Here are the titles of some books I’m working on as of today, in the hopes that I can have book sales like Scott McClellan:

- Wha Happened?
- I Lied To You, But You Can Believe Me Now
- How I Made A Sucker Out Of You
- Lying for Powerful People
- My Insights As An Outsider
- Out of The Loop
- My Excuses
- I Was Only Following Orders
- Wisdom From A Man Stupid Enough To Believe George W. Bush
- It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time

Can you think of any other good book titles to fit into the new genre of political book created this week by Scott McClellan?

Back in 2004, Irregular Times created a new kind of reference book: 2004 Reasons to Boot Bush. The book listed 2,004 separate reasons to remove George W. Bush from the White House in the 2004 presidential election. These “reasons” were not mere bullet points, of the sort you might get from David Letterman. Most were explanations long enough to be considered political essays.

The following video looks back to this political book from 2004 as a way of reflecting on how, sadly, America is still suffering from the problems created by the first term of President Bush. In the second term, come to think of it, things have gotten even worse.

This retrospective comes just as Irregular Times is releasing its new political reference guide, 2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President. This new book is not an update of the 2004 Reasons to Boot Bush. It’s new material written just for this year. It also includes a much more extensive discussion of political issues that the 2004 book did. 2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President is about three times as long as the 2004 reference guide, and so has had to be divided into two separate volumes: (See Volume One and Volume Two).

On the terms of some children, If The Dinosaurs Came Back, by Bernard Most, is a fine book with some interesting visualizations imagining what would happen if the Earth of tens of millions of years ago was combined with the Earth today. For my son, however, the book doesn’t quite ring true.

Bernard Most seems to imagine dinosaurs mostly as really big tools just waiting for people to come along and use them. Most visualizes dinosaurs serving as bridges for people to drive over, ladders for painting houses, cranes for building skyscrapers, and plows for turning the earth over for giant farms.

The dinosaurs in this children’s book are docile implements for human domination of the Earth. What would they be fed in order to fuel their gigantic appetites? Where would all the vegetable matter for the sauropods come from, what with all the dinosaur-powered construction covering nature up with asphalt? Who would provide the flesh for tyrannosaurus work horses to feast upon?

These questions weren’t dealt with. The dinosaurs in this book are rather uninteresting anti-godzillas, confirming our Earth-wrecking habits rather than confronting them.

One might say these issues don’t matter, because it’s just a children’s book, or that we can’t expect the book to represent the responsible relationship between people and their environment, because the book was written way back in 1978.

However, my seven year-old son spotted the gap between the natural character of dinosaurs and the contrived behavior of the resurrected beasts in this book. After I got done reading it to him, he commented, “Dad, if dinosaurs came back, they would be wild animals and ferocious.” It’s a truth obvious enough even for elementary school.

If you want comforting stories about animals rather than ferocious tales of nature, then stick with Mrs. Tiggywinkle the hedgehog. Don’t mess with the character of dinosaurs.

I looked at a certain section of my library this afternoon and was struck by a difference between two sorts of progressive political books I saw on the shelf. Some had been very timely when they were published, but were not at all enduring in value, whereas others had not achieved much initial acclaim, but have been valuable to me for quite a long time.

Al Franken’s book, Lying Liars and the Lies they Tell, is amongst the first group. It had a great public relations event to start it out, with Bill O’Reilly’s hyperventilating lawsuit against Franken, and so it soon reached the New York Times bestseller list.

Satanic Panic, a more philosophical book about the patterns of mass paranoia about satanic plots to kill babies, is a book that I continue to pick up and look at every year, even though it’s ten years older than Al Franken’s book.

Al Franken wrote about timely events, but didn’t have much vision beyond the next year or two in his material. Satanic Panic was about events in the 1980s, but it was describing a cultural phenomenon that dates back to the Salem witch trials, and far beyond that.

I discussed these differences in the following video, but was interrupted by my three-year old bouncing daughter, who had an assessment quite unlike mine.

Eric Alterman has written what he describes as a handbook for post-Bush America. It’s called Why We’re Liberals.

