Banned books

The deal is to bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you've read in part (from consuming multiple chapters down to just skimming, I suppose), and ignore the rest.

1. The Bible
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. The Arabian Nights
6. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. The Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
37. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
38. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels
46. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. The Diary of Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. A Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
54. In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Another Nail in the Coffin

Mosey on over to the the Yahoo! Group called Clinton Dems Against Obama and take a gander at that message frequency. It can't all be sweetness and light.

I'm done

All right. I give up. I can't do anything here. The phone cuts out on me whenever I try to check voice mail. After three tries, I was able to sign in to voice mail only to discover that they were all deleted. How? I have no idea.

I bought a 250-minute card and my phone says I have 500. Why? I have no idea. Adding the card was another exercise in pain.

Ugh.

1 AM and I am back in Music City. 30 miles to I-69, 36 to Indiana, 170 to Indianapolis, 120 to Louisville, 136 to Tennessee, 50 more to Antioch equals 542 miles. According to the map, Kalamazoo, Indianapolis, Bowling Green and Nashville all draw to a single line. Marshall/Fort Wayne and Louisiana form two humps on that trip. Meh. On the other hand, the map says 10.83 hours to traverse, so I'm beating the odds at 8.75 anyway. All I need do is eliminate the need to pee and enlarge the gas tank by one-third and… I could shave off 20 minutes. Hmm. Radar detector? Stealth paint? FoP sticker?

A private pilot's license is beginning to look reasonable (for ludicrously high values of reasonable).

Gas signs from the past.

Propaganda

I have met a lot of people here in Tennessee that I almost certainly would not have met in Michigan; partly because Tennessee is growing, partly because my social circle is necessarily rather ad hoc down here. Not that I did not know any religious people in Michigan, or drug dealers, but I certainly did not tend to live with them in rather close quarters.

One person I met was a young guy who had lived in Saudi Arabia with his father, who had some ongoing business in the KoSA. Some people think SA is terribly anti-American; while I agree that it is rather bigoted, certainly Western society, as a whole, presented a similarly depressing picture back in the day. And that is what I took from this young man. First, the Saudis are not under any illusions that the KoSA is rather unique: when you disembark you are required to sign a document that informs you, in stark language, that the penalty under sharia law for many minor offenses is either death or something close to it. We find this disturbing. I would find it far more disturbing if they tried to cover it up or claim it was normal, a la the Islamic Rebublic of Iran. KoSA is every bit as exceptionalist as the U.S. but in a different way: homeland of Mecca and Medina, SA is almost the Vatican, the Solomon's Temple, of the Islamic world and, indeed, as you might expect of the Papal States, the royal family is terribly weak unless, and only unless, their official acts are seen as completely orthodox and conservative; then they act from a position of strength. Note that bin Laden turned professionally anti-American when the King allowed American soldiers in the Kingdom only to repel Iraq from Kuwait. That act was a radical change and radical change is bad.

How old-fashioned is Saudi Arabia? This kid told me a story of tooling around the desert in a dune buggy until his old man cut it short. The father saw, on a far dune, horsemen: the bedou. In the old days, the bedou made pocket change by raiding and kidnapping. Since it is hard to tell if a man cares he is living in the 21st century by his distantly-viewed face, the father got his kid out of there in a hurry: they were known to hit isolated targets even today.

It is romantic, in a way, to think of the bedou, old even in the time of Christ, as a going concern. It is also a bit frightening, given that even the city Arabs and Turks found them troublesome and rebellious. It is a living reminder of the age of the world and the thin veneer of civilization papering over all that blood and strife, just as I feel when I read, pace some blogger, that the age of the iPod is in fact powered by electricity usually generated by coal.

My landlord is another type I had not met in Michigan; an ex-Colombian living in the U.S. College-educated, his first name is Adolfo. He was named after Adolf Hitler.

He was born in 1960.

As it turns out, his grandfather was severely burned in a barn fire as a boy. He ended up in Germany, which was the only country which could, more or less, repair burns of that extent. Apparently, in addition to the medical care, the young man was quite impressed by the Nazi response to the Depression. And thus "Adolfo".

