Statuary Hall

When I was a kid my sister was assigned a project to make a blueprint of her dream house. And from that moment on, I was obsessed.

It was right around the time I first visited Hearst Castle, which also helped. I've been at least three, maybe four times, and don't tire of that colossal edifice. For the uninitiated, here it is:

It's kind of amazing. America doesn't have things like this. And I fell in love with it.

So began my fascination with blueprints and housing designs, galleries and museum exhibits. I designed 12-story mansions with roller coasters in the attic. I designed modest Victorians with menageries and stands of redwoods.  I designed natural history collections that would rival those of New York.

There were surely other influences. Dr. Seuss books are often just lists of fantastic things in disguise as stories. (Consider 'If I Ran the Circus', 'If I Ran the Zoo', and 'McElligot's Pool'.)

Now, here I am, 29 years old, and my students are working on self-guided projects.

This means they put on headphones, watch videos, and work at their own pace. It's great for what they're doing. But it is boring as sin for me, sitting there hour after hour, watching them work.

And that's what prompted me to design a statuary hall. There are a few of these already. Most notably there is the National Statuary Hall, wherein each State chooses two notables to represent them in the halls of Congress. A more dated collection is the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, which is a weird and seemingly arbitrary collection of busts in the Bronx.

Bored at my desk I thought: why not make my own, of people I find inspiring, interesting, or influential? and with that the youthful passion was reignited.

Here below you can find the fruits of this labor. In my mind each person is depicted by a bust, and is laid out in blue-print fashion the way the exhibit would look. Placement of busts is intentional, and not arbitrary. It took a couple of days. As far as productivity goes, I make no comment. Please note that the last 50, in green, are international people who would need to have a place in my hall of influences. Also note only people from the American era (1776- onwards) were considered, leaving out the colonial-types. The date cutoff also applies to international influences (no Socrates or Cervantes). The red walls are informational.

First, the blueprint:

And the list of names:

