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2007 Book Poll
OK, it’s time for the annual book poll. I only read 79 books this year, compared to last year’s 86, but I ascribe that to some long books and a lot of traveling in August when I read only three books in the whole month. I’m also surprised at how much genre fiction I read, but a lot of those books are really fast reads (I think I read the whole five books of the Time Quartet in three days).
(Apologies: I left out a lot of books, and therefore had to restart the poll.)
The End Of America
Naomi Wolf has written a powerful political pamphlet that’s got me thinking: The End Of America: Letters Of Warning To a Young Patriot.
Subtitled “A Citizen’s Call To Action,” the book makes a simple point without sliding into hysteria: The transition from a democratic government to a fascist state has happened many times in recent history, always by ostensibly legal means, and usually with the tacit cooperation of most of the country.
Populations in fascist or totalitarian systems adapt to fear through complicity … when a minority of citizens is terrorized and persecuted, a majority live out fairly normal lives by stifling dissent within themselves and going along quietly with the state’s act of violent repression. …[F]ascist regimes can be “quite popular” for the people who are not being terrorized.
Most of us are, for now, in the latter category, and behaving exactly as described.
This shift, she says, happens according to a ten-point plan, followed not only by the monsters of history like Hitler and Stalin, but also by everyone from Pinochet to Musharraf. She makes a compelling case that this plan is well underway in this country, putting into one very small and precise book the fears many of us are probably feeling.
This country is slowly sliding into totalitarianism, and may in fact be further along that road than we realize. And beyond that, her point is that democracy is fragile; that we have grown accustomed to “outsourcing” our democracy to lawyers and civil rights organizations and professional activists, which is how we got ourselves into this fix in the first place.
The ten-point agenda looks like this:
Netscape Navigator, 1994-2007
Time Warner has announced that it will stop supporting or updating Netscape Navigator. I didn’t know it was still being produced.
Back in the dark ages, before “the Internet” and “the Web” were synonymous to most people (before most people had ever heard of either, actually), when Bill Gates was still laughing off the Internet and the founders of Google were probably still in high school, the dominant web browser was NCSA Mosaic, produced by the good folks at uiuc.edu, and available for free.
Then some of those folks left and started their own company, which they renamed Netscape after the University of Illinois objected to their calling it Mosaic. The release of Netscape 1.1 in late 1994 was a milestone; the first time that HTML tables had been properly implemented in a web browser. Among other things, this meant that publishers could put ads next to articles. Suddenly, we who were talking about web publishing had a business model.
I can’t find an image of it, but after they changed the name of the company they adopted one of the single ugliest corporate logos ever, a big blue embossed N, that when the browser was loading a page, reversed perspective, sinking into the page and then coming back up, so that it was universally known as the “breathing N.”
By 1996 or so Internet Explorer was already edging it out, and I now remember Netscape mainly as a pain in the ass, with its horribly broken Javascript interpreter and non-standard silliness like “server push.” Between Netscape’s bugginess and IE’s deliberate disregard of standards (and its bugginess) the late 90s were not a fun time to build fancy web applications that actually worked for the majority of your users.
But Netscape had a good run, managed to shake up Microsoft when it was nearly all-powerful, and was for a while the biggest news in the industry.
Speaking of Legends: Ike Turner, 1931-2007
He was both a legendary musician and a legendary monster. Maybe it’s true that he never got to tell his side of the story, but really, what could he have said? The spectacle of Phil Spector denigrating Tina and calling Ike “misunderstood” was the stuff of parody; one unbalanced violent nutcase defending another.
But Ike Turner has been treated unfairly by history. He was a violent abuser, let’s make no bones about that. But that’s not why he’s so loathed in the public eye. The list of men in the music world who are idolized despite their violent behavior towards women (up to and including murder) is endlessly long. But Ike abused a woman who was as intensely talented as he was, who would be listened to when she spoke out. That’s the difference. This doesn’t excuse what he did, but it should make us all think twice about why we scorn him so much more than we do Jerry Lee Lewis or Miles Davis or the many many others who did as bad as Ike if not worse without paying anywhere near the consequences.
In the end, you have to judge a musician by his or her music. And Ike’s was simply magnificent. He would have been a legend if he’d never met Tina, if only for “Rocket 88,” commonly considered the first rock&roll song. Was it really? Who knows. It’s a classic record, with Ike’s piano driving a monster beat, all the elements that would become rock&roll coming together on a single brilliant record. At Sun Records before Sam Phillips discovered the white boy he’d been looking for, Ike was instrumental in the early careers of people like B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf. He was a brilliant bandleader, a masterful piano and guitar player, and a damned good singer. I mean, this guy sang with with Tina Turner and more than held his own!