The truly humorous part of all this is that the grandson is quite liberal. I mean, Socialist. Which means simply that he pursues the same old bad ends from an international, not chauvinist, perspective. One might be tempted to suggest different ends. One might also harbor fantasies of a Five Year Plan for peace in the Middle East. According to this guy:

- Vincente Fox is all for the rich. (Yeah, what did those lousy Morgans, Fords, Gates and Astors ever do for America?) The next Mexican President, of a different party, will also be for the rich.

- The U.S. government dictates currency devaluation in all of South America.

- South Americans are only allowed to buy Esso (you know, Exxon) oil while the Norte Americanos must share their home market with British Petroleum. The same goes for cars, soda, &c. This is the way the U.S. wants it and Europe and Japan meekly accept this.

- France is full of diplomatic geniuses thwarted by that cowboy in the White House.

- South American pharmaceutical companies produced "generic" anti-HIV drugs before the bad U.S. free-trade agreements. The term "pirate" never occurs to him, just as it never did to the Russians I met who thought Linux was a bad deal when you could "distribute" MS Windows for the cost of a CD-R.

- He has no idea why South American unemployment skyrocketed in the 1990s. Apparently, the thought that Malaysians, Taiwanese, Koreans, Chinese and Indians are now in the jobs market does not occur to him, nor that the Norte Americanos also suffered from this dislocation.

- The Chinese will soon overtake America as the great power. Their crippling bad debts and political rigidity does not occur to him, nor that they may suffer the fate of the Japanese. ("Our Economy Is Stuck On Suck.") Nor does he think that trade will tie their war hand.

This reminds me of the great blog post on the Arab Parallel Universe. In fact, I see one of the commenters spelled it out: "Man, I feel so related to this post: change Arab Parallel Universe for Latin American Parallel Universe, and you get almost the same. And I thought we were [the] land of Magical Realism!"

Apparently, our State Department sucks far more than I thought: these thoughts are the common currency of people who do not read hard news. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus indeed. What do we pay those goons in Foggy Bottom for, again? Are we no longer the land of Madison Avenue? Deep down I know that America was like this back in the day: Washington and Adams both risked ultimate defeat in negotiating peace treaties with England and France because the great mass of American opinion, among the low, in those days was virulently paranoid about aristocratic, monarchial, European influence on our way of life and our government. We were lucky to go through that then, before the age of nukes, before suicide bombers and sarin gas.

"I am not a Pillar, but a Buttress, of the Established Church. I support it from without."–Lord Melbourne

Where's somercet?

I will get the address for everyone soon, which reminds me that I will have to take it to the bank to change the address there. The phone is cell only. I am writing this at work because the Internet connection at the new place is wireless and I have no Wifi adapter.

New landlord: nice guy. Stupidly liberal in that weird, So. American way. He does outreach for Latinos and the Catholic Church. If you think some Americans are paranoid about Wal-Mart, go talk to a Latino. You will get a whole new appreciation of living in a country that does not hate capitalism. Politics aside, he is pretty cool for a total neat freak. I did laundry all day today, and have a bunch of clothes in my closet with a floor fan blowing the air in on them. I am bunking on my camping pad and a blanket, using my sleeping bag for warmth. I am enjoying the wonderful, whole townhouse cleanliness while I can, before I am embittered by excessive housework.

Oh, and don't bother with the Fastmail address, either. That is unreachable as well. Please write me at Dell, although that means that any pictures you send me pretty much have to be pried out of email and sent along to my home (long story). In fact, if you have any pictures, please send them to Fastmail. I will get them eventually.

Oh, and I saw my first black widow spider last night, just outside my new place. Something new everyday, huh?

Clerks ii or, the reckoning

Sometimes, one of the hardest things in life is to admit what you really want. Gay kids used to suffer from this a lot, of course, and now have champions who denounce all who might drag them back to the opposite sex, but in truth, most of this confusion is purely human.

Currently, we have a society with rankings, slowly and ever changing, that provide good enough lives for the majority and opportunities for the minorities to negotiate different lives. Our generalized others have priorities. Some people think it possible to eliminate this; I think any change will simply substitute one bigotry for another. Eliminate all social ranking and a few will be happy without oppression and the majority will flail about looking for guidance. (You may try to convince me this would be better; you may also teach a pig to sing, if you like. As I noted, a good society allows the dissatisfied to spend their time however they wish.)