1.      John Muir

2.      Dorothea Lange

3.      Benjamin Franklin

4.      Jeanette Rankin

5.      Liliuokalani and Kamehameha

6.      Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger

7.      Abraham Lincoln

8.      Frederick Douglass

9.      Robert H. Jackson

10.  Diane Fossey

11.  Julia Butterfly Hill

12.  Cesar Chavez

13.  Louis Comfort Tiffany

14.  Ray Charles

15.  Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce

16.  WEB Du Bois

17.  Martha Graham

18.  Winsor McCay

19.  Allen Ginsburg

20.  George Marshall

21.  Tecumseh

22.  Harriet Tubman

23.  Saul Alinsky

24.  Penn Jillette, Teller, and James Randi

25.  Joseph Henry

26.  Paul Tillich

27.  Nellie Bly

28.  Woodrow Wilson

29.  Susan B. Anthony

30.  Julia Morgan

31.  Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman

32.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

33.  Norman Borlaug

34.  Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein

35.  Booker T. Washington

36.  Joan Didion

37.  Upton Sinclair

38.  Ansel Adams

39.  Ishi

40.  Hunter S. Thompson

41.  Martin Luther King Jr.

42.  Geronimo

43.  John Dewey

44.  Langston Hughes

45.  Stephen Mather

46.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

47.  Zitkala-Sa

48.  Samuel Gompers

49.  Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein

50.  Thomas Paine

51.  Eleanor Roosevelt

52.  Thomas Jefferson

53.  Jim Henson

54.  Herman Melville

55.  Ralph Bunche

56.  Bernie Sanders

57.  Chester Nimitz

58.  John Wesley Powell

59.  Alice Paul

60.  Jared Diamond

61.  Miles Davis and John Coltrane

62.  Thomas Nast

63.  Dolores Huerta

64.  Helen Keller

65.  Harry Houdini

66.  John Brown

67.  Harvey Milk

68.  Jane Addams

69.  Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacajawea

70.  Warren Burger

71.  Willard Libby

72.  Eugene Debs

73.  Ida B. Wells

74.  Dwight Eisenhower

75.  Henry David Thoreau

76.  Rachel Carson

77.  Earl Warren

78.  Robert Ingersoll

79.  Walter Reuther

80.  Norton I

81.  Frank Lloyd Wright

82.  Margaret Sanger

83.  Theodore Roosevelt

84.  Nat Turner

85.  Gene Sharp

86.  Frank Gehry

87.  Barrack Obama

88.  John Jay

89.  Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

90.  Bob Dylan

91.  Daniel Webster

92.  Claire Patterson

93.  Clarence Darrow

94.  Sitting Bull

95.  William Jennings Bryan

96.  Jesse Owens

97.  Daniel Boone

98.  Thomas Hunt Morgan

99.  John F. Kennedy

100. Will Eisner

101. Louis Armstrong

102. Horace Mann

103. Flannery O’Connor

104. Alexander Hamilton

105. Walt Disney

106. Amadeo Giannini

107. Grace Hopper

108. Sequoyah

109. John Singer Sargent

110. Rosa Parks

111. Lyndon B. Johnson

112. David Sarnoff

113. Helen Gurley Brown

114. Walter Cronkite

115. Jonas Salk

116. Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe

117. James Madison

118. Aaron Copland

119. Duke Ellington

120. Thurgood Marshall

121. Jacob Riis

122. Amelia Earhart

123. Edward R. Murrow

124. Stanley Kubrick

125. John James Audubon

126. Chief Joseph

127. Louis Brandeis

128. James Brown

129. Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason

130. Emma Goldman

131. Ulysses S. Grant

132. Elie Wiesel

133. Ralph Waldo Emerson

134. Sergey Brin and Larry Page

135. Betty Friedan

136. John Marshall

137. Scott Joplin

138. John Adams

139. Neill Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins

140. Robert Reich

141. Charles Merrill

142. Fred Korematsu

143. Mark Twain

144. Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein

145. Joan Baez

146. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

147. George Washington

148. Clara Barton

149. John J. Pershing

150. Daisy Bates

1.      Jean Piaget

2.      Nelson Mandela

3.      Ludwig van Beethoven

4.      Alexis de Tocqueville

5.      Marquis de Lafayette and Thaddeus Kosciuszko

6.      Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy

7.      Ai WeiWei

8.      Shunryu Suzuki

9.      Jose Marti

10.  Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru

11.  George Eliot

12.  Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre

13.  John Maynard Keynes

14.  Mary Wollstonecraft

15.  Dag Hammarskjold

16.  Mikhail Gorbachev

17.  Lewis Carroll

18.  Hayao Miyazaki

19.  Jorge Luis Borges

20.  Aung San Suu Kyi

21.  William Morris

22.  Christopher Hitchens and Charlie Brooker

23.  Claude Debussy

24.  William Wordsworth

25.  Igor Stravinsky

26.  William von Humboldt

27.  Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg

28.  Andrei Sakharov

29.  Toussaint Louverture

30.  Immanuel Kant

31.  Salvador Dali

32.  George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney

33.  Federico Fellini

34.  Ludwig Wittgenstein

35.  Sun Yat Sen

36.  Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung

37.  AS Neill

38.  Simon Bolivar

39.  Mustafa Kemal

40.  Charles Darwin

41.  Soren Kierkegaard

42.  Hannah Arendt

43.  Winston Churchill

44.  Virginia Woolf

45.  Pablo Picasso

46.  James Burke

47.  Hans Christian Oersted, James Clerk Maxwell, and Michael Faraday

48.  Ludwig Quidde

49.  Alan Turing

50.  Kwame Nkrumah

You're welcome.

Must Reads?

Are there certain books we all should read? It's a fun conversation. Here, for my records, are the ones I think we'd all do well to try. Of course, like all good arbitrary lists, the total is 100.

It is also hierarchical, in a snooty way, with definite presumptions of taste. Truly, there's something for everyone.

Novels

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

The Plague by Albert Camus

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Poetry

A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

Beowulf

Eagle or Sun? by Octavio Paz

Epic of Gilgamesh

Monkey’s Raincoat by Matsuo Basho

The Inferno by Dante

La Jeune Parque by Paul Valery

Mathnawi by Rumi

The Odyssey by Homer

Poet in New York by Gabriel Garcia Lorca

Selected Poems of Du Fu

Selected Poems of Li Bai

Sister My Life by Boris Pasternak

Two-Part Prelude by William Wordsworth

The Wasteland by TS Eliot

Plays

The Bacchae by Euripides

Betrayal by Harold Pinter

The China Tree by Isam Mahfouz

The Clouds by Aristophanes

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka

Faust Part One by Goethe

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Life is a Dream by Calderon La Barca

