Kenny ://

Reading list - a must do list

I'm sitting here trying to force myself to work in advance of a big week of travel for work and decided to run through the RSS first.  One of the RSS's to which I subscribe is "Thinkers." It contains feeds from sites like Salon, Freakonomics, Gladwell, Kottke, NPR, and one of my favorites - Marginal Revolution.  Today a post from MR contained a reading list of Literature and Law. I gave the list a once-over and decided it contained all the elements of a good reading list for anyone interested in growth.  Some of these books belong to the canon of literature, but not all of them do. A good list to start on for the holidays and for Summer. These are not at all light reading and no canonical work should be - it should demand from the reader a bit of participation in the outcome.  

For the list, visit this site but I'm also pasting it here for you.  I don't know all of these but if they belong in a list with the ones I do know, it's a list worth checking out in its entirety.

Law and Literature reading list, Spring 2009

• The Five Books of Moses, edited and translated by Robert Alter.
• Billy Budd and Other Tales, by Hermann Melville.
• The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka.
• Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg.
• The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman.
• In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott.
• Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, by Fernando Verrissimo.
• Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line.
• Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, by Leo Tolstoy.
• Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1.
• Out: A Novel, by Natsuo Kirino.
• I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.
• Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90.
• Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.
• Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov.
• Blindness, by Jose Saramago.

Finally, I can read a magazine

I don't want to jinx it, but I think I'm finally done with the semester. Last night was my last exam, for which we're allocated 2 hours. What happened in my class, though? Well, I'm glad you asked.

Professor Blowhard comes in 5 minutes late and says, "First, we need to do some housekeeping" and then proceeds to hand out mimeo'd copies of articles from the Wall Street Journal and the local paper and we had a discussion, during our exam time, which then gave us about an hour to complete the exam. Realistically, the test only took me about 20 minutes but I was actually getting warm I was so angry that this prof who loves to hear himself speak was showing so little respect for the time we students put in to prepare for this exam only to be derailed with even more discussions about materials we'd never discussed in class. I'm so happy to be done with that class. The other two I kind of think I'll miss, but only in that "Remember that time you wrecked your bike through the back of a parked station-wagon window?" "Yeah, I miss those times" kind of way.

After the exam, a few classmates and I went to have a beer, commiserate about the semester, and decompress. Someone asked me how I plan to spend the next 3.9 weeks of not having school work to do and I really had no answer. "Read a magazine?" I asked aloud. Seems like the easiest thing to do to waste a few hours each day. Then it dawned on me. I actually have a few hours to waste each day for the next almost 4 weeks! I need to maximize my enjoyment of that free time! I'll probably do that by reading a magazine, running, riding my bike(s) and swimming in preparation for next year's triathlon season. Of course, I say that now, all enthusiastic and drunk on free time . . .

The mustache contest party is getting closer but I think I've plateau'd on my facial hair growing patience. I can't stand having facial hair but I'm a trooper and will carry on.

Talk about bad planning

Actually, talk about NO planning. Herr DeLay, Tom, that is, has recently published a book titled "No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight."

I read a little blurb about it in the April 7th edition of The Economist which is a news rag I've recently subscribed to. The 'review' of the book starts with "When Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, announced in April 2006 that he was resigning from Congress, he had ample reason to want to leave Washington. He had been indicted for money-laundering and repeatedly admonished by the House Ethics Committee." The review doesn't paint a rosy picture from there, it's pretty much the same sort of language throughout. I'm not a fan of Mr. DeLay by any stretch of the imagination so I happily read the rest of the article about "the Hammer," has he was affectionately known among his face-shooting and crooked lobbyist friends in D.C.

One thing I can't understand, though, is how someone can claim they've been in a "fight" to bring credibility to their career and name and 3 pages later describe himself as a man who " . . . drank a dozen martinis a night, cheated on his wife repeatedly, and earned the nickname "Hot Tub Tom"."

Is that the definition of an overinflated sense of riteousness and self-importance? I dunno, but I'm guessing yes. The Asser is more like it - Hammer my tookus.

Anyway, that's not what made me take note of the article, worthy tho it was of reading twice. The item that made me take notice is the title. Does no one on his publishing team remember the HORRIBLE Jean Claude Van Damme movie of the same name made in 1986? "No Retreat, No Surrender."

The tagline (from IMDB):
Tonight, He either fights for his life or he'll be running for the rest of it.

The Plot summary (also from IMDB):
Jason Stillwell, a Bruce Lee fan, is beaten numerous times and trains from the ghost of Lee. Jason then must use his newly acquired skills to save Seattle from a crime syndicate, whose top martial artist is the deadly Ivan.

You read that right, gomez's. Trains from the ghost of Bruce Fukkin Lee. Who's "the deadly Ivan?" Van Damme. Duh.

Brilliant piece of strategy there, Mr. DeLay's ghost writing team, publicist and PR representative. An assier name couldn't have been available with any worse connotation than the one chosen.

