Guilt and Innocence: A daily primer

The book industry reaches a new low...

Some frat boy writes a book about a night of drinking 21 shots and now it seems he's planning on taking down the book industry with him.

In order to make the book more appealing to college-age readers, Iversen plans to release shot glasses and a clothing line based on the book. He is also working on a movie based on the novel.

Books should not be marketed like the latest B-list movie. Even the crappy romance imprints don't release merchandise to accompany their sub-par writing.

Hide-and-Seek Alarm Clock

As anyone who has had to face me first thing in the morning can attest, I am not a morning person. Also, while alarms do wake me up, I have a tendency to turn them off and go back to sleep.

Well, this clock in development at MIT hides from you when you press the sleep button, ensuring that one is in fact awake.

As soon as this is actually available for sale, I'm buying one.

An interesting turn of events.

I was recently torn between buying tickets to one of two upcoming concerts: Something Corportate and the Decemberists. I ended up buy SoCo tickets as I know they ahve a good reputation live, but it turns out this may have been the better decision for another reason:
The Decemberists recently had their trailer and instruments stolen.

I wonder if they'll make it to Columbia... Hmm. Regardless, it's an unfortunate turn of events for the band.

Book #11: The Book of Illusions

How is it that I will read five or six books in a row without really, truly liking any of them and all of a sudden I read two in a row that I really like?

The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster is a strange book in a few ways. It was definitely and enjoyable and quick read, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. The story itself doesn't sound so literary or engaging. A widowed man finds himself wrapped up in the life of a supposedly missing director of silent films. At best that plot sounds like a bad grocery store novel, but Auster's writing is amazing and surprisingly profound.

There's a quote on the back of the novel from The Wall Street Journal suggesting that Auster is perfecting his own literary genre. If this is the case I would suggest the genre be called something like literary biography. The book reads almost like a biography, but the story is pure fiction.

The final thing about Auster's writing that confounds me is the way he seems to have separated himself so clearly from his work. While reading The Book of Illusions it's easy to forget that you're reading a story or that the is a piece of fiction. The Book of Illusions is nice and immersive, a book that makes it easy to forget the rest of the world.

Short People Rock

Research on the advantages of shorter height.

Okay, so maybe most of you can use me as an armrest, but between my five-foot height, vegetarian diet, and reduced sleep, I am definitely going to outlive all of you.

The things the internet drags in...

I was on a Thesaurus.com page looking for a synonym to "spiritual" to describe How We Are Hungry (though you will note I gave up and used "spiritual-esque:), when I noticed a Google ad for a service claiming to alter your DNA so you can prepare for ascension.

Out of desperate curiosity, I clicked on the link. Scanning the page, it seemed rather like a satirical page, until I noticed that there's actually a Paypal link at the bottom and remembered that whoever is running this site has actually invested money in buying a Google text ad.

Well, I guess there has to be a service for those people for whom Jesus-scented candles and better tasting communion wafers just aren't enough...

Book #10: How We Are Hungry

I actually bought How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers over winter break and have no excuse as to why I never got around to reading it until now, as I was really excited when it came out and Eggers happens to be just below Palahniuk and Coupland in the favorite authors category. However, I really started reading it as we were driving through Kansas and just devoured the whole thing.

A lot of the reviews I'd read of this book have mentioned that they thought Eggers was trying to hard to be literary and that most of the stories were just too self-conscious. And most of them, in their trite way, claimed that the book left them hungry. However, I think they're all bloody idiots.

I loved this book. Not all the stories are as engaging, and I'm not sure about the extremely short one or two page stories, but I Iove the spiritual-esque feeling that Eggers captures in most of the stories.

Also, the final story in the book, "After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned," is just amazing. I'd actually read in before in Speaking to Angels, a compilation edited by Nick Hornby, but after reading it a second time, I was completely floored. That story alone makes this book completely worth buying this book.

I can't wait for Egger next work, and I hope he continues on his self-conscious,  too literary trend, because I like the direction his work is going, even if the critics don't.

That saying: "You can never come home again." Well...

Every time I come home it takes a few hours before I acclimate to being here and remember why it is that I keep spending ridiculous amounts of money for the privilege of staying here for a few days.

Mostly, it's because the first few hours are spent lying in my bed staring at the ceiling wondering what I'm going to do for the next week.

Somehow I survived my trip across Kansas with someone else's family. It's always weird to be thrown into a situation where you are the odd one out in what is a typical, familial situation. However, the whole situation was not nearly as painful as I feared it might have been.

Darcie spent the night Saturday and I ended up picking a fight and getting upset with her because this seems to be the only interaction I am capable of with her, lately.

I was annoyed when she left Sunday morning and I wanted some sort of distraction, so I called Drew and she came over. We watched some Sex and the City and played The Sims 2: University for awhile before we both declared that the game was torturously boring. Then we watched a Rainbow Brite movie and just laughed at its ridiculous eighties character. By then she was feeling sick, so she went home and I went back to being agonizingly bored.