The Misanthrope by Moliere

No Dramas by Zeami

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Recognition of Shakuntala by Kalidasa

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Short Stories

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka

The Decameron by Boccaccio

Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun

Ficciones by Jorge Borges

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

The Nose and The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa 

Selected Short Stories by Edgar Allen Poe

“A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert

Thousand and One Nights

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Essays and Miscellaneous Literary Works 

The Apology by Plato

“Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Hojoki by Chomei

Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko

Maxims by La Rochefoucauld

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

“Portrait of an Anti-Semite” by Jean-Paul Sartre

“On the Pleasure of Hating” by William Hazlitt

On The Shortness of Life by Seneca

Selected Essays by Montaigne

Selected Essays by George Orwell

“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

“Why Look at Animals?” by John Berger

Graphic Novels

Akira by Katshuiro Otomo

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

Bone by Jeff Smith

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Kim Deitch

The Contract with God Trilogy by Will Eisner

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories by Gilbert Hernandez

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

Sandman by Neil Gaiman

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Comics

A Right to Be Hostile by Aaron McGruder

Bloom County: The Complete Library by Berkeley Breathed

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson

Copper by Kazu Kibushi

FoxTrot: The Works – Assorted FoxTrot by Bill Amend

Gordo’s Critters by Gus Arriola

Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips by Walt Kelly

So Many Splendid Sundays! by Winsor McCay

There Is a Heppy Lend Furfur Away by George Herriman

Campaign Finance Reform. Again.

Here is a list of things I care about, that I consider a moderate to high priority. Some things I may have forgotten, which doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re important, I just am not thinking about them right now:

Global Warming and Renewable Energy / Fuel Independence

Social Justice and Racial Equality

Veteran’s Services

Making Social Security Viable

Women’s Health (Planned Parenthood, Paid Family Leave, etc.)

Prison Reform

Drug Reform and Marijuana Legalization

Statehood for US Territories and Washington D.C.

Voting Rights and the Abolishment of ID Laws / Election Day as a Federal Holiday

Gun Reform

Immigration Reform

Scaling Back of Nuclear Stockpiles

Scaling Back of NSA Privacy Violations

Poverty and Homelessness

Abolishing the UN Security Council Veto and Joining the International Criminal Court

Infrastructure

Debt – National, Credit Card, Student

Mental Health Treatment

Monsanto and Agribusiness

Judicial Election Reform

White Collar Crime

The Decline of the Public Domain

Income Inequality

Trustbusting and Breaking Up of Monopolies

National Endowment of the Arts

Native American Rights

Abolishment of the Death Penalty

Human Trafficking and Slavery

Guantanamo and Army Contractors

Sovereign Immunity / Supremacy Clause

Increasing UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Foreign Aid to Developing Nations

Education Reform – Removing Testing / Abolishing the SAT

Bank Interest Rates / Bank Reform / Wall Street Reform

Abolishing the Penny and the Nickel

Disallowing Gerrymandering and the Electoral College

LBTQ Discrimination Protection

Scaling Back the Military-Industrial Complex

Terrorism and TSA Overhaul

Preschool and Early Education

USDA and FDA Reform

EPA Strengthening

Increased Union Membership

Do you agree? Disagree? It doesn’t matter.

Not a bit. Because nothing will get done on any of this unless you deal with one issue:

Campaign Finance Reform

Until you get the money out of politics it doesn’t matter a whit. And as we’ve seen for the past however many years, nothing is getting done. Congress is breaking records for inaction.

There is so much that is important right now, it seems ridiculous to even prioritize.

And I don’t blame the politicians. To get reelected, under the current insanity, requires you raise a little over $10,000 a week. Every week. For two years.

That’s the average, and it’s insane. Ask yourself, gun to your head, where would you get $10,000?

You could ask family members and friends. They might be able to chip in a few hundred here, and thousand there (if you’re lucky). You may have some money socked away in your checking, or your savings. (I mean, something like 38 million of us are living paycheck to paycheck, and the national average for amount of cash on hand is only four grand, so…)

You can sell things. Cut off services – you don’t really need cable, or Netflix or whatever – this is important. You need this money, and every little bit helps. Pretend they’ll kill your child if they don’t get it, or something. The only option not available for you is loans – you can’t put it on a credit card or visit a loan company.

So let’s say, at the end of the week, you get the money. It was hard, but you scrounged up $10,000 – a quarter of the average American’s yearly income.

