Well, Red. (Red Emma)

Hey, kids! It’s Red Emma’s Biblio-Blog! 

     I DON'T KNOW what you online folks do when not reading DISSENT the BLOG and Michael Berube on-line and watching last night’s Daily Show or listening to Sean Hannity or, my current favorite, “The Frank Pastore Show: The Intersection of Faith and Reason,” KKLA 4-7 daily on 99.5 FM. 

     This week, Frank, a former professional baseball player who worked with Athletes in Action (Campus Crusade for Christ), tells you how to vote like a troglodyte and discusses

“A Night of Christian Comedy” (I won’t even touch that) and “Revolution,” which seems to be a series of free Christian heavy metal concerts (check out the video).

Besides these amusements and pulling the wings off of flies, Red’s struggle for mental health includes reading, watching and listening, which is designed to maintain his already heightened states of amusement or anger, two states roughly bordering Florida and Texas. So, as the election cycle comes to its orgasmic conclusion and you light up a ciggie and turn the bedstand light back on, here’s some RECOMMENDED READING. 

Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. I start teaching this sort of revisionist natural history meditation to undergrad comp students in a few weeks. It’s full of words like “evolution” and “co-evolution” and “evolutionary biology.” Wish me luck. But, seriously, it’s quite smart and accessible, especially for a guy like me who flunked Bio. 

RE/Search Pranks, Volume II. This is the follow-up issue to one of the very best in the occasional series from the San Francisco-based alternative publisher V.Vale, whose underground titles include everything you will never hear or see on NPR or the New York Times, including an issue devoted to the late, lamented Supermasochist Bob Flannagan, RIP. So far I’ve read interviews with Jello Biafra and the Yes Men, those anti-corporate media pranksters whose exploits are documented in the eponymous film. 

Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation. Short, quasi-epistolary treatise on how nutty is the entire premise not only of fundamentalist religion but, more urgently, how nutty is the complicity of so-called moderate or tolerant or liberal religionists who go along with it all. Imagine, some voters let their community college trustees start meetings with a fucking prayer.

J. Robert Lennon’s Mailman. I am a tough crowd, if a small one. I will put a book down if the writer is not keeping me entertained. Perhaps this accounts for the six-foot high stack by my side of the bed, which will kill me in the next earthquake. This is a smart, funny novel about a very odd and human mailman who sees the terrible and awesome consequences of each and every one of his actions, from not delivering a letter to abandoning a very bad kitty cat by the side of the road. (The cat is rescued, and then Mailman has to pretend that it was lost to the sexy woman cat lover who finds him and beds him and later dies, leaving him sad if not full of regret, but still with the damned animal, which keeps him awake all night.) 

Ben Ehrenreich, The Suitors. This is a wild retelling of the Penelope story by the journalist son (he writes for the LA Weekly) of the famous journalist mom (Nickel and Dimed, etc.). A dark, poetic, hilarious and prismatic update of the Odyssey that’s odd, yes, but so fueled by the idiom and tropes of our political moment that you think somebody is talking about us all in the next room. If you like George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline) and Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures), you will dig this. 

Christopher Moore, The Stupidist Angel. Xmas is coming. Time to gird yourself for battle. Fast, furious, funny.

I, Fatty by Jerry Stahl. The local book club I facilitate is reading this novel based on the tragic life of Fatty Arbuckle, doomed comic film star. Or they say they are. Some people arrive at our monthly meetings not having read the book, but the wine and cheese is sure good and I gasbag convincingly about LITRACHOOR. Stahl says he wrote the book to learn about our “pharmocracy,” where heroine was once legal and, because he was so strung-out, the doomed Fatty had to actually wear a fat suit just to portray himself.

Gary Wills’ comprehensive piece in the current New York Review of Books on how Bush has appointed rightwing religionists wingnuts to govern & administer at every level. Until now I had never imagined writing to ask for a longer (!) piece in the Review of Books, but I wanted more. I assume he is writing a book. 

Have you seen Richard Dawkins’ The Root of All Evil? So far as I can tell you can only view this amazing two-part BBC documentary in about fifty parts, short sections of it having been downloaded by fans of the show to YouTube. 

The Wire, Season 3. (HBO) Even better than seasons one and two, this case study of, ostensibly, the drug war, takes on all of our civic institutions through the device of “the wire,” that is, the use of electronic surveillance by Baltimore police of gangsters and, necessarily, everybody. Available through Netflix. (Are you my secret Netflix buddy?)

We Jam Econo. A moving, smart, profile of the San Pedro punk band, the Minutemen. In the car, I am driving defensively. I have to cuz of all the naughty bumperstickers on it. Like “Doing My Best to Piss Off the Religious Right” and “Lobotomies for Republicans: It’s the Law!” 

And I am playing, real loud, the audio book version of Al Franken’s The Truth With Jokes on CD. Al talks. I laugh. People honk and give me the finger. We have a lot of fun, all of us. --RE