Rising Hegemon
One goal I have this year is to read Alexis deTocqueville's Democracy in America. I decided I needed to read it after hearing this brief excerpt read by George Plimpton at the beginning of Ric Burns' American Experience film "The Donner Party":
It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor Americans pursue prosperity. Ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. They cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach as if they expected to stop living before they had relished them. Death steps in, in the end, and stops them before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them.Other reading goals including (finally, really) finishing The Power Broker , reading Catch 22 (how is it I have missed Catch 22 all these years?), and starting Dickens' Bleak House. (Please note that I am not committing to finishing the latter.)
"The Donner Party" is a terrific film, by the way. Well worth your time -- and you can watch it online.
10 comments:
i loved that documentary. i need to keep reading my orations volumns so i can ebay the set. THIS xmas. as if. maybe xmas 2012. just in time for the end.
The student cafeteria at the university of Colorado I've been told is appropriately named Donner Hall.
vox
my bad. It was named after Alfred Packer, who killed and ate members of his camping party caught in a blizzard in the Colo. mountains in 1874, almost thirty years after the Donner party. He did time for manslaughter. vox
I remember reading Alexis deTocqueville back in college but since that was like 100 years ago I couldn't tell you a fucking thing about it.
Get the Cliff's Notes.
Those are worthy goals, wrt deTocqueville, Heller and Dickens.
Catch-22 will probably make you think that Bush and Cheney used it as a textbook. deTocqueville is important as any for understanding the American character (if there is any) and Bleak House will give you a unique view on how the law is administered (it's also the only non sci-fi book I know of that employs spontaneous human combustion as a narrative device :) ).
Never read Catch 22? I can't imagine coming to it now. It's commonly referred to as anti war but I never bought that. It's about the individual caught in the sweep of history. I've come to understand it, or see it even if that was not Heller's thought, as anti institution. The unthinking madness of institutional cultures.
(I didn't really like the movie originally. I like it better now but it could be done again. Instead of the obsession with the look and absence of dialog to do it with floods of words, never done anymore in movies, could be great.)
Somewhere this year I saw a comment that Cathcart and Korn were the prototypical post war Organization Men. Milo of course is the prototypical CEO.
The greatest modern anti war novel is William Eastlake's 'The Bamboo Bed'. "War is the last best hope of the incompetent to convince the unwilling to attempt the impossible."
If you start reading Bleak House, you will want to finish it. It's my favorite Dickens of all time, and it has all his propulsive plot devices, intriguing characters, depth of focus, and, yes, human spontaneous combustion, which takes place in a scene that Stephen King would have killed to be able to write.
I bought Bleak House last year, on the advice of a character from a Donna Leon mystery novel. Still haven't cracked it yet -- it is under Freedom in my big book pile.
Catch-22 was a revelation when I read it for high school English class, the year after they had me read Catcher in the Rye. I still remember the joy Mrs. Raven took in explaining the etymology of Sgt. Scheisskopf's name for those who were doing romance languages. It was a good thing going to school in the 70's and 80's, when a lot of really bright people who dropped out of the rat race in the late 60's ended up finding work.
Bleak House has, for a lot of its length, a -- for me at any rate -- really creepy female narrator. Dickens had woman issues, methinks. For my money, Nickleby or Dorritt.
I agree that Power Broker is a slog, but it is worth it. I read it when I took community organizing classes from the Industrial Areas Foundation back in the early 1980s.
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