Great. Do it again.

What do you do? What can you do? You’ve already begged money from the people you know. You sold stuff, wiped out your bank accounts. How do you get $10,000 for the second week? And the third. And the fourth. And the next two years.

Even if you’re wealthy, let’s say you have $100,000 in savings to draw from, that still won’t even cover one year’s worth of campaign money. In fact it’ll only cover around two and half months, and by March you’re screwed. You need more money.

I don’t even blame the politicians.  Why do you think they get nothing done? Because they are fundraising all the time, because their political life depends on it. Of course they go to corporations and billionaires – who else could they even go to?

Whether grassroots or in the pocket of the billionaire class, either way, fundraising is the main issue our Representatives and Senators need to deal with. (Senators, of course, have to raise even more – a staggering $98,000 a week.)

That’s why I don’t care what’s important to you – the single most important thing that has to happen in America, if you want movement on anything (barring, perhaps, a direct act of war) is to fix campaign finance reform. Most Americans support this – but of course it can’t get done with Congress in the pockets of the wealthy, who enjoy the power and privilege their contributions create.

Justice Stevens proposed the following amendment to the US constitution:

“Neither the First Amendment nor any other provision of this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit the Congress or any state from imposing reasonable limits on the amount of money that candidates for public office, or their supporters, may spend in election campaigns.”

Elegantly phrased and simple. Solves the problem of Citizens United (allows corporations to spend unlimited quantities during campaigns) and McCutcheon (allows individuals to spend unlimited quantities during campaigns).

So. That is why Bernie Sanders doesn’t sound like a broken record to me, when he repeats the dire need for this change. Because he is addressing the fundamental problem – not the symptom, not the distractions. He is addressing the need to a fundamental change in how we do politics. It is the focus of his campaign, the focus of his website.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, says on her website she will “appoint Supreme Court Justices who value the right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections.” How, exactly? You don’t get to fire Supreme Court Justices. The only Justice who is likely to retire in the next four years is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she always supported Campaign Finance Reform anyway. She does say she wants the constitutional amendment for Citizens United – she’s not a Republican, after all. But nowhere does she say she’d be willing to get rid of Super PACs – which predate Citizens United  in a decision called Buckley v. Valeo and which would still be able to raise mind-boggling quantities of cash. A system she is currently benefitting from.

Bernie doesn’t have a Super PAC, and wants to get rid of them as well. From his website: “That is why we must overturn, through a constitutional amendment, the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision as well as the Buckley v. Valeo decision.”

Do you care about… things? Do you want things to change? Anything? Then you need to fix campaign finance. And to do that properly, you need Bernie Sanders.

2015 in Books

After last year's inordinate number of books read, in the mid-60s, I have returned in 2015 to a more reasonable amount, of around 40. Without further ado, here are the books I read in 2015, with a special bonus round at the end commemorating five years of doing these recaps.

Nonfiction

Laughter: An Essay on the Comic by Henri Bergson

There are a few gems, in terms of passages, and when he gets going on art it’s good. Mostly cruddy, though.

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

My second encounter with Feynman. This six-chaptered book (like its easier predecessor) distinguishes itself by solely focusing on a single topic: relativity. I appreciate it since, unlike others, it starts with the math (introducing vector algebra), and works forward.

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

This is an incredible little work – part scientific study, largely memoir, scatterings of fiction – the last chapter is such a knock-out I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The Mountains of California by John Muir

As a Californian I wanted to get in touch with Muir’s writings. This, his first book, has all of the expected love for the “Range of Light” with nice stories of travels and travails, and interesting scientific field-guide types of descriptions.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

With the ecstasy of a Transcendentalist in the woods, Dillard marvels at the world, with passages of crackling familiarity and astonishingly perceptive juxtaposition. A must for anyone interested in the wide-eyed fascination of nature.

The Adventures of Ibn Battuta

Battuta is famous mainly for being a Muslim traveler throughout Africa, Asia, and as far afield as Russia. That journey in particular is often considered a highlight of the accounts, but the work is dry as unbuttered toast, lacking any of the pleasure of a travelogue, reading more as a chronicle.