Depreciation and real world examples

We've all heard it - buy a new car, drive it off the lot and instantly it's worth $10k less. Who has ever or is ever going to make a u-turn and try to sell that car back to the distributor right then and there to test the theory? Not me.

Another one I've heard is that assets depreciate over time but I've never had a tractor or industrial equipment that can depreciate and that "over time" is measured in years, not anything really easily definable for a few reasons.

1. If you've bought something that expensive with a high rate of depreciation, odds are you're in it for the long haul and won't be trying to turn it over so quickly.
2. Do you notice a loss in value of something that you've bought 15 years ago? I'm willing to guess you, like me, don't want to have to go to www.BEA.gov or www.BLS.gov to determine the rate of inflation, then research to find the rate of depreciation on the exact item you're looking at, blah blah blah. It's too much work.

Here's a concrete example that really pissed me off today, though. I'm in grad school - it's good, it's an investment in my future, etc. What gets my blood up is when I spend $150 on a book that our professor never even brings to class herself and yet we're required to have bought it and when I go to sell it back, I can only sell it back for $30. $120 depreciation over 2.18 months is NOT simple economics. It's simple rape-your-wallet-onomics. My book depreciated at a rate of $.55 a day, I never even opened it $.0002 a day.

Fug me, I'll never buy books from the school bookstore again.

A small good thing

I'm a firm believer in rituals, the things we do on a regular basis that not only help us pass the time, but also add to our definitions.

For example, every morning I wake up as early as I can drag my carcass out of bed to make coffee and read the news. That's what my step-daughter calls "Kenny time." She's defined me through my morning rituals. It's part of what makes me me to her, I suppose. I think it's funny the routines we go through without ever paying attention to their consistency, regularity, or necessity.

When I don't get my Kenny time in the morning, I go through the day feeling a little off kilter as if I haven't been able to make the day my own for some reason. Routines, we all rely on them.

When I started thinking about my need for my "Kenny time," I was reminded of my favorite Raymond Carver short story, "A Small Good Thing." The story is about a couple who lose a young son after he's hit by a car. The first half of the story is the immediate aftermath of this car accident and the reader goes through this tragedy with the parents as it unfolds, not after the fact. Carver's a genius when it comes to character development and reader involvement, IMHO. Anyway, the boy passes away after spending time in a coma and the parents are, for obvious and good reasons, unglued by the incident. Their child doesn't pass away, however, until after the phone calls start.

The first call comes very early in the morning, before normal people are up and at 'em and when the mother answers she can hear machinery in the background. "Is it my son??? Is it about my son??" she pleads because she thinks she's received this call from the hospital. The man on the other end of the phone says something like, "Yes, it is. Have you forgotten about him?" Turns out it's not some ominous portent or anything like that, it's a baker from whom the mother ordered a birthday cake for their son before he was hit by a car. She'd apparently forgotten about the cake, for obvious and good reasons.

The point here is that, after tracking down who the caller is and confronting the baker at an odd hour of the night at his bakery, he tries to soothe her by offering her a small treat, a small good thing of a treat. It's those small things like eating, bathing, treating yourself to something delicious either to the taste or to the senses (reading good literature, listening to good music, or eating good dark chocolate) that bring comfort, the mindless things we do that just seem right and comfortable for us to go through. Those rituals I go through are the balancers in my life. They used to involve spending hours and hours a week on my bike, but those hours and hours have been slowly decreased and decreased and decreased over the past few years.

Now, "Kenny Time" is my only opportunity for what I consider to be the only absolute "normal" in my own life. How is it the absolute "normal" in my life? Because it's something I've defined and created for myself that's just for me and Milo (the dog who is always ready with a paw in the mornings). It's the one thing in my day that I simultaneously have absolute control over and don't have to do a thing to make it happen, other than get up in the morning.

I heard the Oscars were sometime recently

Did Forest Gump win anything? When is there going to be a sequel to that gem? What about Titanic?

I once met someone who said their all-time favorite movies were Forest Gump and Saving Private Ryan because, and I quote, "Those movies are real, man. You don't even know what nam was like unless you've seen that movie. And inner discovery? What the hell do you think FG was all about, man? Inner discovery!"

Puh. Leeze. Dot. Com.

Zackpe and I actually did get out and see a movie this past weekend. The Number 23. If you haven't heard of it, it's got Jim Carrey and, much like Robin Williams, I much prefer him in serious roles instead of shtick roles like that crappy Ass Ventura.

To sum up, read Crime and Punishment by Fiodor Dostoyevsky, add some trauma (physical and mental) induced amnesia, some freeky deeky numerology, suicides, a loving wife and son and chop about 300 pages out of the book and you've got The Number 23. I loved it. So much so that I'm going to dig through teh boxes and boxes of books in the basement to find my tattered and well-read copy of C & P just to get back in touch with my inner Raskolnikov again.