Are you satisfied working a counter nights? Do you like "fat" chicks or "loser" guys? Do you think Hudson Hawk is sorely underrated? Is reality television the greatest thing ever? Do you really not want to get married? (Most twenty-somethings who denounce marriage and/or kids do so in the same way that eight year-olds pronounce sex "icky" and may safely be ignored in my little poll, or you may regard them, per my theory, as breeders unwilling to admit they do wish to hitch up and squeeze out a few puppies.)

Either way, how do you know what you really want? And if you figure it out, will you proclaim it proudly or skulk in the corners?

In 1994 Clerks. was a cornerstone film for me. Kevin Smith described my life perfectly: annoying customers, romantic failure and buddies driven by American pop culture and pr0n. Wanting a cinematographer and cash, Smith created a pure comedy of words not seen since the Marx Bros. were at the top of their game. I was dating Stacy at the time. I love her still but hindsight shows what I knew but did not want to know at the time: we were not working out and we never would. I was twenty-five years old and had worked at Majik Market, Gateway Shell and the Speedy Marathon across from the Kalamazoo Fisher Body plant (since closed). I could quote any Bob Dylan song you could name. Smith's world was mine.

Twelve years later, Smith gives us Clerks II. In purely cinematic terms, II is a little under-written. (I am almost aghast that Smith found no time to brutalize the Star Wars prequels, and am surprised that Smith seems unwilling to include politics, which is, in the 21st century, a kind of pop culture.) May I perish before including spoilers, but Randal's speech at the end was crunchy because Randal has to admit what he really wants... and it made me think.

I am living 531 miles from the place I called home before it drove me from its shores (bear with me, I am feeling poetical) with watered-down Socialism that the paranoid voice-in-my-head tells me is designed to "right-size" the native population for some purpose obviously nefarious because it is otherwise senseless. I have never been too fond of Michigan. A lot of people criticize it for being unfriendly, something I, in my perma-bubble, have never noticed. Some people in Michigan, though, were and are important to me. Some I loved are now dead. Two of them are not only alive but ready to kill me for leaving. I have known both for more than twenty years: unimaginable for a kid who moved around all his young life. The one I loved enough to marry. The other, again pace Kevin Smith, "Hello, I'm Jay and this is my hetero life-mate, Silent Bob." (Really, we even look like them!) And, of course, I have my own little rugrat who specializes in adorability and obstructionism.

Leaving was not easy. I am living farther from my family than anyone else I know. My brother was further when he left Allentown, PA for college in Wisconsin, if only by a couple hundred miles (and our extended family was there in Greater Cleveland for emergency outreach). But here I am. Why? My wife told me, some time before I left, that if I did not have a job it was because I was not looking hard enough. My reply now is, boy, were you right. I had to look a lot harder, and farther, to find one. Was it worth it?

A hard question, that. I think I still have not found my niche in life. I am good at computer support, but would rather work on the server side of things. I may never be qualified for that. On the other hand, maintaining this blog is reawakening my taste for writing. I know I have not written much lately, but if you only knew how much this job exhausts me. I am an unpeople person in a people job. But really, I have never known just what I would be best (or just really, really good) at. I read biographies where people meet a person who changes their track entirely or helps them on the right one and I almost explode with envy. I am, of course, thrilled to be making money. Everyone down here is pretty upbeat and friendly. Life is stressful but fairly rewarding.

I may never know what I want, but I know what I need right now and, apparently, TN and DOC are it. It sucks a bit that not everyone is completely supportive, but enough of the right people are and I can not ask for anything more.... Well, heh, who am I kidding?

Definition: the generalized other is not "what the people you know will think", it is "what the people the people you know will think." The people you know are significant others; we know this because you, uh, know them.

Moving day

I found a new place today, the thirtieth. Move out day is tomorrow. I drove down ninety-five percent of my with-me possessions and am about to pack the car with the last of it.

Now this is God picking you up and setting you down where you need to be. My new landlord will probably drive me insane with cleaning but after this place, he is welcome to do so. A former Colombian, he works in Catholic and immigrant outreach. Sometime, I will write up our conversation with the one I had with an American kid who lived in Saudi Arabia and the one I had at KLUG with the Russian exchange um, students? Businessmen? Whichever, I will post it here; truly, we live in Fortress Disneyland and the world is much scarier than we thought.