Mr. Dooley: On Ivrything and Ivrybody by Peter Finley Dunne

Humorous-ish essays from the fictional Chicago barkeep about matters of import from the Spanish American War through Teddy Roosevelt’s administration. An odd little glimpse into the turn of the century, Mr. Dooley was at one time a sort of Jon Stewart and Will Rogers rolled into one. Dialect (broad Irish), references long forgotten, and certain politically incorrect writings have diminished his clout into the 21^st century considerably, and perhaps not unfortunately.

Liber Abaci by Fibonacci

Only those with a strenuous love of word problems, medieval mathematics, or obtuse reckoning advised to proceed.

The Adams-Jefferson Letters edited by Lester J. Cappon

The complete correspondence between Jefferson with John and Abigail Adams. Wonderful work, although it does run 600 pages, sometimes in sections that, to the modern reader, are a bit obsolete. Essential for those with an interest in the Enlightenment, early America, or old men complaining about the Missouri compromise.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus

It’s been a while since I dabbled in writers from antiquity. This book is an overview of skeptical arguments, primarily directed against the Stoics. Interesting highlights.

The New Science by Giambattista Vico

From the early 1700s, this work attempts to reconcile the Bible, mythological poetry, and philology. It does not succeed.

The Upanishads edited by Valerie Roebuck

Commentary on the Vedas that lay the groundwork for the yoga tradition. Some interesting concepts, but by in large not philosophical texts.

Creating Magic by Lee Cockerell

The distance between garbage cans in Disney parks is the same distance it takes while walking to unwrap a candy bar. Gems like this show you how the entertainment empire, the parks especially and hospitality, became the efficient machines they are. I really enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone who wants to know how to manage... anything.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

When the Belarussian author won this year’s Nobel Prize I immediately searched for this well-praised journalist’s work. The text, comprised of a selection of interviews from all parts of society affected by the catastrophe, is one of the most haunting, harrowing, and devastating books I’ve ever read.

Saving Capitalism by Robert Reich

I’ve read a good deal of Reich. It’s hard for me as a consequence to step out of my bubble and realize that what he’s writing is often new to people.

An Investigation of the Laws of Thought by George Boole

The first 100 pages or so are quite interesting, but eventually the work confounds any but the most ardent enthusiast, with a couple hundred pages of obtuse mathematical equations on probability, with a brief, unedifying coda.

Fiction

Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

Devotional poems, with some nice turns of phrase.

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving

The two famous tales – Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow – are lost amidst a very reflective, melancholic travelogue through Britain. While parts are intriguing, with other fantastical tales lost within, it does get a bit repetitive and dry.

A Dance to the Music of Time, Second Movement by Anthony Powell

After a year’d passed since the ‘First movement’ I was quickly able to pick up where the narrative had left off. Each ‘movement’ comprised three novels, some 800 pages per installment. Powell’s character, Nick, is now my age, and reflecting as a cypher on the lives of others with increasing maturity. I look forward to the back half.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

I had never read Hugo, so my tradition of reading important French authors continued. Incomparably better (who can be surprised?) than the Disney-fied version.

Journey to the End of the Night by Louise-Ferdinand Celine

Celine is an important French modernist, and influential existentialist. The book reads as a shooting-gallery of existential dreads and numbness, from the pointlessness of high adventure, to the banality of the everyday as months pass…

Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca

I strongly preferred Poet in New York, but that may be due to the difficulties of translating these ballads. Reading a dual-language edition, I recognized (gropingly with my inferior Spanish) that the poems in the original were marvelous, but not well-suited to translation into English.

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

A remarkable post-colonial novel, the Sudanese Salih tells the story of a mysterious man, and the plain goings-on after an enigmatic life in Europe. The narrator is an interesting character, as much as the unfathomable subject of the piece.

Before Daybreak, The Weavers, The Beaver Coat by Gerhart Hauptman

A three-play collection of the German realist master and Nobel winner. The first two are proletariat tragedies, and the third a somewhat amusing proletariat comedy.

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe

A repetitive selection of four short novels, focusing on madness, corpulence, family, and suicide, I could appreciate Kenzaburo’s form, but not so much his content.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

I rarely read the more ‘popular classics’ but I was very pleasantly surprised by this Cold War spy thriller. I tend to forsake thrillers for the same reason as mysteries, in particular, that they are a long wind-up to a punchline. Yet this work did it so well I wasn’t even mad.

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan

A highly unreliable narrator/author tells a tale of reincarnation in peasant China that progresses from the dawn of Mao’s revolution to the Millennium. Complicated ancestral lines, love stories, reincarnation, and the aforementioned narrator make this difficult to follow, and while passages are rewarding, and Mo knows how to write, the sum is not more than the parts.