The music Ike and Tina made together was amazing. It was probably Ike’s best work, and was certainly Tina’s. Her deservedly successful solo career was built on her great voice but those cheesy eighties productions are fizzy wine coolers next to the straight-no-chaser whiskey of Ike and Tina Turner. The only time she ever had a band worthy of her, Ike was leading it. There are individual Ike & Tina records — “Let’s Get It On” to name just one — that blow every single solo record she ever made through the wall, leaving holes shaped like Simmons electronic drums.
Ike never recovered from Tina leaving. Between his own problems, and the ignominy of being mainly known as the guy who used to beat up Tina Turner, he never got his career back on track. I saw him at Tramps in the mid-1990s, when he was touring behind his comeback album Here and Now, and while he could still put a band together, he didn’t have it anymore. The album isn’t bad, but live, he was clearly trying to recapture what he no longer really had.
If many of his peers managed to avoid having to lay in the beds they made, while Ike languished in his, that doesn’t let Ike off. But he was a great and talented musician, and I think it’s unfortunate that his personal problems have obscured his gifts and left too many people unaware of some truly great music.
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I Am (A Different) Legend
For the second time in a few weeks I went to see a movie based on a book I like very much, and watched a film with a new ending, written to suit the conventions of Hollywood, that significantly changed the entire point of the book.
But whereas I left The Golden Compass commiserating with friends over how bad it was, none of us walking out of I Am Legend could say anything for a few minutes. It’s a terrifying and deeply disturbing film, with a brilliant performance by Will Smith, that does change the book significantly but does so thoughtfully, and in ways that sometimes actually improve on the original (which I wrote about a few posts ago).
The below assumes you’ve read the book and seen the movie, and contains spoilers
Apple: Sleek, Yet Useless
Especially at this time of year, the word “airport” generally brings to mind long waits, obnoxious staff, pointless routines, and frustration. This is true, apparently, in networking as well as in travel. “Airport” is Apple’s brand name for its wireless networking products. Last week, I bought a new wireless router, an “Airport Extreme Base Station,” and two “Airport Express” units, small boxes that plug into the wall and let you stream music wirelessly, or connect a computer, or share a printer.
I am a Mac lover. I’ve been using Macs since the original 128, and now that they’re Unix machines, I wouldn’t use anything else. But that doesn’t mean I’m a fan of Apple, and the past week has been a painful lesson in the value of open standards versus sleek proprietary hardware.
I won’t bore you with the details of my wireless setup nightmare, but trying to get these devices working was like trying to instruct Dubya on the finer points of foreign policy. A pointless exercise in frustration, trying to find the nonexistent substance underneath the slick exterior.
Apple’s sleek designs are increasingly user-unfriendly. The Airport devices are nearly featureless, with the only status indicator a single unlabeled light. Green means working, and other than that, you need to look in the book to figure out the code. Blinking amber means “unable to connect,” according to the book, although in my experience it actually meant “unable and unwilling to connect, either now or at any point in the future, so go away and leave me alone.” The reset button doesn’t.
The devices were unusually sensitive to interference from cordless phones and other devices. Once a connection was interrupted, it was almost impossible to re-establish without completely reconfiguring the devices from scratch. Configuration can only be done with Apple’s software, which is next to impossible to figure out if the standard-setup wizard isn’t appropriate for your situation. Apple’s support staff is arrogant, yet clueless; at one moment they insist that the device is incapable of doing something that it’s already doing, and at the next, give completely contradictory instructions on how to get it to do something else.
I finally got rid of the whole setup, and replaced it with a couple of Linksys devices for half the price. I can’t stream music wirelessly, but you know what? I’d rather run a cable; it’s less work and less frustration and will work reliably.
I am increasingly skeptical of Apple’s hardware skills and more importantly the philosophy behind everything they do; the iPod at least has the virtue of working flawlessly and being vastly superior to any competing device (at least until the battery runs out) but in this case the Linksys equipment is far superior, even if it doesn’t look quite as slick. And if it has fewer features, well, at least they all work. I held off buying an iPhone mainly because AT&T’s network is so inferior to Verizon’s, but I’m not sure I’d buy an iPhone at this point even if it were made for Verizon’s network. Maybe I’ll wait for the Google phone.