Novels To Read Before You Die: As I Lay Dying

The First Lines that I posted a few weeks ago -- the opening of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying -- contain a cornucopia of information about the remainder of the novel. For starters, in these two simple sentences, Faulkner reveals that he has set this novel in the poor, rural South. We know that the characters are poor because one of them wears a "frayed and broken straw hat," not the kind of haberdashery the well-heeled would wear. By referring to the cottonhouse, Faulkner informs us that is set in that part of the South that grows cotton. Further, we know that the setting is rural because because the two men walk through a field. Finally, the narrator displays the trait of detachment by describing how he would look to someone else. And, of course, we know that Jewel is tall. 

That these sentences convey a great deal of information is certainly no accident. Faulkner must have worked and reworked them to set the scene and tone exactly as he wanted. He tells the story of As I Lay Dying from the first-person perspectives of the poor white Bundren family, a story that descends from the detached to the macabre and that contrasts the corrupt and mad aspects of human nature with the tiny voices of resignation and decency. Faulkner thought it his best novel. That he successfully conveyed so many human truths through the story of an illiterate clan led by a venal and selfish patriarch is a tour de force. Read this book; it's one of Citizen K.'s Novels You Must Read Before You Die (photo by Carl Van Vechten)...

The Decline And Fall Of Newspapers Redux: David Sirota agrees that they have no one to blame but themselves:

Beltway scribes didn't have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren't compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates' positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn't need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren't obligated to focus on "elevat(ing) the most banal doings" in the White House to "breaking news," as The New York Times recently noted.

But that's what happened. Rather than investing in the valuable steel and concrete of hard reporting, national news outlets began printing the most worthless kind of commercial paper — rumors, personality profiles and other such speculative derivatives that consumers could find elsewhere.

I'll go even further: There was a complete failure of imagination on the part of newspapers when it came to taking their product to the internet. Unable to see beyond their printing presses, they initially saw their internet sites as an adjunct of the printed paper instead of the other way around. As a result, the web sites simply reproduced the print version, which amounted to a dull and unimaginative approach that did not fully leverage modern technology. 

Moreover, papers remain stuck in a 20th Century business model that stresses competition with other papers instead of a cooperative amalgamation of news and opinion resources. For example, nothing that I know of has prevented Washington state newspapers from developing a single internet portal. This might have attracted more traffic and advertisers and still allowed for print editions. Something like this could have broadened reader perspectives by redefining the meaning of "local" for the 21st Century. Instead, as Sirota writes, we got fluff journalism that reduced the stature of the papers while providing information easily available elsewhere...

If you lived in New Orleans, you could spend this weekend Jammin' on Julia and stuffing your face at the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival with the new NOLA Brown and Blonde Ales as your constant companions...

Seattle actor John Aylward talks about his years as ER's Dr. Donald Anspaugh....

Newsweek's John Barry writes that President Obama must regain the trust of our traditional allies, and that this is a massive undertaking that won't be resolved at the G20 meetings:

It is hard to overestimate the damage that the Bush administration did to America's historic Western alliance. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's offhand dismissal of "Old Europe," as against the new states of Central Europe, set the tone. Rumsfeld later said he'd mangled his text; and in another circumstance the European allies might have accepted that. But Rumsfeld's misspeaking, if that is what it was, points to the real damage. At its root, the Europeans believe they were systematically brushed aside—even lied to. At the depth of the Iraq debacle, one senior adviser at No. 10 Downing Street exclaimed: "We've been betrayed by a bunch of incompetents in Washington." Tony Blair, Brown's predecessor and that official's admired boss, was effectively destroyed by his support of W. The same adviser is now in Britain's Washington embassy. Does anyone believe he has forgotten what prompted his outburst?...

Where is Diogenes when we need him?...

Rushbo Stupidism of the Day:

By the way, my firm belief is the stock market -- what is it up now? Waiting for the number -- it's hovering around 260, 265, 270, whatever it is. And I maintain this is because President Obama is out of the country. The market loves it when Oba -- oh, it's up 306. There must be news that he's extending his stay overseas. There must be news he's not coming back as soon as they thought he might be going back. I mean, the markets going nuts, and the only thing here that's different is that Obama's gone. He's out of the country. If Obama said that he'd stay out of the country for a month, the markets would hit 8,500 today. They'd jump another three or four hundred. In fact, all he would have to say is that he's extending his stay for maybe a couple of weeks.