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Difficult, lengthy epic of Homeric themes in the Caribbean. Only to be approached if you have a serious interest in the investment. But it may pay off – especially the middle third.

Selected Poems by Jaroslav Seifert

Around the 1930s and onwards Seifert begins to approach high levels of lyricism focusing on a broad theme of love, from romantic and humanist to joi de vivre.

Arcadia Borealis by Erik Axel Karlfeldt

Unabashedly pastoral rhyming poems, reflecting the turn of the century’s reaction against industrialism.

Platero and I by Juan Ramon Jimenez

In a superb translation by Eloise Roach a gentle world is illuminated through Jimenez’s reflections. The last ten pages or so aren’t quite as rapturous as the first two hundred, but it hardly seems fair to malign it on that point.

The Bonds of Interest by Jacinto Benavente

A nice little comedy/farce about society with some better-than-average wordplay.

The Axion Esti by Odysseas Elytis

An interesting and deft poem, celebrating the Greek Orthodox interpretation of the Old Testament, layered with personal recollections of the Second World War.

O the Chimneys by Nelly Sachs

This poetry collection starts out very strong, and gets comparatively weaker, culminating in a rather uninteresting, and unrepentant ‘mystery’ play.

A Longing for the Light by Vicente Aleixandre

A collection of poems which begin with themes of existential loneliness, then segue into passionate manifestations on love…which don’t quite land as well as the earlier works.

Decameron by Boccaccio

One of the few Great Books to elude my reading it over the years I was quite glad to finally encounter this massive work. Ribald and amusing, clearly influential, but – I can’t believe I’m honestly going to say this – could have been shorter. Please don’t hurt me.

Njal’s Saga

Previously I’d only read the short Vinland Sagas, but this lengthy epic has an unusually powerful draw to it, and moves of its own accord. The last section is rather rambly, and poorly tied to the rest, but most of the work is quite compelling.

Idylls of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson is sad Prince Albert died, and compares him to Arthur. I can only wonder how Victoria, who is analogously the faithless Guinevere, must have thought of it.

Barbarian Odes by Giosue Carducci trans. William Fletcher Smith

Rather difficult to find in English translation, these poems, “barbarian” in their meter rather than subject matter, ostensibly are the Italian poet’s finest works. A knowledge of the classical is a must, and even then they tend to be bogged down in allusion. Those which I knew the allusions, or which avoided that problem, were well written, but this was not the majority. Only worth seeking out if a specialist.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

A harsh, violent little book. I’d say hardboiled, but there’s too much attention to color patterns and detail – and its somehow both too greasy and not greasy enough.

Graphic Novels

Saga vol. 1-5 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Good writing and good illustration. Vaughan knows what he’s doing, far outpacing he earlier ‘Runaways’, and Staples clearly has studied Eisner and the rest of the best.

Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland by Eric Shanower and Gabriel Rodriguez

Slim, pleasant volume that pays homage to the great work by McKay. The chapter of Escherian themes was a nice touch, along with a number of other little nods.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and For the Man Who Has Everything by Alan Moore, Curt Swan, and Dave Gibbons

Two particularly good stories of a character that’s very hard to write for well (three actually – The Jungle Line is included and is good too – just not quite as memorable).

Top 5

Voices From Chernobyl

The Periodic Table

Platero and I

Season of Migration to the North

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Special 5^th Year Roundup!

My First Books of the Year list was in 2011, and since then I have read, as of this year, around 220 books. So here are the Top 5 in Nonfiction and the Top 5 in Fiction, culled from the best of five years. It’s a fivestravaganza!

TOP 5 NONFICTION 2011-15

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Unwinding by George Packer

From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp

Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov

TOP 5 FICTION 2011-15

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Sister My Life by Boris Pasternak (Fayderman, trans.)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Giosue Carducci

The other day I tracked down an English language translation of Carducci's Barbarian Odes. Carducci is not well known in the English language, perhaps due to the scarcity of translations. This one, effected by William Fletcher Smith and published by the George Banta Publishing Co, in 1939, seems to have been financed by Smith himself. The quality is poor, and the copy I found, running 49 pages, had numerous scribbled typographical corrections made in the margins by a dutiful pencil.

