Some blurry pictures, mashed together.
So here are a couple of books I’ve read in the last few days…
Here’s a book that sets out to tell you “why Americans don’t think for themselves”, but basically starts to meander around the author’s pet peeves in our emerging (if not fully functioning) monoculture. This book does do one thing well. It stretches your reading vocabulary muscles. Which I enjoy from time to time. The author also rails against Terry Gross and Fresh Air, a target worthy of some bashing if there ever was one. With all the recent films and Frontline episodes that I’ve seen about the downward spiral of the American way of life, this book just adds to the depressing weight of shame and despair without really shedding light on the path to the next ‘American Sublime’, as he puts it. I suppose if we all turn off our televisions and stop shopping at Walmart it would be a good start. Really, people, stop shopping at Walmart!
Here’s a collection of little ditties from our friend from Vancouver, Douglas Coupland. I was surprised mostly by both the age of this book and the realization that Generation X was written in 1991. How time flies. Unfortunately, having read the somewhat depressing The Middle Mind right before picking up this somewhat (at times) depressing book, I almost feel like putting Dude, where’s my car? in the DVD player for a couple of days. Coupland shares some what I assume to be fairly personal apocalyptic nuclear visions in one section of the book that made me remember all the times that I knew the nuclear winter was just upon us. When I was in high school in Bellevue I would look out my bedroom window to the west, towards Seattle, watching for the flash of light from the nuclear missiles that would surely be targeted at the Boeing plant in Georgetown. Strange how these memories come back so vividly when other things from that time of my life are so murky…