A day of discovery:

1. I always surprise myself with how well I learned packing from Dad. I stuffed almost everything I brought down here into a single carload. I only have a chair, the computer, bedding and a few clothes left. When I crept out of the apartment complex, the speed bumps bottomed out my suspension.
2. How empty even carpeted rooms sound with nothing in them; surprising even after all these years and moves. A lonely sound.
3. I need furniture: a bed, especially, perhaps a dresser. I may make that an excuse to shift my days around and drive up to Kalamazoo, though really, I could not bring down a bed with my car. Maybe if I bought a supercheap ticket, I could fly? But what would I do if showed up and the rental truck was not available?
4. My new place, on Sunday afternoon at least, is nine minutes from work. Bliss. Happiness. A lot cheaper.

Time to pack the chair and computer. My landlord has Wifi (wireless) internet only so my computer will be disconnected until I get such a card and hook it up. So use work email only, and do not send to my Google Mail address because I can't access it from work.

Guh. Bed. Now. While I can enjoy it.

Wonky of sleep...

Speaking of wonky, I was on the phone till a little after ten tonight. I can barely think straight. The woman and I were joking about each of us downing some Scotch after we hung up.

Two places, and a couple people who will hotel room with me if they fall through. Feeling a bit twitchy, here.

And another thing about the 30-day contract people... I am basically their slave until they get tired and release me from the phone. I feel like a genie, which reminds me:

A genie, imprisoned in a lamp, alone and desperate to escape, promised it would grant three wishes to whomever released it.

A thousand years later, the genie swore to bring untold riches and treasure to whomever would free it from its prison.

A thousand years after that the genie swore unending pain and torment on whichever luckless bastard finally set it free.

Genie, I so totally understand you.

Another lesson...

Don't read H.P. Lovecraft just before going to bed... especially do not read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" because that one is the scariest of the bunch...

I am still looking for a new apartment. I have a number of good leads, though, including a couple very near where I work. For that matter, I have been looking through jobs ads as well, and found an opening in Ypsilanti which might be interesting, though it lists GM as one of its customers and I am not sure how much longer GM will be around.

I found one duplex which would be fantastic. It is in Inglewood, which is right across the Cumberland in a little neck of the river, with a fantastic, gorgeous park just down the street. Cross your fingers...

My current schedule is Mon-Tue-Fri-Sat, 9 am to 8 pm. Traffic is much lighter then, which is nice. My call volume is up and my refunds are down, which is also nice.

I lost some personal possessions when my group got moved while I was out for two days. The guy who took my desk threw out the notebook I kept during my training and my aspirin. I hope to get my headphones back, at least. Nice guy. I am currently sitting next to two guys who are pretty cool. The one is friendly, the other is post-modern cynical. Better than isolation, I guess.

I am not looking forward to moving, but I have little choice, as staying here with all new roommates does not attract me. Also, I do want to live closer to Nashville and a night life of some sort, even if it is only some cafés.

Yes, I should be sleeping. But that story...

"Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--"

*shivers*

QOTD: "In his house in Raleigh, dead Elvis lies dreaming."

Things I failed to mention, being wonky with lack of sleep

I bought a watch, one of those hybrid pocket watches that hang, upside-down, from a belt loop. With my keys, key card and my new watch all hanging from my belt loops, I am starting to resemble Batman. With the key card on one of those retractable reels, I can swing across caverns created by the Building Densification project (I am not joking, that is the name) or, for stubborn problems, garrote people to death like a British commando.

This watch rocks. I used it to time my breaks. Two breaks of exactly 30 minutes total time. Heh. But I find myself wanting a watch fob for it. Also, I regret that I could choose the stopwatch OR the compass.

I bought an umbrella. I got to use it about twenty minutes later. Thunderstorms here hit like a wall; you drive along and suddenly, you can't see. The rain also comes in bands that you pass in and out of. Surprisingly, aside from the ant situation created by roommates too dumb to realize that ANTS LIVE ON SUGAR and that DRIED SODA POP on the counters is nothing more than DRIED SUGAR WITH FOOD COLORING, the bugs here are not too scary. Excepting, of course, the beetle I saw crawling along the parking lot next door which I saw while standing on a THIRD FLOOR BALCONY. I think it was a beetle, puppies do not glint in the sodium lights like that.

I have today and tomorrow off, therefore I will be apartment hunting for these two days. I have a bunch of numbers to call. Here's hoping.