Even to find it I had to track down a copy in an auxiliary library of stacks kept by the UC system, cloistered in a very pleasant facility in Richmond, CA. The reading room was very nice as well, and due to the short length I quickly read the small collection.

The poems were originally published in Italian between 1873-1889, and are split into three 'Books'. Themes are typically focused on the ancestral, the glory of Rome and Italy, the poets Dante and Homer, and similar subjects. A working knowledge of Classical myths and history is valuable, as no notes are provided. Characters such as Garibaldi make appearances alongside Romulus and the like.

Most of the poems are not very good. The title 'Odi Barbare' refers not to the content, but instead to the meter and rhyme employed. This was lost on me, albeit having a decent grounding in poetry. It was forgettable, in all. Yet in his heydey he was the national poet of Italy, and in 1906 the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Interestingly he was openly an atheist, and died in 1907, just after receiving his Prize, aged 71. His pre-Christian morality also lends understanding to the use of the term 'Barbarian' to describe the 50-odd poems contained within.

One stuck out, though, which I will go ahead and transcribe below:

At the Station in an Autumn Morning

     How sullen there behind the trees the street-lamps follow each
other, yawning light over the mud through the branches dripping
with rain.
     Wailing, sharp, grating shrieks the engine near. Around are the
leaden sky and autumn morning as a vast phantasm.
     Where and to what move these people muffled and silent as they
hurry to the dark coaches? to what unknown sorrows or torments
of far distant hope?
     You, o Lydia, give to the dry form of the guard your ticket and
to trampling time you give your beauteous years, your joyous
moments, and your memories.
     Along the dark train the watchmen hooded in black go and
come as shadows; a pale lantern they carry and hammers of iron:
and the iron
     brakes when tested give out sorrowful sound and long: from
the depths of the soul replies a woeful echo of tedium that seems a
shuddering.
     The coach doors hammered to closing seem outrages: a scorning
seems the final call that rapid sounds; on the glass panes heavy
grates the rain.
     Now the monster, aware of its metallic soul, smokes, quakes,
heavily breathes, unbars its eyes of fire: fearful through the dark-
ness it hurtles its space-defying whistle.
     The profane monster goes; in fearful train it carries away my
love beating its wings. Alas! the white face and beauteous veil
saying farewell vanished in the darkness.
     O face flushed with sweet pallor, o eyes star-shining with peace,
o white untroubled face mid luxuriant curls bent with movement
sweet.
     Life was trembling int he warm air; summer was trembling
when her eyes smiled upon me, and the young sun of June was
pleased to kiss with flood of light her soft cheek
     in through the chestnut curvings of her hair: as a halo my
dreams more beauteous than the sun were enfolding her noble self.
     Under the rain in the dark mist I now return: and into these
would I lose myself; I stagger as one drunk; I touch myself  to learn
if I, too, am a phantasm.
     Oh, what a falling of leaves, a falling cold, unceasing, mute,
heavy on the soul. I feel that alone, that eternal, that through all
in the universe is November.
     Better for him whose sense of being has strayed away, better
this gloom, this darkening mist: I wish, I yearn to plunge me into
a nothingness that may endure forever.

2016 Candidates' Birthplaces

Presidential birth states are an interest of mine.

For example, many people don't know Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Or that all 43 Presidents come from only 21 states.

Virginia leads the pack, with eight Presidents, followed closely by Ohio's seven. Massachusetts and New York each get four. Texas, Vermont, and North Carolina, two.

Some interesting things about the 2016 candidates' birth states:

Hillary Clinton. If Hillary wins she will be the second President born in Illinois, the first having been Ronald Reagan.

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are from New York. Either one would be the first New Yorker President since FDR. Also of interest - Sanders would then be the only US President to have been born during the twelve years of the Roosevelt administration. (George HW Bush was born in 1924, and Clinton in 1946.) George Pataki, also a New Yorker Presidential hopeful, missed the Roosevelt window by two months.

Martin O'Malley would be the first President since Andrew Jackson not to be born in one of the states of the United States of America. He was born in Washington D.C. and would be the District's first President. Jackson was the last President to be born in the Colonies before the Revolutionary War.

Jeb Bush would be the first Bush from Texas. George HW was born in Massachusetts, and George W in Connecticut. Carly Fiorina is also from Texas, and she or Jeb would be the first Texan since LBJ.