Do we liberals really need a handbook for these new times? Some of us do seem to need a hand out of the box of defining ourselves as anti-Bush, but Barack Obama’s campaign seems to be serving in that role rather handily.

Perhaps we need a travelogue for why we have become liberals, or how we have moved within the land of liberalism. For that travel, a field guide to the different varieties of liberal might be useful too.

I’ll stop with the liberal quibbling, though, and let Eric Alterman speak for himself in the video you see below. It’s of Alterman speaking about the ideas behind the book.

Right now, the United States Senate is preparing to renew the Protect America Act, a law passed in the middle of the night on a Saturday in the middle of the summer of 2007, just when Americans were least likely to be paying attention. The Protect America Act, on a practical level, gives the President the ability to conduct massive electronic spying operations against American citizens without anyone knowing about it and no one able to stop it.

Under the Protect America Act, the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General have the power to listen to your telephone calls, read your emails, and follow your activities across the web without any search warrant. The law also prevents any oversight of the spying programs by Congress, and gives the Attorney General the right to order any American to help out with these spying programs - or be thrown into prison.

You can start the project to protect yourself by informing yourself. First, go on over the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and read what they have to say about the Protect America Act. Continue to their Stop the Spying campaign, and take action there.

Then, get yourself some background reading so that you can start to prepare for these spying times. The following books are a place to start:

Odyssey of an Eavesdropper: My Life in Electronic Countermeasures and My Battle Against the FBI - Martin Kaiser III and Robert S. Stokes

Understanding Surveillance Technologies: Spy Devices, Privacy, History & Applications - J. K. Petersen

Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World - Maureen Webb

Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions - John Weckert

The Hidden Face of Technology: Is Technology Turning Britain into a Fascist State? - Philip N. Thompson

Privacy: Total Information Awareness Programs and Latest Developments - Gina Marie Stevens

Privacy: Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping - Gina Marie Stevens

iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era - Mark Andrejevic

Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption - Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau

Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID - Katherine Albrecht

Techniques in Countersurveillance : The Fine Art of Bug Extermination in the Real World of Intelligence Gathering - Greg Hauser

Surveillance Detection, The Art of Prevention - Laura Clark and William E. Algaier

No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society - Robert O’Harrow

Liberty Under Attack: Reclaiming Our Freedoms in an Age of Terror - Richard C. Leone and Greg, Jr. Anrig

Lovers of Jane Austen’s novels will want to tune in to PBS this year, which is playing an adaptation of every one of Jane Austen’s works, plus a movie of biographical fiction based upon her life, Miss Austen Regrets. Persuasion played a week ago. Northanger Abbey was on last night. Both of these are new adaptations, as will be Sense and Sensibility, the last of the series, to play on March 30 and April 6th. Given the strong changes to the plot of Sense and Sensibility in the Emma Thompson version some years ago, it ought to be interesting to see how this story is brought to screen.

Becoming Jane, a fictionalized biography of Jane Austen, is due to be released on DVD on Feb 12, 2008, so it ought to be a great time for Austen enthusiasts… who then can return to her books when their TV sets have cooled.

My attention was caught yesterday afternoon by an interview of author Sara Paretsky interview by The Progressive. Paretsky discussed her identity as an author of crime fiction, but then talked about her non-fiction interests, which seem focused on the threats to American liberty posed by the american government’s transformation into a nationalist regime of Homeland Security.

Paretsky writes about her ideas about the Homeland Security State in her memoir, Writing In An Age Of Silence, as well as through fiction in the V I Warshawski tale, Blacklist: “The trail leads her back to the McCarthy era blacklists, and forward to the ominous police powers the American government has assumed today. V I finds herself penned into a smaller and smaller space by an array of business and political leaders who can call on the power of the Patriot Act to shut her up.”

It’s an interview worth listening to, and two books worth reading.

…of course, it’s not the books that change.

People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens’ or Scott’s books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.

Well, that’s loss. To have house and Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss–for a moment. But there are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field.

- written in a letter to W. D. Howells in 1887