Lueders Haus Blog

I was finally able to finish Barack Obama’s book, “Dreams from My Father“, while on vacation. It’s the first book by a politician I have read. He wrote the book in 1995 after finishing law school and I don’t think he was thinking of running for president back then. I’m sure he had some hopes of future office in maybe state or local government. I say this because most of the book is focused on his community organizing on Chicago’s south side. Which seemed to be his true passion when he wrote the book and where he wanted to return to. I’d say he went on a little long in that part but the parts on his childhood and his trip to Kenya were very interesting. His father’s “dreams” seemed to involve having as many children with as many different women as possible. Making it near impossible to keep track of all his brothers. Overall it was a good read but I don’t think I’m going to pick up Hillary’s or Edward’s book anytime soon.

The Arts section of today’s Sunday Times was very Sci-Fi themed. First with a piece on Philip K. Dick’s new Library of America volume (edited by Jonathan Lethem).

The books aren’t just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino. To come up with an American analogue you have to think of someone like Emerson, but nobody would ever dream of looking to him for movie ideas. Emerson was all brain, no pulp.

From the descriptions of him he seemed to channel Charles Bukowski.

For the nerdier Sci-Fi fans they have a piece on the revival of sorts of MST3K. Canceled in 1999, the creators have a new gig, called rifftrax, creating alternate alternate sound tracks for recent movies, instead of old B-grade sci-fi movies. Thanks to broadband you can now download their sound tracks as MP3 and play them along on your computer while watching the DVD. You have to get your girlfriend (if you have one by now) to do the robot puppets on the bottom of the screen. Sounds like a party to me!

Jonathan Lethem new book, “You Don’t Love Me Yet” is out. This follows a great essay he wrote in the February issue of Harper’s. Best essay I’ve read in Harper’s since the flash mob piece last year. In a salon interview he talks about how he is giving away the movie rights to this novel. (For 2% of the film’s budget if made.) We are still waiting for Edward Norton’s version of “Motherless Brooklyn”.

Finally got around to renting “A Scanner Darkly“. Philip K. Dick stories sure do make for entertaining movies. I think this movie is more entertaining then Licklater’s earlier work, “Walking Life“. Which also was done in rotoscope. But in “Walking Life” the rotoscope was used to a better effect. It actually added something to the scenes where in ”A Scanner Darkly” it gave the movie a comic book feel to what was originally a novel.

On one of the DVD bonus features (which I get to watch now that Sherry is not around) had some interesting footage from an interview Dick gave in the ’70s. He complained how because he was a science fiction author he was not considered a serious author. Science fiction was instead meant for kids and could contain little sex or violence. That science fiction limited itself to “Westerns in Space” instead. I haven’t read much science fiction since I was a kid. (Except for the odd Lethem.) I call that my Heinlein phase.

Finally finished Absurdistan. It was good. not the masterpiece that The Russian Debutante’s Handbook was. The fat jokes were funny, but the hijinks in this novel were generally not as entertaining. It reminded me of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in that it was too “ripped from the headlines”. Are we going to have to page through every authors take on the conservatives now? Now it might finally be time to start Against the Day.