I decided to take advantage of my digital cable, so I watched Supersize Me! and Clerks. My mommy made me enchiladas for dinner, which I was terribly excited about since I don't get anything approaching edible mexican anywhere in Missouri. The whole state seems to have never been exposed to decent Mexican food.

After dinner, something was happening with our plumbing and my parents began screaming at each other about it. At this point, I was not only bored out of my mind, but annoyed because nothing in this family ever changes and it felt just too much like I was living her again, rather than just visiting, so I made the executive decision to go upstairs, hide, and start reading The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster. At some point I fell asleep and I woke up at three in the morning sprawled sideways across my bed, still in my hoodie.

But, today, today was the sort of day that is worth coming home for. I woke up at about eleven when Darcie called me. I got up, asked my mom to drive me over to her house, took a shower there since our plumbing had yet to be fixed. I didn't really care to be there, but I really needed a shower. I came downstairs and Darcie was ranting about being bored, so we called Ryan, and the three of us went downtown to Paris on the Platte. We ordered drinks, Ryan bought some cloves, and we just sat around and talked for a couple of hours. Afterwards, we went on a brief walk across the Platte to see this old sun dial Ryan had been talking about. However, there were a bunch of shady characters sitting around it, so we only stayed long enough to roll down the steep grassy hill next to it like we were children.

Afterwards, we were vaguely attempting to find the Tattered Cover in the 16th Street Mall, but I really had no idea where it was on 16th Street, so we ended up going to the Barnes and Noble on 16th Street, instead. Oh how I've missed bookstores! It was jsut as well that we ended up at the Barnes and Noble, since I had gift cards there. I bought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime  by Mark Haddon and Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollman.

The icing on today was that I finally got my Splender CD back from Darcie, which I am now playing loudly in my room. A room to myself, downtown Denver, books, coffee, loud music, and my wonderful, unusual friends.

Yeah, this is why I keep coming home.

Scratch and Sniff Religion

In my earlier post about the new recipe for communion wafers, I basically implied that I don't think religion should enter the marketplace. Well,  the same thing applies for candles that smell like Jesus..

From the article:

"We wanted people to be able to experience Christ in new ways and to be able to read a bible and have that scent and that candle as a reminder that he is with us all the time."

"You can't see him and you can't touch him," says Bob Tosterud. "This is a situation where you may be able to sense him by smelling. And it provides a really new dimension to one's experience with Jesus."

What is America's problem? Do we have to fall for every single gimmick like this?

Furthermore, do they not teach the bible story about Jesus and the moneychangers in the temple, anymore? That was always a favorite of mine, and this is why I think these weird religous products are absurd. Also, to my knowledge hygiene was not that great in ancient Judea, so I doubt anyone is getting an authentic experience of the scent of Jesus.

Pre-Packaged News (or Beating the Dead Horse of Journalistic Integrity)

I know that most of you are probably sick to death of hearing about the  Video News Releases, but this is one of those issues that makes my blood boil so intensely that I can't resist dissecting it.

From the NY Times Article:

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets. "Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

...

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

This sort of covert, almost malicious activity on the part of the government, with our tax dollars is appalling. What's worse about this particular situation is that I know I can't blame this whole mess on the government. The media, who are supposed to be protecting the public and revealing this sort of smoky thing to them, have been force-feeding us non-news.

Journalism is supposed to serve to protect the public from the government and when they fail to do so, they are betraying the public trust. Furthermore, when they willingly hand their audience over to the government to save money and maximize profit...  Well, it seems almost like treason.

The Times also wrote:

It is also a process in which all participants benefit.

Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.

...

In essence, video news releases seek to exploit a growing vulnerability of television news: Even as news staffs at the major networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their hours of news coverage without adding reporters.

When I first saw that phrase, "It's a process in which all participants benefit," in J-1100, I remember immediately thinking, "Everyone but the public." Furthermore, at the same time I was reminded of Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire, when he kept asking them to stop hurting America. Now, the talking heads on Crossfire seem benign after all the scandal and torrid money that's flowing through journalism right now.

After reading all this, I'm having a crisis of faith about my major. My parents are currently paying the University of Missouri a quarter-grand a year, because a year ago I was still convinced that, even though I knew the media was having its problems, that journalism was still an important role in democracy. But now, I'm just not sure that's true anymore.

I'm trying not to think apocalyptic things, but words like propaganda are turning into warning signs about the coming year of 1984 in my head, and I'm no longer sure that I want to be in journalism. Now, I'm thinking politics may actually be the less corrupt way to go about things. When everything has turned into a careless search for profit, what's the point?

In the words of Jon Stewart, Could everyone please stop hurting America?