To Ruhleben -- and Back

A review on Amazon says it best: "this memoir was a strange and wonderful surprise: English college kid sneaks into wartime (1914) Berlin as a journalist on a dare, gets in way over his head, is thrown into a prison camp, and then escapes with a fellow inmate in broad daylight to run, hide, and bluff their way across Germany to freedom. It's a really engrossing, old fashioned page turner. It's not a war book at all, more like a weird survival odyssey with a total wiseass."

The best part is that it is true. A little slow at the beginning but even that part is interesting in how similar prison camp survivors descriptions of food are: the slow, contemplative chewing of each piece: trying to see how many times you can chew a morsel of bread...

I guess this isn't a surprise...

Who does the computer tell you to vote for? Here are my results...

Your results for "Presidential Candidate Selector -- 2008 Front Runners"

URL: http://SelectSmart.com/plus/select.php?url=08frontrunners

Percent

Rank

Item

(100%) 1: Sen. Barack Obama (D) Information

(96%) 2: Retired Gen. Wesley Clark (D) Information

(95%) 3: Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D) Information

(91%) 4: Ex-VP Al Gore (D) Information

(87%) 5: Sen. John Kerry (D) Information

(82%) 6: Sen. Christopher Dodd (D) Information

(80%) 7: Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) Information

(77%) 8: Sen. Joseph Biden (D) Information

(76%) 9: Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) Information

(75%) 10: Ex-Sen. John Edwards (D) Information

(70%) 11: Gov. Bill Richardson (D) Information

(59%) 12: Gov. George Pataki (R) Information

(55%) 13: Gov. Mitt Romney (R) Information

(48%) 14: Sec. Condoleezza Rice (R) Information

(46%) 15: Ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) Information

(46%) 16: Rep. Ron Paul (R) Information

(36%) 17: Ex-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R) Information

(34%) 18: Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) Information

(31%) 19: Sen. John McCain (R) Information

(27%) 20: Sen. George Allen (R) Information

(25%) 21: Rep. Duncan Hunter (R) Information

(25%) 22: Sen. Sam Brownback (R) Information

(23%) 23: Rep. Tom Tancredo (R) Information

(11%) 24: Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) Information

(0%) 25: Sen. Russ Feingold (D) Withdrew from race.

Globiblio and Bluestockings

Yesterday, I went to a book club. You know, a real book club, where people discussed real literature and not some Mitch Albom, Dan Brown, or other current top 10 book. It was at 826Chi and the 15 or so of us read Monkey, apparently one of the most famous novels in China. The book is basically a group of four creatures (a priest, monkey, pigsy, sandy) who are on a quest from China to India to receive the Buddhist scriptures and hopefully gain enlightenment. Along the way, they have to overcome obstacles that challenge them emotionally, physically, and spiritually - so basically your standard epic. But instead of all the fractured stories that we tell our kids in America that pass on ethics (Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyon, etc.) this book would open up a world of possibilities to discuss with your child.

At first Monkey is this party crashing oaf that is pretty annoying but with amazing magical powers that he learned from a zen master so there is enough fighting to keep the interest up but then there are these profound (and somethings pithy) statements that would shape the zeitgeist of the country: "Such blank scrolls are the true scriptures." I really liked this statement which focuses on the interplay of silence and spirit. The repetition of water as a force both as an obstacle and an element from rebirth is a nice touch also.

Overall, the other members seemed like great fun; the discussion never got too deep but I'm not sure it really needs to: as Monkey-Squirrel has said, "It's the common experience that counts" - to top it off, people brought Chinese food to eat, peaches to snack on, and Tsing-Tao to drink. I can't wait for next month.

On the train ride back home, I read Lethem's 55-page short story, This Shape We're In. I'm not sure that it's a great or even good book and it doesn't really have the great description that I've come to love from Lethem - it has an interesting comment on the post-downfall of America and the interplay of sex and violence but ultimately lacks focus which is almost absolutely critical for a short story.