Ben Carson would be the first President from Michigan, Marco Rubio the first from Florida. Michigan is one of nine states that has had a major party candidate, but never won a Presidential election. (From Michigan neither Mitt Romney nor Thomas Dewey became President.) Those other eight states are Maine (Rufus King lost to James Monroe), West Virginia (John Davis lost to Calvin Coolidge), Indiana (Wendell Willkie lost to FDR), Arizona (Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson), Minnesota (Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan), Kansas (Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton), and Colorado (John Kerry lost to George W Bush).

John Kasich (apparently a person) would be the first President from Pennsylvania since James Buchanan, who currently is the only President from that state. Unless Rand Paul, born in Pittsburgh, took the title instead.

Chris Christie would be the second President from New Jersey, the first being Grover Cleveland. Woodrow Wilson, associated with that state, was actually born in Virginia. Speaking of which, Rick Santorum and Jim Gilmore are both from that state. Each would have the chance to be the first Virginian President since Wilson.

Mike Huckabee, would be the second President from Arkansas, after Bill Clinton. They were both born in the same town, of Hope.

Ted Cruz would be the first President, ever, in a foreign country. He was born in Alberta, Canada.

Ted Cruz is also the second-youngest candidate, after Marco Rubio. Both would be the first Presidents born in the 1970s. So far no US President was born in the 1950s, but many candidates could change that: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, and Rick Santorum were all born in that decade.

Also Obama is the only President born in a US capital, Honolulu. Jim Gilmore or Carly Fiorina could change that - or Martin O'Malley, sort of.

To be fair, Rufus King was born in what was, at the time, Massachusetts, and only later became Maine. But Maine's a nice state, so we'll give them Rufus.

Star Wars Yadda Yadda

I was the perfect age when the last ones came out. And that, right there, ought to tell you where this is going.

My first Star Wars experience was one night, when I couldn't sleep, I went into my mom's room and she was watching Return of the Jedi. It was the Jabba palace seen, and Jabba the Hutt became a revelation to me. I'd never encountered such a non-human life form as the Hutt, since most aliens I knew, watching Star Trek TNG, were all humanoid.

Actually I don't recall when I saw the other two. I had definitely seen them by middle school age, though. And that's when the Lucas-modified versions came out. Beyond this the only connection I had was the loosely-inspired Star Tours ride at Disneyland.

Standing in line at Stonestown's cinema, in San Francisco, with a crowd of other people, waiting to see the new, enhanced, Star Wars was very cool. It was my first fandom, I suppose - that feeling of belonging to an in-crowd. Again, my mom was with me. We went and saw it, and I was  a bit confused. I liked the movie, but there were parts that didn't quite seem right, as I recalled.

Then the new movies came out, the prequels. And boy did Jar Jar Binks suck. And the other crap. All of Phantom Menace, really. But I was, by now, a Star Wars Fan, and so I dutifully collected trading cards, saved allowances for action figures, read books of trivia, even looking up collectibles. I liked the Star Wars universe, and spent much of my time just before high school in my room, creating, of all things, costumes based on the fantastic creatures, for what would be in my mind an incredible parade of Star Wars creatures. (I should mention that around this time I ran Bay to Breakers, San Francisco's freak-flag flying footrace replete with nudity, garish outfits, and floats - one of which I distinctly remember, was of Jabba the Hutt.)

As the Prequels played out I was increasingly disappointed, and visited the theaters dutifully.

When the DVDs were released I made sure to buy the copy of Star Wars that had the original theatrical version - not the one I had seen in theaters as a young kid. It was added to the CGI version as a "Bonus Feature". Like most, I am still waiting for them to get their proper, un-messed with due. Perhaps with the buzz generated by Disney - but I somehow sort of doubt it.

So I'm not excited about the new movie. I'm sure it'll be good. It seems like it's not disappointing people. But, having been burned, over and over, I'm sort of done with the whole thing. When I went off to high school I left Star Wars very much behind. I've never bother to buy Empire or Revenge on DVD. If the price is ever right, I guess I will. It's not a priority. Likewise, I will probably go see this movie in theaters, but not for some time. Maybe in January.

As for Disney's control of the franchise, they are the masters of getting people excited about stuff, so I'll give them kudos for the civilization-scale frenzy they've created. They know how to get it done - although with a built in fandom like Star Wars it is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel (even if the fish are suspicious from the last time they got barreled up). Disney will continue to rule the media galaxy, a parallel which I find particularly amusing.