Eggers in Chicago

I trained into the city yesterday to check out the Valentino Deng and Dave Eggers book signing / reading yesterday. There were at least 250 people crammed into this small room - it was so packed in fact that to get from the front, book-signing part to the back, reading area, Deng and Eggers had to go out the front door and come back into the store via the back, emergency-exit-alley-way. I was fortunate enough to get there early to get my book signed before the show and still have a seat, albeit on top of a bookcase. Dave and I chatted for a couple of minutes about the need to infuse modern fiction in the classroom and how reading books like the Scarlet Letter; however good, ultimately turns kids off to reading and writing. Eggers has always been a big supporter of education (starts tutoring centers / writes about educators) and had these parting words: Keep at it. Do not tire.

When I was in college I sent my uncle a postcard of IU, he sent one back of UC with these words in closing: Do it right. I still think he influenced my philosophy of life more than any text I'd read at the time.

Do it right. Keep at it. Do not tire.

Anyway, the reading was at the inauspicious 826Chi tutoring center which can be seen to the right. The front of the store is a secret agent supply store known as "The Boring Store" because if you are a secret agent you can't be seen going into a spy store. The hope is that each tutoring center can be run self-sufficiently from the profits of the store. This summer I would like to volunteer there if they need help. I think I could help the 6-18 year olds learn more about creative writing and I would learn some new, great activities that I could take back to the classroom next year. But, that's the long view. We'll see how everything shakes out.

Hoosiers Basketball

For the last couple of years, watching IU basketball has been an anxiety inducing chore. This season things have started to turn around with new coach, Kelvin Sampson. It used to be that IU would build a lead, muck up the last couple of possessions before halftime, make no adjustments, and lose the lead and usually the game.

Nowadays, IU can build a lead. Or more importantly sustain one: up by 5 with a few minutes to play used to be as good as a loss. Even when things aren't going the Hoosiers' way, I am confident that they will make the correct adjustments and get things going their way. There is still plenty to improve on, but watching IU is fun again.

The Worst Hard Time

American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the 20th century. As as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster. The dust storms, or dusters, were bad beyond belief. The idea of 200 mile blizzards of dirt that could blind a person or fill them with dirt so full that they would die is almost unthinkable. What is even more amazing is that people had such faith that it would once again rain that they lived through constant dust in everything, a severe multi-year drought that killed all crops, biblical bug infestations, and a diet that consisted of pickled tumbleweed and water. This amazing book is a mostly oral history of people the country forgot about from the 1900-1940's. Tremendous things happened to the world at that time but hundreds of thousands of Americans were living in dugouts and dying of "dust pneumonia". Ike Osteen, now in his 90's, somehow survived the terrible, forced depravity of the dust bowls and shortly after joined the army to find himself fighting the Germans on D-day. What an amazing story.

What is even more astonishing is that we really haven't learned anything about environmental disasters. The belief that plowing millions of acres of fields or shooting on TNT into the clouds would induce rain draws strong parallels to those people that virulently deny global warming nowadays. In fact, in the same exact area of the dust bowl, pipes currently suck up water out of the Ogalalla Aquifer, the nation's largest freshwater source, at a rate 8 times faster than nature can replenish it. The water is used to raise cotton that is shipped to China so that China can make clothes to ship back to our big-box clothing stores. So what do we get out of the deal? Less water, fewer jobs, and mickey mouse t-shirts. Globalization at its best. Good grief.

If You Have the Means

I highly recommend you pick up The Decemberists new album if you haven't done so already. It has the nice earthy smell of the civil war intermixed with the poppy taste of the 70's.

Dirt

So I'm reading The Worst Hard Time with my Pops and I came across this fact in the introduction that I can't even wrap my mind around. On April 14, 1935, thereafter known as Black Sunday, the storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth in seven years to create the Panama Canal . Twice as much dirt. One afternoon. That's crazy.


The picture is from that storm. Pure dust and dirt.

Three Books That Didn't Make It and Other Errata

There were three books that I was sure would be my favorites this year that just turned out not to be up to snuff for the top 10 list - here they are in no particular order...

A Private History of Awe - Scott Russell Sanders

Unlike the other two books on this list I really liked this book. Sanders is a professor at Indiana University, my alma mater, and I'll defer to his description of the book: "I set out to describe my own brushes with the ground of being, the holy source of all that rises and passes, and to record my search for a language and way of life adequate to those experiences. The resulting book may irk true-believers at one extreme and militant secularists at the other. But I hope that readers who dwell between those extremes will find, as the Quakers say, that A Private History of Awe speaks to their condition." His personal stories don't really stick with me which is why it's not in the top ten but they helped me to think about and notice the world around me in a more "spiritual" sense.

The Children's Hospital - Chris Adrian

How can a book this good looking be so boring? McSweeney's publishing has this new book of the month club where for $100 they will send you the next 10 books that they publish (usually one a month). I signed up for it because of this book - the design is so nice that you wish that all of the books on your library were as pretty. Alas, you can't always judg.... never mind. This book is ostensibly a retelling of the Old Testament (particularly Noah's Ark) but it never really goes anywhere new. You can see the twists coming from 100 pages away and at 700 pages that gets to be a little tedious and while the backstory of Jemma's life is cleverly interwoven most of the time you are thinking "ugh, more backstory? the front story is boring enough" I wanted to like this book so much and the touching ending almost got me to cry (a herculean feat) but it's not worth the emotional payoff to wade through those 690 pages that makes it possible.

The Pinochet File - Peter Kornbluh

I've said it before in a previous post I love Chile; however, The Pinochet File is written so dryly and you can't wait for the 500 page book to be over. In fact, most of the time, I was so bored and I couldn't even be outraged that we were permitting this to happen or that US citizens were killed in their nation's capitol by a group of terrorists that we helped install. It's too bad this book wasn't better because this year saw the death of Pinochet and would have helped people understand the outrage that this man caused.

****The Big List of Books I Read in 2006****

• Anthem : Rand
• Bering : Frost
• Catch Me if You Can : Abagnale
• Walking to Vermont : Wren
• Voices of Protest : Brinkley
• The Pinochet File : Kornbluh
• The Crusades Through Arab Eyes : Maalouf
• Confederacy of Dunces : Toole
• The Moviegoer : Percy
• The Supreme Court : Rehnquist
• A Private History of Awe : Sanders
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich : Solzhenitsyn
• Winning the Race : McWhorter
• The Buddha of Suburbia : Kureishi
• Number9Dream : Mitchell
• The Sheltering Sky : Bowles
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold : Marquez
• Fortress of Solitude : Lethem
• Saturday : McEwan
• The Path Between the Seas : McCullough
• Winesburg, Ohio : Anderson
• The Automatic Millionaire : Bach
• Of Mice and Men : Steinbeck
• The Road : McCarthy
• Field Notes from a Catastrophe : Kolbert
• Housekeeping vs. The Dirt : Hornby
• The Children's Hospital : Adrian
• Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip : Ilf

****The Big List of Races I Ran in 2006****

• Fanny Freezer 5K : Fort Wayne, IN
• Nutri-Run 20K : Fort Wayne, IN
• Race to Wrigley 5K : Chicago, IL
• Run with the Spirit 5K : Fort Wayne, IN
• Ravenswood Run 5K : Chicago, IL
• Indy Mini-Marathon 13.1 mi : Indianapolis, IN
• IU Mini-Marathon 13.1 mi : Bloomington, IN
• Chicago Half-Marathon 13.1 mi : Chicago, IL
• Chicago Marathon 26.2 mi : Chicago, IL
• Sears Tower Climb 103 floors : Chicago, IL
• Pilgrim Pacer 5K : LaGrange, IL